Bloody Tuesday:

For more than 11 years, Tuscaloosa resident John Giggie stopped by his barber’s shop twice a month for a quick trim and a lesson on the city’s civil rights past.

Giggie, who is white, is an associate professor of history at the University of Alabama.

His barber, the late Rev. Thomas Linton, who was Black, always shared with Giggie stories about past civil rights marches, mass meetings, and demonstrations that took place in Tuscaloosa in the 1960s.

The septuagenarian even kept a small museum in a back room of his shop, stuffed with displays of framed newspaper clippings, photographs and “colored” and “white” Jim Crow era signage.

A Violent Day, Mostly Forgotten

One day Linton told Giggie about the day—Tuesday, June 9, 1964—when a white mob carried out a brutal, bloody attack on local Black civil rights demonstrators at the historic First African Baptist Church in downtown Tuscaloosa. The attack was so destructive and so vicious that it left the church building marred and its stained-glass windows shattered. Moreover, the violence sent 33 bloodied and tear-gassed Black protestors to Druid City Hospital emergency room.

Despite the level of violence, the attack is a largely obscure event in civil rights history, overshadowed by more well-known atrocities such as Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene “Bull” Connor’s 1963 attack on children and teenaged protestors in Birmingham and the “Bloody Sunday” attack on demonstrators on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama in 1965—two events credited for helping change public opinion about the movement.

“Linton always talked about the day that had been forgotten in civil rights history, and he called it ‘Bloody Tuesday,’” Giggie says. After hearing the story of Bloody Tuesday, Giggie set out to research the incident and to learn more about the people involved.

In his new book, Bloody Tuesday, Giggie looks back at that fateful incident, which he characterizes as perhaps one of the top transformative moments of the Black civil rights movement involving citizen participation.

“It’s a great story,” says Giggie. “It’s a story about Black resilience, determination in the face of the Klan, and a police department sent squarely to prevent them from marching and picketing for freedom. I decided to take it on as my relationship with Rev. Linton deepened.”

The Rise of Robert Shelton, Imperial Wizard of the KKK

Tuscaloosa is a city that sits 50 miles southwest of Birmingham. And, like Birmingham, it is a city with a history deeply rooted in racial violence—a city where white officers routinely tortured and beat Black demonstrators with cattle prods, night sticks, and the butt ends of their revolvers. In fact, records show that between 1865 and 1945, more than 100 Blacks in Tuscaloosa murdered by lynching, Giggie says.

Furthermore, Tuscaloosa was home to the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America, the largest and most powerful branch of the Klan. His name was Robert Shelton.

Giggie describes how Shelton, a factory worker, printer, and auto tire salesman, rose to the highest levels in the Klan by stoking violence against Blacks in Tuscaloosa, to keep them in their place and promote white supremacy.

Shelton was in the violent mob that chased Autherine Lucy, the first Black student to attend the University of Alabama, off the campus in 1956. He and fellow Klansmen also threatened to kill Tuscaloosa News editor Buford Boone after he criticized the mob that attacked Lucy. And the Klan burned a cross in the yard of attorneys Alberta and Jay Murphy, a couple who publicly opposed racial segregation.

But despite his tendency toward violence and intimidation, Shelton wanted the Klan to have a more polished image in society, Giggie says. Shelton often wore starched white shirts and dark suits. He even maintained a three-room office on the fourth floor of the Alston Building on Greensboro Avenue.

“Shelton was a fascinating character. He yearned to make the Klan respectable, but he himself was unable to act in a genteel, restrained manner,” Giggie says.

Shelton’s desire for respectability influenced his decision to get involved in party politics, and he backed Alabama Attorney General John Patterson for governor in 1958. He and his Klan followers passed out pamphlets for Patterson and ripped down the posters of Patterson’s opponent, George Wallace.

Patterson won the election, and out of gratitude, he rewarded Shelton’s employer, Goodrich Rubber Co., with a contract with the state, and Goodrich promoted Shelton to become its state sales representative.

“When Patterson became governor and rewarded Shelton for his efforts to help solidify white supremacists behind him, the one thing Patterson told him was, ‘You cannot be in the headlines.’”

But Shelton found the temptation to be in the spotlight irresistible, and he soon made headlines when he publicly threatened “bloodshed” in Montgomery if Rev. King succeeded in efforts to integrate the public schools, Giggie says.

Consequently, Goodrich Rubber Co. fired Shelton, worried about damage to the company’s reputation, and Patterson distanced himself from Shelton as well.

