Fred Montgomery: From sharecropper to mayor

New Crisis, The, Sep/Oct 2000 by Johnson, Lucas

It's been more than 70 years, but Fred Montgomery still hears his mother's warning: "If you're walking in the street and someone white is coming your way, then you get off the street."

Montgomery grew up going in back doors and using restrooms marked "colored." It was not uncommon for white boys to ride horses through marble games Montgomery played with his friends. Now 83, Montgomery has seen lots of changes in his hometown of Henning, Tenn., which has about 1,000 residents and lies about 50 miles north of Memphis. Most notable is that families who once called him "nigger" now call him "mayor."

"We've come a long way, but there's still work to be done," he says.

For Montgomery, whose boyhood friends included writer Alex Haley, work has been a way of life. He spent many hours sharecropping with his 12 brothers and sisters. Later he toiled on the railroad, then became a plumber. He and wife Ernestine raised 11 children. When he reached retirement age, the work continued. He became curator of the Alex Haley Museum when he was 66 and was elected mayor when he was 71.

"I always felt like I would be somebody one day. No matter how tough things got, I believed I could overcome," Montgomery says.

Helping the racially mixed town he has

called home his entire life overcome the racial divide that separated it for much of its existence is a key component of his life now. It wasn't always that way. In fact, Montgomery himself felt a strong animosity toward whites until he was 61. It took the drowning of a second son and his own failed suicide attempt to change him: "I believe God left me here to be a servant to the people, both black and white, and to treat them honest and fair."

Montgomery grew up on the outskirts of town. His family was poor, like most area blacks, and often struggled to put food on the table. Montgomery recalls the time his father killed a small quail that served as dinner for the family of 14. The only other edible item in the house was flour. As always, his mother worked a minor miracle: "She cut that bird into littie pieces, cooked it and then poured flour and water into another skillet to make gravy. It wasn't a lot. But after praying over it, our bellies were as tight as though we had eaten a feast."

Still, it was a hard existence. The owners of the land on which he and his siblings picked cotton required them to meet quotas that left them little time for school. When they did attend the allblack, one-room school, they tried to absorb all the knowledge they could with the hope it would lead to better lives: "It's hard to describe just how deep our dreams were. We all talked about what we were going to be when we grew up."

Among his classmates was Haley. The two became close friends. As teenagers they spent much time at Haley's home, sometimes collaborating on love letters to their girlfriends. Montgomery was not as good a writer and left the prose to Haley, who eventually moved away and joined the Coast Guard, where he continued writing love letters for shipmates.

Haley's aunt, Elizabeth Murray, taught many of the local youngsters. She was very strict but respected: "Back then, there was no such thing as raising your voice or a hand to a teacher. When I said my prayers at night, I would ask blessings for my mother, my father and then my teacher. They were that highly thought of."

When he was 16, Montgomery dropped out of school and married his sweetheart, Ernestine. They had six sons and five daughters, and celebrated their 65th anniversary this year. Montgomery worked on the railroad for $2.20 an hour and took odd jobs to make ends meet. One of them involved plumbing, which he liked so much he started his own business. In just a few years, Montgomery had earned enough money to buy his own trucks and expand the business outside Henning. In 1962, when things seemed to be at their best, tragedy hit when one of Montgomery's sons drowned.

"I remember thinking, 'Lord, if something like this happens to one of mine again, I don't know what I'll do,"' he says. Following the death, Montgomery threw himself into his work. He also decided to get involved in politics, winning election as an alderman: "It gave me a voice to talk for the people and get things done."

Montgomery suffered another painful blow in 1978 when a second son drowned. He was devastated and attempted suicide:

"I got on a bridge and tried to drive off the edge, but the steering wheel wouldn't turn. It just would not turn." The next morning, when he went into town, a number of people offered condolences. Some were white, and that led Montgomery to change his attitude.

"Grown white men came up to me and hugged me with tears running down their face," Montgomery says. "It really put me in a state of knowing and believing that white people cared as well."

With a new view on race, Montgomery ran for mayor.

"A lot of people said he was too old to be mayor," says James Treadway, Henning's police chief. "But I think he was just the right age. It just made him wiser."