Daughter recalls father's role in Tallahassee bus protest

Joe Spagna was one of 26 people arrested during the 1956 Tallahassee bus boycott. In fact, he was the only white person arrested during Tallahassee’s first salvo in the civil rights movement.

And his daughter, Ana Maria Spagna, will be forever grateful her father was arrested.

Because it led her to visit Tallahassee and participate in the 50th anniversary of the bus boycott in 2006. Because it led to a friendship with one of the black men arrested with her father. Because it taught her the importance of the civil rights movement. Because it led to her writing an award-winning book, “Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus.”

More than anything, she is grateful her father was arrested because it led her to a new understanding of the man who died when she was 11 – and it brought peace to her tumultuous emotions.

The ride to equality started 60 years ago​

On Thursday, Tallahassee will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the bus boycott.

“I didn’t realize how mad I was at my father until I started research. Seeing documents and hearing stories helped me through a lot of grief I couldn’t experience at 11,” said Ana Maria Spagna. “It was a life-changing event.”

Ana Maria Spagna, 48, lives in remote Stehekin, Washington, near North Cascades National Park. The author of five books, she wrote, “Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus,” about her father’s arrest and experiences in the 1956 bus boycott. The book won the prestigious River Teeth Non-Fiction Prize in 2009.

The Tallahassee bus boycott began in May 1956 when two female Florida A&M students refused to move to the back of a city bus. Their arrest spurred FAMU students to start a boycott of city buses, an effort soon taken up by black pastors and businessmen, who formed the Inter-Civic Council.

The boycott lasted seven months, as black residents – the bus company’s chief customers – refused to ride the buses. The boycott was so successful that bus service was suspended in July. When it resumed in December, the city commission passed an ”assigned seating” ordinance, to prevent blacks and whites from sitting together.

On Jan. 19, 1957, three black FAMU students and three white FSU students – including Joe Spagna – tested that plan. They boarded a city bus and took their assigned seats. But once the bus started moving, Spagna switched seats with one of the black students, creating two interracial groups sitting together.

The bus driver drove immediately to the Tallahassee Police Department station, where Spagna and FAMU students Johnny Herndon and Leonard Speed were arrested for violating the seating assignment ordinance. The trio was convicted and sentenced to 60 days in jail and $500 fines. But NAACP attorneys appealed the conviction, which was upheld by a federal district court, to the Florida Supreme Court and U.S. Supreme Court, both of which refused to hear the case.

Touchstones remain with bus boycott past

In April 1958, Herndon and Speed, served two weeks apiece of their original sentences. But Spagna, who graduated in February 1958, had already left town and never served time.

As Ana Maria Spagna learned in writing her book, her father was considered a hero in the local civil rights movement and nobody resented his leaving town before serving time in jail.

“Johnny (Herndon) disabused me of that notion,” said Spagna, who struck up a friendship with Herndon that lasted until his death last July. “Johnny said my father was in danger (as a white person involved in the movement) and his leaving did not undercut the bravery of what he did.”

Joe Spagna (SPAHN-ya) was 25 when he was arrested in Tallahassee. Son of an early pro football player, Spagna dropped out of Dartmouth when his own football career ground to a halt after one season of college ball. He spent a stint in the Marines before enrolling at Florida State University, where he earned a degree in English.

After he graduated from FSU, he moved to San Francisco and operated a bookstore for several years. In 1963, he moved to South America and worked for Catholic Relief Services in Venezuela and Columbia for five years. He met and married his wife, who was in South America, on a Fulbright Scholarship. The couple, who had three children, eventually settled in Riverside, Calif., where Spagna was a psychiatric social worker until his death in 1979.

Ana Maria Spagna barely knew of father’s role in Tallahassee; only after his death did the family hear sketchy accounts of the incident.  Then in 2005, she was Googling her brother, Joe Spagna, a noted entomologist. She came across a reference to Joe Spagna in a book called “Inside Agitators: White Southerners In the Civil Rights Movement,” and realized it was her father.

She contacted the author, looking for more information. Though he had none, he encouraged her to pursue the story.

She wrote dozens of emails. She spent a week in Tallahassee, reading through Tallahassee Democrat microfilm at the FSU library. She began piecing together bits of family lore, which included stories from friends of her father who considered him one of the most principled, socially conscious men they ever knew.