“Eventually, it cost Shelton everything. It cost him Patterson’s sponsorship. It cost him his job. So, at that point, he decided to double down on being violent,” Giggie says.

In May 1961, in Anniston and Birmingham, Shelton organized the Klan’s violent attack on the Freedom Riders, a racially mixed group of activists who rode buses together from Washington D.C., through Alabama to defy racial segregation in the South on interstate buses.

The Arrival of T. Y. Rogers—A Shrewd and Charismatic Leader

Just a couple of blocks from Shelton’s downtown office was the historic First African Baptist Church, one of the most prominent Black congregations in the city.

Formerly enslaved people founded First African in 1866, after breaking from First Baptist Church because the white members refused to give basic privileges to the Black members. By the 1880s, many Black professionals and landowners in Tuscaloosa made the church their home.

Throughout the following century, members of Tuscaloosa’s Black middle class and its working-class community made attempts to protest Jim Crow segregation and discrimination, but they lacked a leader willing to dedicate his life to taking on the color line, Giggie days.

Then, in January 1964, Theopholius Yelverton “TY” Rogers arrived in Tuscaloosa to take the reigns as pastor of the First African Baptist Church.

Rogers grew up in Coatopa, Alabama, a farming village in Sumter County 70 miles southwest of Tuscaloosa. He was a protégé of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and even served under King as an assistant minister at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Atlanta.

King had Tuscaloosa in his sites as the next city to push for integration, and he announced that Rev. Rogers would lead that movement.

But when Rev. Rogers arrived in Tuscaloosa, Giggie says whites paid little attention to the new pastor in town—perhaps because they took comfort in the knowledge that no Black protest had ever produced lasting change in the city, Giggie writes. Whites believed the congregation at First African, which included many teachers and business owners, would hold Rogers down from stirring up trouble in the way of protests, just as former pastors who tried to make changes had been hindered.

Rogers, however, was one of the most intense civil rights leaders in the South—a shrewd and charismatic leader who would soon prove his abilities at civil rights organizing, says Giggie.

“This was someone who drove fast, who smoked regularly, ate his foods in big gulps, and when he preached, it was as if his tongue was on fire. He was impatient. He demanded change now.

“He was very much a King protégé in the sense that he believed that for too long justice had been deferred and denied and that it was no longer time to be patient,” Giggie says. “In that way, he was the perfect instigator.”

The Confrontation: Rogers and Police Chief William Marable

Rogers’s big test came a few months after his arrival, when Tuscaloosa’s new county courthouse opened with much fanfare. The year before, in 1963, in preparation for the integration of the University of Alabama, local Black clergymen and city officials had made a deal that any newly constructed buildings in the city would be integrated.

But when the new courthouse opened, the facility had Blacks- and whites-only restrooms and water fountains.

Rev. Rogers sent a letter to Probate Judge David Cochrane and demanded that all segregation signage be removed. Cochrane, however, rebuffed Rogers’s demands, and members of the County Board of Revenue voiced their support for Cochrane’s position.

Rogers shot back, declaring that he and the Tuscaloosa Citizens for Action Committee, an affiliate of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, would hold a city-wide campaign demanding that the segregation signage be torn down.

Tuscaloosa’s Chief of Police William Marable, however, refused to issue a permit for Rogers to hold a march.

Rogers and leaders with the Tuscaloosa Citizens for Action Committee made plans to protest anyway. They held mass meetings and, on the morning of June 9, 1964, Rogers and other demonstrators gathered at First African Baptist Church with plans to march to protest the courthouse’s separate facilities.

The goal, Rogers told demonstrators: Get to the county courthouse. Drink out of the whites-only water fountains. Use the whites-only restrooms.

At 10:15 a.m., Rogers opened the church’s main door to start the march, but he saw that hundreds of helmeted white police officers and other local whites had surrounded the church, armed with clubs, axe handles, and other weapons.

Giggie writes that one teen protester, Dorothy Corder, recognized several of Robert Shelton’s followers among the police officers.

Then Giggie captures the brief exchange that took place between Chief Marable and Rogers.

‘‘‘Reverend, I told you I can’t let you march.’”

“‘I’m going to march.”’

“‘Arrest him.”’

Police officers arrested Rogers and the other Black leaders; then the officers and the white mob swarmed the other demonstrators, beating them and driving many of them back into the church building.

At that point, Marable ordered the city’s fire department to direct its high-pressure hoses at the church’s front door and windows. The force of the water punched holes in the stained-glass.

Afterward, on orders from Chief Marable, officers shot tear gas canisters through the broken stained-glass windows. The gas burned demonstrators’ eyes and noses. And, as they coughed and gagged and ran out of the church in search of relief, they ran straight into the mob’s path.

