While at Auburn University my concern for racial injustice increased through participation in the Wesley Foundation where, under the leadership of Reverend Shaw, we had begun to discuss the evil of the separate-but-unequal treatment imposed upon African Americans. While some later wrote that we were the silent generation, actually many of us then were quite vocal in small groups, if short on action. In the Atlanta Constitution, reporter Ralph McGill instructed a wider audience in the South and beyond about the wrongs done to African Americans.
After only two years at Alabama Polytechnic Institute (renamed Auburn University in 1960), in 1956 I joined the U. S. Marine Corps. I had taken the train from Auburn to Montgomery to join the Army. Upon finding the Army recruiter away for lunch, I went next door and joined the Marine Corps for a three-year tour of duty. I was transported to a large hangar at Maxwell Air Force Base where several hundred recruits were sitting around waiting for orders. Over the public address speaker, we heard this loud command: "All men who joined the Marines step up to the desk." Only two persons came forward, amidst wisecrack warnings from the other recruits -- Issac Ward, a young black man from Dothan, Alabama, where my wife, Mary Jo Clearman Logue grew up, and me.
When Issac Ward and I walked up to the desk of the U. S. Marine sergeant, whose dress blues were covered with medals of service and heroics, we probably both needed a friend, but neither one of us spoke. Instinctively, even before boot camp, we both knew there were times when one should just listen and obey. After my physical exam, when I covered the same eye twice so I could pass the test -- a decision on the rifle range at Parris Island I would later regret. I looked around for Issac Ward, but he was gone. I did not see him again until the next morning when I boarded the train in Montgomery for Parris Island, South Carolina, via Atlanta, Georgia. I had stayed the previous night at a very nice hotel in Montgomery courtesy of the U. S. Government, a new experience for me. When I naively asked Issac Ward where he disappeared to after our physical exams, he replied matter-of-factly that he had spent the night in a part of Montgomery that I did not see.
Issac Ward and I sat together on the train trip from Montgomery to Parris Island, probably a new experience for both of us. When we got off the train in Atlanta for a layover, I was upset by the separate waiting rooms and decided to sit with Issac Ward in the "colored" section of the depot. I assumed that Blacks would be less likely to protest my presence in their waiting room than would Whites oppose Issac Ward's presence in theirs. Certainly, that was a rare experience for me. Issac Ward didn't express an opinion. While waiting for the train to Parris Island, together we walked over to the Atlanta Constitution building to speak to my brother, Mickey, who covered college sports for that paper. I assumed that a newspaper that published Ralph McGill's columns in support of equal opportunities for African Americans would likely be more receptive to racially mixed guests
Little did I realize that day on the way to Parris Island that a few years later; while working on a doctoral dissertation at Louisiana State University, I would be sitting in Ralph McGill's office, taping an interview with him about his many speeches on human rights. I returned to Auburn in 1958 to complete a B.A. degree in sociology and a year later the M.S. in communication studies at Florida State. In 1967 I finished the Ph.D. at Louisiana State University studying the history and criticism of public address. My dissertation was on the theory and practice of Ralph McGill's persuasive civil rights discourse.
All units in the Marines during the three years in which I served were racially integrated, also a new experience for me. I learned later, however, that there were no African American Drill Instructors at Parris Island during my training. Issac Ward and I became relatively close during our training at Parris Island.
Just before our scheduled graduation from basic training, I caught pneumonia and was sent to the base hospital. When I returned from the physician's office to pack my sea bag for the hospital, seventy fellow-Marines and the Drill Instructor looked on. For a reason known only to himself, the Drill Instructor yelled, "Private Ward get up here and help Private Logue pack his sea bag!" Issac Ward and I spoke few words as we held the sea bag open and placed my personal articles in it. We managed only an awkward farewell more appropriate for the Drill Instructor than for each other, a rare pause in the unremitting day and night training.
When I returned to final days of training from the hospital, the Drill Instructor met me at the bus, arranged to have me join a new platoon that thankfully was close to graduating from Parris Island. He also walked me down to a base seamstress to have PFC (private-first-class) stripes sewn on my shirts and coat. Hospitalization meant that all my buddies in Platoon 6 would graduate without me, go home for a 30-day leave, and return for combat training at Camp Geiger as a unit without me.
