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AP PHOTO
Leonard Speed, Johnny Herndon, and Joe Spagna outside a Tallahassee courtroom in January 1957
after they had been arrested for riding in mixed racial groups during the Tallahassee bus boycott.
A Foot Soldier’s Bus Ride
A daughter’s exploration into her father’s past in the
civil
rights
movement raises personal and historical questions.
Like a lot of good stories, this one started with wasting time. Ana Maria Spagna ’89 was Googling her brother, Joe Spagna, and came upon a blurb from a book called Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement. She knew that couldn’t be her brother. It had to be her father, also Joe Spagna, who died tragically while out jogging when she was young. So she ordered the book. She’d heard the story about his involvement in the civil rights movement before, but she didn’t believe it. But there it was, in two paragraphs and a long footnote: he’d been arrested for riding a bus in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1957 and his case had gone all the way to the Supreme Court. Little beyond that was known.
So, Spagna set out to uncover her father’s story. The resulting book, Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus: A Daughter’s Civil Rights Journey, chronicles her pursuit of that story and all it meant for her and her family. The book won the 2009 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize and will be published this spring by the University of Nebraska Press (nebraskapress.unl.edu). The excerpt presented here takes place when Spagna went to Tallahassee for the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the bus boycott during which her father was arrested.
* * *
In the morning, I go running and sweat-soak my shirt in two Florida minutes.
Back at the motel, I open a special fold-out section from the previous Sunday’s Tallahassee Democrat dedicated to the boycott. The biggest news is that the publishers of the Democrat are apologizing, now in 2006, for having supported segregation in 1956 and beyond. This is yet another small gesture, one that cynics could easily dismiss as too little, too late—fifty years too late!—but celebration organizers last night were nearly ecstatic. If it’s worth remembering who took risks, it’s worth remembering who failed to do so.
I sip my coffee and page through now-familiar photos and sagas. I stop to study a timeline of the boycott and feel familiar discomfort. Here’s the problem: the timeline shows that the boycott began when [Wilhelmina] Jakes and [Carrie] Patterson [sat next to a white woman on a Tallahassee bus and were arrested] in May 1956 and ended with victory when the Supreme Court ordered Montgomery [Alabama] to integrate city buses in December 1956. That makes Dad’s role a little difficult to explain, since he rode the bus in January 1957, after the Montgomery order, because the boycott was flailing after the supposed victory. The problem isn’t that my dad’s role gets ignored. His name is listed alongside Johnny Herndon’s and Leonard Speed’s in the fold-out on the “honor roll” of those who made the boycott a success. The problem is that, once you start explaining exactly what my dad and his friends tried to do, you come close to suggesting that, well, maybe the boycott wasn’t such a success.
The fold-out section states in small print that Ordinance 741, the bogus save-segregation law they tried to prove unconstitutional by sitting together on the Sunnyland bus in 1957, was never actually repealed. It stayed on the books in Tallahassee until 1973, when the city took over bus service from the private company. Of course, I know that lousy ordinances stay on the books everywhere. Every so often someone puts out a list of ridiculous laws (no parachuting for women on Sunday in Florida) and obsolete laws (no washing a mule on the sidewalk in Virginia). But those laws weren’t challenged all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. People didn’t risk their lives to challenge them. The fact that Ordinance 741 was never repealed feels to me, personally, like a slap. The fact that I can walk a mile south across the railroad tracks right now, in 2006, and see segregation thrive feels like something worse than that.
I remind myself that I haven’t come to Tallahassee this time to worry over such things. I’m not here to figure anything out. But I have a few hours on my hands before a scheduled luncheon, so like an addict backsliding, I head to the library archives at FSU [Florida State University] to read more interview transcripts.
The first I find is with Dan Speed, the grocery owner and boycott leader, who discusses, among other topics, the test ride. The interviewer asks him if he had encouraged his son, Leonard, to take the test ride.
“No, I’ll tell you what happened along that line,” says Speed. “We had a meeting, and in that meeting we came to a decision that we needed (lost transcription). . . . We didn’t have anyone in our group who was willing to go and, of course, one of the boys from FSU said, ‘Well, I think that I can serve as one of the persons and help solicit somebody.’”
“Joe Spagner (sic)?” asks the interviewer.
“Yeah, that’s the guy. He said he could assist in doing it and I said I can help get somebody to work with the blacks and of course this is how that really got moving.”
