John Wayne Witnessed Racism at Lunch Counter In 1964 Alabama — Then He Acted D

Alabama, April, 1964. A lunch counter in a diner on the main street of Anniston, 70 miles east of Birmingham. A man named James Whitfield, 31 years old, a school teacher, sits down at the counter and asks for a cup of coffee. The owner tells him the counter does not serve colored people.

James does not move. He has sat at counters before and been moved from them, and he has decided on this particular morning that he is not going to be moved from this one. He has been sitting there for 20 minutes when a man in a tan Stetson comes in off the street. Here’s the story. James Whitfield was born in 1933 in Anniston, Alabama, the son of a man who worked at the Anniston Army Depot and a woman who taught Sunday school at the 17th Street Baptist Church and believed, as a matter of conviction rather than optimism, that her children would live in a better country than the one they were born into. James had grown up in Anniston with the particular education that black children in Alabama received in that era, which was the formal education and the parallel education that ran beside it, the one that taught you which sidewalks and which counters and which water fountains and which silences and which rooms were yours and which were not. He had gone to Tuskegee

Institute on a scholarship in 1951 and returned to Anniston in 1955 with a degree in education and a teaching certificate. He had taken a job at the Anniston Colored School and had been teaching sixth grade English and social studies there for 9 years. He was a careful teacher who kept notes on each student in a small notebook, what they were struggling with, what they were good at, what kind of encouragement reached them, and what kind did not.

He had filled four of those notebooks by 1964. He had a wife named Ruth, who was a nurse’s aide at the Anniston City Hospital, and a daughter named Clara, who was 3 years old and who had her father’s eyes and her mother’s habit of saying exactly what she meant. He had participated in sit-ins before, beginning in 1960 when the movement came to Alabama with a force that could not be ignored.

He had sat at counters as part of organized actions and as an individual, both, because he had decided that the organized action and the individual act were not the same thing and that both were necessary. He had sat at counters in Anniston and in Birmingham and in Gadsden and had been removed from some of them and had not been removed from others and had been arrested once in Birmingham in 1962 for disorderly conduct, which was the charge they used when they needed a charge and the facts of the situation did not provide one. He had paid the fine himself and gone back to teaching on Monday. On a Thursday morning in April of 1964, he walked to the Main Street Diner on his way to school, three blocks from where he was parked, and sat down at the counter at 8:15 and asked for a cup of coffee. He had chosen the Main Street Diner for no particular reason except that it was on his way and that the reason a man

chose a specific counter on a specific morning did not need to be complicated. He was wearing his good teaching clothes, a gray wool jacket, a white shirt, a tie Ruth had given him for his birthday 2 years before. He had dressed carefully that morning the way he always dressed carefully in the mornings he planned to sit at a counter, not because he believed his clothes changed what the owner of the counter saw, but because he understood that what he wore was part of what he was saying. And what he was saying was that he was a man who taught other people’s children for 9 years and paid his taxes and raised his daughter and deserved a cup of coffee without incident. The owner of the Main Street Diner was a man named Harold Cord, 50 years old, who had run the diner since 1948. He served good eggs and kept the counter clean and was known in Anniston as a fair businessman who paid his suppliers on time and remembered his regular customers orders. He was not a man who thought of himself as cruel. He was a man who believed the way things were was the way things

should be, which is a different thing from cruelty, but which produces the same outcomes. He told James the counter did not serve colored people. He said it in a flat voice without particular heat, the way a man states a rule he has not had cause to question. James said he would like a cup of coffee.

Harold said he would not be getting one at this counter. James put his hands flat on the counter and looked at the menu posted above the grill. He did not move. Harold went back to the grill. The other customers at the counter, four men in work clothes and one woman with a shopping bag, looked at their plates.

Nobody said anything. The clock on the wall behind the counter read 8:17. By 8:35, nothing had changed. James had not moved. Harold had not moved. The other customers had not moved. The clock had moved to 8:35. John Wayne came through the door at 8:37. He was 57 years old. He had been in Alabama for two days for the dedication of a veteran’s memorial in Gadsden, an event he had agreed to attend 18 months earlier because the man who organized it had served in the Pacific, and because Wayne believed that men who had served deserved to be honored in person by someone who understood what that meant, an event he had agreed to attend 18 months earlier because the organizer was a man he respected and the memorial honored men he considered worth honoring. He was driving to the Birmingham Airport for a noon flight to Los Angeles. He’d been driving since 7:00 in the morning and had not eaten and needed

coffee and something hot. He saw the diner’s name on a painted sign above the door and the open sign in the window and pulled the truck to the curb. He saw the diner’s sign from the street and pulled over. He came through the door and stopped for a moment to let his eyes adjust from the April morning sun.

He looked down the counter. He saw the empty stool beside the man in the gray jacket and the white shirt and the tie. He saw the four men with their eyes on their plates and the careful quality of their not looking. He saw Harold behind the grill not looking at the man in the jacket. He understood what he was looking at within about 3 seconds because it was Alabama in 1964 and the situation arranged itself plainly.

He walked to the counter and sat down on the empty stool. He set his hat on the counter. He looked at James. He said good morning. James looked at him. He placed the face. His expression did not change. He said good morning. Wayne looked at Harold behind the grill. He said he would like two coffees and two orders of whatever was hot.

Harold set down his spatula. He looked at Wayne. He looked at the stool. He looked at James. Something moved across his face, the calculation of a man who has just introduced a new variable into a situation he thought he understood. He said, “Sir, this counter does not serve colored people.” Wayne said, “I heard you say that.

