Being there

ED: We’re going to close the show today with a little more from my conversation with Hank Thomas. He’s the man we heard a few minutes ago describing the anticipation in the crowd when Martin Luther King, Jr. approached the podium. As we mentioned, Mr. Thomas was also one of the original Freedom Riders a couple of years earlier.

HANK THOMAS: I am so fortunate to have not only witnessed tremendous changes in this country but to have played a small part in that. I’m 72 years old now, and I kind of every once in awhile sit down in my library. And I’ve got lots of books on the Civil Rights Movement, and, of course, the Freedom Rides.

And I have to kind of smile a little bit and say that I was a part of it. And what a great honor. I drag out all of the trite expressions that were ever written and say, man, it was a good time to be alive.

ED: What was your involvement in the struggle after that day? Did it continue to be an important part of your life?

HANK THOMAS: Yeah. I was inducted into the Army in October of ’63. But I knew prior to the march that I was in trouble with the draft board. So when they are combing their records to fill their quotas in a particular area and you’ve got these black folks who’ve been causing problems in the Civil Rights Movement, so you move to the head of the list when it comes down to drafting people.

I didn’t want to go into the infantry. Everybody knew that if you volunteered, then you can get a choice of perhaps assignments or jobs in the military, at least I thought. So I decided, well, if I’m going to go in, I’ll become a medic. Little did I know that the place where they need medics is right out there with the infantry is. And I thought I’d be assigned to a hospital, and I was assigned to a infantry unit.

ED: You served– you were in Vietnam?

HANK THOMAS: Yes. I served as a medic in Vietnam. And part of the irony is the first soldier I treated, I came upon, I think he was a 18-year-old white boy from Alabama. He was very badly wounded. And when he saw me, he didn’t call me nigger. He said, doc. Doc, can you help me?

As a black man, I have followed in the footsteps of my father, who served in World War II, and my grandfather, who served in World War I, and we’re all Buffalo Soldiers. And a Buffalo Soldier is any black man or woman who served his or her country and could not eat in a restaurant, could not get a room at a hotel. We are Buffalo Soldiers.

ED: So let me ask you this, if I might. You live in Atlanta.

HANK THOMAS: Yes.

ED: So you went back to the South. Looks like it would have been tempting to have said goodbye to the South and headed to New York or Chicago or Los Angeles.

HANK THOMAS: I got out of the Army in ’66, and I had never had a desire to live in New York or Philadelphia or Detroit. I knew about the kind of racism that existed in the North. And with the changing of the South, I knew that the South would be the place to live. I was correct. Life is much better for black people in the South. And certainly opportunities, if you have an education, are much greater in the South for black people than any other part of the country.

ED: It’s often seemed to me that Dr. King did more for the economic development of the South than anybody else before, because you can’t really have all these transnational corporations and national corporate headquarters and stuff in the segregated South.

HANK THOMAS: No doubt about it. The Civil Rights Movement has lifted the living standards of everyone in the South. And certainly let’s say the white lower middle class has benefited from the Civil Rights Movement, especially women have benefited from the Civil Rights Movement as much as blacks. And so the country today is in a much better place, not only in terms of socially but economically. It’s in a much better place than it was 50 years ago.

And the fact that a person like myself, who at one time was refused service at a McDonald’s restaurant and has over a period of 25 years owned seven McDonald’s restaurants, a person like myself who could not get a room at a hotel and has owned four Marriott hotels, that has not taken anything away from that Southerner blue collar worker. The country is a much better place for everyone.

ED: That’s Hank Thomas. He served as a marshal at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and currently makes his home in Stone Mountain, Georgia.

[MUSIC – STAPLE SINGERS, “LONG WALK TO D.C.”]

BRIAN: That’s all the time we’ve got for today. As always, you can find more on today’s topic at backstoryradio.org. All of our shows are posted there along with a link to our free podcast.

PETER: We’ll be back next week with other deep dive into the mysterious world of the American past. In the meantime, don’t be a stranger.

ED: Today’s episode of BackStory was produced by Tony Field, Jess Engebretson, Nina Earnest, and Jesse Dukes. Emily Charnock is our research and web coordinator, and Jamal Millner is our engineer. BackStory’s executive producer is Andrew Wyndham. Special thanks this week to Eleanor Holmes Norton and Gloria Richardson.

PETER: Major support for BackStory is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, the University of Virginia, Weinstein Properties, the W.L. Lyons Brown, Jr. Charitable Foundation, an anonymous donor, and the History Channel– history made every day.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Brian Balogh is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Peter Onuf is professor of history emeritus at UVA and senior research fellow at Monticello. Ed Ayers is president and professor of history at the University of Richmond. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

[MUSIC – STAPLE SINGERS, “LONG WALK TO D.C.”]