Return to Business
After the bombing in Birmingham, Dees and Fuller went back to moneymaking.
They started selling cookbooks to Future Homemakers of America. They
profited a dollar a book and sold 250,000 in three months. Because of
profits like this, Dees of Fuller was closed. In terms of Morris's promise,
no one had come to him. No one had come to him to ask for justice in
America.
But a lot of soul searching did come. George Wallace was elected governor
of Alabama, known for his defiance of integration as ordered by the
U.S. Supreme Court.
Dance and Rumors
The marketing business was going very well and in December 1964, Dees
and Fuller rented a ballroom at the Jefferson Davis Hotel for a Christmas
party. The hotel itself wasn't an integrated hotel but Morris and Millard
still invited their black employees as well as their white employees.
In the Dees and Fuller firm, blacks made up nearly a quarter of the
workface and held many jobs that blacks couldn't get elsewhere. The
hotel was not notified that there would be blacks at the party.
For the people at the firm, they worked with the blacks everyday. But
their families had not and many had never been in the same room with
a black before. Morris had swam with blacks before, he had eaten with
them at the same table. He had grew up with them. And now, he felt like
dancing with them. "…blacks were dancing with blacks and whites were
dancing with whites. That in itself was an eye-opener, and when Millard
and I each danced with some of the black women who worked for us, an
amazed silence fell over the place." (90)
Word of the event spread quickly throughout Montgomery. One of the
employees even heard someone say: "That's the place where they print
Communist literature for all these niggers and their marches. You can
tell when those people come at night with their briefcases and they
leave with boxes of things."