Her research and writing were pivotal in understanding her father – and sorting out her own life. For one thing, she began her journey unsure about what motivated her father to participate in the bus boycott.

“I think it was a real, clear moral decision. He felt it was the right thing to do. He was brave,” she said. “I don’t think he wanted to be a hero. Like Johnny (Herndon), it was just what you do. Still, it was a big moral choice. And I have a lot more admiration for him than when I started the story.”

For another thing, the book unlocked her writing talents. She had published one book of essays before "Test Ride." She has now published five books, with her most recent, “Reclaimers,” about people, especially two small California Indian tribes, “reclaiming” sacred land and water from a utility corporation.

“Writing (‘Test Ride’) opened new worlds to me. It showed me the world is rich with stories that people are willing to share,” Spagna said. “It broke things wide open for me.”

Most of all, it helped Spagna come to terms with her father’s death. On Jan. 19, 1979 – 22 years to the day her father was arrested in Tallahassee -- her father decided to take a run. He was recuperating from triple bypass heart surgery and was supposed to take it easy.

But he had taken up running when Ana Maria joined her first track team at age 8. Running had turned into an obsession for him. On that fateful day, feeling caged up by his recuperation, he asked Ana Maria to join him on a run. When she refused, he told her not to tell her mother he had gone for a run.

60th anniversary observance is a lessson for the young

Hours later, after her mother had come home but her father had not returned, the police called. Joe Spagna had collapsed while running. He fell into a coma and died a week later.

For more than 25 years, Ana Maria Spagna was filled with anger and guilt over her father’s death.

“Asking me to go with him, then asking me to keep it secret, was a crummy thing to do to a kid; I didn’t even tell my mother about it until the book came out,” Spagna said. “In hindsight, if I had told someone, they could have helped me work through it.

“I feel better today because of the experience of writing ‘Test Ride.’ That was the turning point in how I felt about my dad and how I behaved that day.”

In a bit of kismet, her search coincided with the 50th anniversary of the bus boycott in 2006. Tallahassee celebrated with a weeklong series of events, which drew U.S. Rep. John Lewis, a civil rights icon. Organizers invited her to participate, which she did.

The anniversary celebration coalesced and galvanized her feelings about civil rights. As a child of the 1970s and 1980s growing up in California, she had only a polite appreciation for the importance of racial equality. But in meeting people such as Lewis and Tallahassee civil rights icon Patricia Stephens Due, plus Herndon and others involved in the 1956 bus boycott, she became a believer in the cause.

She writes of sitting in Tallahassee’s Bethel Missionary Baptist Church, listening to Lewis share the anguish and triumph of the civil rights movement:

“This time, I know: I believe in hope. I believe in doing what’s right, no matter how big or small, and hoping it’s enough. And it is. It is enough.”

Gerald Ensley can be contacted atgeraldensley21@gmail.com .

Thursday schedule

Grand Ballroom, Florida A&M University

1925 Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd.

Theme: Honoring the Past and Embracing the Future

7:45 a.m. – Registration/Exhibits (free Continental Breakfast)

8:30 a.m. – Opening remarks by Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum, Leon County Commission Chair Bill Proctor, Rev. Dr. Julius H. McAllister, Jr., Rev. Dr. Richard Mashburn and Rev. William Foutz; music by soloist Frances Stallworth.

9:15-10:25 a.m. – Panel discussion: Recollections of Movement participants. Eddie Barrington, Henry Steele and Frederick Humphries.

10:30 a.m.-11:40 a.m. Panel discussion: Where History Meets the Future. David Jackson, Dorothy Inman-Johnson, Juan Escalante, Darius Young.

11:45 a.m. – Symbolic walk from Grand Ballroom to FAMU Way/Under the Over at Lake Anita.

Noon – Speakers, refreshments, unveiling of StarMetro bus in tribute to 1956 bus boycott.

1 p.m.-3:30 p.m. Music and entertainment.

All events are open to the public and attendance by civil rights movement foot soldiers is particularly encouraged.

For more information, visit www.neec-inc.org and click on TAL Bus Boycott