Guarding the Grave

(c) 2017, Dean Bonner

 

The first day was the worst.  People lined the South Atlanta streets, expecting trouble.  Mourners nervously eyed our carload of white people with apprehension and suspicion as we rolled slowly through and came to rest beside the simple white headstone draped in flowers.

Rain hissed on the pavement the first time we dropped Dad off at Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s grave in South-View cemetery.  Soon days turned foggy.  A few details are misty fifty years later, but I remember the fog that lasted for weeks.

He had been an armed guard for a just short while.  It was steady money compared to the sporadic income from emptying out Atlanta hippie houses with a flatbed dump truck borrowed from his cousin.

GFA Trucking was on strike.  He’d been with them since he began driving at age 16. Fourteen years on a tough job.

Some of the trucks he drove were equipped with showers on the end, in case the chemical cargo spilled onto the driver.  Dad would stand naked on the back porch and hose off before coming into the house after work.

He wasn’t about to cross the picket line, even after nearly two years of suffering from the strike.  When Dad joined the Teamsters, companies refused to put heaters in the truck cabs. When drivers complained about windshields icing up, owners installed just defrosters, and told drivers that if anyone was found diverting heat from the defrosters to themselves, they’d be fired.

In April 1968, no guard companies hired black guards.  At Advance Security, the white guards turned down the job guarding MLK’s grave.  They didn’t think much of King.  Except for two: one very old man, and my dad, who was 29 at the time.  Dad was a longtime King admirer who said that King was fighting for all poor people, black and white, and for unions.

The cemetery guards were paid for by Scripto, a pen company two blocks from Ebeneezer Baptist Church, whose workers King had supported in a strike.

When Dad first began working for the guard service—before the King assignment—we would surround Dad when he came home from work with his revolver strapped to his side.  The first week we asked—later we impatiently whined, “Did you shoot anyone TODAY?”

Once we’d experienced the tension at the gravesite, we stopped asking such questions.

Things had improved slightly.  The electricity was back on—Mama could take in washing and ironing again.  After nearly two years, we had a little something to go with the biscuits and gravy that had been our sole subsistence for a year and a half.  We still didn’t have indoor plumbing, but we were doing better.

Even suffering along with his family, Dad wouldn’t take another trucking job during the strike.  His father had worked alongside J. P. Mooney in north Alabama’s Hog Mountain gold mine in the Thirties, doing hard, dirty work.  Mooney was an organizer for the Communist-led International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers.  Mooney was unsuccessful in unionizing the Hog Mountain mine, the largest gold mine east of The Mississippi.  Dad understood union loyalty.
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After the mine closed, Pawpaw joined Mooney in the cotton mills nearby. He helped Mooney in his efforts in trying to unionize the mill workers, but they were unsuccessful in the Sylacauga mill.

Mooney was successful in the mill in the city of Avondale, though, after hard-won battles that nearly killed him.  Mooney was roughed up, then nearly beaten half to death.  The Avondale Mills company police chief visited him in his hospital room. He complimented Mooney on his persistence, but said that if Mooney returned to the mill, he would have him shot.  Mooney returned.

Mooney got the union in the mill in the city of Avondale, and put a black man on the union local’s executive board.

Union was a tough sell.  The mills paid better than the sharecropping the workers had left behind.  The Sylacauga Avondale mill also had a hospital and supported the schools, and even had a beachfront resort for workers, black and white.  Yet it did control all aspects of workers’ lives: their houses, churches, and schools. It wasn’t as good as the Tallassee mill, which would also pay for college and work the kids’ schedule for them to attend, but Avondale was better than the ones in the Carolinas and Georgia.  Mooney and Pawpaw didn’t stir significant union support.

We were poor.  So poor that when Dad’s sister had a baby that only lived a short while, he and his brothers took turns with my aunt’s husband hand digging the baby’s grave in frozen ground.  It took weeks.

Even us kids understood who King was.  Dad was pleased in having a small part in protecting King, even if it was after an assassin took him down.

We didn’t know what to expect.  For a few days after King’s funeral, black storeowners understandably stood by their stores with shotguns, anticipating trouble.  Tensions eased, slightly, after a couple of days.

We didn’t know if people would try to desecrate the grave, throw bombs, or shoot into the crowds of mourners.

But it was quiet.  Dad noticed an older black woman lingering at the headstone, chipping at its edge.  He was very gentle in telling her that if everyone took a souvenir, there’d be no stone left to visit. She smiled and left. People had chipped a few pieces off the stone’s edges already.

The grave was at a slight angle to the ancient cemetery’s entrance, close to the street.  It was a bit cramped for cars.  To prevent cars backing up into traffic, Advance Security had gravel spread along the side of the grave, to join a path circling through the cemetery to the Jonesboro Road driveway.   People drove slowly through to pay respects, black and white.  A few would linger.  When Dad stopped them from chipping a souvenir, they picked up the gravel. So many took a piece, Advance had to regularly replenish it.

King’s grave sat between the silently looming Atlanta Penitentiary on one side, and the segregated Fun Town amusement park that King had lamented being denied entry to as a kid.  Lakewood fairgrounds and Lakewood Heights were very near.  Before moving into the shack, we had lived in the low-income projects called Blair Village, across the street from the cemetery’s Jonesboro Road side.

In the end, King helped us.  With only two guards willing to do the job, Dad raked in massive overtime that he saved to buy a new house trailer, getting us out of the tarpaper shack we’d lived in since the strike began.

Dad still has his worn Teamsters’ Union card, dated 1954.