David J. Garrow – Southern Changes

The Origins of the Montgomery Bus Boycott

David J. Garrow — Tue, 01 Oct 1985 04:00:05 +0000

The Origins of the Montgomery Bus Boycott

By David J. Garrow

Vol. 7, No. 5, 1985, pp. 21-27

Jo Ann Gibson Robinson moved to Montgomery, Alabama, in the late summer of 1949 to join the English Department at all-black Alabama State College. A thirty-three year old native of Culloden, Georgia, twenty-five miles from Macon, she was the twelfth and youngest child of Owen Boston Gibson and Dollie Webb Gibson, landowning black farmers who prospered until Owen Gibson died when Jo Ann was six years old. As the older children moved away, operating the farm grew more difficult for Mrs. Gibson, who eventually sold the property and moved into Macon with her younger offspring. Jo Ann graduated from high school there as the class valedictorian, and went on to earn her undergraduate degree at Fort Valley State College, the first member of her family to complete college. She took a public school teaching job in Macon and married Wilbur Robinson, but the marriage, heavily burdened by the death in infancy of their first and only child, lasted only a short time. Twelve months later, after five years of teaching in Macon, Jo Ann Robinson moved to Atlanta to take an M.A. in English at Atlanta University and then accepted a teaching position at Mary Allen College in Crockett, Texas. After one year there, Mrs. Robinson received a better offer from Alabama State, and moved to Montgomery.

Mrs. Robinson was an enthusiastic teacher and responded energetically to her new position at Alabama State. She also became an active member of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, which many Alabama State professors attended, and she joined the Women’s Political Council, a black professional women’s civic group that one of her English Department colleagues, Mrs. Mary Fair Burks, had founded three years earlier when the local League of Women Voters had refused to integrate.

It was a blissful fall, Mrs. Robinson later remembered. “I loved every minute of it. ” Just prior to Christmas she made preparations to visit some relatives in Cleveland for the holidays. Storing her car in a garage, she boarded a Montgomery City Lines public bus for the ride to Dannelly Field, the municipal airport. Only two other passengers were aboard, and Mrs. Robinson, immersed in holiday thoughts, took a seat towards the front of the bus. Suddenly, however, she was roused from her thoughts about her family by angry words from the driver, who was ordering her to get up.

“He was standing over me, saying ‘Get up from there! Get up from there,’ with his hand drawn back,” she later recalled.

Shaken and frightened, Mrs. Robinson fled from the bus. “I felt like a dog. And I got mad, after this was over, and I realized that I was a human being, and just as intelligent and far more trained than that bus driver was. But I think he wanted to hurt me, and he did . . . I cried all the way to Cleveland.”

That experience convinced Mrs. Robinson that the ‘Women’s Political Council ought to target Montgomery’s segregated bus seating for immediate attention. “It was then that I made up . . . my mind that whatever Icould add to that organization that would help to bring that practice down, I would do it,” Mrs. Robinson recalled. “When I came back, the first thing I did was to call a meeting . . . and tell

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them what had happened.”

Only then did Mrs. Robinson learn that her experience was far from unique, that dozens of other black citizens, primarily women, had suffered similar abuse from Montgomery bus drivers. Over the previous few years several black women, Mrs. Geneva Johnson, Mrs. Viola White, and Miss Katie Wingfield, had been arrested and convicted for refusing to give up their seats. Earlier in 1949, two young children, visiting from the north and unfamiliar with Montgomery’s practice of reserving the first ten seats on each bus for white riders only, even if black passengers were forced to stand over vacant seats, also were hauled in for refusing a driver’s command to surrender their seats. Some oldtimers in Montgomery remembered how the black community had mounted a boycott in the summer of 1900, when the city had first imposed segregated seating on Montgomery’s street cars, a boycott that had won a refinement of the city ordinance so as to specify that no rider had to surrender a seat unless another was available. Nonetheless, drivers often made black riders who were seated just behind the whites-only section get up and stand so that all white passengers could sit.

Mrs. Burks thought black toleration of those seating practices and other driver abuse, such as forcing black passengers to pay their dime at the front, and then get off and board the bus through the rear, side door, was scandalous. “Everyone would look the other way. Nobody would acknowledge what was going on,” Mrs. Burks remembered. “It outraged me that this kind of conduct was going on,” and that so far no black community organizations had done anything about it.

