Headline: THE
STRUGGLE CONTINUES \ IN 1963, DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. TOLD THE WORLD, "I
HAVE A DREAM, " AND LOCAL PROTESTERS MARCHED INTO HISTORY
Reporter: By Florence Shinkle and Greg Freeman
Publication: ST.
LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Last Printed: Sun., Jul. 25, 1999
Section: METRO, Page: C8, Edition: FIVE STAR LIFT
By the 1960s,
civil rights protests were nothing new in St. Louis. But, tied into the national
civil rights movement that reached its zenith in that decade, such actions intensified
locally.
"A
movement doesn't start from an idea. It starts from a feeling -- a feeling of
anger, a feeling of pain, " said Percy Green, founder of ACTION, a leading
activist group of the 1960s and 1970s. "When enough people feel that way,
they rise up, all of them, and things happen."
In 1963, during
the same week that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. marched on Washington and delivered
his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, Green and others were participating
in the protest at Jefferson Bank and Trust Co. -- a milestone event in local
civil rights history.
The
bank was targeted by CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, when bank officers
announced their intention of laying off four black tellers who held precious
white-collar jobs. Knowing the protest was coming, the bank's officers had gotten
a court injunction against it.
Watched
by police, the demonstrators sat in the bank, sang songs until the bank's closing
at 6 p.m. and dispersed peacefully. But it still got a number of them 90 days
in the city Workhouse, including Norman Seay, who started a prison school while
marking time. Also arrested was William L. Clay, who ultimately would become
Missouri's first black congressman and a political institution.
Similar
protests were staged at other St. Louis companies and clothing stores until
hiring agreements were reached with 15 of them.
In
East St. Louis, 200 blacks paraded in front of City Hall protesting the failure
of city officials to improve hiring opportunities for them there.
In 1964, Green, who'd avoided getting jailed as a result of the Jefferson Bank protest, was arrested at the Arch. He and a white friend, Richard Daly, scaled the still uncompleted structure to protest hiring discrimination at the site and throughout the city, an issue that city comptroller Virvus Jones would take up again 25 years later.
Next, Green tackled
the secrecy and exclusionism of the Veiled Prophet, the ultimate symbol of St.
Louis society. To the delight or dismay of many, in 1972, he engineered the
unmasking of His Most Mysterious Majesty by ACTION member Gena Scott, who made
the snatch during the Veiled Prophet Ball in Kiel Auditorium. (Although news
accounts at the time didn't identify the unmasked Majesty, he was Tom K. Smith
Jr., then a senior vice president of Monsanto Co.)
"We
had to do extreme things just to have normal expectations, " Green said.
In large part
because of the "extreme things, " the system's doors began to open.
In
1973, Gov. Christopher S. Bond appointed Theodore McNeal as the first black
president of the St. Louis Police Board. That same year, John Bass became the
city's first black comptroller.
In
1975, the U.S. District Court enforced a consent degree requiring the St. Louis
Fire Department to hire one African-American for every white firefighter, ending
the practice of all-white staffing in all but two fire districts.
In
1979, the Veiled Prophet accepted three black physicians into the membership.
In
1982, Freeman Bosley Jr. upset city Circuit Clerk Joseph P. Roddy, winning a
position from which, in 1993, he would launch himself into the mayoral race
and become the city's first black mayor.
Many say the fight
is not over. Just two weeks ago, protesters shut down construction work on Interstate
70 in a dispute over whether the state should require the use of additional
minority employees and firms.
"I
think we've won a lot of legal gains, but I don't know if we won over people's
minds, " says Norman Seay.
***
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