Black History Month – Bob Dylan, Civil Rights and Me by Jack Coll (Part Two)

Black History Month

Bob Dylan, Civil Rights and Me

Part Two

By Jack Coll

2-20-25

Welcome to Part Two of Bob Dylan, Civil Rights and Me.

     I started writing articles in honor of “Black History Month” more than three decades ago in the once popular town newspaper “The Conshohocken Recorder.”  I started writing about local “Black Leaders,” in our community including Ned Hector, war hero, Rev. Marshall Lee, founder of St. Paul’s Church, Rev. Marshall Lee’s father the Rev. Abram Lee, a former slave and later a preacher who lived on East Sixth Avenue in Conshohocken and was instrumental in founding the Galilee Baptist Church in Roxborough.

      Rev James Groves, a great supporter of anything to do with Conshohocken and served on many committees, Olive Lee Banks, who broke color barriers throughout Montgomery County, and other black leaders in Conshohocken like Darlene Groves, Gus Morgan, George Bland, Lucius Carter and James “Ike” Griffin, Conshohocken’s first African American President of Town Council among others.

     I’ve also written about many national African Americans and national events pertaining to the Civil Rights movement including, Medgar Evers, Emmett Till, Martin Luther King, James Meredith and the Little Rock Nine. 

     As Donna and I have crisscrossed our way throughout the country on a number of occasions, I never missed an opportunity to visit a historic civil rights monument, museum, and points of interest along with numerous Civil Rights landmarks. 

    Part of our travels were all about chasing music landmarks and monuments, and part of our travels took us to see where landmark civil rights moments happened.

     The 16^th Street Baptist Church was certainly one of them.  Of all the history I’m aware of, and all the sites I’ve seen, the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, and the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama are the three sites that keeps me awake at night.

     On September 15, 1963, The congregation was gathering for their daily Sunday Service inside the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham,  It was an overcast day but the clouds didn’t dampen the spirits of five young girls in the basement of the church, two of them sisters, preparing to take part in the Sunday Service as it was Youth Day and excitement filled the air.  Just before 11o’clock, the congregation was knocked to the ground, a bomb exploded under the steps of the church, as debris fell throughout the church attendees sought safety by hiding under the pews in the church.

     In the basement, four of the little girls, 14-year olds Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and 11-year old Cynthia Wesley, were killed.  Addie’s sister Susan survived, but was permanently blinded.

     Members of the congregation knew it was no accident; they knew it was yet another bomb that had exploded as it had dozens of times before in what was known as “Bombingham.”

     On one of my visits I went into the church as parishioners were already gathering for a service, I slipped into the back row with my camera in hand, got down on my knees and said four prayers for the four little girls that were killed in the bombing on that September day in 1963.  I made my way up into the balcony where I took a number of photographs of the interior of the church.  The church offered tours of the facility at that time, I didn’t want to go into the basement, seeing the outside of the church was enough for me, the thoughts, looking at the window where the children sat and thinking of a bomb.  I couldn’t bare the thoughts of what I would see every time I closed my eyes from that moment on in fear of seeing the kill zone.

     On May 11, just eight months after the church bombing, a bomb destroyed the Gaston Motel where Martin Luther King, Jr. had been staying and another bombing damaged the house of King’s brother, A. D. King.  Several other bombings were recorded in the following months in and around Birmingham.  On one of our trips to Birmingham I visited the Gaston Motel, where civil rights meetings were common with many of the movement leaders including Martin Luther King Jr., the hotel is not open to the public but I shot a number of photographs outside the building.  

     I also visited the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee,  on a couple of occasions where Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated on April 4^th, 1968.  The hotel was built a hundred years ago in 1925 and was a typical Southern Hotel accessible only to whites in early years.  However, by the end of World War ll, the Lorraine had become a black establishment,  which had among its early guests Cab Colloway, Count Basie, Roy Campanella, Nat King Cole, Aretha Franklin.  A handful of musicians and performers from Stax Recording Studios then located a couple of blocks away, guests included Sam and Dave, Isaac Hayes, Otis Reading, Wilson Pickett, The Staple Singers, Donald “Duck” Dunn, Booker T, and Steve Cropper among others.

