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Ruby Pearl and Sergeant Kirkland:
Fried Chicken and Canteen Water
by Rus Cooper-Dowda
A decade ago, a woman who worked with me casually mentioned that she had been one of the thousands arrested during the Children's Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama's 1960's civil rights unrest.
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She didn't integrate anything. She didn't turn off the hoses. She put herself at great risk to simply feed people, which was her talent.
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Then she went on to say something that changed my life in a wonderful way: "And you know," she told me, "there was this ol' handicapped white lady for a time who showed up for every single demonstration and march givin' out fried chicken with the fixin's in clean boxes. But every time a photographer got close or a newspaper reporter tried to ask her why, she would run or hide. Nobody could ever find out her name -- we just knew her as a great cook and an ol' handicapped white lady."
And I then got to say in return,
"Welll..if you'd still like to know the name of that ol' disabled white lady, I can help. She was my grandmother and her name was Ruby Pearl..."
Forty years after the fact, my disabled grandmother's small effort to help the civil rights effort in Birmingham brought together two near-strangers and two different racial experiences.
Here is Ruby Pearl's story:
She was part African-American, part Cherokee, married to a mean Caucasian man. All the men around her were racist. But Ruby took her Christianity seriously. She took the loving her neighbor part seriously, too.
She couldn't openly support Dr. King and his work as a stay-at-home, poor, rural, handicapped woman in a racist family living on the edge of Birmingham in the early 1960s. But she lived on the railroad line. Therein was her avenue to help out -- until she became bed-ridden by her uncontrolled diabetes.
Ruby had a large chicken coop and a garden. That translated to chicken to fry, egg money for train fare and vegetables to cook. All these were assets over which she had a little bit of control.
My grandmother used all of the above to cook for protestors in Birmingham, ride the train to get the food into town and then get back home before male family member workshifts were over.
The penalty for getting caught would have been that she couldn't do it anymore. She would have been physically abused by her husband, too. But Henry never beat her for it.
She hauled fried chicken to Birmingham for Dr. King as long as her health held out. Ruby was already quite disabled when she started her secret support scheme.
Us grandkids helped keep her civil rights work secret for her own protection and then for own complicity. Over the years we have wondered whether her boxed lunches had made a difference.
She didn't integrate anything. She didn't turn off the hoses. She put herself at great risk to simply feed people, which was her talent.
So to have a veteran of those days remember Ruby Pearl as "that ol' white handicapped lady cook" really made my day.
In Fredericksburg, Virginia today, there is a monument to Sergeant Richard Rowland Kirkland. He became known as "The Angel of Marye's Heights" at only nineteen years of age. Why? Because after a Civil War battle there he voluntarily took canteen water to dying soldiers who were lying untreated in the field.
He couldn't stop the evil by himself, but he didn't just ignore it, either. He did what he could, where he could.
Ruby Pearl's monument for her part in the Southern civil rights struggles of the 1960s are those remembered white boxes with clean string around them and spots, proving the chicken was freshly fried.
Rus Cooper-Dowda is a minister and freelance writer in St. Petersburg, Fla.
Posted Feb. 1, 2003
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