Mardon Walker and Naomi Graver

[00:02] NAOMI GRAVER: We are now recording. Hi, my name is Naomi Graver I am 22 years old. Today is Tuesday, August 24, 2021. I am currently in Los Angeles, California, and I'm here today with Martin Walker who is going to tell me a story. Martin, would you like to introduce yourself?

[00:26] MARTIN WALKER: My name is Martin Walker I live in Baltimore, Maryland. It is 1-24-19, sorry, 2021, and I am 76 years old. And I'm going to start my story now. This is what happened to me in Atlanta, Georgia, starting in the fall of 1963, and how my court case there ended up with a decision in my favor at the U.S. supreme Court in May of 1965. I was 18 years old at the time, a white college student from Rhode island, and I was attending Connecticut College for Women. But I'd applied and been accepted by my college to be an exchange student as a sophomore at Spelman College in Atlanta. Spelman was and still is a black woman's college. A student from Spelman took my place at Connecticut College. When I went there at her college, I had decided to go as an adventure. I knew I had never had a black friend. I'd never been to. I'd been to a segregated high school in Florida and then a small school in Rhode island where there was one black family. So I went out of curiosity as an adventure, as a chance to be in a city, at a college system where there actually were was Atlanta University, Morehouse and Spelman, where I could take courses from. It sounded like an exciting thing to do. While I was there, there were four white students only, including me. Three of us were exchange students and there was a woman from Norway. The school being there at the school was academically exciting. Unfortunately, Howard Zinn had been a professor there before I got there, but had been dismissed because of his politics. But I did have a seminar that I took, an honors seminar with Staunton Lind. And in that seminar was the writer Alice Walker who wrote the Color Purple. And so I got to know her from being a classmate. I took very challenging courses at Morehouse, Atlanta University and at Spelman. But at the same time, living in the dorm, I had wonderful conversations and friends. The students were so open. And many times we talked about race, both from where they came from and what was happening on the national level. I went saying that I was going to be an observer. I definitely wasn't going to participate in any kind of civil rights demonstrations. I think that didn't even enter my mind when I went. But in the fall of 1960, three, a bomb went off in a church in Birmingham, Alabama. And in my dorm were other students, were students that had known the families of the four little girls that were killed in that bombing in their Sunday school class. And there definitely was a real tension in the atmosphere of the dorm when confronted with the enormity of this occurrence in Birmingham. And then the president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated that same semester. So there was definitely a heightened sense of national politics on campus. But we were more interested in what was going on in Atlanta at the time, which was not an integrated city. There was an effort made to make it seem as if it was more enlightened than it truly was. And one of the first things I did was join a picket line with my roommate at First Baptist Church, where a white minister from Los Angeles had been dragged down the steps of the church because he had attempted to go to a worship service with two black college students. He was convicted. He was jailed. He was beaten terribly in jail and remained there because he had not been able to make bond. So many. There were many white picketers as well as black picketers at the church. My roommate was from Indianapolis, and she, I found out later, became a medical doctor. Halle was her name. She was walking back to the dorm from the Morehouse campus with a Morehouse student once and was confronted by a group of young white men, one of whom threatened her with a knife. So she had had a scary episode already, and she went one day shopping for things for a room at a shopping center near the college. And after she'd done her shopping, she went to get something to drink at the lunch counter there and was refused service. She came back to the dorm room and was furious. And I think at that point I realized that I was really angry about. About the issue of denial of access to public accommodations by students at the college and by anybody with black skin involved in Atlanta, as well as white students who were with them. Looking back, I think my parents approved for me to actually go there. It was. I was in a Navy family. Both my parents were college educated and from the West Coast. And it certainly was a leap of faith that they sent me to Spelman. Another factor that made me become more active in the civil rights movement was that the SNCC office, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was right near the campus, and they sent SNCC workers on the campus to encourage us to participate in a series of demonstrations that were being held in Atlanta at the time. Spelman and Morehouse students marched downtown, picketed at several Restaurants that did not serve blacks. And then a series of sit ins were organized at a restaurant. It wasn't really a restaurant. It was a fast food chain called Crystals with a K. And that was where I was first arrested. The charge was disorderly conduct. And I found out to my horror later, the dean of Spelman had sent a telegram, a Western Union telegram to my mother saying, I regret to inform you that your daughter