Bloody Tuesday’s tale, 60 years on, remains still to be widely recognized for its horrors. For reasons of pain, on the parts of those bloodied and beaten, and shame, for Tuscaloosans who allowed or even urged the “daymare” to unfold, as well as failures from media, the events of June 9, 1964 have been talked about mostly within families.
More: First African Baptist Church to commemorate 60 years since ‘Bloody Tuesday’
This weekend as First African Baptist Church holds a 60-year commemoration, a collation of that day, and the ripples surrounding, will be available for all to read, in recently published book “Bloody Tuesday: The Untold Story of the Struggle for Civil Rights in Tuscaloosa” (Oxford University Press). More than 150 interviews give voice.
John M. Giggie, associate professor of history at the University of Alabama, and director of the Summersell Center for the Study of the South, heard tales first from his barber, the Rev. Thomas Linton, who mentored him, and urged patience.
Giggie worked 11 years on the book, uncovering sources official and anecdotal, pursuing records from newspapers that didn’t fully mark the significance, in part because the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had sent deputies such as James Bevel and the Rev. T.Y. Rogers to lead in Tuscaloosa. They were not camera-magnets on par with the ardent orator.
Other press, consumed with tumultuous years, treated it as a one-day story, despite it being the largest single invasion of a church in civil rights history, with more injured and arrested than on Selma’s Bloody Sunday, eight months later.
The “Freedom Summer” murders of civil rights volunteers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner happened just weeks after Bloody Tuesday; passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act came just a week or so after.
“So these incidents began to elbow Tuscaloosa off the front page,” Giggie said.
On Bloody Tuesday, more than 500 men, women and children were intercepted in an attempted march from First African Baptist Church to the then-new courthouse on Greensboro Avenue, which had been opened, despite promises, with segregated facilities. City police and a deputized mob rained terror with batons, billyclubs and baseball bats.
The marchers didn’t make it more than 50 feet.
As violence erupted, many ran back to the church, but even there couldn’t find sanctuary: Tear gas canisters crashed through stained-glass windows. Donning gas masks, police swept the very young and the elderly from closets and other hiding places. Thirty-three people were beaten badly enough to require hospitalization. Others, fearing the city would be monitoring the hospital, took refuge in Linton’s barbershop, or at homes nearby, and treated their own wounds. Chief of Police William Marable made 94 arrests, including Rogers and other leaders.
Following the Rev. Thomas Linton’s lead, when the historian mentioned writing a book, the reverend, who saved a wealth of artifacts from Tuscaloosa’s civil rights struggles at his barbershop before his death in 2020, braced Giggie for a long journey.
“And he didn’t tell me why initially, but I think what he meant is: It will take a long time for people to trust you,” Giggie said. In the back of his shop, the barber had a treasure trove of newspapers and other materials, a collection now owned by the city, and planned to become the heart of a civil rights museum named for Linton, recently announced as one of Mayor Walt Maddox’s 2024 capital projects.
Thanks to technology, newspaper databases became a primary source, but the historian struggled to cross-reference the stories of those who had been at the church with written records.
“The people involved were relying on their memories of traumatic events several decades previous,” he said. “So part of my job was deciding when to trust, when legal records couldn’t be found to fully corroborate.
“So the book is as much about a relationship as it evolved between an older civil rights leader and a younger white professor. Slowly that relationship grew,” Giggie said. Until Linton died at the age of 88, they spoke more often than when the professor needed his hair trimmed.
“He, like everyone else, can’t understand why this story wasn’t told when it happened. I would speak to people who would ask me, ‘Where have you been?’,” Giggie said.
He found a “concerted effort” by police and white media to “… frame the story as one of Black thugs attempting to ransack downtown Tuscaloosa, and police within their rights to respond.”
Like his relationship with Linton, Giggie made in-roads with living witnesses through persistence, and patience.
“The stories are enormously painful,” he said. “And not only that, but people were forced to live with this, with no avenue for redress.
“There was no hearing in which Black people could testify to what they experienced. There was no legal form in which a white person who was part of the violence was asked to explain their actions.”
Linton and others expressed concerns that even the positive changes, the progress, can be eroded, without constant vigilance, which must center around awareness.
Sunday’s events begin with a 3 p.m. service, “Where Do We Go From Here,” with U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell as guest speaker. At 4:15, a recreation of the planned march will be held from the church to the courthouse, including participants, organizers, leaders and foot soldiers from “Bloody Tuesday.”
Back at the church afterward, a reception will be held at 5:30 p.m., including a book signing with Giggie.
Reach Mark Hughes Cobb at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Alabama historian’s ‘Bloody Tuesday’ book was 11 years in the making
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