My mother told me this story, and she told it with the particular mixture of pride that only a woman who has lived through something truly inspiring can manage.
It was the afternoon of September 19th, 1946, and the Falmouth Baptist Church had been scrubbed, pressed, and flower-arranged within an inch of its life for the wedding of a young woman who had the radical and apparently dangerous notion that all of her friends — all of them — ought to be present at her wedding. This was deeply segregated Virginia, mind you, where such notions were considered somewhere between naive and incendiary.
The bride’s white and Black friends had come. They had dressed in their finest. They had driven or walked or been driven to this church on this warm September afternoon to witness this union. And the ushers — bless their well-meaning, thoroughly conditioned hearts — had it all figured out. The white guests would be seated below, in the warm, proper pews. The Black guests would be guided, politely, firmly, and with the smooth efficiency of long practice, up the stairs to the balcony. The separate balcony. The remote balcony. The balcony that said, without ever saying a word: you are welcome here, just not quite here.
St. Clair Brooks — the father of the bride, a man who had not spent his years on this earth to be trifled with — stepped into the vestibule. He saw what was happening. He took it in.
And then something rose up inside St. Clair Brooks that was older and more powerful than the customs of the Commonwealth of Virginia.
He threw out his chest. Not the puffed-up chest of a man trying to appear important. The chest of a man who was important, at least in the way that mattered most at that precise moment, in that precise vestibule.
“What on earth are you doing? These folks are my daughter’s friends too! And I’ll be damned if they’re getting marched up to some remote balcony. Now go get those people and have them come sit down here — with my daughter and all our other friends.”
— St. Clair Brooks, September 19, 1946
The ushers complied. One does not argue with a man whose chest is thrown out like that.
And so it came to pass that on a warm afternoon in September of 1946, in a Baptist church in Falmouth, Virginia, segregation ended. Briefly. Locally. Unofficially. And entirely without the permission of the Commonwealth.
The ceremony proceeded. The vows were spoken. The rings were exchanged. And when the whole glorious business was concluded, the guests — white and Black, all seated together, all witnesses to the same love — spilled out of the church and into the afternoon sun.
Someone produced rice. Someone always produces rice. And they threw it. All of them. A joyful, laughing, impossible blizzard of white rice, tossed by Black hands and white hands alike, raining down on a bride and her new husband in a shower that made no distinctions whatsoever. The rice did not know. The rice did not care. The rice simply flew. It just did not matter.
St. Clair Brooks — grandfather, patriarch, and briefly the most powerful man in Stafford County — watched all of this from the church steps. And if his chest stayed thrown out just a little longer than necessary, well. Nobody said a word about it.