"Tell It": The Civil Rights Struggle in Tuscaloosa

People frequently experience Tuscaloosa, Alabama, as the home of the University of Alabama and its sports teams, or a series of well-marked exits that they pass as they barrel down Interstate 20 toward or away from Birmingham. In civil rights scholarship Tuscaloosa similarly occupies the status of a university town sitting in the shadows of Birmingham, Montgomery, and Selma. Autherine Lucy briefly desegregated the university in 1956. Governor George Wallace delivered a fiery diatribe as James Hood and Vivian Malone permanently desegregated the university in 1963.

Yet, after these milestones, Tuscaloosa’s civil rights activists persisted in the face of violent resistance, writes historian John M. Giggie in Bloody Tuesday. Drawing on years of oral history research with over one hundred current and former Tuscaloosans, Giggie provides a groundbreaking history of Tuscaloosa’s civil rights struggle that extends across the 1960s.¹Anthony J. Blasi, Segregationist Violence and Civil Rights Movements in Tuscaloosa (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1980); Simon Wendt, “God, Gandhi, and Guns: The African American Freedom Struggle in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 1964–1965,” Journal of African American History 89, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 36–56. Blasi’s narrative emphasizes the years before 1964. He demonstrates how the Druid City’s activists, while attuned to developments across the state and nation, joined a highly local movement that won important victories after 1963 but didn't attract national attention.

Bloody Tuesday consists of a prologue, introduction, nine chapters, and an epilogue, nearly all of which Giggie organizes chronologically. The first three chapters are also biographically oriented, each prioritizing an individual: Theophilus Yelverton “T. Y.” Rogers, Jr., a young Black pastor who led the First African Baptist Church; the national Ku Klux Klan (KKK) leader Robert Shelton; and the Tuscaloosa police chief William Marable. Giggie lays out Tuscaloosa’s physical and institutional landscapes and provides the backstory of the city’s grassroots civil rights networks, hyperviolent KKK scene, and more measured white political establishment. Rogers, a mentee of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the primary leader of the Tuscaloosa Citizens Action Committee (TCAC), is the most important figure in Bloody Tuesday, which prioritizes the perspectives of Black activists.

The heart of the book explains why law enforcement and white vigilantes brutally attacked TCAC-led activists on Tuesday, June 9, 1964. Giggie narrates how, day-by-day, tensions mounted between TCAC and the Tuscaloosa Police Department as protests against segregation and discriminatory practices expanded between April and early June. On the morning of June 9, hundreds of Black residents gathered at First African Baptist Church to, in Rogers’s words, “Get to the county courthouse, drink out of the white fountain, and go to the white restrooms.”²Giggie, Bloody Tuesday, 135. Before the march could begin, Tuscaloosa’s police force, allied law enforcement departments, and deputized white thugs assaulted peaceful marchers, desecrated the church with firehoses and tear gas, and arrested Black residents en masse. Giggie delves into that thwarted Tuesday march, considering the perspectives of TCAC organizers and volunteers, child marchers chased by law enforcement, and police personnel. He reveals how the violence of June 9 proved a watershed moment in local civil rights history and produced traumas that followed TCAC supporters, and at least one police officer, for the rest of their lives.

Giggie shows how civil rights organizers regrouped in Bloody Tuesday’s wake, pragmatically accepted armed self-defense due to Klan violence, orchestrated boycotts and sit-ins, and scored victories—including bringing down the city’s segregated public transit system. Despite repeated successes, the Tuscaloosa story unfolded alongside much more publicized civil rights campaigns, such as Mississippi Freedom Summer and the Selma-to-Montgomery marches (which several Black Tuscaloosa residents joined).³Giggie, Bloody Tuesday, 225. This overshadowing helps explain why the story surrounding Bloody Tuesday became a matter of local memory—carried by movement veterans like the barber-pastor Thomas Linton and the Stillman College alumna Willie Mae Ike—rather than part of national civil rights history.

In his analysis of oral histories that discuss local memory, Giggie provides sense of the tightness of Tuscaloosa’s civil rights map and the racial and spatial logics that Black activists navigated and challenged. Most of the narrative unfolds in a compact downtown oriented by Greensboro Avenue, “Tuscaloosa’s color line.”⁴Giggie, Bloody Tuesday, 100. TCAC members marched on Greensboro Avenue for practical and symbolic reasons, though this racial demarcation line was far from absolute. The historic Greenwood Cemetery, replete with Confederate markers and tombstones, stood beside two civil rights nerve centers: Rogers’s First African Baptist Church and Linton’s barbershop, both only a ten-minute walk from the Alston Building (located on the white side of Greensboro Avenue), that housed the headquarters of Shelton’s United Klans of America (UKA), the largest KKK organization of the 1960s. The Alston Building stood a block-and-a-half from city hall and just down the street from the county courthouse—the intended destination of the June 9 march. Giggie describes how civil rights activists and adversaries understood segregated spaces and crafted march plans, escape routes, sit-in strategies, roadblocks, and police barricades.

