One of the most rewarding aspects of riding on the Voices of Civil Rights bus
is the sense of discovery that awaits us each and every day. Take today’s
stop, New Albany, Indiana. No one on the bus, not even Vern Smith, our
walking, talking civil rights encyclopedia, had a take on New Albany.
Nor did any of the reference books on board mention this bucolic town
of 40,000 just across the mighty Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky.
But within minutes of stepping off the bus, we were climbing the learning
curve of New Albany’s rich past and present. Sally Newkirk, the director
of the Carnegie Museum for Art & History, provided the first lead, driving
a carload of us including Sandra, Vern, and Dan Lewis, one of the History
Channel cameramen, over to the Division Street School, the old “colored” elementary
on the town’s East End. By next spring, the restoration in progress
will become the town’s showcase for New Albany’s African American
heritage as well as a learning lab where the town’s elders can share
their stories and build an archive.
“When you don’t have a history, you create it,” Newkirk
explained.
Newkirk said the 120-year-old two-room schoolhouse with white clapboard
sides, maroon shutters, and a red brick foundation had fallen into disrepair
and was on the verge of being torn down. But a 1995 Carnegie Museum exhibit
on African American women called Voices Seldom Heard, which included oral
histories, inspired the community to preserve the building.
The Carnegie is augmenting the preservation effort with an excellent DVD
they are producing on the Underground Railroad, which utilizes historical
information directly tied to the New Albany area, but resonates far beyond
the town limits.
Back at the Centenary United Methodist Church, where today’s event
was held, others were meeting Kathryn Hickerson, the AARP Indiana volunteer
who spearheaded the drive to create a place to showcase New Albany’s
black heritage. Hickerson, who lives in the house she was born in, used to
have to walk a mile and a half past the white school down her block to Division
Street School back in the early 1940s. Newkirk traced Hickerson’s daily
walking route in her car.
A block from the Ohio River levee, at the corner of East Third and East
Main, we stopped at the Second Baptist Church, formerly the Second Presbyterian
Church, a sturdy red brick structure built in 1849 that was the first stop
from Louisville on the Underground Railroad to Canada. The day before, Lester
Sloan showed us the church in his hometown of Detroit that was the last stop
before slaves crossed into Canada and gained their freedom. We ran into Lester,
Rita, and Andy Bowley by the Second Baptist on their own tour of New Albany.
They were talking to a man at the plumbing store next door who told them
the church and the building that the plumbing store was in were once connected
by a secret tunnel. It too was part of the Underground Railroad.
New Albany’s economy was built on steamboats. The town was second
only to Pittsburgh in steamboat construction in the United States until after
the Civil War, when railroads rendered steamboats obsolete. But the river
continued to define the town’s character. Since New Albany is “below
the falls of the Ohio,” where the river drops 25 feet in three miles,
which restricted river traffic until locks were built, the town has been
tied to the South. Yet it was far enough north that Jim Crow laws were not
overt, but rather simply understood as a way of life. New Albany wasn’t
so much pro-slavery as anti-black, a not uncommon subtlety found in the North.
I suppose “’Nobnee” isn’t in the civil rights history
books because no one was killed during the height of the movement. But a
century earlier, in 1863, there were race riots triggered by whites who complained
blacks were stealing their jobs, which prompted many freedmen to leave the
area for good.
Still, the townspeople had plenty of stories to tell, as we quickly learned
during the program in the Centenary church sanctuary. The mayor, the police
chief, several firemen, and several other town, county, and school officials
turned out. So did fourth- and fifth-grade students from Lillian Emery Elementary
who walked to the school from down the street.
The Community Choir charged the gathering up with a spirited rendition
of “Wade in the Water.” Pastor Mike Roberts delivered a welcome
to his church. Oneita Phillips assumed the persona of Mary McLeod Bethune
to recall the days of slavery and the power of learning. Kathryn Hickerson,
Sally Newkirk, and Cliff Willis from the state AARP office all spoke, as
did several other members of the community.
But it was Ruth Bledsoe, an elderly senior citizen, who had the memory
to do the real truth-telling.
“I did live through those times,” Bledsoe said by way of introduction. “And
at those times I did not believe I’d live to come in here because I
could not come in here unless it was to mop the floors.” She related
personal stories of going to the “colored” school, being turned
down at job interviews because of her skin color rather than her qualifications,
and of the humiliation after integration when white children got free passes
to Mountain Berry Park in Louisville and black children were given consolation
tickets for an ice cream and pop picnic at the local park, because “colored” children
weren’t allowed at Mountain Berry Park. That, she said, was a defining
moment. A “stand-in” was organized to deny black children access
to buses that would take them to the picnic and Bledsoe had a confrontation
with the principal.
“Just what do you people want?” she said the principal asked
her. “What am I going to do with all the ice cream?”
“We could care less about what he did with that ice cream,” she
told the gathering. “It’s kind of sad our children played together
every day but when we went to school we went our separate ways. I often wondered, ‘Why?’”
Bledsoe then proceeded to bring it all back home to the here and now. She
knew Lillian Emery, the woman for whom the school that the black and white
children in the audience attended was named. As she looked directly at the
young students, Bledsoe recalled, “she said there would never be a
black person enter the doors of that school as long as she lived. I’m
going to tell you children she would turn over in her grave if she saw you.”
She then offered them this advice:
“Stand up to be seen.
Speak up to be heard.
And sit down to be appreciated.”
I don’t know if the children really understood what Ruth Bledsoe
was telling them, but I sure did. Inch by inch, the struggle goes on, even
in New Albany, Indiana. Pretty soon, they’ll have a place where they
can hear all about it.
