Photograph by Derek White/Getty Images for Scripps
Last week, Xernona Clayton had an impromptu encounter with a lasting piece of her trailblazing life’s legacy. After being accidentally dislodged from her seat by a fellow passenger aboard a flight back to Atlanta, the civil rights legend found herself on a gurney being wheeled into Grady Memorial Hospital downtown.
Looking around the Grady ER, she took note of the mix of Black, brown, and white medical personnel and patients swirling around her. Despite her injuries, a smile flickered across Clayton’s face.
In 1963, shortly after moving from Los Angeles to Atlanta to work for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Coretta Scott King at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, she befriended local Black doctors. When Clayton learned Black mothers-to-be could only give birth at Grady on Thursdays due to segregation, she joined forces to desegregate the city’s hospitals. Working beside Dr. Otis Smith, the first practicing Black pediatrician in Georgia, the aide to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. flew to Washington D.C. with four Black doctors to plead with President Lyndon Johnson for help. Johnson listened intently but offered no promises.
“Finally, I told him, Mr. President, I know you and my boss are friends and somehow I thought you were a good guy,” she recalled this week. “You could fix this with the stroke of a pen. This is very disappointing.”
Thanks to Clayton and the work of other civil rights leaders, Johnson’s signing of the Medicare Act on July 30, 1965, requiring hospitals receiving federal funds to end racial discrimination, became one of the landmark moments of the Johnson presidency. Under pressure from the SCLC, Clayton, and others, Grady Memorial Hospital quietly—and voluntarily—desegregated almost two full months earlier, on June 1, 1965. The Grady doctor wheeling Clayton through the ER last week knew his civil rights history. Beaming, Clayton recalled, “He introduced me to the other Grady staff, saying Your job exists because of this woman. She helped to desegregate this hospital. It was the thrill of a lifetime. All these years later, my work stands.”
As she turns 95 this week, the entire city is invited to Clayton’s birthday party August 28 from 5 to 7 p.m., hosted by Atlanta Downtown, the art nonprofit Dashboard Atlanta, and WSB-TV’s Fred Blankenship at Xernona Clayton Plaza, where her statue is located at West Peachtree Street and Xernona Clayton Way. In addition to a few speeches and some cake, the park’s new nature-themed public art will be unveiled.
Photograph courtesy of Atlanta Downtown
Throughout her 60-plus years in Atlanta, Clayton worked for the Kings at the SCLC, became the first Black TV talk show host in the south, worked for Ted Turner as the vice president of public affairs at Turner Broadcasting, and in 1993, created the Trumpet Awards, recognizing Black achievement in the arts, politics, business, and sports.
During a reflective conversation this week in the Trumpet Awards Foundation’s 10th floor conference room overlooking the downtown skyline, Clayton discussed key moments from her trailblazing life in Atlanta, from her unexpected friendship with Calvin Craig, the grand dragon of Georgia’s Ku Klux Klan at the height of the civil rights movement, to her groundbreaking WAGA-TV The Xernona Clayton Show and the powerful final gift she was able to give to her boss Dr. King in 1968 in the hours after his assassination.
Shortly after you got to Atlanta, you started working for Model Cities, which was a federal program designed to help poor neighborhoods. Visiting the Adair Park neighborhood, you discovered Calvin Craig, the grand dragon of Georgia’s Ku Klux Klan lived nearby and attended the meetings. Not only did you strike up a friendship with Craig, but because of your influence, he left the Klan. What was going through your mind when that happened?
I had gone shopping on a Saturday and I was coming home, and when I turned into my normally quiet street, I saw cars parked everywhere. In the crowd was Mayor Ivan Allen. He told me, Calvin Craig just held a press conference and announced he was coming out of the Klan and credited a Black woman, you. I had no idea he would make that announcement, but I could see the change in him. When he would come to see me, I would always take time to talk to him. Usually, it was just to tell him how crazy an idea was he had just espoused. (laughs) But I was never afraid of him. It wasn’t until much later that I learned our visits together had become the topic of his dinner conversations. That Miss Clayton is a fine woman . . . You’ll never believe what Miss Clayton told me today . . . After he got out of the Klan, Mayor Allen started forwarding Mr. Craig’s mail to my office. I was running out of places to put it. Many of the folks writing him wanted to do press interviews so I began arranging them for him. It got so he would not even consider an engagement until he asked me about it first. We did an interview together here in Atlanta, a call-in show at WRFG. One of the Black callers got on the air and said, I don’t know what all the fuss is about with you two. Colored women and white men have been going to bed and having sex together for a long time. That’s all these two are doing! I could tell Mr. Craig was upset. Afterward, he escorted me to my car and told me I wanted to be sure you’re safe and I wanted to apologize for the ugly things that caller said. I told him, Now you know as I do there are lots of ugly people out there, a whole lot of them. Don’t think nothing about it.
