Community columnist Bob Nicholson: Huntsville racial history

By John S. Peck

February 22, 2010, 6:44AM

"We don't serve negroes here." It's early 1962 in Huntsville. Segregated Huntsville. If you were black and tried to eat at a downtown lunch counter that's what you'd hear (or worse). In July 1962, Huntsville will become the first city in Alabama to desegregate lunch counters. You don't know that yet. When it desegregates, it will do so without violence. But that's in the future; violence in response to demands for civil rights is the norm you have seen.

Huntsville will go on to be the first school system in the state to desegregate, again without violence. None of that has happened yet. It is early 1962. You live here. Will you do the right thing? What side of history will you be on?

To be black in Huntsville was to be denied access to hotels, restaurants, schools and parks. If you were a black businessperson, you had difficulty renting office space. Newlywed? You could not run your bridal picture in the newspaper.

If you were black you knew that separate was not equal. You could tell from the water fountains, you could see it in the school buildings.

There had already been limited progress on civil rights in the South, but progress bought with blood. Now the movement had come to Huntsville and the Community Service Committee was organized, committed to change using nonviolent tactics.

It happened without violence against the protesters because there was a line the white leadership of Huntsville would not cross. While the majority of white citizens sat out the fight, protesters picketed the downtown lunch counters, demanding the right to sit and eat. That's all - they wanted to be treated like everyone else.

In the end, it was economics, not a desire to do the right thing that ended segregation in Huntsville; actions like Blue Jean Sunday for Easter 1962, an economic protest organized to punish merchants with segregated lunch counters.

Protesters urged black church members to wear blue jeans to Easter services and forgo new Easter clothes. Segregation simply became too expensive to Huntsville's future to continue.
Greenbacks in the register were more important than the color of faces at the counter.

Almost 50 years later, the controversy seems absurd. There are very few that would argue the morality of segregation. Yet supporting segregation won political races in Alabama in the 1960s.

Jesus may have told us to "love your neighbor as yourself" but to most Alabama's white population in 1962 that did not extend to blacks.

Of course, most of the white population did not act openly against the protesters. Their silence and their lack of support for change were how they expressed their opinion.

In 2010, racism still exists, but most of us recognize that segregation costs all of society. We understand that such an evil damages the soul of the oppressor as well as the oppressed. In 2010 it is easy to choose which side of history we would be on now. But if you were around in 1962, which side of history were you on?

I was 2 years old in early 1962 and unaware of what was going on downtown. It would be hubris to say that if I had been an adult then, I would have done the right thing. It would have taken a level of courage that I'm not sure I have.

Silence was an easy choice and I might not have seen this as my fight; the cost of standing up as too high a price.

Certainly, there are still pockets of segregation around today, but they are anachronisms of an earlier day that has thankfully passed. Now, whenever I hear someone talking about the good old days, speaking wistfully of the past, I think of 1962 and ask "good for who"? Nostalgia is longing for a time that never was. A look at history through a cataracts-clouded lens.
No one should forget the real progress that we have made. Nor should they deny the progress yet to be made.

It is now 2010. Who is your neighbor? What are the issues that we face today? In 2058, when you look back in hindsight to today, which side of history were you on?

Bob Nicholson is a community columnist for the Times. 
For more information on the Civil Rights movement in Huntsville, read "The Agitator's Daughter" by Sheryll Cashin, or watch "A Civil Rights Journey" by Sonnie Hereford III (available at the Huntsville Public Library). Send comments tobobncolumn@gmail.com.