Every once in a while Southerners, black and white, need to be reminded how deeply ingrained racial segregation was in the region and how much courage it took to do things that today seem so perfectly natural — like setting up a bi-racial committee. That, in a nutshell, is what Phil Noble’s Beyond the Burning Bus: The Civil Rights Revolution in a Southern Town (New South Books) is all about. It is also about the place where this act of courage occurred — Anniston, Alabama.Anniston does not get much attention in studies about the Civil Rights Movement. When the city is mentioned it is usually in connection with the events of Mother’s Day, May 14, 1961, when a mob of white toughs, armed with clubs, bricks and knives, attacked the Freedom Riders who were traveling in buses across the South to challenge segregation. The Riders were brutally beaten and one bus was set on fire. To Anniston’s shame, the picture — taken by an Anniston Star photographer — of the burning bus was sent around the world and became almost as famous as the dogs in Birmingham or the sheriff’s posse at the bridge in Selma.
But Anniston never became a symbol of racial violence the way Birmingham and Selma did. Although there would be other incidents, on the whole Anniston handled the transition from segregation to integration with dignity and calm.
Always conscious of what happened in Birmingham and determined not to let it happen here, civic leaders in Anniston did in Alabama what civic leaders in Atlanta did in Georgia. The parallels are not exact, historical parallels never are, but they are significant.
For one thing Anniston, like Atlanta and unlike Birmingham, had a strong core of civic-minded whites who called the city their home and were determined to keep it calm and progressive. They were the effective counterbalance to the under-class unrest on which the Ku Klux Klan fed. But, as Phil Noble effectively points out, civic-minded whites were still segregationists and Anniston was as racially divided as any city in the South. Noble knew this first hand. He came to Anniston in 1956, as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church which, like all the other white churches in the city, had no black members. Indeed, during his early years in the city Rev. Noble never met an African American minister. Which, when you think of it, was not odd. Most whites had little contact with blacks and vice versa. That was life in the 1950s South.
The 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education unsettled white Anniston as it did whites throughout the South, but schools did not integrate. Instead Annistonains watched the news, heard of demonstrations, and wondered if and when the Movement would come to their city. It came on a bus. And in the aftermath of that event a 24-year-old black minister, Rev. William B. (Bob) McClain, wrote Rev. Noble and suggested communication be opened between ministers in the city. So a group of them met, in a black church because blacks did not come to white churches, and from that meeting eventually came a bi-racial Ministerial Association — communication had begun.
But communication between ministers of both races did not naturally lead to communication between black and white civic leaders. Plans for forming a bi-racial group to deal with issues of the day were still in the talking stage when, again on Mother’s Day, May 12, 1963, Klansmen fired shotguns into the homes of two black families and into a black church. That turned talk into action. Three days later the city formed a bi-racial Human Relations Council to advise city government on civil rights matters and Phil Noble was asked to serve as chairman.
While there was opposition to this approach, on the whole the response was positive. Within a few weeks Anniston was receiving national attention for “showing the way” to racial harmony and over 100 communities had contacted the city for advice on how to deal with racial issues.
That, however, was just the beginning. There would still be the “library incident,” when two black ministers, N.Q. Reynolds and McClain, were beaten by a mob for trying to check out a book at the city’s public library. And there would be other violence — white on black and black on white — but calm was restored, in no small measure because of the Human Relations Council.
Phil Noble writes from inside events and brings to what happened a fresh and much needed perspective. Those who lived through the 1950s and 1960s ought to read this book and remember what it was once like. Those born after those decades ought to read it to see what it took to get us where we are today.
But readers should also recall the words of Phil Jr., J. Phil Noble’s son. In the midst of all that was happening he said to his father, “I’m afraid you all are going to get everything done and there will be nothing left for me to do.” Rev. Noble told his son not to worry, there would always be more needing done. Both father and son were right. Rev. Phil Noble and his black and white colleagues did a great deal, more than might be expected given the time and circumstances. But, as we know, there is still more to do.
Anniversary symposium
Sept. 15 is the 40th anniversary of both the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham and what is referred to in Anniston as the “incident at the library,” the bloody ambush of two blacks who tried to integrate Carnegie Library by a mob of angry whites.The library beatings followed other violence in the area, causing a few key leaders in the black and white community to choose to lead the city down a road of racial reconciliation rather than violence.
Phil Noble’s book, Beyond The Burning Bus, is a celebration of this choice. In conjunction with the launch of the book, he and many of the same people who rescued Anniston from racial hatred four decades ago, are holding a symposium that aims not so much to look at the past, but to find a way of healing the festering racial wounds we still have.
The schedule of events is slated to begin on Saturday, Sept. 13, 9:00 a.m., at the Anniston Room of the Anniston/Calhoun County Public Library, and will end on Sunday, Sept. 14.
