You’re a leader. You’ve always been a leader,” Will Ella Bailey
recently said to her son D’Army. “You were chosen, and there was
nothing you could’ve done about it.”

Bailey, a lawyer and recently retired Circuit Court judge in
Memphis, has a slightly different take on the matter.

“As I look back on my life,” Bailey said in a phone interview with
the Flyer, “what I did, the things I’ve done, did come
naturally. But I didn’t set out to be a leader of a protest movement,
though I certainly took my share of initiative. My ‘movement’
involvement and my political involvement … they were never
objectives. They just happened. … The times happened.”

And so they did and do again in the pages of Bailey’s autobiography,
written with the assistance of Memphian Roger Easson and the first of
three volumes planned: The Education of a Black Radical: A Southern
Civil Rights Activist’s Journey (Louisiana State University
Press).

The “times” Bailey was referring to are these: the years 1959 to
1964 — pivotal times in America’s civil rights movement. And
Bailey was there, in the thick of it, first as a witness to events,
then as an organizer of events. But Bailey, it’s true, never set out to
be a leader. These things, though, do happen.

As Bailey recounts, he grew up in a tightly knit and vibrant
neighborhood in South Memphis. His father Walter worked as a Pullman
porter. His mother eventually worked as a nurse, one of the first black
nurses at St. Joseph Hospital. And like the neighborhood, Bailey’s was
a close-knit family — so close that “Papa” was the name Bailey
used for his grandfather, who owned Bailey’s Stand, a sundry store. The
grandfather was D.A.: first name “Darmy,” pronounced “Dee-army.”

Bailey altered the spelling of his own name, and, yes, he was a
student leader at Booker T. Washington High School. At the same time,
he was learning to negotiate the terms of a segregated city beyond the
boundaries of South Memphis.

But was Bailey a political firebrand by the time he enrolled at
Southern University near Baton Rouge? Hardly, though as a teenager he
kept up with civil rights issues as reported in national black
newspapers and in Memphis’ Tri-State Defender and Memphis
World. He also observed first-hand Memphis’ black movers and
shakers in the campaigning Bailey did for candidates backed by the
Memphis Shelby County Democratic Club.

Bailey’s natural outgoingness served him well. He was elected
freshman class president at Southern, but it was the student
lunch-counter sit-ins in 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina, that
galvanized him into taking personal action. It was professors at
Southern too, such as Adolph Reed, who taught him to question America’s
power structures. And it was Bailey’s protest activities at Southern
that eventually got him expelled by the university’s president, G.
Felton Clark, an expulsion that luckily landed Bailey into the academic
hands of another Clark: Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.
(A town that Bailey learned not to pronounce “Wor-kester.”)

Was the North what Bailey hoped it would be? Yes, in that he was
surrounded by eager, questioning students. No, if he was too often
questioned by the white, middle-class students at Clark as the
embodiment of “Negro America.”

What Bailey went on to discover in the great liberal North was even
greater racial isolation than existed in the South. So Bailey did
something about it: He invited Malcolm X to speak on campus, a
highlight of Bailey’s book. But Malcolm X isn’t the first of the big
names scattered throughout Bailey’s memoir — look for activists
at their earliest such as Tom Hayden, Barney Frank, and Abbie
Hoffman.

How far does The Education take us? As far as the March on
Washington (which Bailey described as “a grass-roots, mass-initiated
mobilization” turned “media propaganda festival”) and Bailey’s
departure for law school at Boston University, then Yale. Promised for
volumes two and three of Bailey’s autobiography: his career as a city
councilman in Berkeley, California (years when he dealt with a man
Bailey termed a “psychopath,” Huey Newton) and Bailey’s return to
Memphis, a legal career, and his work to found the National Civil
Rights Museum.

So: Stay tuned for future autobiographical installments on the life
(and times) of D’Army Bailey. But for the time being, be at Burke’s
Book Store on October 22nd. That’s when Bailey will be signing copies
of The Education of a Black Radical.