My first permanent duty assignment after boot camp and combat training at Camp Geiger was at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, where we learned years later that the water was polluted with dangerous chemicals. Below I am pictured at Camp Lejeune in 1956 trying to look "salty".
Fortunately, Daddy taught us to shoot the bb-gun and 410 and 12 gauge shotguns. Also, nearly two years of Army ROTC at Auburn University were a benefit. However, because I had difficulty seeing the small target several hundred yards away, initially on the firing range I was sent to the optometrist for glasses.
If you blundered by calling your rifle a "gun," you were compelled to stand nude on a table in the squad bay before some seventy fidgety-footed recruits, holding the weapon high above your head with one hand, and your crotch with the other, repeating loudly with required accompanying gestures: “This is my rifle, this is my gun; this is for killing, this is for fun.”
Fortunately, Daddy's cowboy belt discipline and three years of grueling football practices under Coach R. L. Beaird at Auburn High School had braced me well for boot camp physical and mental demands. Reverend Shaw also cautioned me about the risque side of military service and asked if I knew the "hand method" on which to rely if necessary. Once while our small survey unit was camped in concert with an engineering company deep in the interior of Luzon Island in the Philippines, a local resident rolled a sad appearing prostitute to the fringe of the encampment in a makeshift wheelbarrow. Below is a photograph of Reverend Ashland Shaw.
Over two years after joining the Marines, when I had been promoted to sergeant, I was packed in a troop ship with hundreds of others all dressed down to T-shirts because of the heat. Tensions were high. While exiting a movie in an overly crowded passageway on the ship, I brushed the shoulder of a black Marine. He grabbed me by the collar, shoved me against the bulkhead, and threatened, "white boy, who do you think you are shoving?" Frightened and anxious to improve my situation, I responded in my native Pine Apple speech: "I realli' wadn' tryin' to push inybody." When my assailant, who could have been from the North, heard my Alabama accent, things got worse. He said to a few of his black colleagues gathering around, "Hey man, look what we got here, a FARM BOY!"
I'm not sure what would have happened to me had this racial conflict accelerated. To my good fortune, Sergeant John Williams, a close black friend in our small survey artillery unit and resident of the Virgin Islands, came along and placed his arm about my shoulder, and with a big smile and clipped speech deplored, "what have you gotten yourself into now, Logue," and then somehow walked me past the angry faces while, at the same time, identifying with their feelings. Below is a picture of Sergeant Williams of the Virgin Islands, taken when we were practicing artillery fire for six months on Luzon Island, Philippines, 1958.
Near the end of my three year tour of duty in the Marines, in 1958, after returning to Camp Lejeune from stints at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, California, Okinawa, Japan, and the Philippines, I was walking on the base one day and met Corporal Issac Ward. We had not met since he helped prepare me for the tour to the hospital. We returned to my squad bay for a long chat about where we had been and what we had seen and experienced during our tour in the Corps. Below is a picture of Issac Ward practicing the prone position with the M-1 rifle at the rifle range, Parris Island, South Carolina. He was a model soldier and person. (Photograph from Platoon 6 Graduation Booklet, given to us upon graduating from Boot Camp, Parris Island, 1956.)
On April 8, 1956, after my boot camp training ended, a Drill Instructor marched 74 men of Platoon 71 from their barracks into Ribbon Creek, one of the tidal streams on Parris Island, and six of the recruits drowned. This unusual incident led to an investigation by the Marine Corps. Following this review, but after my departure from Parris Island, apparently changes in the handling of recruits at boot camp were implemented. These planned improvements were designed to retain the Drill Instructor's authority while, at the same time, disallowing his abuse of it.
Ironically, when I returned to Camp Lejeune after hospitalization and a thirty-day leave at home, a delay in the cutting of my new orders necessitated that I go through combat training with some of the Marines who had survived the forced march through Ribbon Creek.