     Martin Luther King Jr., chose to stay at the Lorraine during the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike.  King, Andrew Young and other black leaders had come to Memphis to support 1,300 striking sanitation workers.

     The Lorraine Hotel, as well as the Rooming House where James Earl Ray fired the shot from are both included in the Civil Rights Museum, I’ll never forget the feeling in-me, as I stood        

on the second floor balcony outside the Lorraine, in front of King’s room, (306) starring down at the concrete where King laid dying from a bullet years earlier.  James Earl Ray who fired the shot from a rooming house bathroom was later convicted and died in prison in 1998.  I later toured the rooming house, walking into Ray’s room, the common bathroom located at the end of the hall from where the shot was fired was enclosed in plexi-glass.  Martin Luther King Jr., was 39 years old when he died.

     Another site we visited that took my breath away was the Edmund Pettus Bridge located in Selma Alabama,  where the “Bloody Sunday Attack” took place on March 7, 1965.  Armed police officers attacked and brutally beat Civil Rights Movement marchers unarmed and peaceful demonstrators with horses, billy clubs, dogs, and tear gas as they were attempting to march to the State Capital in Montgomery. 

     Television images of the attack presented Americans and international audiences with horrifying images of marchers left bloodied and severely injured, and roused support for the Selma Voting Rights Movement.  Amelia Boynton who had helped organized the march as well as participating in it , was beaten unconscious.  A photograph of her lying on the Edmund Pettus Bridge appeared on the front page of newspapers and news magazines around the world.  In all 17 marchers were hospitalized and 50 treated for lesser injuries, the day became known as “Bloody Sunday.”

     On January 20, 2020, I walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, I remember it well , Donna and I were heading to a framing convention in Las Vegas, we drove down taking the southern route due to weather conditions.  It was Martin Luther King Jr. Day and there had been a reenactment March across the bridge that morning.  We arrived shortly after the marchers had broken-up.

     I parked the car and with camera in hand walked across the bridge, opposite the way the protesters had marched back in 1965, so, as I walked back over the bridge I could walk in their footsteps.  On the opposite side of the bridge was the Civil Rights Memorial Park on one side of the road and an African American Museum, highlighting the “Bloody Sunday” march on the other side.  There was some activity in the park so I wandered into the park first.

     I stopped to strike up a conversation with a few guys and talked to a guy name George Sallie.  George was 90 years old and 55 years earlier, when he was 35 years old, he crossed the bridge with other protesters in March 7, in 1965. I asked him what the day was like and he said he was beaten with an Alabama State Police billy-club.  The Trooper split his head wide open and George had the scars to show me.  I wasn’t prepared to conduct an interview at the time but I did ask him, “What was it like to be on the bridge on Bloody Sunday? George replied without hesitation, “scary. “ I walked slowly back across the bridge, it was a beautiful sunny day with bright blue skies.  The temperature hung around 60 degrees.             

      I stopped in the middle of the bridge just to take it all-in. I hung over the railing for a few minutes, snapped a couple of photographs, the Alabama River below was calm the water below was sparkling in the sunlight, and I couldn’t help but thinking, how or why, such a tragic incident could take place here.

     As I finished my walk back across the bridge, I noticed an African American lady sitting at the intersection with a bright orange vest on, she had apparently been directing traffic during the re-enactment walk.  I asked her if there was a big crowd.  She pondered the question for a brief moment and replied; “it was alright, ya-know, people got beat damn near to death all those years ago marching, and now this community don’t even come out to vote.”  Now that’s a sad story because on Bloody Sunday the protesters were marching for voting rights.

           Another stop along the way to Vegas was Little Rock, Arkansas.  I wanted to see the Little Rock  Central High School, which became a national emblem of the often violent struggle over school desegregation.  Three years after the Supreme Court’s decision, which officially ended public school segregation, a federal order was sent to Little Rock to comply.  On September 4, 1957, Governor Orval Faubus defied the federal court order, calling in the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine African American students from entering the building.  The African American students were famously tagged, “The Little Rock Nine.”  The Governor’s order to prevent the nine African American students from entering the school became a flash-point in the Civil Rights Movement.

