CIVIL RIGHTS ERA
Gay youths, Black & white, led North Carolina fight
Lavender & red, part 56
By
Leslie Feinberg
Published Mar 10, 2006 11:15 PM
Gay youths, Black and white, led breakthrough
struggles against racism and Jim Crow apartheid in North Carolina—the
Durham and Chapel Hill freedom struggles—during the early 1960s, and won
victories that reverberated throughout the Deep South.
Historian James T.
Sears, a significant white contributor to Southern struggle history, devotes a
whole chapter about three of the main organizers of the North Carolina movement
in his book “Lonely Hunters—An Oral History of Lesbian and Gay
Southern Life, 1948-1968.”
Quinton Baker, African American and gay,
was a key leader. Baker was born on the coastal plain of North Carolina in 1942.
He grew up in Greenville, a town of 21,000, making a living by shining shoes.
While not transgender in today’s terms, Baker once explained, “when
you speak the way I speak in the South, you stand out. For a lot of people my
speech pattern was feminine.” But, he added about growing up in his
community, “Back then, you could be funny but not ostracized. The attitude
was one of quiet acceptance.”
Baker was a senior in an all-Black
high school on the day—Feb. 1, 1960—when four African American
first-year students at Agricultural and Technical College (A&T) ordered
coffee at a downtown Greensboro, N.C., restaurant from a counter that only
served whites. They were refused service.
The next morning, 27 Black
A&T students arrived together and ordered coffee at that counter. “We
are prepared to keep coming for two years if we have to,” one of the youth
vowed.
The “sit-ins” electrified the South. One week later,
the sit-in movement sparked similar protests in North Carolina cities with
historically Black colleges: Durham, Elizabeth City, High Point and
Winston-Salem. Another week passed and the sit-ins at lunch counters to protest
racist segregation had spread from Nashville, Tenn., to Tallahassee, Fla.
Sears noted, “By the end of March, 68 cities in 13 Southern states
reported sit-ins, including a wade-in at the all-white swimming pool in Biloxi,
Miss., a read-in at the library in St. Petersburg, Fla., and a host of kneel-ins
at all-white churches.”
Hundreds of youth activists were arrested
and locked up, where they faced serious charges. City officials in Orangeburg,
S.C., gave the go-ahead to turn power hoses on student demonstrators and then
held them in an open stockade in 40-degree weather. Tallahassee cops teargassed
youth activists. Klan mobs met civil rights demonstrators with bats and pipes in
Bessemer and Montgomery, Ala.
This struggle marked the qualitative opening
of a youth-led civil rights movement, and it was the real beginning of the
larger student struggle of the 1960s and 1970s. By the day Baker graduated high
school in May 1960, a few businesses had agreed to end white-supremacist
segregation of their lunch counters. Within one year, the struggle won
desegregation of lunch counters in 126 Southern cities.
Baker was drawn
into this vortex of struggle. He said he looked forward to the fall of 1960 when
he would enter North Carolina College (NCC) in Durham. Black college students
were organizing. Lacey Streeter, another native of Greenville, led the NAACP
college chapter at NCC.
Baker later recalled, “By the time I got to
college I was so ready and prepared [for struggle] that it became almost more
important to me than the academic work. It was the force.”
He added,
“My first semester I was in the NAACP and I was demonstrating. I
didn’t stop for the four years I was there!”
As Baker
organized boycotts, sit-ins, rallies and street demonstrations, his tactical and
organizational skills became renowned. He helped other young leaders to develop.
He became president of the NAACP state youth organization and an NAACP
Commando.
Baker later recalled, “A lot of student leaders and
activists were often gay men,” adding that the men weren’t often
aware of lesbian activists.
Baker worked closely with two gay, white
anti-racist activists.
Anti-racist struggle awakens white
activists
Pat Cusick, like other white youth who were
shoulder-to-shoulder in the struggle, had grown up under white supremacist
indoctrination. These youth had to break with the racist ideology they had been
taught in order to put their bodies on the line to end Jim Crow
laws.
Cusick worked at a General Electric plant in Rome, Ga., after the
Army “honorably” discharged him in 1953. The voice of Lillian Smith,
a now-famous Southern anti-racist white writer, reached Cusick after she sent a
letter to the editor of the New York Times hailing the 1954 Supreme Court
decision that formally ended racist segregation in schools as “every
child’s Magna Carta.”
Smith, while she did not use the word
lesbian to describe herself, had a female life partner.
Cusick went to
school at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill—a sister city to
Durham, but with a much smaller Black population. He worked as a campus
custodian in 1962 while he studied mathematics.
When the writer James
Baldwin, African American and gay, came to Durham to speak to the students,
Cusick traveled from Chapel Hill to hear him.
Baker was there, too. He
explains, “We were interested in him because of his racial analysis and
his analysis of our condition, more so than his writing having sexual
undertones. Of course there were always attempts to read materials that talked
about homosexuality. He came down in support of what we were
doing.”
Cusick first became an activist in the “ban the
bomb” movement for nuclear disarmament. He later said that in his early
years as a white Southern activist, “It was much easier for me to be
against the war in Vietnam and form the Student Peace Union than to get involved
in civil rights—I never even considered gay rights.”
An openly
gay white youth, John Dunne, also joined the SPU. Sears wrote,
“John’s apartment was the first place where Pat [Cusick] talked at
length with other gay men who shared his passion for social justice: ‘We
talked about homosexuality and bisexuality mostly on an intellectual level with
a bit of sexual tension. At the forefront, though, were discussions about the
peace movement and civil rights.’”
