Mary McAnally shares the story of how she organized the only Freedom Bus from Oklahoma during the Civil Rights Movement. She went with 40 University of Tulsa students and participated in sit-ins in Montgomery, Ala. She was arrested alongside Dr. Martin Luther King for her civil disobedience. As King told her, “You might get arrested, but you’ll be in good company.”
Transcript
Mary McAnally: When you feel like you’re linking your life arm-and-arm with the life of people like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, people who have even sacrificed their lives for their cause, it’s a holy feeling.
My name is Mary McAnally. In 1960 I was a student at TU and Martin Luther King came there to speak. He urged students to come down south and sit with him in the sit-in demonstrations that they were having. The lunch counter sit-ins were the attempt to get government to require that restaurants allow black people to eat at restaurants where white people eat.
That spring, which was 1961, I had just turned 21; I organized the only Freedom Bus that went from Oklahoma down south. It’s during spring break; we played cards and told jokes and boys and girls met up. You know, 40 college kids [laughs]. It’s an exciting, incredible group of young people.
We went to a hotel that King had set aside for Freedom Bus people. When King came and said, “Okay, let’s go, we’re going over here to this restaurant. You five go there and you five go there,” and you know, boy, we marched in tune. I went to a restaurant that was a trolley car restaurant – you know, they used to take old trolley cars and turn them into a restaurant. It was in a part of town that was where the white part of town was beginning to get colored. I use the term as they did then.
So there were colored people wanting to eat at the restaurant and being refused, so, we went in and we were mixed race, sat down and you could feel the hostility and within any time at all the waitress would come over and said, “We can’t serve you here. You’ll have to leave.”
We didn’t get right up and leave; we said “Why can’t you serve us? You’ve run out of food? We’re hungry and we’re from Tulsa, Oklahoma and we came here to get something to eat.” They ended up calling the police and the police came in and arrested us. There were five in my group, but by the time they took us to jail there were already about 80 people at the jail.
Took six hours, I know, for them to process me and took me almost that long to get to the telephone to call my mother to ask her to wire me $25 for the fee; which she did. King told us, he said you might be arrested so be prepared for that. But if you are, you’ll be in good company.
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