     Ten days later in a meeting with President Eisenhower, Faubus agreed to use the National Guard to protect the African American teenagers, but on returning to Little Rock, he dismissed the troops, leaving the African American students exposed to an angry white mob.  Within hours, the jeering, brick throwing mob had beaten several reporters and smashed many of the school’s windows and doors.  By noon, the police were forced to evacuate the nine students. 

     When Faubus did not restore order, President Eisenhower dispatched 101^st Airborne Division paratroopers to Little Rock and put the Arkansas National Guard under Federal command.  By 3 a.m. soldiers surrounded the school, bayonets fixed.  Under Federal protection, the “Little Rock Nine” finished out the school year.

     Upon my visit to this National Landmark, I took a few exterior photo of the one hundred year old school. I also walked into the school unannounced, walked a few of the hallways, taking photographs, (I made sure that no students were in my pictures) and walked out without anyone ever saying a word to me.

     Then there was Dylan’s, “The Death of Emmett Till,” song.  The death of Emmett Till was a tragic true story of a 15 year old kid from Chicago who was not accustom to the racial differences between Chicago and Mississippi.  I’m not sure what album this song appears on but I don’t think I heard it until the early 1970’s.  Dylan tells the whole story in his 1963 song,

“It was down in Mississippi not so long ago

When a young boy from Chicago town stepped through a southern door

The boys dreadful tragedy I can still remember well

The color of his skin was black, and his name was Emmett Till.”

     It’s a sad, sad story.

Emmett Till was an African American kid born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1941,when he was 14-years old he traveled to Money, Mississippi in the Mississippi Delta, to spend time with some relatives.  He was abducted, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi on August 28, 1955, at the age of 14 years old.  There had been murders, lynchings, abductions, rapes, and beatings throughout the Jim Crow South going back to the beginning of time, but nothing like the case of Emmett Till, had ever captured the nation’s attention like this case.

     Emmett Till was accused of offending a 21 year old white woman, Carolyn Bryant, in her family’s grocery store.  The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers were acquitted drew nation-wide attention to the long history of violent persecution of African Americans in the United States.  Till posthumously became an icon of the civil rights movement.

     Just months after Till’s murder, Rosa Parks also sparked the civil rights movement when she refused to give up her seat to a white passenger in December of 1955. That incident sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott.  

     What happened at the Bryant Grocery Store is a matter of dispute, Till was accused of flirting with, touching, or whistling at Bryant.  Till, at the age of 14 and not aware of any un-written rules for black-males interacting with a white females in the South caused Bryant’s husband Roy, and his half brother J. W. Milam, who were armed, to go to Till’s great-uncle’s house and abduct Emmett.  They took him away in the middle of the night where they beat and mutilated him, wrapped in in barb-wire, before shooting him in the head and sinking his body in the Tallahatchie River.  His body was discovered three days later.

     Oh, they caught the guys, Bryant and Milam, who had acted out the murder with several other men and were later put on trial.  The All-White jury found the two men not guilty of Till’s murder.  Protected against double jeopardy, the two men publicly admitted in a 1956 interview with Look Magazine that they had tortured and murdered the boy, selling the story of how they did it for $4,000 (equivalent to more than $40,000 today, 2025)

     In 2017, author Timothy Tyson released details of an interview with Carolyn Bryant, during which she alleged, she had disclosed that she had fabricated parts of her testimony at the trial.  She had retracted her testimony that Till had grabbed around her waist and uttered obscenities, saying “that part’s not true.”  The 72 year old Bryant also reportedly said, “nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.”  The New York Times stated at the time, regarding Bryant’s admission that portions of her testimony were false; “This admission is a reminder of how black lives were sacrificed to white lies in places like Mississippi.” The New York Times noted that it also raises a new question of why no one was brought to justice in the most notorious racially motivated murder of the 20^th century, despite an extensive investigation by the F. B. I.    