was arrested last night in an unauthorized demonstration. She is in jail under a fictitious name. You will be informed of further developments. Well, the fictitious names that we were in jail with were the names of the Spelman dormitories. I gave my name as Laura Spelman. Somebody else was Abby Rockefeller. And we thought it was pretty funny that the court clerk had just no concept of the college to realize that these names that had been around since the late 1800s were the ones that we were given to court. We were taken off to jail. One thing about the civil rights movement in the 60s, it was a singing movement. Now with Black Lives Matter, it's a chanting movement. And you hear all those chants, the demonstrations. But we sang, and we sang in the paddy wagon. We sang in the jail cells. We sang in the dormitories on campus, at rallies, at marches. There were always songs in the air. Things like, ain't gonna let nobody Turn me around oh, freedom this little light of mine oh, there were so many songs that we sang. Now, when we got to the jail, the jail, of course, was segregated. So the black students that I was arrested with were all together in one part of the jail, and I was with the white prisoners. But when I got there, into the jail cell, a very butch lesbian announced to the other prisoners that I should be left alone. That in fact, she admired me because I reminded her of a student that she'd met in another jail who had a Freedom Rider, she called her, who had written a letter to the governor on toilet paper protesting. And this woman and her girlfriend kind of looked after me while I was in the jail. We were there for about 30 hours. It was a horrible place. There was an open toilet. The food was brought in in a bucket, and we were given these bowls to eat it out of. There were rotten bologna sandwiches for one meal. The beds were just almost impossible to sleep in. But our lawyers showed up the next day and there was a very low bail set, and we were released. And when we went into court, we were given a small fine and sent away by the judge. By the way, our lawyer, Howard Moore, later on represented Angela Davis in California when she Was charged with the conspiracy to commit murder around the George Jackson case. But at the time, he was a young man, and we really looked up to him. So after that, I said, I better not get arrested again. And. But the demonstrations continued, and students in my dorm continued to participate. And so I ended up at another Crystal's restaurant. And this was in January. In fact, it was January 13, 1964. The way that we would get into these restaurants, which the. The manager would keep the door locked and only let white patrons inside. I would go first, and the manager would come and unlock the door. And the other students, the black students, would be crouched down below the glass out front where she couldn't see them. And as I went in, I dropped my purse, and as I did that, the other students would come piling in behind me and go and sit on the lunch counter stools. That was our method for getting in. And that's what we did that day. Well, we were ordered to leave, and a new law was being used to arrest us. It was a law passed by the Georgia legislature specifically for circumstances, Citizen demonstrations like this. And it made it against the law to refuse to leave when asked to do so by an owner or manager. And that was the state law that we were arrested under. And so instead of being taken back to the city jail with a disorderly conduct charge, I found myself at the fulton county jail, now the Fulton county jail. The city jail's prisoners, I think, were mostly drunks and prostitutes that had been picked up the night before. But at the county jail, women were serving sentences and had been convicted of things like check fraud, More sophisticated violations of the law than you would have in the city jail. So, once again, the jail was segregated. And I went into this great big room full of. There was a day room, and then there was a room full of cots. A little bit apprehensive, but just biding my time. I found out later that stick didn't like having a single white person sent to the county jail because of the terrible beating that reverend Jones had experienced, and normally would send somebody else out to get arrested so that I wouldn't have been there alone. But as it happened, the person at the SNCC office who was responsible for that was out sick that day. And that seems to be why I was in this. Needless to say, the black students in the other part of the segregated jail were treated royally by the other prisoners, by the black workers that were like the housekeepers of the jail. And they sang and had a wonderful time. I just kept Quietly to myself. And nothing happened until I went to sleep. The first night I woke up because a woman was beating on my head. A whole crowd of women prisoners were around me, and they yanked me out of bed and threw me on the floor and started kicking me. I had been to nonviolent training that SNCC offered, and I knew to curl up in a ball to protect myself. And they started shouting at me, nigger lover and traitor to the race. And when I didn't fight back, they finally tired of this assault on me and left me there on the floor. The next morning, a deputy, a white male deputy, came in and directed the women to drag me into the day room. And while I stayed curled up on the floor, proceeded to tell the other women that were in the jail cell how fortunate they were not to be like me, how I was the scum of the earth, that they should have complete disdain for anybody like me and feel proud that