If you do not know the words to "Delta Dawn", then you have never spent a day with Joan Bonds. She is the personification of a beautifully written history book. Once you enter the paged of her stories it is very difficult to tear yourself away. Joan has a story for everything, and I mean everything. She even got a guy to voluntarily get into her oven! However, that is a story for another day, on this day I was on a mission to retrieve from the book of Joan her story of Birmingham in the 1960’s. I was not prepared for the things she told me, and maybe a part of me did not believe these things actually happened until someone I knew told them to me. Here is a brief look into the life of a twenty-something-year-old, white, woman in the heart of the Civil Rights movement.
I do not now who was more excited about this interview, Joan wanting to share her story, or me wanting a personal account of the History of Birmingham. Joan and I sat on the sofas in her den with CNN news in the background and she began to tell me her story of the 1960’s. She was just about my age when she witnessed the events that we read about in books. My mother had told me about Joan marching in the sixties so that is where I started. I asked what Birmingham was like then, she told me that the atmosphere was very tense.
She became involved in the movement after witnessing an elderly black man get passed over at a down town drug store. The clerk refused to sell him water so he could take the medication he had just purchased, and when Joan purchased a cup of water for the man the clerk called her a "nigger lover". This event stuck with Joan and she became very involved with the happenings down town. She attended many Church meeting to organize the people against the segregation, and even marched when the four girls were killed at the church. On her way to the church her taxi driver told her to duck, and soon after a brick came through the window hitting the driver in the head. Joan and the driver were taken to the emergency room, where tempers were higher than outside. The doctors were seeing the less severe white patients before they would see the seriously injured black patients. She told me it was safer outside where the riots were happening.
After the bombing the city of Birmingham was under Marshall law, and there were guardsmen on every street corner downtown. This was when Bull Connor and his boys were hosing down the protesters, setting dogs on them and even using cattle prods on them. Joan saw these events when she rode the bus to work. They would stop you with their big guns in hand and ask who you were and where you were going. Joan told one guardsman, "I am Joan Bonds, and I am going to work at the Downtowner, just like I did yesterday, and just like I will do tomorrow."
At the time of the bombing Joan knew a newspaper reporter, and got a press pass to attend the mass funeral. At the church she heard Dr. King speak for the first time. She watched the families and friends of the girls, and she admitted that on that day she was ashamed to be white. The funeral was not the only time she had the opportunity to hear Dr. King speak. He spoke about boycotting the downtown shops at one of the meetings she attended.
Throughout these events Joan was employed at a restaurant called the Downtowner. She watched history happen in her own front yard. She was in the restaurant when she heard the news that President John F. Kennedy was shot. "People say they will always remember where they were that day, and it’s true," Joan told me, she was watching the television in the bar at the restaurant. And all was quiet. She was also there when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. No one knew what to expect when he had been killed. The white people were scared of the riots that would take place, in fact the white customers that were in the restaurant left and went home.
Joan even waited on Marlon Brando when he came to eat after marching at Selma.
Joan was living with her sister at one time during all of this, and was forced to leave. She had been threatened because she was standing up for what she believed was right. She moved away from her sister to protect her and her family. Once Joan had children she calmed down. She still believes in everything that she stood up for she just had to protect her own children. Even when she was in a restaurant that was "closed" so a group of black customers could not come in. Sitting still and not doing anything was very hard for her.
Joan told me that she loved everything about the sixties. Especially the music, Janis Joplin is her favorite and she will sing it for you if you ask, even if you do not ask she will still sing. As I closed the book on Joan Bonds 1960’s history, I left with a better understanding of what this city was really like. What a place this would be if we just had a few less Bull Connors and a few more Joan Bonds in this world.