     During our travels in 2023, Donna and I spent several days down in the Mississippi Delta, sometimes called “The Most Southern Place On Earth.”  My mission during that part of the trip was to spend some time on the “Mississippi Blues Trail.”  The Delta is strongly associated as the place where several genres of popular music originated including the Delta Blues, Cajun Music, Zydeco evolved into the Blues and became known as “The Devil’s Music.”  In the early part of the century  “Swamp Rock” became popular and some say that years later it was the fore-runner to Rock and Roll.

     The Delta, is also known as “The Cradle of American Music,” and a number of artists who called the Delta “Home”, not that they all grew up in the Delta but it’s where a number of them cut their teeth popularizing their own brand of music including Muddy Waters, Ike Turner, Sam Cooke, Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson, John Lee Hooker, B. B. King and Bobby Blue Bland along with a long list of others.

     While in Clarksdale, Mississippi I stopped to view, and ponder what is known as “The Crossroads” a mythical intersection where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil.  I found the intersection at Routes 61 and 49, and the commercialism surrounding the fake monument in the middle of the intersection almost laughable. Robert Johnson, selling his soul, and that intersection is another story for another time.  Clarksdale did have a couple of nice music museums and a number of really great Blues Clubs, and a wealth of African American history tied in with the Civil Rights Movement.

     About an hour from Clarksdale was Money, Mississippi, the location of the Bryant Grocery Store, where the Emmitt Till tragedy all began.  I knew that the former grocery store location was my next stop.    

Money, Mississippi is an unincorporated community, located along the Tallahatchie River, where fewer than 100 residents reside in the community, although in the mid 1950’s the population was around 400 thanks to a cotton mill located in the community at the time.

     While driving through Money in search of the site of Bryant’s Grocery Store, I found the small town kind of a deserted place with gravel roads I noticed a State Marker on the side of the road at the base of a bridge.  Well, that bridge was the subject of a hit song back in 1967 that Bobbie Gentry wrote called “Ode To Billy Joe.”  You might remember it, “Mama said she got some news this mornin’ from Choctaw Ridge, today Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge.”

Driving along Money Road, just above the Tallahatchie River, next to the railroad tracks was the former site of Bryant’s Grocery Store, with two State Markers posted alongside the property.  The walls  of the building were still in place, but the interior of what was once the store was overgrown with trees and other debris.

     It was hard to believe that this lonely intersection with this run down building, and a restored garage next to it, (Milan’s garage) was once a hub of activity some seventy years ago.  I got out of my car and kind of leaned on the fender just across the street from the dilapidated building just to take it in and visualize the scene back in 1955.

    I pulled my camera out and started walking around the area.  I photographed what was left of the store, which was nothing, and the walls that once housed the store and apartment where the Bryant’s lived.  I could visualize a group of black youths, children really, perhaps ages 12-16 gathered on the one corner having a good time as kids do, the store on the other corner, and young Emmitt Till, who wandered back into the store after his group of cousins and friends had left the store not realizing the fire-storm about to come down on him.

    I must have spent twenty minutes to a half-hour there, it was a lonely place, not one car came past, I didn’t see any other person while I wondered around, not that there were any other buildings in site, but it was all kind of creepy.

     I can’t say that these incidents above are things Bob Dylan taught me, but they are incidents and other things Dylan made me aware of at a young age.  For some of you it might be a good time to listen to some of his early stuff, and for those of you that have heard it, and are familiar with it, this might be a good time to revisit some of those great-awareness songs of the 1960’s that he wrote.  And by-the-way, if you’re a Dylan fan, are you aware that Dylan recently had his very first Number-One song on the charts, it’s called, “Murder Most Foul,” a 17 minute master piece that revolves around the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  And make sure you listen-for 74 references in the song to other music artist and or songs.

     It’s a little weird when you show-up at a civil rights landmark and everything seems calm and cool, knowing that more than half a century ago these places were a lightning rod in the never ending fight to secure equal rights in this country.

If you took a few minutes, and read parts one and two of this column I’d like to say thanks, and keep in mind that the information provided were simply snapshots of a much longer and more detailed account of these incidents.  If interested you can go on-line (where a lot of this information came from) to get the entire story to all these history making incidents.  

Yes, there’s a dozen more stories I could tell you about my travels, but perhaps some other time.