These detailed spatial considerations exemplify how Giggie analyzes Tuscaloosa’s civil rights story as a local political struggle. His analysis resembles earlier work by Glenn Eskew and J. Mills Thornton, III. While neither Eskew nor Thornton place as much weight on oral histories as Giggie, all three highlight the centrality of Black institutions and local politics to civil rights campaigns in Alabama cities.⁵Glenn T. Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1997); J. Mills Thornton III, Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002). Giggie shows how the Tuscaloosa movement leaned on Black businesses, churches, and Stillman College—a historically Black college that supplied student and faculty support for TCAC protests.⁶Giggie, Bloody Tuesday, 103, 119, 131. Rogers and other TCAC leaders frequently sought dialogue with white city leaders, whose receptivity to their demands fluctuated according to federal scrutiny, the resolve of Black protestors, and financial concerns, such as the costs of police overtime in mid-July 1964. TCAC responded to state and national developments, including the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and sometimes enjoyed support from nationally known Black activists, such as comedian Dick Gregory.⁷Giggie, Bloody Tuesday, 197, 202, 117–118. Yet Tuscaloosa’s civil rights movement was by and for Tuscaloosans, who navigated local spaces, political dynamics, and dangers as they tackled their city’s patterns of discrimination. 

As in other cities, Tuscaloosa’s civil rights movement and its segregationist opposition consisted of uneasy coalitions. Giggie illuminates why those internal tensions mattered. Young officers in TCAC, Rogers included, faced opposition from older Black leaders who felt sidestepped. Disagreements about protest tactics and demands divided Black congregations, such as the Bailey Tabernacle CME Church pastored by the young TCAC organizer William Larkin.⁸Giggie, Bloody Tuesday, 96–97, 121. TCAC, an affiliate of King’s nonviolent Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), debated internally about nonviolence and armed self-defense. Klan violence made some Black organizers “hesitant to turn the other cheek,” and most TCAC members, including Rogers, eventually accepted armed self-defense as a necessity.⁹Giggie, Bloody Tuesday, 114. Meanwhile, Klan members accused each other (sometimes accurately) of FBI spying. Giggie tracks an ever-widening rift between the KKK and white city officials, who came to realize the Klan was a liability and threat to their authority.¹⁰Giggie, Bloody Tuesday, 119.

Two important political trends run through Bloody Tuesday. From April 1964 to January 1965, Tuscaloosa’s African American leaders and activists generally united in the face of violent opposition, while the movement’s enemies fragmented over concerns about tactics, public opinion, and federal intervention. Klan members, city officials, some white businessowners, and white moderates such as the Tuscaloosa News editor Buford Boone disputed the efficacy of violence and the political and economic risks of public protests, prolonged boycotts, and white vigilantism. These divergent trends explain why TCAC members garnered such broad support in their lengthy campaign against Druid City Transit and why segregationists struggled to make a dent in that bus boycott, which Giggie describes as the Tuscaloosa movement’s “most impressive victory.”¹¹Giggie, Bloody Tuesday, 215.

Bloody Tuesday’s significance is two-fold. Giggie contributes to several areas of civil rights scholarship, especially a long tradition of historians analyzing local Black political organizing. Yet more importantly, he provides a groundbreaking study of Tuscaloosa’s civil rights struggle and makes a strong case for situating it in history alongside Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma. Like their better-known counterparts, Rogers, Linton, Ike, and hundreds of Black Tuscaloosans organized a movement that tested civil rights legislation, weakened segregation, and caught the attention of federal authorities and national civil rights organizers. Revealing how Tuscaloosa was a microcosm of the civil rights movement and an important movement site in its own right, Giggie brings the city out of Birmingham’s shadow.

About the Author 

William Robert Billups is an assistant professor of twentieth-century US political history at the University of Notre Dame. He primarily researches racial and political violence and far-right internationalism during the post–World War II era. His in-progress book manuscript, American Terror, analyzes the scale, ramifications, and international dimensions of over one thousand arsons and bombings against the US civil rights movement and its allies. 

• fAfrican American History
• fMemory and Memorial Cultures
• fPolitics and Government
• fRace Relations
• fSocial Movements