they were basically white women. After that, I was very afraid of staying there. And fortunately, got bailed out that first day and did not have to go back into that jail cell, which was a great relief. Well, the semester ended, and I went back to Connecticut College. It was my sophomore year, my second semester. And one night I got a phone call from Atlanta. And the phone call was my case was called. Suddenly, the next morning, I had to be in court. Get to Atlanta, Marty. Immediately. I flew down to Atlanta and was about a half an hour late getting to the courtroom. There were 29 cases that were called, but the judge selected my case to be called first. And there was no doubt in my mind that it was because I was a white woman from the north, that he had called my case. He was furious that I was late to court. He canceled my bail, and I ended up staying in jail for six more days until somebody in Atlanta, a black man with a house, put it up as the necessary posting for my bail. The bail law in the state of Georgia at the time said that if you did not go through a bail bondsman, that the bail had to be covered by unencumbered property in the county in which you were being tried. And unencumbered means a piece of property with no mortgage on it. You can imagine how difficult it was just to find somebody who was willing to post their home without a mortgage as bail for someone that they didn't know. But meanwhile, the trial commenced, and I sat in jail. Unfortunately, I went back to the very jail cell that I had been in at the Fulton county jail, where the women had assaulted Me, this is many, many weeks later. But there was a woman there that had been present when I was originally there. And I saw her go around to the other prisoners, whispering in their ears. And I could just feel the hate and the tension in the room. I got a bed where I could put my back up against the bars of a jail cell and just sat up all night that first night, terrified, I told my lawyer the next day what had happened. When the trial actually began, I had two lawyers. Howard Moore was still representing me, and then Donald Tolliwell was the senior attorney. He actually went on later in life to be a federal judge. They were supportive, but the judge had raised the bail considerably higher. And so I had to wait until somebody could be found to post it before I could get out. Meanwhile, when I was taken back to the jail, I begged the deputy in charge to put me in solitary cell. And I did that until finally they did move me to a solitary cell. And it was such a sense of relief that I was finally safe. While I was in jail, I had a visit from Martin Luther King Senior. He had become alarmed at this judge's continuing to require unencumbered property as bond for demonstrators. And he came and visited me for about half an hour. And he. We talked about my case, but we talked about civil rights in general. And he was let in to see me because there were elections in Atlanta and he was the pastor of the largest black church in Atlanta. Afterwards, he spoke to the press and described me as being a courageous young woman, which I was really touched by. There were other people that tried to visit me in jail, but they weren't allowed in. As I sat in jail, tremendous publicity was being given in Atlanta to the trial. Years later, I found out that a woman actually brought cookies for me to the jail. But, of course, I never got them. And as the trial continued, it became very clear that I was going to be convicted. The judge, his name was Derwood Pye P Y E. And he hated civil rights demonstrators, particularly people that were coming from the North. And he was determined to make an example out of my case. One of the character witnesses for me was a professor that I had at Spelman. And when he got into a fairly innocuous exchange with the judge, the judge held him in contempt and sentenced him to 20 days in jail. There were a lot of reporters covering the trial, including a young reporter from the New York Times. And at the conclusion of the trial, I was found guilty. And I was sentenced to the maximum sentence for that particular misdemeanor of Trespass. And I was given a sentence of 18 months in jail, 12 months of it at hard labor, and $1,000 fine. Now, $1,000 fine at that time in today's money would be about, I think, $10,000. It was a huge amount of money. And even the Atlanta Constitution's editor wrote, saying that in a column that the punishment was disturbingly disproportionate, although he acknowledged that I had broken the law. This particular sentence and the fact that I was 18 years old and white from the north, and maybe because I was tall and blonde, as newspaper articles also pointed out, got attention not just all over the United States, but I've seen articles that were in German and French newspapers. My picture was in Time magazine. There were numerous articles in the New York Times, all of them decrying what had happened in terms of the sentence that I was given and the words and actions of Judge Pye. Well, we. My lawyers appealed the case. They asked for a reconsideration of the sentence. The judge denied it. They then appealed the case to the Supreme Court of Georgia. And there the court upheld my conviction unanimously, Even though the 1964 Civil Rights act had been passed by the US Congress, signed into law by President Johnson, and said there was to be no discrimination in public accommodations, which certainly included Crystal's Restaurant. But the Supreme Court of Georgia said that was the law in Georgia. I had broken it because I didn't leave when asked to and that my convictions stood. Meanwhile, I'd