Despite its hardships, I became a better person for my voluntary service of two years, eleven months, and thirteen days in the Marine Corps. (I was allowed to leave the military a few days short of my three-year enlistment period to meet the deadline for re-enrolling in Auburn University’s forthcoming term).
My formal schooling in artillery survey in the Marine Corps taught and motivated me to study, also a novel experience for me. After combat training I was sent to artillery survey school, where I graduated third of 31 students, including enlisted men and officers. During my three years, I served with small artillery units that measured and calculated distances and directions from 105 and 155 Howitzers -- and once in the Philippines, an Honest John missile from the back of a truck -- to targets using a 20-second transit. I learned to apply trigonometric functions that I had failed to master in a mathematics course at Auburn some months earlier. I also benefited significantly from interacting with African Americans on a daily basis from equal status. I will always remember my buddies -- Ferguson, Walindoski, Moyer, Long, Schoen, Hagan, Blankenship, Murphy, Sneed, Wilson, Cantrel, Shoffit, Ackerman, Boyce, Williams, Armstrong, and Ward.
While the formal instruction, challenging training, deployment, associations, and friendships in the Marines were invaluable, at the same time, in a graduate seminar in sociology during my doctoral program at Louisiana State University, I could draw on firsthand knowledge to write a research paper on "Brainwashing at Parris Island." Dr. Vernon Parrington, instructor for that project, had been blinded by an artillery shell during World War II. That distinguished professor had graduate assistants read research literature in sociology to him in French and maybe German. He would serve on the committee to hear my defense of dissertation on Ralph McGill.
In 1960, I graduated from Auburn University in sociology. Mary Jo Clearman and I were married December 1959. She graduated in 1960 in home economics from Auburn University. In1961 I finished the master's degree at Florida State University in communication studies and took a job at Birmingham-Southern, a respected Methodist liberal arts college located in the city. (This college has now closed!) I taught public speaking and public address and coached the debate team. I can recall that at the invitation of the local chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), Charles Morgan, Jr., a young lawyer from Birmingham, spoke at the College on racial problems confronting society and what responsible people should do to help solve them. (Mr. Morgan passed away in 2009.)
When teaching at Birmingham-Southern College, I attended a Billy Graham rally, maybe the first mass racially integrated public meeting in Birmingham, if not all of Alabama. The Reverend Billy Graham asked that we repent of our sins and accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, refrains probably heard often in the Protestant churches our family attended regularly in Pine Apple, Greensboro, and Evergreen. While exiting the Billy Graham revival along with thousands of others, I was shaken when I spied my former Parris Island Drill Instructor, dressed immaculately in civilian suit and tie, his some 6 foot 4 inch frame straight as a board, same bold face, towering head and shoulders above most others, marching briskly as if on parade pass Blacks and Whites leaving the huge football stadium. I hid in the crowd.
When we moved to Birmingham in 1962, we rented an apartment in Homewood. In 1963, when an old home owned by Birmingham-Southern College just across Arkadelphia Road from the campus became available to rent, we moved there, but we continued to worship at Trinity United Methodist Church in Homewood.
On Sunday, September 15, 1963, around 8:30 a.m., we left our rented home across from Birmingham-Southern College and drove to Trinity Methodist Church on Oxmoor Road in Homewood, following a route that took us past Kelly Ingram Park, 16th Street Baptist Church, and over Red Mountain by the Vulcan statue.
That same morning, at 10:22 a.m., dynamite set off by at least three white men at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama killed four young African American girls who were attending Sunday School and injured numerous others. Approximately thirty minutes later, Mary Jo, Michael, our 2 1/2 year-old son, and I were driving home from Sunday School across Kelly Ingram Park from the bombed house of worship.
On that fateful Sunday morning, we arrived at Trinity United Methodist Church around 9:30 a.m. After Sunday School, about 10:55 a.m., deciding not to attend the 11:00 a.m. worship service, we got into our two-toned 1958 Ford and started home. We returned home by the same route that we traveled to Sunday School. From Oxmoor Road we drove down Red Mountain on 26th Street to the Vulcan statue, where 26th becomes 20th Street, the main thoroughfare through Birmingham. We drove through Five Points South, under the railroad tracks, turning west onto 4th avenue. We turned north and came to Kelly Ingram Park situated across from the 16th Street Baptist Church, which had just been bombed.