” He said, “I am ordering two coffees.” He said, “Bring them both.” Harold said, “Sir, if you want to eat here, you are welcome to. He is not.” Wayne said, “Then we will both wait.” He turned back to the counter and put both hands on it and looked at the menu board. The diner was quiet.

The four men with their eyes on their plates had their eyes on their plates with greater intensity than before. The woman with the shopping bag got up and paid and left. Harold looked at James. He looked at Wayne. He looked at the street through the plate glass window. He was not a foolish man and he understood what the street would see if it looked in.

John Wayne sitting beside a black man at a lunch counter in waiting. He poured two coffees. He set them on the counter, one in front of Wayne and one in front of James. He did not say anything. He went back to the grill. James picked up the coffee cup. He held it for a moment, both hands around it.

His hands were steady. He drank his coffee. Wayne drank his. Harold brought two plates of scrambled eggs and white toast without being asked. He set them on the counter. He set them down. He went back to the grill. James and Wayne ate breakfast. The other men at the counter paid and left one by one. The diner was quieter.

They ate without hurrying. Wayne asked James what he taught. James told him sixth grade, English and social studies. Wayne asked how long. Nine years. Wayne said that was a long time to teach the same grade. James said that in his experience, sixth grade was where certain things got decided for a child.

Whether they believed they were capable of hard things, whether they understood that hard things were worth it. And that he preferred to be present for those decisions. He said, “Somebody is going to be in that room with them. It might as well be someone who is paying attention.” Wayne looked at his eggs.

He said, “Yes.” They ate. Wayne paid for both plates when Harold came with the check. He left a dollar tip on the counter. He stood and picked up his hat. He said to James, “I am sorry it took 20 minutes.” James looked at him. He said, “It has taken longer than that.” He said it without bitterness.

He said it the way a man states the span of a thing he has been engaged in for a long time and intends to remain engaged in. Where are you watching from? Drop your state in the comments. I want to see how far this story reaches. Wayne nodded. He went to the payphone on the wall beside the door. He called a number in Birmingham.

He spoke for 5 minutes. He came back to the counter. He said to James, “There is a lawyer in Birmingham named Fred Gray who handles civil rights cases in this district. He said he had called Gray’s office and given them the name of the diner and the date and James’ name and told them to follow up if James wanted legal support for anything that came from today or from any previous incident.

He said the retainer would be covered. James looked at him. He said, “I know Fred Gray’s name.” He said it without surprise because James Whitfield was a man who’d been doing this work for four years and knew the lawyers who handled this work. Wayne said, “Then you know he is the right lawyer.” He put his hat on.

He said, “Keep your seat.” He walked out to his truck and drove toward Birmingham. James sat at the counter for another 20 minutes. Harold did not ask him to leave. The morning traffic came in and out and Harold served them and James drank a second cup of coffee which Harold poured without being asked.

And then James paid for the second cup himself and left. He was back at school by 10:00. He taught third period without mentioning where he had been. The Civil Rights Act was signed into law on July 2nd, 1964, 83 days after that Thursday morning in April. It made what Harold Cord had done that morning illegal going forward which was the point of the law and which James had believed would happen and which he had spent nine years of sit-ins and four notebooks of student observations and two arrests and one Thursday morning with a stranger at a lunch counter helping to make happen. The Main Street Diner in Anniston opened its counter to all customers the following week. Harold Cord served black customers without incident for the remaining 11 years he ran the diner before he retired in 1975. James Whitfield went back to school that Thursday and taught third period and fourth period and fifth period and went home and ate dinner with Ruth and Clara

and did not mention the morning except to say it had gone well. He taught at the Anniston school until 1991 when he retired at 58. He had taught 27 years total. Over those years he had participated in more actions than he could count precisely. He’d been arrested twice more in the summer of 1964 and in Selma in 1965 and had been represented both times by Fred Gray’s office.

He had never paid anything toward the retainer. He had not asked where it came from and nobody had told him. His daughter Clara grew up in Anniston listening to her father’s careful explanations of why things were the way they were and why the way things were was not acceptable. And what a person could do about that if they were willing to sit down and wait.

She went to the University of Alabama School of Law and became a civil rights attorney. She worked for the Southern Poverty Law Center for 19 years and argued three cases before the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Then she opened her own practice in Birmingham and spent 20 more years doing the same work.

James Whitfield retired in 1991 and spent his last years in Anniston in the house he and Ruth had lived in since 1957. Ruth died in 2001. James died in 2009. He was 75 years old. Clara was with him. Clara donated two items to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute on 16th Street in 2011. The first was a photograph taken by a passerby through the plate glass window of the Main Street Diner on a Thursday morning in April 1964.

It shows two men at a lunch counter, one in a gray jacket and tie, one in a tan Stetson, both with their hands around coffee cups, both looking straight ahead. The second was the diner receipt, two coffees and two orders of eggs dated April 1964, paid in full with a $1 tip noted in handwriting in the margin.

The display is in the education gallery on the third floor of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. The placard reads, “James Arthur Whitfield, 1933 to 2009, sixth grade teacher. He sat at the counter. He drank his coffee. He went back to school and taught third period. He did this kind of thing for years in many places before and after that Thursday.

The photograph shows one morning. There were many mornings. If this story reached you, pass it on. Share it with a veteran in your life. Hit that subscribe button if you haven’t already. There are more stories coming, and unfortunately, they don’t make men like John Wayne anymore.