gone back to college and was being told by my lawyers how the case was going. It was a time in which I was going out and doing public speaking to different, really small groups, talking about what had happened in raising money for sncc. I finished my academic work at Spelman, although some of it was turned in a little late, and felt very good with how I'd done and continued my studies at Connecticut College. The case was accepted by the US Supreme Court with a number of other cases. Now, one thing to remember is that there have been hundreds of black students from southern black colleges arrested in sit in demonstrations throughout the south, and there were really very little attention paid to any of that in the press. But my case, again, because I was white and young and from the north, got a tremendous amount of attention, including the fact that it was now before the U.S. supreme Court. In May of 1965, the U.S. supreme Court, in a 5, 4 decision, reversed my conviction. The reasoning was based on actually another case that they decided at the same time called Ham vs City of Rock Hill, North Carolina. And they held that the Civil Rights act of 1964 should be applied retroactively to cover cases that were still in the system in which, had the law been in effect, the crime would not have been permissible as one to be prosecuted. It's pretty unusual for a law to be applied retroactively. Usually there's a certain date it's passed, it's a certain date that going forward, it applies. So this was a huge gift to not just me, but to hundreds of people throughout the south that have been rested in these sit in demonstrations. But the fact that it was a 5, 4 decision and looking back on it, certainly gives me pause. Judge Pai, when he found out that the Supreme Court had overturned his conviction of me, was evidently furious, and he had me re indicted on new charges. Riot and malicious mischief related to a demonstration where I've been on the outside. This demonstration was at a restaurant called Labs in downtown Atlanta. There were students demonstrators that were inside the restaurant, but I was just part of the crowd outside. And I was accused of carrying messages between the head of sncc, James Forman, the executive director, and someone else. One thing I remember distinctly about that demonstration was the appearance of the Ku Klux Klan in their robes. They were not allowed to have their faces covered when they were in downtown Atlanta, but it certainly was a frightening site. And interestingly, when I was going back through the newspaper articles at the time, the Atlanta Constitution had actually interviewed the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan and asked him to comment on my case and my conviction, which of course he thought was the appropriate thing to have happened. Anyway, there was the Klan at this demonstration. I never was arrested at it, but here I was two years later, finding myself with these new charges. My lawyers did something that was. There were actually 101 cases that the judge had called up, and my lawyers tried something that had never been done before. Before the judge could get his hands on my case and any of the others, they asked the federal district court to take the cases away from him. Now, usually when something goes wrong in a criminal proceeding, the way that you remedy it is on appeal after the conviction has been entered. This was called removal, and the cases were removed to the district court. Except for my case, where the district court judge found that there was sufficient evidence to believe that I had possibly participated and was guilty of riot, malicious mischief. So we appealed that decision. When I say we, I mean Donald Hollowell and Howard Moore to the fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. And that case, which is also called Walker vs. Georgia, the name of the U.S. supreme Court case. In that Walker vs. Georgia case, the court granted removal of my case, and once it went to the federal district court, it was dropped. That particular case was in my federal jurisdiction textbook when I went on to study law after I graduated from college. And it was. It's a concept that has rarely been used. These corrupt Chicago judges had cases taken away with the same removal that happened in my case. Well, now I had no more legal charges against me. Graduated from college, went on to law school at the University of Maryland, and I became a civil rights lawyer, which is something my lawyer had said to me when I was first arrested. He said, anybody can go out, lie down in the street. You have to have a skill if you're going to help this movement. And I saw he said, be a lawyer, be a printer, but do something that can make a difference. As a civil rights lawyer, I defended racial minorities, women, prisoners, gay and lesbians, and also was the lawyer for the Black Panther Party in Maryland. But I thought back to a core belief that I had had since a child, which is confront injustice. And I really felt frustrated as a civil rights lawyer when I lost cases knowing that justice was on my side. And so I changed careers, and I ended up spending the rest of my career at an inner city black community college in Baltimore, working with students in a way that I felt made a difference in their lives, and that I could do that every day and continued on the outside as a leader in the gay community with the National Lawyers Guild, but doing something in an academic environment. And that is what happened to me, because I went to a black women's college in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1963.