Black activism did exist in Montgomery, even though it had not yet focused upon bus conditions, despite the widespread complaints. Several years earlier Arthur Madison, a New York lawyer who came from one of black Montgomery’s most prominent families, had returned home and tried to stimulate black voter registration, but white legal harassment had forced him to return to New York. The outspoken pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Rev. Vernon Johns, who had come to Montgomery in 1948, regularly denounced the bus situation, but many blacks viewed Johns as too unpredictable and idiosyncratic to assume a leadership role in the community. The brutal rape of a black teenager, Gertrude Perkins, by two white policemen earlier in 1949had led Rev. Solomon S. Seay to repeated efforts to obtain justice in the case, but white officials had brushed off his complaints.

Another visible black activist was Pullman porter Edgar Daniel Nixon, a member of A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a local leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NMCP). Nixon served as Alabama state president of the NMCP in 1948-1949, and also devoted much time to his Alabama Progressive Democratic Association, a black alternative to a state Democratic Party that continued to discourage black participation despite the 1940s’ demise of the “white primary.” Nixon regularly mounted one initiative after another; in 1954 he succeeded in winning 42 percent of the vote in a losing race for a seat on the party’s Montgomery County Democratic Executive Committee, a tribute not only to the more than 1,500 black voters that Nixon and other activists like businessman Rufus A. Lewis had helped register, but also to the grudging respect that many whites felt for Nixon’s tireless efforts.

Lewis, a well-known former football coach at Alabama State College, had been especially active not only in encouraging black registration but also in trying to unify black Montgomery’s civic activism. Although some colleagues viewed Lewis and Nixon as low-key rivals for top leadership, Lewis’ Citizens Club served as a regular hang-out for politically-minded blacks; his Citizens Steering Committee, formed in the fall of 1952, looked to find ways to exert some black political influence over Montgomery’s city policies.

Equally if not more important to the political life of black Montgomery than Nixon’s Progressive Democrats, the NMCP branch, or Lewis’ Citizens Committee, however, was Mrs. Burks and Mrs. Robinson’s Women’s Political Council. By the early 1950s Robinson had succeeded Burks as president, and the core membership of regularly active participants numbered at least thirty women such as Thelma Glass, Mary Cross, Irene West, Euretta Adair, Elizabeth Arrington, and Zoeline Pierce, who were either faculty members at Alabama State, teachers in the local, segregated public schools, or wives of relatively well-to-do black professional men. More than either Nixon’s circle or Lewis’, these middle-class women were the most numerous, most reform-minded group of black civic activists in Montgomery.

The first notable opportunity for black political influence to make itself felt came in November, 1953, in a special election to fill one vacant seat on the three-member Montgomery City Commission. The black-supported victor, Dave Birmingham, a genuine racial liberal, won fifty-three percent of the vote in a contest that involved little discussion of race and allowed Birmingham to construct an electoral coalition of blacks and lower-class whites.

Impressed by their success in representing the balance of power, black civic activists, led by the WPC, met in late 1953 with Birmingham and his two racially moderate colleagues, Mayor W. A. “Tacky” Gayle and George Cleere, to voice three complaints about the racial practices of the municipally regulated and chartered bus company, Montgomery City Lines. Blacks having to stand over empty, white only seats on crowded buses was a constant insult and problem. So

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was most drivers’ practice of forcing blacks to board through the rear door. Additionally, while buses stopped at every block in white sections of town, it was only every other block in black neighborhoods.

The three commissioners, Birmingham in particular, listened politely, but nothing came of the session.

Undaunted, Mrs. Robinson, who served as the WPC and black community’s principal spokesperson, obtained another audience with the commission in March, 1954, and reiterated the three complaints. The WPC, which historian of Montgomery J. Mills Thornton III has accurately termed “the most militant and uncompromising organ of the black community” in pre-1956 Montgomery, also presented the commission with specific details of driver abuse of black passengers. This time the city officials agreed to alter the bus company’s practice of stopping only at alternate blocks in black areas, but they and the city’s lawyers insisted there was no way, under Alabama’s state segregation statutes, that any changes or improvements could be made in bus seating practices. Robinson and other black representatives contended that elimination of the reserved, whites only seats, and a halt to the practice of making blacks surrender seats to whites on overcrowded buses would eliminate the most serious problems, but the white officials rejected the WPC’s proposal that the front-to-back seating of whites, and back-to-front seating of blacks, with no one having to stand over an empty seat or give one up after being seated, would in no way offend the state segregation law.

Mrs. Robinson and her colleagues were unhappy over the city is refusal to show any flexibility. In early May, the Commission did approve the hiring of Montgomery’s first four black police officers, but many black Montgomerians attached greater importance to the ongoing prosecution of a black teenager, Jeremiah Reeves, who faced the death penalty for the supposed rape of a white woman in 1951.