“They just got on it and sat down in front?”
“Oh, yes. It was understood. They knew what we wanted and they performed in that respect.”
“And of course they were arrested. I mean the bus driver called the police?”
“They made pretty good rounds at first, and they had enough money to keep riding and I think they got tired of . . . (lost transcription).”
The interview stops cold, the photocopied text trailing off into oblivion. . . .
This is beginning to seem suspicious. Were they hiding the truth from the Johns Committee, trying to keep the bus driver’s behavior off the record, protecting my dad for some reason, or protecting all of them? Or was Dan Speed’s voice simply difficult for the transcriber to hear on the recording? More to the point: Did the boys ride one bus or two or more? Were there three riders or six? I’ll never know for sure.
As the week goes on, mention of Dan Speed, the architect of the carpool and treasurer of the ICC [Inter-Civic Council], the bailer-out of jailed protestors, will be rare and grudging at best. History, it seems, is changeable. But some characters are utterly predictable.
The next interview I find is with none other than Judge John Rudd, the municipal judge who tried my dad, who tried the Tallahassee Nine, who tried Patricia Stephens Due, who never failed to lecture the defendants with thinly veiled disdain. The same bitterness permeates his comments twenty years after the fact, in 1978, once the civil rights movement was, for the most part, a done deal. He does not mince words.
About activists: “These people, they grab a little placard and bound up and down public streets. What are they accomplishing?”
About blacks: “I haven’t done a damn thing to them except support them. And they haven’t been victimized by me and my generation worth a damn. I don’t owe them anything.”
The interviewer begins to lose patience and steps in.
“Of course you know that the blacks come from slavery, and after the Civil War for 200 years, they were second class citizens.”
At this point Judge Rudd, as [my father’s friend] Jon Folsom would say, comes completely unglued.
“Well, now, I’m sick and tired of that theory and philosophy and that’s just a new approach to get further sympathy and something for nothing.”
I can live with the fact that change is slow. But the intentional slowing of it, the purposeful and wrongful manipulation of justice, can still enrage me.
* * *
I’m late for lunch.
I’d found the community college campus and parked the rental car before I realized that I didn’t know where, exactly, on campus the event was to be held, so I call [anniversary organizer] Cynthia Williams’s cell phone from a pay phone in the student union.
“Where are you?” she cries.
Turns out they’re holding festivities awaiting my arrival. This I did not expect. I wanted to be a spectator, not an honored guest. I had gotten the distinct impression the night before that was exactly what I would be.
“In the student union,” I say. “I’m wearing a pink shirt.”
“OK,” she says. “Reverend Foutz will be right there.”
Through double glass doors, I can see three men in suits walking fast, three abreast, across a wide nondescript lawn toward me, so I hang up and scurry out so they can get me where I belong.
“How are you this morning, Sister Spagna?”
And so it begins. For the rest of the week I will be Sister Spagna, which sounds somewhere between a nun, a radical lesbian feminist, and an honorary black woman. The name sounds silly enough that I nearly giggle, but it rolls from their tongues easily and is effused with warmth. They don’t mind that I’m late. They’re glad that I’m here. They whisk me into a large conference room where I shake hands and make apologies—so sorry, thank you, glad to be here. I can see immediately that I am underdressed yet again, and that I’m one of perhaps three white people in a room of a hundred or more.
“This is Sister Spagna,” Reverend Foutz says and seats me at a table up front with administrators from the community college.
This luncheon honors Carrie Patterson and Wilhelmina Jakes, who sat on the bus in 1956 to start the boycott, though neither is in attendance. Jakes, a retired schoolteacher, could not make the long journey. Patterson is dead, strangled to death in 1969 at the age of thirty-three, likely in a domestic dispute. No one mentions that fact or the fact that no one was ever convicted of the crime.
On the dais sit ten prestigious black women including Patricia Stephens Due, the activist leader, the first to say: jail no bail. They are here to honor, in addition to Jakes and Patterson, women throughout Tallahassee who supported the boycott, many of whom are in the room, all of whom were brave and selfless and steadfast.
One of the women, a college professor, steps forward.
“God is good,” she says.
“Yes, he is,” the crowd responds.
By the time the next speaker stands to say “God is good” I won’t miss a beat.
“Yes, he is,” I will say.