[37:11] NAOMI GRAVER: Thank you, Martin. That was an amazing story and really awesome to, you know, sit in and be a part of hearing that. Do you want to answer a couple of questions, or would you just prefer to wrap up?

[37:26] MARTIN WALKER: Sure.

[37:26] NAOMI GRAVER: We only have about, you know, two minutes. I'm curious about. You know, you mentioned before the bombing in Birmingham, right after you started at Spelman, that you hadn't really been interested or maybe known about participating or demonstrating in civil rights. Can you talk a little bit about that? Did you hear about it growing up? Were you kind of, you know, shut off in that way? What kind of turned that spark for you?

[37:58] MARTIN WALKER: I was. I was completely oblivious to what was happening with the civil rights movement. I was vaguely aware that the modern march on Washington for jobs and freedom had taken place. But I was working at a Girl Scout camp before I went to Spelman, and I went there with just no Knowledge of what it meant that there was a civil rights movement in this country. I went just because I thought I would be around smart, interesting people that were different from me. I was that naive.

[38:37] NAOMI GRAVER: Did you have, you know, support from your family when you started demonstrating and when you were arrested?

[38:45] MARTIN WALKER: Well, I found a letter that I'd written to my mother, and I told her that after 30 days. 30 days after 30 hours in the city jail, my narrow, sheltered life that I'd lived had crumbled. My parents knew that I was. They were distressed for me, but they knew what was going on. And my father came and was there for my whole trial before judge Pye. In fact, Judge Pai was horrible to him when he tried to speak on my behalf.

[39:24] NAOMI GRAVER: Do you know. You know what ended up happening to judge Pai? Had you followed him, his career after your case was overturned?

[39:31] MARTIN WALKER: Well, it was an elected judgeship, and because of the shame that he had brought on to the white establishment at Atlanta, he was not continued in office. The white citizens of the establishment was really horrified at the attention that my case got all over the country.

[39:58] NAOMI GRAVER: Yeah, I can imagine. Absolutely. We are wrapping up now, but is there anything else you'd like to say to finish up?

[40:14] MARTIN WALKER: Having experienced this at 18 was absolutely a life changing experience for me, and I am grateful for the life that I've led from my vantage point of being 76, that I had such an incredible opportunity when I was 18 years old.

[40:37] NAOMI GRAVER: Thank you so much for letting me sit in with.