New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
March for their lives
Hamden man dodged racist mobs while marching with Martin Luther King Jr.
Fifty-four years later, John Pawelek can still hear those thousands of marchers, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., singing “We Shall Overcome” as they crested a hill and came into full view at dawn near Montgomery, Ala.
“Oh man, was that emotional!” said Pawelek last Tuesday morning as he sat in his home in Hamden. “At first, we could just hear them singing. Then, there they were, linked arm-in-arm: John Lewis, Jesse Jackson, Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King, leading all the others.”
For a 22-year-old graduate student from Brown University, it was an unforgettable moment. Pawelek and two friends from Brown had flown down the night before in a crowded cargo plane; they were heeding King’s nationwide call asking people across the country to join the effort to allow blacks to vote in Alabama.
The experience of marching with King inspired Pawelek and changed his life. But as America prepares to celebrate another King holiday on Monday, Pawalek admits he’s disappointed racism still has not been eradicated.
Pawelek contacted the New Haven Register because he believes it’s important to tell people how brave King and his supporters were and what they accomplished as well as what still needs to be done.
“There were 20,000 of us who marched that day in 1965,” Pawelek said. “I’m 76. Although I’m in good health, there aren’t that many of us left (of the 20,000). This is eyewitness history. I was 10 feet away from Martin Luther King.” What motivated Pawelek to risk his life down there, to be spat upon by angry Southern racists who might have pulled him out of the line of marchers — he was on the edge closest to the mobs — and beaten him, perhaps killed him? He said his firsthand experience with racism in his native Baltimore at age 12 spurred him to go to Alabama 10 years later.
“Like Selma (Alabama), Baltimore wasn’t integrated,” he recalled. “The black schools were on one side of town and the white schools were on the other side. The black schools were very rundown. My father supervised industrial arts for the city’s school system; on weekends we’d go into the white schools’ industrial shop classes, take the nice tools and then go to the black schools and switch the nice tools with the rusty ones! That made a big impression on me.” When Pawelek was in junior high school in 1954, the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education ruled that schools must desegregate. “For the first time, there were black kids in my school. The white parents protested and tried to block us from going to school. Many white parents wouldn’t let their kids go in, but my parents insisted that I go. I was one of seven white kids who went to school in the morning. We had to walk through this gauntlet of parents screaming at us. That was like Alabama years later.”
Because he was younger and smaller when he encountered the earlier mobs, Pawelek said, “I think I was more scared in Baltimore when I had to go through that crowd.”
But this experience had an upside: “This was the first time I’d ever met a black kid. I started hanging out with them. I realized black kids were human beings.”
Pawelek fast-forwarded to 1965. “Martin Luther King was all over the news with sit-ins and people getting killed. This was really dangerous stuff and King was very courageous.”
Pawelek noted King attempted to lead marchers across Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, from the black side of town to the white side. The goal was to march to the state capital of Montgomery, 54 miles away, to press for action on voting rights.
The first two attempts to cross that bridge were unsuccessful, as the nonviolent marchers were repelled by police using dogs, clubs and firehoses. But for the third try, King and his other organizers sent fliers to churches and schools all over America,
“There were 20,000 of us who marched that day in 1965 . .... I was 10 feet away from Martin Luther King.”
John Pawelek, Hamden
urging them to join the march.
“I saw the flyer on a bulletin board at Brown,” Pawelek said. “I knew I wanted to go right away. So did my friends Jim and Barry. But we were nervous, not knowing what to expect when we got down there.”
He recalled the drive to Boston and the $50 flight from there to Montgomery, sitting on the wooden floor of the cargo plane with about 50 others.
They arrived in a dark Alabama about 3 a.m. But instantly their spirits were buoyed and they began to feel safe when they walked into the lobby of the Montgomery airport.
“It was full of people: old, young, clergy, all colors,” Pawelek said. “It brings tears to my eyes, just thinking about it.”
“We were ushered outside where pickup trucks were lined up. Black farmers were waiting to drive us to the drop-off site where the marchers were going to be. When we got there, we were fed drinks and sandwiches. ”
They waited in a field; the skies were beginning to lighten.
At about 5 a.m., at the dawn’s first light, they heard the singing. And then the marchers came over that hill, with the sun rising behind them. Pawelek and the others waiting in the field ran up to join them, applauding and singing along to “We Shall Overcome.”
Pawelek saw King pass by, 10 feet away, followed by the other early marchers. “We waited two hours to get into the line.”
“I was tall, so I was placed on the outside. A young black woman was linked arm-in-arm with me. For a white man to be arm-in-arm with a black woman — I don’t know if it was illegal, but it was certainly unheard of!”
“George Wallace was governor and he was adamantly against integration. We had a chant: ‘Oh Wallace, you can’t jail us all! Oh, Wallace, segregation’s gonna fall!’”
Sitting in his living room, Pawelek began to sing as he did that day 54 years ago in Alabama: “I’m gonna lay down my sword and shield! Down by the riverside! Down by the riverside!”
The chants and songs lifted the marchers’ spirits but the local white people were enraged. “It was very, very scary,” Pawelek said. “All along the way there were people yelling at us, calling us the worst words you could imagine. It was their culture, they didn’t know any better. You couldn’t be angry with them. But this is why it was so courageous of King to be doing this.”
Pawelek said things got “really ugly and dangerous” when they reached the outskirts of Montgomery. “The National Guard was there, with fixed bayonets but they had confederate flags on their sleeves. Supposedly, they were protecting us, but they weren’t. They didn’t stop people from running into the street. They were spitting on me. My face was wet. My left arm was all wet. That was really scary because I knew what else could happen.”
But they made it safely to the big square in downtown Montgomery, where the 20,000 gathered to hear King. “He stood on the courthouse steps, giving a full-out Baptist minister speech,” Pawelek recalled.
The convoy of pickup trucks delivered them back to the airport without incident. But the marchers later learned that Viola Liuzzo, a volunteer driver from Michigan, had been kidnapped and murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan.
After Pawelek and his wife, Linda, moved to Hamden, they joined the Unitarian Society of New Haven. Inspired by his time with King, Pawelek participated in the society’s program working with inner city kids at the Waverly Townhouses in New Haven.
Asked if he is optimistic racism will fade away, Pawelek replied, “I’m always optimistic. You can’t be a scientist and not be optimistic. (He is a senior research scientist at the Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Dermatology and the Comprehensive Cancer Center.)
“The only way to deal with racism is through pure love of everything: of the Earth, of other people,” Pawelek said. “Love and respect have to be instilled in us. It’s the only way.”
Pawelek will observe King’s holiday by presenting a civil rights slideshow to kids at the Unitarian Society. “I think telling children about this is the most important thing.”