Chesterfield, Tate Recall Civil Rights Movement

Two leaders who came of age in the civil rights era recalled their roles and memories in the tumultuous decade of the Sixties, which celebrates the 50th anniversary this month of the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

KATV’s Scott Inman led a roundtable discussion on this week’s Talk Business & Politics TV program with State Sen. Linda Chesterfield (D-Little Rock) and businessman Sherman Tate, both of whom were college-bound teenagers in the mid-60’s.

Chesterfield, a Hope native and the first African-American to graduate from Hendrix College, recalled her formative childhood years not understanding why she had to sit in the back of a bus or why she was discriminated against in a business or public building.

“It was walking into a store as a young girl and not being able to drink out of the water fountain that was so nice and shiny with the cold water. It was not being able to try on clothing in the stores or shoes. It was not being allowed to use the bathroom downtown,” Chesterfield recalled of trips to Little Rock.

“I don’t think people understand that those little things are just so important. To make sure your shoes fit properly. To make sure your dress fits properly,” she said.

To this day, she still carries personal habits from her childhood that were shaped by discrimination.

“Something that is still indelibly imprinted in my mind is I don’t leave home without going to the bathroom. It’s just a part of a culture that I grew up with,” she said. “These are things that are very small, that don’t seem like big things and that we take for granted, but they were not things that we could take for granted during that time because our lives were on the line if we did not follow the customs of the day.”

Former Arkla and Alltel executive Sherman Tate, who as a freshman at Philander Smith College in 1964, was a protestor the following year to desegregate the State Capitol Cafeteria, which refused to serve blacks after passage of the historic law.

“I’m on the campus of Philander Smith College and some members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee – SNCC [pronounced ‘snick’] were on campus from time to time and they started to talk to us,” Tate said. “I was totally shocked to find out that we, as African-American students, could not go to the state capitol of this state and go into the basement and into the cafeteria and eat. They wouldn’t let us in.”

Tate said on the first day, he and other protestors marched from the Philander Smith campus to the capitol for a sit-in, but were eventually turned away. A repeat happened on Day Two, but on Day Three, the African-American students were served.

Chesterfield and Tate said the passage of the Civil Rights Act instilled more courage in their generation, but it didn’t lead to a quick shift in attitudes.

“Yes, when the Civil Rights Act of ’64 was signed one of the things it did, it mandated access to facilities and schools — you couldn’t discriminate or you weren’t supposed to discriminate. But it slowly started a cascade of changes,” Tate said.

Tate and Chesterfield both expressed concerns about voting rights and public education and the direction of those debates in Arkansas and the U.S. today. Watch their full interview with Inman in the video below.