Remembering Lamar Weaver
How one (white) man supported the Civil Rights Movement in the Jim Crow South and should be remembered for it.
I first saw Lamar Weaver’s name in the cursive script of a description on a packet of negatives deep in the Birmingham News’s film archives. The images from March 1957 were filed alongside the other news covered that day. But his was a story largely set aside in the passing years. History has made much of the highlights of the Civil Rights Movement, but the day to day actions by people like Weaver made advances both in action and perception that have led our changed world.
In early 1957 the early work of the budding Civil Rights Movement had led to the nominal de-segregation of city buses, but resistance to any and all forms of de-segregation was virulent. Since the train provided service that crossed state lines it was subject to federal laws, not state laws. Jim Crow laws should not apply, reasoned Civil Rights leaders.
The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, announced that he intended to take the next step in desegregation by sitting in the Whites-Only waiting room of Birmingham’s train station, Terminal Station. His house had been bombed three months earlier when he announced that he would lead the desegregation of the city’s buses (following the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Montgomery bus boycott). He told a few colleagues, friends and supporters of his plans. And he let the news outlets know his intentions.
When Shuttlesworth arrived at Terminal Station a white mob was there waiting. Young men wearing tee-shirts, stood in the doorway to the waiting room and challenged Shuttlesworth. But he walked on. As he and his wife, Ruby, sat and waited for their Atlanta-bound train, the crowd milled around the edges of the room. “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss was among the crowd, yelling at the Shuttlesworths. Twenty years later Chambliss was convicted of bombing the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and killing four girls who were attending Sunday school at the time of the blast.
Lamar Weaver, a 28-year-old white man, walked out of the crowd, shook hands with the Shuttlesworths and sat with them as the crowd yelled epithets and curses. As the Shuttlesworths boarded their train, Weaver walked outside to his car. The mob followed. They rocked his car, trying to flip it as he frantically pulled out and sped away. He was later fined $25 for causing a disturbance. Within days he testified to a Congressional Civil Rights Inquiry in Washington, DC and went to Florida as threats against him continued.
Weaver later moved to Cincinnati. After Rev. Shuttlesworth’s Birmingham house or church was bombed a third time, he followed Weaver to Ohio, though he continued weekly trips to Birmingham for many years. He died in 2011.
The events at Terminal Station made the front page of the Birmingham News, but was largely forgotten as other events in the Civil Rights Movement captured the attention of the city and then the world. Well-maintained archives are a thing of greatness, and the Birmingham News’s rows of cabinets of film negatives from the 1940s until the newspaper went digital around 2000 kept most of its knowledge neatly preserved and filed away. Who knows how many other stories of every day actions that led to change those files hold. The are not the names that became well-known in households around the country, but are consigned to the footnotes of the pages.
I first saw the images from the mob scene outside Terminal Station in November 2004 during a project to determine how the Birmingham News’s photographers covered the Civil Rights Movement. The following March I sat down with Weaver at his house in Marietta, Ga. and we talked about the 1950s and the years since. He was a lay Presbyterian minister but had worked a number of jobs to support himself over the years. He had moved around, but still thought about Alabama. He titled his memoirs “Bury My Heart in Birmingham.”Terminal Station was torn down in 1969. An underpass that carries Fifth Ave. traffic under Highway 280 is the only reminder of the grand structure that once stood there. The Jim Crow South went out slowly but surely over the years thanks in no small measure to the actions of everyday men, women and children who, like Lamar Weaver, (who died last weekend at the age of 85) challenged the world around them for what they thought was right.
Greg Garrison of al.com (formerly The Birmingham News) wrote an obituary for Weaver earlier this week.
Photos used with permission of Alabama MediaGroup.