I’ll never get to the point where I yell “Amen.” But Barbara DeVane does. She is white as can be, and she yells it louder than anyone in the room. She sports dangly bracelets and bright red lipstick, and she’s the first on her feet for every ovation, the loudest in every response. She is utterly unselfconscious and apparently effective. Later, I’ll Google her name to find her involved in every cause there is in Florida: women’s rights, civil rights, workers’ rights. When I crane my neck to see her, she smiles, winks, and waves, her forefingers flapping toward me playfully, and I relax.
After several speakers, Patricia Stephens Due stands last to address the importance of remembering history. The room grows still. She is a formidable presence with the dark glasses she’s had to wear continuously for forty-five years, ever since her eyes were damaged by tear gas during a 1961 protest right here in Tallahassee. Her voice is low and slow and unyielding. And her favorite phrase is “foot soldiers,” meaning those who actually hit the street back in the day, those who did something.
“Stories live forever,” she says. “But storytellers don’t. Listen to the foot soldiers while you can.”
She could be speaking to me.
“If you don’t tell your story, someone will tell it for you, and they will get it wrong.”
After she finishes, a reporter approaches and asks me to tell my dad’s story. The administrators politely stand to get in the food line, scooting behind my chair to pass, as I tell the story as honestly as I can: my father did his part, then skipped town.
“It was too dangerous,” I say, “for him to stay.”
The reporter scribbles fast.
I tell him how the family didn’t know, how I came in January, how I admire Jakes and Patterson, how I am here to learn and not to be honored. Like a ballplayer after the big game, I try to say the right things. But I fail.
The administrators file back to their seats with plates of food.
“So, you’ve come all the way from Seattle?”
“Yes.”
“And your father got arrested during the boycott?”
“Yes.”
“Then he went to Washington?”
“No . . .” I start to explain that he went to California and then to South America. “But he jumped bail, right?”
“Right.”
I try to explain that he had graduated, that he was encouraged to leave by his attorney. I list the same bogus excuses I’ve found inexcusable myself for months now.
“He could’ve gotten killed in jail,” I say finally. “It was just too dangerous.”
The conversation, already chilly, freezes hard. The woman’s chin jerks upward slightly, defiantly, one eyebrow lifts over eyeglasses.
“Now you know. That’s what it was like for my people every day,” she says. She slows to enunciate: “Every. Single. Day.”
“Yes,” I say too fast and eager, staring down at my unused napkin shredded in my lap. “You’re right. You’re absolutely right.”
From what I can tell, maybe a third of this room was alive during the boycott—they might remember it—and the rest, I’m guessing, don’t need a special occasion to remember discrimination.
I stand, last in line, to fill my plate with baked chicken.
Reverend Foutz’s young daughter, Yolanda, passes me as I make small talk with another woman, balancing my plate on one hand, to shake with the other.
“Yes, I came from Seattle. Thank you for having me. I am honored to be here.”
Yolanda pauses beside me, and reaches over in a one-arm hug, and pulls my collar straight. She pats my shoulder and smiles as if to say: you’re doing just fine.
* * *
Patricia Stephens Due signs a copy of her book for me: “To the daughter of a foot soldier from FSU. Remember, the struggle continues.” Laura Dixie, a woman who was spurred to action by bus discrimination in the late 1940s and had been an activist ever since, approaches.
“I never knew your father, but I certainly knew of him. We appreciate what he did for us. Thank you for coming.”
“It’s an honor to be here.”
Just as I’m preparing to leave, Reverend Foutz puts a hand on my shoulder, to lead me toward the head table to meet C. K. Steele’s sons and, with them, Carrie Patterson’s son, up for the day from Tampa.
Derald Patterson reaches out for my hand with both of his.
“Your mother must’ve been a very brave woman,” I say.
He smiles, head bowed, so two gold molars show, and shifts his neck to the side, adjusting the collar of his suit coat.
“I didn’t know her well,” he says. “She died when I was so young.” He gestures toward the podium where her portrait is displayed front and center, right beside Jakes’. “I’m only now beginning to understand.”
“I know what you mean,” I say.
Ana Maria Spagna is a 1989 graduate of the UO’s Clark Honors College, and she will be on campus to read from Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus as part of the college’s fiftieth anniversary celebration May 6–7. She is the author of the essay collection Now Go Home: Wilderness, Belonging, and the Crosscut Saw and was the winner of the 2002 Oregon Quarterly Northwest Perspectives Essay Contest. Spagna lives in Stehekin, Washington.
