His Life · Chapter 5 of 8 · c. 1948 – 1956
The NAACP Years
He led the Anniston branch and then the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP, led what he remembered as the first statewide voter-registration drive, and was in office when the state outlawed the organization.
Before him there was Thomas Jackson. Jackson owned a two-story dry-goods store on Tenth Street and edited Anniston’s Black newspaper, the Anniston Observer. Before the war he had led the local NAACP. Then, as Gordon Rodgers told it, the town’s banks agreed among themselves not to lend him the money he needed to stock his shelves for spring. He could not survive, and he left for a Northern city. Rodgers thought it was Chicago.1
That was the risk for anyone who took the job. After the war it was offered to the dentist on Cooper Avenue.
“They didn’t control anything, didn’t have any money, didn’t have any influence with the government, and nobody wanted to put their hands in it because you’d lose your job. So they got on to me, and I said, ‘Hell, yeah, I’ll be the president.’”
The Anniston branch
He became president of the Anniston branch in the late 1940s. He gave both 1948 and 1949 in the same interview.2 Fifty years later, when asked why, he answered as a citizen.
“It was a matter of life. I mean, you couldn’t share their privileges and the good things that come from democratic government. Um, when black people can’t vote and don’t have anything to do with electing officials, they can’t talk to officials about doing something about things — you just gotta get into the equation.”
He served on state committees and held state offices, and then he was elected president of the Alabama State Conference of the NAACP. The exact years of his state presidency have not yet been confirmed. A contemporary newspaper shows him in the office by March 1956, and his obituary places it during the Montgomery bus boycott.3 He carried both jobs while running a dental practice.
“I had to make a living and be the president of the Anniston chapter, and at the same time I was president of the state, and there were meetings to go to every week in Birmingham and Montgomery. It was a real busy time. I thought it was worth doing, so I rolled up my sleeves and stuck with it.”
The vote
The work he was proudest of was voter registration. In the 1950s a Black citizen of Calhoun County who wanted to register faced a board that could ask any question it liked and grade the answer however it pleased. “It could be different for all three of you,” he said.4 By his account, the state conference under his leadership took on the problem across Alabama.
“When I was president of the NAACP, we conducted the first statewide voter registration drive. And that spread around through the different counties and the different municipalities, and now voter registration drives are common practice.”
1954 to 1956
In May 1954 the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education. “The whole state — all of the black people — were elated,” he remembered. According to a later Anniston Star profile, that same year he made the first formal request to the Anniston Board of Education to integrate the city’s schools.5
In March 1956, as state president, he gave the main address at a memorial service in Chattanooga for Walter White, the NAACP’s longtime executive secretary. The Associated Press reported his words:
“I was happy about the (U.S. Supreme Court) decision … but I couldn’t avoid a fear that we might lack the guts to see that it is enforced. This is a time of testing for us, when we will prove what we really are. We’ll find out whether we’re men or craven cowards. This is our chance to leave the bayous and backwaters and get into the main stream of American life.”
The Birmingham News, March 26, 1956 · read aloud to him in 2002
The test had already begun in Montgomery. For more than a year the city’s Black residents refused to ride segregated buses and organized their own rides to work. He made the trip down more than once.
“I made a couple of trips down there. The bus boycott went on for a whole year, and it got to be the general policy: black folks would wake up an hour earlier so that they could get out and wait for the vehicle that did the hauling of black people to certain points downtown, where they could go to work.”
Outlawed
On June 1, 1956, Alabama Attorney General John Patterson obtained a state court injunction that barred the NAACP from operating in Alabama. The state demanded the organization’s membership lists, the same names Gordon Rodgers’s father had once protected by taking in his neighbors’ mail. According to his obituary, Dr. Rodgers refused to turn the list over and went to Washington to testify about it. The NAACP fought the case up to the U.S. Supreme Court. It took eight years to return to Alabama, and in the meantime, the obituary says, “the organization was basically underground.”6
The danger was real. His niece remembered the threats. He remembered it this way:
“We realized that there were mobs riding around, shooting your house, and you could go down the highway and someone would shoot your car, and there were all kinds of dangers involved. But we had to — if we’re gonna achieve our goals, you’ve got to expose yourself to these dangers and perils.”
He was never jailed. He laughed that “maybe I could run real fast,” and then became serious: “you can’t run — you got to sit there and offer your body as a sacrifice if you wanna achieve your goals.”7
Footnotes
-
Dr. Gordon A. Rodgers Jr. on Blacks in Anniston (2002 interview), Side B, 13:24–17:04. Frederick Burger’s notes attribute the banks’ refusal to Jackson’s “pro-integration activities” (Burger research file, p. 2). ↩
-
Alabama Oral History No. 93 (1995), Tape 2, 2:52 (“nineteen forty-nine”), 5:59 (“the late nineteen forties”) and 6:38 (“nineteen forty-eight”). ↩
-
“State NAACP chief says court edict gives Negro chance,” The Birmingham News, March 26, 1956, p. 11; William Thornton, “Gordon Rodgers, Anniston dentist, civil rights leader, activist dies at 92,” The Birmingham News, Dec. 27, 2007. In 2002 he said of the dates, “I’m blank on these days.” ↩
-
2002 interview, Side B, 27:35–32:41. ↩
-
1995 interview, Tape 4, 1:11. The school-board request is reported in “Dr. Beverly Rodgers,” The Anniston Star, and has not yet been checked against school-board records. ↩
-
The Birmingham News, Dec. 27, 2007. The ban was lifted after NAACP v. Alabama ex rel. Flowers (1964). In both interviews Dr. Rodgers sometimes remembered the ban as Governor George Wallace’s. In 2002 he named John Patterson, who was attorney general at the time and later became governor, and that matches the historical record. ↩
-
1995 interview, Tape 2, 9:33. ↩