As we drove adjacent to Kelly Ingram Park across from the east side of the dynamited church, we came up behind cars that had stopped in the road as if there were a wreck up ahead. People scampered about as if leaving a fire. Wondering what was happening we looked out the windows of our 1958 Ford into the angry faces of young African American men lining the curbs on each side of the road. Suddenly there was a loud crash that seemed to come from inside our car. Then we saw young African American men standing at the curb with partial bricks in each hand, one brick hanging down in one hand at the ready and one drawn far back for throwing in the other. With angry shouts and all their might, they hurled bricks onto our car, striking the side and back. Nearby was an old building that had collapsed, making available the bricks.
Mary Jo and I were more frightened wondering what all was happening. We were sitting targets, bumper-to-bumper with cars in front and behind. There was no escape. We quickly locked ourselves in the car. Sensing the heightened tension, little Michael began to cry. Mary Jo placed Michael beneath her on the floor of the front seat. I was holding on to the steering wheel and trying to keep the clutch of our straight-shift drive pressed down so that the car wouldn't stall. From inside the car each smash of a brick sounded like an explosion. Fearing that a brick would crash through a window, we attempted to turn away, half-duck, and shield our heads with hand or arm.
Suddenly there was a firm tap on Mary Jo's side window. We both grimaced and attempted once more to shift away from the thud. We glanced over and saw the frantic face of a quite elderly African American man close to the window. He tapped again, and signaled urgently with his rotating hand for us to lower the window.
Reluctantly Mary Jo let the window down an inch. The African American gentleman said firmly through the crack over the noise of the street, "Move over and I'll sit with you." Mary Jo moved next to me, holding Michael in her lap.
There sat Mary Jo, Michael, and I amidst a storm that we could not comprehend, with bricks striking cars in front and back of us, the angry shouting unceasing. We were sweating and shivering in fear, with a black stranger sitting cheek-to-cheek with us in the front seat, a rare sight in the Deep South under any conditions.
When the elderly African American gentleman entered our two-door car, sat down beside Mary Jo, and closed the door, the bricks stopped. Our passenger looked straight ahead, silently. Finally, the cars in front of us began to move forward, and we inched on past 16th Street Baptist Church where, unbeknown to us four African American girls, Denise McNair, 11, and Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, all 14, had been murdered at 10:22 a.m., the moment the church clock stopped. Sunday School was ending and the four girls were preparing to sing and usher at a worship service. Among the injured was Sarah Collins Cox, 12, who had numerous pieces of glass removed from her eyes and eventually lost an eye. Others were seriously injured by the dynamite placed at the basement of the church by Thomas Blanton, Jr., Bobby Frank Cherry, and Robert Chambliss, all apparently former members of the Ku Klux Klan.
One of the Church's stained-glass windows that remained in place had the face of Jesus blown away, as pictured below. (Photograph property of Birmingham Public Library. Courtesy of Birmingham Public Library Department of Archives and Manuscripts,)
Wondering if it were safe, I stopped the damaged car down the road a block or two and, without a word the African American gentleman opened the damaged door and got out. Bent over slightly from age, he began walking back slowly toward what we learned later was the site of the murders.
Leaving Birmingham Southern College in 1964, I enrolled in the Phd program in communication studies at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. Mary Jo Logue worked in the Entomology Department. Michael McLeod Logue was born there. I finished the doctorate in 1967 and taught for a year at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.
In 1967, we moved to Athens, Georgia from Arkansas University, where I taught communication studies at the University of Georgia for 33 years. I won the Josiah Meigs professorship, honoratus medal for teaching honors students public speaking, and the creative research medal for published research in southern discourse, including that of Eugene Talmadge, Richard B. Russell Jr., Ralph McGill, and Andrew Young.
While teaching at the University of Georgia, that same Drill Instructor, now out of the Marines and disheveled, came unannounced into my office to inquire about a doctoral program in public administration. When he walked into my office, I quickly stood as erectly as I could manage at the time.
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