Austin Harton remembers growing up in 1960s Birmingham, Ala., in a black neighborhood routinely attacked by the Ku Klux Klan.
Harton, husband of District 97 Board of Education President Michelle Harton, was a young child at the time. The homes of blacks were targets of firebombs, as were black churches, so much so that the city earned the nickname “Bombmingham.”
“Birmingham was very, very segregated,” said Harton, 53, who moved to Oak Park with his wife in 1989. “I definitely remember the bathrooms that said ‘Men,’ ‘Women’ and ‘Colored’. The [separate] water fountains I can remember, and going in the back of some establishments.”
Harton was born in 1955, one year after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that declared segregated schools unconstitutional, and the same year as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, starting with Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of a public transit bus.
Harton, who has a younger brother and sister, was a childhood friend of Denise McNair, one of the four little girls killed in the bombing of the 16th St. Baptist Church on Sept. 15, 1963. Denise was 11 years old. Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins and Carol Robertson-all age 14-were the other victims. The vicious act was carried out by Klan members who weren’t convicted until more than a decade later.
Harton was 8 years old when the bombing occurred. McNair’s father, Chris, was a photographer in their neighborhood. He took Harton’s baby pictures and his graduation from high school. Harton’s mother sometimes took him over to the McNairs’ home where he recalled seeing Denise.
The 16th Street Church bombing was a pivotal moment of the ’60s Civil Rights Movement, sparking outrage nationwide.
As a child, Harton could feel the tension. Blacks were under such constant attack that his father and other black men would sometimes head out into the streets with shotguns to keep individuals with hostile intent from entering the neighborhood.
“Once black people began to assert themselves as far as demanding equal treatment and things of that nature, then it was ‘black people getting out of place,’ and that’s when people started having problems,” Harton recalled.
His parents were open with him about what was going on. They also shared stories from the past. His mother told him about one of her uncles who was lynched for an alleged crime that he didn’t commit.
Harton’s father shared a story from his youth during the 1930s of older black men coming around asking if they knew this or that man, looking for relatives who were sold years before into slavery.
Harton’s parents also told him where their last name came from. Like so many blacks today, his last name belongs to his ancestors’ slavemasters.
“What happened was that the Strawbridges sold my great-great-grandfather to the Hartons, and that’s how the Harton name came about. They talked about a lot of things, but not to saddle me with the idea that I couldn’t do certain things,” he said. “I think they wanted me to know what had gone on with them.”
As a child, Harton didn’t know any white people personally and didn’t interact with them, unless they worked at a store or some other public venue.
Some white families lived across the tracks from his neighborhood, but the only interaction he had with their kids was throwing rocks at them with his friends.
Harton wouldn’t experience any meaningful interaction with whites until high school when the Birmingham schools integrated in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
He was transferred to Birmingham’s all-white West End High School his sophomore year, located in an area known as a haven for the Klan. Harton’s parents were “very concerned” but allowed him to go.
The school’s student body was set up to have a 50/50 spilt between blacks and whites. The school’s faculty, too, was equally spilt, black and white.
Though segregation was officially abolished with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, racial hatred and discrimination were still going strong in Birmingham and elsewhere, Harton noted.
His white classmates had parents who were members of the Klan, and they’d sometimes talk at school about the Klan meeting their dads attended the night before.
Some white teachers had issues with teaching blacks, but for the most part didn’t mistreat any of the students, Harton said. The black faculty really went out their way to both teach and advocate for the black students, he added.
After the school was integrated, white teachers believed standards would have to be lowered in order for blacks to take honors classes. The black faculty disagreed.
“The black teachers said, ‘You keep the standards where they are, and the students will rise to meet or exceed those standards,” said Harton.
While his parents were open with him, some things were still painful to share with their young son. Birmingham’s Kiddie Land amusement park was a popular attraction for white families, but blacks were denied entry.
“I remember we used to drive by Kiddie Land, which was like, at that time, Six Flags. We’d drive along and see the Ferris wheel and the roller-coasters, and you couldn’t go. I said, ‘Why can’t I go?’ And he said, ‘Well, you know, they won’t let us go.'”
Years later, Harton shared that story with a white acquaintance, who really couldn’t grasp how bad those years were for blacks.
“This is why I think people really don’t understand what the situation was like. That’s why they were bombing the houses. It was terrorism. Basically, they were saying that you’re not going to do that, and we’re going to show you why you better not try.”
CONTACT: tdean@wjinc.com