You were good friends with Atlanta Constitution publisher Ralph McGill, who regularly took up civil rights in his front-page column. Notably, you single-handedly integrated the paper’s society page when you called McGill up one Sunday after flipping through photos of all the white brides in the paper and asked, Don’t Black girls get married in Atlanta? McGill once described your influence on him as “pricking the conscience of white Southerners.” What memories of your friendship with McGill can you share?
Mr. McGill called me one day and said, How about lunch? I would always drop whatever I was doing because I just enjoyed having lunch with him. There was a building right around the corner here in downtown where the Atlanta Press Club used to be. Well, we walked into that building and up the stairs and of course everyone was happy to see Mr. McGill. I didn’t know where we were. When we got to the door of the dining room, a man told us, Oh, Mr. McGill, you know she can’t come in. Mr. McGill replied, What do you mean? and the man told us, Well, Mr. McGill, you know this is for press club members only. McGill smiled and said, But Miss Clayton is a member and pulled out a membership card from his pocket with my name on it. Mr. McGill had gone and arranged my membership into the Atlanta Press Club and since he was the publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, they weren’t going to refuse him.
Photograph courtesy of Atlanta Downtown
In April 1968, you were an invaluable help to Mrs. King following Dr. King’s assassination. Just before Dr. King was to lie in state at Spelman College with mourners already lined up down the street, you advised Mrs. King to open the casket to insure everything was in order. When you, Mrs. King, Dr. King’s parents and close friends Harry and Julie Belafonte lifted the lid, the reality of what happened to Dr. King in Memphis was apparent. When you quietly asked the mortician what might be done, he gave you an argument. So borrowing face powder from Mrs. Belafonte, who had a lighter complexion and from Mama King, who had a darker complexion, you blended them together and then applied the powder to Dr. King’s face so he would look more like himself to the world. How did you find the strength in that moment to do that?
I didn’t, really. I was trembling. But that [mortician] had made me so angry. When I pulled him aside and quietly asked if something could be done, audibly, in front of Mrs. King and the family, he said to me, Miss, his jaw was blown off! I thought that was the crassest thing you could say in that moment. All I could think was, We have to do something with this side of his face. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was so mad at that undertaker, it was just something I did in the spur of the moment. I thought by blending the light with the dark, it would give us something better than what we had. I was asked to reapply it the next morning as well. I didn’t have any directions or even knew how much to put on. It wasn’t a recipe you were trying to keep. It was a recipe you wished you hadn’t had to make it at all.
For The Xernona Clayton Show on WAGA-TV, you booked some of the biggest names in show business, including Sidney Poitier, Mahalia Jackson, the Jackson 5, and Sammy Davis Jr. What’s an interview that stands out for you?
[J.B. Stoner]. He was a racist, admitted it and wore it well. He was proud to be crazy. [In 1970] when he ran for governor, the law required that you talk to all of the candidates. Given who I was, his people called and asked if he was still invited. So I asked, Has he quit the race? If he’s running, he’s just as eligible as the rest of them to be on the show. I wouldn’t mistreat him. Now, the station was asking, Are you going to bring him in? I said, Yup, he’s coming. In the studio, he was sitting as close to me as you and I are now. During that interview, my whole body twitched. He was saying, N**** this and n**** that. It hurt. It was the first time I really felt the anger I knew we all had. His presence made me uncomfortable, but the law required each candidate had an equal opportunity to speak. I will say this about that interview. It was the first time I ever heard him speak, I won’t say sensibly, but respectfully about Black people. He called me Miss Clayton, which I didn’t think he’d do. The interview went okay. He didn’t threaten to shoot the TV camera or the lights at least!
On August 28 at 5 p.m., the city will gather by your statue in Hardy Ivy Park for a free event to celebrate your 95th birthday. How are you planning to mark the milestone?
When they approached me about it, I thought it was a lovely idea. It wasn’t my idea, but I’ll take credit for it! I haven’t seen the art installation yet. But I’ve heard it’s very pretty. At this age, I let the spirit direct me. As I get closer to my birthday, I get more imaginative about the scope, especially when you get into your nineties and now the upper nineties. That’s a lot of years. For my birthday, I like to give the gifts. I give everyone a gift. You exchange gifts with people because they matter to you. So I decided that’s what I’m going to do. These people have made a “mattering event” out of everything I’ve ever done. It’s a way for me to say thank you.
On Thursday, August 28 from 5 to 7 p.m., the city is invited to celebrate Legacy in Bloom, Xernona Clayton’s 95th birthday and art unveiling at Xernona Clayton Plaza inside Hardy Ivy Park at West Peachtree Street and Xernona Clayton Way downtown.
Advertisement
Richard L. Eldredge
Source link