The mob savagely beat the demonstrators, and, by the end of the day, police arrested 98 protesters, most of whom spent a night in jail. Many others sustained serious injuries.

“In my opinion, he [Marable] was as cunning and as aggressive as any police chief in the Deep South,” says Giggie. “We know less about him because he never sought a public persona. He tried to avoid publicity as much as possible. But he was the architect of the police response on Bloody Tuesday.”

“Marable authorized that level of ferocity of violence for several reasons. First of all, he watched [Commissioner] Bull Connor’s attempts to manage the violence in Birmingham and saw him use police dogs and hoses on Black protesters. So, one of the lessons he drew is that you need to be more violent. You need to use tear gas. You need to use Billy clubs and cattle prods and really have a moment that’s cataclysmic; when he authorized the attack of First African, he basically rendered the nerve center of the movement for the city, and also West Alabama, inoperable,” Giggie says.

Perhaps most important, Marable wanted to demonstrate to every Black citizen the power of both the city of Tuscaloosa and its law enforcement officers, Giggie says.

“And the defiling of a Black church—there’s no greater act of aggression a police officer or law enforcement agency can take.”

Trauma and New Strategies for Progress

The Bloody Tuesday incident rocked Tuscaloosa’s Black community.

“Parents were terrified for their children. People worried that there would be another Bloody Tuesday coming up, another attempt by law enforcement,” Giggie says.

In fact, Bloody Tuesday brought about an upswing in Black self-defense strategies, with families arming themselves and sitting on their porches in anticipation of another attack.

“That would be the most immediate lesson, that the Black community had to look inward and not simply pray and march and preach on nonviolence, but to be prepared for another assault and be prepared to defend themselves by whatever means they could,” Giggie says.

Moreover, Giggie says, “What they discovered is that they would have to use federal support to break the color line in Tuscaloosa because it was so violent and so deeply entrenched, this racism. So a little less than a month after Bloody Tuesday, you see LBJ sign the Civil Rights Bill on July 2, 1964.”

Within several months, local Black leaders in Tuscaloosa began using the federal government to their advantage. For example, when 15 white-owned restaurants in Tuscaloosa refused to integrate, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy made the city among the first test cases of the Civil Rights bill and sued them. He won, forcing them to integrate, Giggie says.

“They also turned to the courts, and began filing a series of lawsuits against the city and against the police department that would ultimately force the local powers-that-be to integrate,” he says.

In addition, the FBI began targeting Shelton, carrying out a propaganda campaign designed to sow seeds of doubt among Klan members about his fitness for leadership. Then in 1966, Shelton was sentenced to a year in prison for rebuffing calls by the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities to turn over Klan membership lists.

A Mysterious Death, and Telling the Stories

Rev. Rogers continued leading the fight for civil rights in Tuscaloosa on multiple fronts.

One of the most consequential battles he led was a boycott of Druid City Transit; he and other demonstrators argued that DCT drivers were continuing to discriminate against Black riders, insisting they ride in the back of the vehicles. Rogers won this battle and the DCT eventually surrendered its franchise. Under a new vendor, the buses were integrated.

But despite the many racial clashes and civil rights protests that took place in Tuscaloosa, Bloody Tuesday has gone mostly unnoticed by historians.

Moreover, Rogers’s own career was cut short in 1971 when he died in a tragic and mysterious car accident at the age of 31. His death left his family and supporters bewildered because officials declared that Rogers died after his car left the road and struck a tree, but his injuries were inconsistent with the official story, Giggie writes.

At the time of his death, Rogers was the head of affiliates of the SCLC and becoming a voice calling America to atone for its sins of slavery and segregation and demanding economic repatriation for Blacks, Giggie says.

“He never got his due because he passed away so young,” Giggie says. “There’s a whole world of civil rights activism, determination and suffering that is yet to receive full treatment and analysis.”

Giggie says he hopes his book Bloody Tuesday will remind readers of the heroism and determination of Black citizens during the movement.

“These were local, everyday citizens. So often we forget that it’s those stories, their lives that moved us closer to the Founding Fathers’ ideals,” Giggie says.

“Every southern city, I believe, had a story like Bloody Tuesday. Not as violent, perhaps. Not as dramatic, but incidents in which every day Black men, women, and children marched and protested and stared down police officers,” he says.

“These transformative events need to be remembered, commemorated, and celebrated, because they offer a broader sense of this movement, beyond the better-known events in Birmingham and Selma.”