As the SPU grew, Cusick
said he realized, “How could we be talking about all of this peace stuff
when there was no peace between the races.” The white SPU activists began
a systematic desegregation effort in Chapel Hill, including organizing boycotts
of white-segregationist businesses.
Dunne returned to Chapel Hill on May
20, 1963, from Birmingham, Ala., where he had been arrested on charges of
loitering and failure to obey a police officer. It happened while he was working
to locate Black youth who had been arrested after Bull Connorpolice force turned
power hoses on 600 schoolchildren. He was awaiting appeal of his sentence: a
year behind bars and a $200 fine.
Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his
“Letter from a Birmingham Jail” after being arrested for leading the
Good Friday march there. The powerful impact of the Birmingham demonstrations
was felt throughout the South, including Durham—where young civil rights
activists readied themselves to wage “an all-out war against
segregation.”
However, one white, gay North Carolina student
journalist actively campaigned on the wrong side of civil rights struggle and
desegregation. His name, now familiar, is Armistead Maupin Jr.—a William
F. Buckley admirer. (Sears)
Baker helps lead Chapel Hill
movement
Baker had become a prominent and seemingly tireless organizer
of the widening and deepening Durham protest movement. And he agreed in 1963 to
work with the Chapel Hill movement, too. Soon after they met in that struggle,
Baker and Dunne became lovers.
“With Baker and the Chapel Hill Black
teens involved,” Sears explained, “tactics changed from picketing to
sit-ins and marches.” As the summer of 1963 began, activists were
organizing three marches a week, while picketing numerous white-owned segregated
businesses.
Cusick recalls Baker teaching demonstrators how to fall and
protect themselves from the police. “This created the ire from the Chapel
Hill liberals,” he said, “since we were using nonviolence as a
tactic, not a philosophy.”
When criticized by more liberal elements
for using these tactics to break the law, Baker said, “We would reply,
‘If you agree with my cause, then what you need to do is to act on the
fact that you believe in the cause—don’t worry about
my tactics. Don’t concentrate on what
I’m doing. Concentrate on what you’re
doing that supports the cause that we both believe
in.’”
Cusick described the impact of the
arrest of 34 demonstrators on July 19—including himself—in what was
to become a turning point in the Chapel Hill freedom movement. “Like most
whites, [for me] a policeman was a friendly image. There is nothing like it for
you to get your head whipped, your teeth knocked in, and your ribs kicked. You
come to a knowledge that is much different.”
In
jail, Pat and fellow activist prisoners read and discussed Baldwin’s
“Another Country,” which wove themes of societal racism and
homophobia.
Cusick said, “There were more gays than
people ever realized in the civil rights movement. But you wouldn’t see it
from the outside.” He added, “In the midst of a movement that was
not directly related to sexual orientation but more involved in day-to-day
social justice issues with a common enemy, the movement would bring you closer
together. During that period there was not a great deal of conversation about
sexual orientation.”
Baker was also imprisoned for
his activism in 1963, in Morgantown Prison Camp—one of two desegregated
N.C. state prisons. He observed, “The chain gang was one of those
experiences you say, ‘I’m glad I had it; I never want to do it
again.’ It was there I really learned about the struggle of what it means
to be human.”
Baker wrote letters for Black
prisoners and at least one white. He said, “I learned a lot about people
and their emotions when I had to convey their feelings to someone who they loved
or cared about. Having to read, talk to, and see people, and understanding what
kinds of lives they have, I began to appreciate what being human is
about.
“I began to recognize the superficiality of
some of the things we surround ourselves with and how we separate ourselves. It
was an incredible beginning for me in my quest to understand about being a human
being and how to put into that context my blackness and my sexual
orientation.”
In August 1963, as the March on
Washington was drawing huge numbers, the impact of the gay-baiting and
red-baiting political attacks on Bayard Rustin—the march’s leading
tactician—was also felt by civil rights activists of all nationalities and
sexualities in the Deep South, including Baker, who had been released from
jail.
‘The tactician who brought the
connection’
Baker said of some of the white civil rights
activists he worked with: “There were really some good solid white people
who came into the movement and got to understand where we were at that time. ...
Those white people who got beat up with me, went to jail with me, sat down with
me, and got peed on, it is very difficult to question their commitment. Whether
they had fought through all of their personal racism is a different
story—they were struggling with it.”
As civil disobedience
spread, more activists—Black and white—went to jail. On Jan. 12,
1964, the Chapel Hill Freedom Committee organized a 13-mile march from Chapel
Hill to Durham. There, at least 500 crowded into the First Baptist Church to
hear CORE national chairperson, Floyd McKissick, and John Knowles, a gay white
author of “A Separate Peace,” speak at the indoor rally.
CORE
leader James Farmer told the cheering crowd that night, “Unless Chapel
Hill is an open city by Feb. 1, it will become the focal point of all our
efforts. All our resources, staff funds and training will be centered
here.”
In April 1964, Baker, Cusick and Dunne were sentenced to 6
months, 1 year and 3 years of hard labor, respectively. By July 2, the struggle
had forced President Lyndon Johnson to sign the Civil Rights Act that barred
racist segregation of public accommodations
Cusick concluded that in North
Carolina, Quinton Baker had been “the tactician who brought the connection
to the statewide movement.”
Next: Black and white, gay and
straight—civil rights activists built unity in Jackson, Miss.,
struggle.
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
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