Solomon S. Seay - Jim Crow and Me: Stories from My Life as a Civil Rights Lawyer

John Hope Franklin

As one who lived through the Civil Rights Movement and who participated in it on a limited basis, I am delighted to cheer along the Seay-Boyd collaboration. This is, indeed, an exciting joint effort, not unlike the project my son and I worked together when we published my fathers autobiography, My Life and an Era. It is virtually impossible to portray that period unless one had a special prism through which to view it or, at least, a vantage point from which to consider its momentous events.

I am surprised at the number of people who have, somehow, associated me with the day-to-day developments in the Tulsa, Oklahoma, race riots of late May and early June of 1921. I was not in Tulsa at the time and would not arrive there for the first time until May or June 1925. Meanwhile, my mother, younger sister, and I survived the suspense of not knowing for three or four weeks if my father was alive or among the charred bodies that lay on the roadways for days and even weeks after the shooting and looting had ceased. My older sister and brother were away in a boarding high school in Tennessee. When my mother, sister, and I reached Tulsa from Rentiesville in 1925, I was ten years old and in the seventh grade. My father, whose law practice was better than it had been when he moved to Tulsa just before the riot, was overjoyed that the family was together again.

As I read of the remarkable account of Solomon Seays struggles against Jim Crow in Alabama, I could not resist seeing the striking similarity that they bore to my fathers struggles in Oklahoma. Like Seay, my father fought Jim Crow whenever and wherever he found it. One notable example was the city ordinance against the use of certain flammable materials in construction, a sure effort to block rebuilding by poverty stricken blacks. My father took the case of one of his disobedient clients to the state supreme court, where the ordinance was declared unconstitutional. Then, there were the long afternoons I spent with him in his office, where there were few clients and I had an abundance of homework. I almost wished that clients would stay away, which would give me my fathers exclusive attention, even if it meant that he collected no fees from the very few clients who could afford to pay.

I do not believe that my dad ever met Solomon Seay, and the closest I got to him was in 1943 when I taught in the summer session of Montgomerys Alabama State College. It was the year that I saw patterns of segregation that must have strained the imagination of its creators. The most notable of these was at the state liquor store, where the line leading up to the counter was divided by a wooden wall; but the sales counter itself was common for both races, so that a single clerk could serve people on both sides of the racial divide.

It does not take more than a few minutes of scrutiny to discover that racial segregation represents one of the most creative and imaginative pursuits ever improvised by mankind. Even if the creative spirit was alive and well in shaping the sale and distribution of alcoholic beverages, it was no more creative than some of its contemporaneous colleagues whose creative imagination would doubtless be strained at times in making certain that the races would remain segregated.

I am delighted that Attorney Seay and Delores Boyd have decided to share their experiences with the general public. Her courage as well as her resourcefulness and ingenuity made his life a rich resource for all of us to emulate. For groups that have not yet broken the back of segregation in their lives and experiences, the battle of the Seays and Boyds is an ideal place to begin their own battle against racial segregation in their own lives.