The Church on Bell Street

Eliza Coleman was seventy-three years old and she had been coming to this church since before the walls were up, since the seven founding members met in Sister Carter’s front room on Winters Street in 1907 and prayed on folding chairs and passed the collection plate that was not a plate but a coffee tin with a slit cut in the lid, and she had been coming here since Reverend Solley arrived from the conference to build them a proper house of worship, and she had been coming here since 1910 when the building went up at 220 Bell Street, a modest frame structure with a pitched roof and a cross above the door, and she was coming here tonight, on a Tuesday evening in October 1963, because the NAACP chapter was meeting and because there was business to discuss and because she had not missed a meeting since 1932.

She sat in the third pew from the back, left side, where she always sat. Her husband Ezra had sat beside her in this pew for thirty-six years until the stroke took him in 1948, and now the space beside her was empty but she did not move to fill it or let anyone else fill it. Her hands were in her lap, her purse on the pew beside her where Ezra’s hip had been, and she watched the room fill.

Forty people tonight. More than usual. The young ones were coming now, the ones who watched the television news from Birmingham and Washington and thought this fight was new, thought it had started last spring or last summer, thought it had started when the Reverend King went to jail. Eliza did not correct them. Let them think it was new. New energy was good energy, even when it did not know its own roots.

The NAACP had been meeting at Bethel AME since 1919 when the charter was signed in this room. Eliza had been twenty-nine then, married nine years, her son Walter three years old, and she had stood in the back row because the pews were full and signed her name in the ledger book and paid her first dues, two dollars, which was a morning’s wages for Ezra at the depot. Forty-four years ago. The chapter had met in this room every month since, except for one winter when the roof leaked and they met at the Masonic hall on Lake Street, and even then Reverend Thomas had complained that it felt wrong, like praying in someone else’s house.

The president called the meeting to order. James Mitchell, forty-one, a postal worker, steady, careful with words. He read the minutes. He read the treasurer’s report. He read a letter from the state conference in Las Vegas. Then he got to the business everyone had come for.

The casinos.

Three years ago, in March of 1960, the Las Vegas casinos had opened their doors. The Moulin Rouge Agreement, they called it, though everyone in this room knew it was not agreement but threat that had opened those doors, the threat of Dr. McMillan marching five hundred people down the Strip with cameras watching. Las Vegas had desegregated its casinos, its hotels, its showrooms, all in one day, because the owners understood that national publicity was worse for business than integration.

But Reno was not Las Vegas. Reno was smaller, quieter, and the casino men here had watched what happened in Las Vegas and done just enough to avoid the same spotlight without doing enough to change anything. The signs were down. The explicit refusals were gone. But the jobs behind the tables were still white, the hotel rooms were still conveniently full when a Black family came to the desk, and the show rooms were still seating Black patrons in the back rows or near the kitchen doors when they were seated at all.

“We have three specific complaints documented since August,” Mitchell said. He read them. A family turned away from a hotel room at the Riverside. A man asked to leave a bar at Harrah’s after being served one drink. A woman told there were no openings for cocktail waitresses at a club on Virginia Street, the same club that had advertised openings in the Gazette-Journal that morning.

Eliza listened. She had heard these stories her whole life in this town. She had heard them in 1919 when the chapter was founded. She had heard them in 1930 when Ezra was passed over for a promotion at the depot three times. She had heard them in 1943 when her son Walter came home from the army and could not eat at half the restaurants on Virginia Street in the uniform he had served in. She had heard them in 1952 when Walter had to get his cooking job at the New China Club because Bill Fong was the only casino owner in town who would hire a Black man for anything other than a mop.

The difference now was that there was a law. The Civil Rights Act had been working through Congress since June, and the word from Washington was that it would pass, probably next year, and when it passed the casinos would be in violation of federal law, not just local conscience. The question before the chapter tonight was whether to wait for the law or push now.

A young man stood up. Tall, thin, maybe twenty-five, a face Eliza did not know. He was from the university, he said. He had been in Mississippi last summer with SNCC, registering voters, and he had come back to Reno and found his own town as segregated as any town in Mississippi, just quieter about it.

“We don’t need a federal law to tell these people what’s right,” he said. “We need bodies. We need to sit in those lounges and not leave. We need to apply for those jobs every day until they hire us.”

Mitchell nodded. “That’s one approach,” he said. “We’re also in conversation with the Human Rights Commission and the governor’s office. Governor Sawyer has been sympathetic.”

“Sympathetic isn’t the same as effective,” the young man said.

Eliza watched this exchange and thought about the fifty-six years between the founding of this church and tonight. Seven people in a front room in 1907. Forty people in a church in 1963. The room was bigger now, and the ledger book was thicker, and the young ones had seen things on television that made them believe change was possible in a way that Eliza’s generation had believed it only on faith. But the work was the same. The letters, the meetings, the documentation, the patient accumulation of evidence that could not be denied. This was what the chapter had always done. This was what this building was for.

She raised her hand when Mitchell called for volunteers to document the next round of complaints. She would do what she had always done. She would write the names and the dates and the places in her careful hand, and she would keep the record, because the record was the thing that lasted, the thing that could not be denied or explained away or forgotten when the men in the offices said they did not know, had never known, could not have known what was happening in their own town.

The meeting ended at nine. Eliza stood slowly, her knees stiff from the hard pew, and she walked to the door and stood on the steps of the church on Bell Street and looked out at the neighborhood she had lived in since 1910, the neighborhood where Black families had made their homes because this was where they were allowed to be, and she thought about her grandson Adelaide at the university and her son Walter in his kitchen at the New China Club and her neighbors in Black Springs filling their jugs with running water that had only arrived five years ago, and she thought that the fight was the same fight it had always been, in this room, on these steps, in this town that did not always know what to do with the people who had built it.

She walked home in the dark, three blocks, to the house on Winters Street where she had lived alone since Ezra died.

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