JULIETTE HAMPTON MORGAN: FROM SOCIALITE TO SOCIAL ACTIVIST

Alabama Heritage, Summer 2004 by Stanton, Mary

JULIETTE MORGAN'S PRIVILEGED UPBRINGING IN MONTGOMERY SEEMED UNLIKELY TO YIELD A CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST. YET INSPIRED BY MAHATMA GANDHI, AND TROUBLED BY THE INJUSTICE AROUND HER, THAT IS PRECISELY WHAT SHE BECAME. By MARY STANTON

THE HOTTEST PLAGES IN HELL are reserved for those who during a moral crisis preserve their neutrality." LiIa Bess OHn Morgan lovingly inscribed this sentiment from Dante's Divine Comedy in a scrapbook honoring her daughter ju liette. In retrospect she felt great pride that her daughter had made a public stand against civil rights abuses in her city, but she had not always been comfortable with it. LiIa Bess had warned ju liette that her activities would draw the scorn of Montgomery's white community, and so it had. But after the scorn finally silenced her daughter, LiIa Bess gathered six cartons of mementos of ju liette's courageous life-letters, newspaper clippings, photographs, and scrapbooks-and sent them to the state archives. There they would remain to inspire new generations.

MANY ASPECTS OF JULIETTE Morgan's white southern upbringing-her social class, education, and especially her temperament- seemed unlikely ingredients in the making of a civil rights activist, yet that is exactly what she became. ju liette Morgan was the only child of Frank Ferryman Morgan, a traveling dry goods salesman with political ambitions, and LiIa Bess Olin, a liberated southern belle whose circle of friends included Zelda Fitzgerald, Sara Powell Haardt, and Tallulah Bankhead. Morgan enjoyed a privileged southern childhood complete with Sunday school picnics, horse shows, Confederate Memorial Day Parades, and lessons in piano, dance, and deportment. She attended Montgomery's finest schools and was welcomed in its shops, restaurants, and concert halls. Because of her social position, ju liette Morgan was free to do many things-attend college, work for the public library, teach in the public schools, and vote.

In 1930, after graduating from Sidney Lanier High School, Morgan studied English literature and political science at the University of Alabama. While she was working on her master's degree in 1935, her journalism professor, Dr. Clarence Cason-a man haunted by his ambivalence to the southern way of life-wrote a book of essays called Ninety Degrees in the Shade. In that book Cason observed:

Upon hearing adverse criticisms of conditions as they are, I feel a resentment and an impulse to defend my state and my people; but then I have to ask myself whether a deeper loyalty does not place me under a compulsion to wrestle with these disagreeable challenges until the truth which they contain has been separated from what is false or merely sensational about them. I wonder whether this is not the sort of thing that is taking place in the minds of many other southerners today.

A few days before the publication of his book, Dr. Cason committed suicide. he had concluded that he could not live with the ostracism that criticizing the southern way of life would inevitably bring. Cason's expression of his dilemma and inability to find a resolution left a lasting impression on Morgan.

She returned to Montgomery in 1936 and for the next decade taught English at Lanier High School, coached drama at Capitol Heights junior High School, worked in Neeley's bookstore on Perry Street, and served as a librarian for both the Carnegie and the Montgomery City public libraries. Away from work Morgan had many friends and enjoyed entertaining; loved literature, theater, and music; and lived at home with her mother and grandmother. In most ways ju liette Morgan was a typical genteel southern woman.

One thing-and it seemed a very small thing-that separated her from many of her friends was her inability to drive a car. Unlike most Montgomery whites, Morgan used the city buses to commute to work because disabling anxiety attacks prevented her from driving. It was while riding the buses and watching white bus drivers threaten and humiliate black men and women (who paid the same ten cent fare that Morgan did) that she began to seriously consider the cost of certain traditional southern practices. Segregation and racism became something more to her than a theoretical problem to discuss over coffee.

IN 1939, SIXTEEN YEARS BEFORE Montgomery's famous bus boycott gained national attention, Morgan was writing letters to the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser railing against the abuses she witnessed. She became a member of a small group of Montgomery New Deal Democrats who wrote many letters to the Advertiser'?, "Tell It to Old Grandma" column and worked to abolish the poll tax and to establish a federal anti-lynching law. This group would later include Aubrey Williams, Gould Beech, Clifford and Virginia Durr, and Will Sheehan. In 1946 she joined a controversial interracial women's prayer group and met middle-class, black, working women who shared her passion for politics, music, and religion.

Some years later Morgan moved beyond letter writing and began an active protest one morning on her way to work. Morgan watched a black woman pay her fare and leave the bus to enter by the back door, only to have the driver pull away. She had seen this kind of abuse happen before. This particular morning, however, Morgan jumped up and pulled the emergency cord. When the driver stopped, she demanded that he open the back door and let the woman board. No one, black or white, could believe what was happening. Morgan had launched a one-woman, non-violent protest against the discriminatory practices of Montgomery's city bus drivers. An admirer of Mahatma Gandhi, Morgan had been inspired by his use of civil disobedience to resist British colonialism in India.