Mrs. Robinson was already thinking of how to put more pressure on the Commission to improve bus conditions when, on May 17, came a news announcement that strengthened her determination. The United States Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka and five companion cases challenging racially segregated public schools, ruled that governmentally-mandated school segregation was unconstitutional and that the sixty-year-old doctrine of “separate but equal” was no longer valid.

Four days after the landmark Brown decision, Mrs. Robinson typed a letter to Montgomery’s Mayor Gayle, with a copy to Montgomery City Lines manager J. H. Bagley. She, thanked Gayle for the March meeting and for the change in the buses’ alternate block stopping practice, but reiterated the WPC’s great unhappiness at the ongoing seating policies. Then she politely voiced the threat she had quietly been recommending to her black leadership colleagues.

Mayor Gayle, three-fourths of the riders of these public conveyances are Negroes. y Negroes did not patronize them, they could not possibly operate.

More and more of ourr people are already arrangin with neighbors and friends to ride to keep from being insulted and humiliated, by bus drivers. There has been talk from twenty-five or more local organizations of planning a city-wide boycott of buses. We, sir, do not feel that forceful measures are necessary in bargaining for a convenience which is right for all bus passengers. We, the Council, believe that when this matter has been put before you and the Commissioners, that agreeable terms can be met in a quiet and unostensible manner to the satisfaction of all concerned.

Mrs. Robinson pointedly noted that many Southern cities, including Mobile, already were using the front-to-back, back-to-front segregated seating plan that Montgomery refused to implement. “Please consider this plea, and if possible, act favorably upon it,” she concluded, “for even now plans are being made to ride less, or not at all, on our buses. We do not want this.”

Despite the extremely gentle and tactful language she employed in her letter to Gayle, Mrs. Robinson was hoping that black community sentiment would support a bus boycott to force the Commission’s hand. Another meeting with the white officials on June 1 registered no progress, but Mrs. Robinson found only modest interest in her boycott idea throughout much of the black community, and placed the idea on a back burner for the time being.

Next to bus conditions, the second civic concern troubling the WPC and other black activists was the decidedly inferior quality of the segregated parks and recreation facilities; available to black Montgomerians. One step the WPG had identified as a partial remedy was the appointment of a black member, such as WPC member Mrs. Irene West, to the

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city’s Parks and Recreation Board. Mrs. Robinson voiced this request at a January, 1955, meeting of the City Commission, but despite supportive comments from Birmingham and Mayor Gayle, nothing happened. Instead, attention turned to the upcoming mid-March city elections, and a public candidates’ forum that E. D. Nixon’s Progressive Democratic Association held on February 23 at the black Ben Moore Hotel.

All three incumbents, plus their major challengers, Harold McGlynn for Gayle, Frank Parks for Cleere, and Sam Sterns and Clyde Sellers for Birmingham, attended the first-of-its-kind event and faced questions about bus conditions as well as the Parks and Recreation appointment. A majority of the contenders endorsed a black appointment to the Parks Board, while others avoided any specifics on either topic. Although the open soliciting of black votes by so many white candidates seemed impressive, one of Birmingham’s challengers, former Auburn University football star and state highway patrol officer Clyde Sellers, saw the convocation, and Birmingham’s sympathy for black concerns, as just the opening that was needed to cut into Birmingham’s previously solid white working class electoral support.

Sellers’ strategic desire to make race an election issue got a coincidental boost on March 2 when a fifteen-year-old black girl, Claudette Colvin, refused to give up her bus seat, well toward the rear of the vehicle, so as to accommodate an overflow of newly-boarding white passengers.

Police officers were able to drag Colvin from the bus only with considerable force. The incident immediately sent the black leadership into action. Mrs. Rosa Parks, a seamstress and long time NAACP member who was adult advisor to the NAACP Youth Council, to which Claudette Colvin belonged, immediately began soliciting financial assistance for the her legal defense, as did Mrs. Parkst good friend Virginia Foster Durr, one of Montgomery’s few racially liberal whites.

Rufus Lewis’ newly formed Citizen’s Coordinating Committee, yet another leadershipunity organization which included E. D. Nixon and the WPC’s Thelma Glass among its top officers, quickly sent out a mimeographed letter, “To Friends of Justice and Human Rights,” seeking Colvin’s acquittal, a reprimand of the bus driver involved, and clarification of the oft-ignored city provision that no rider had to give up a seat unless another was available.

Nixon and Mrs. Robinson, thinking that Colvin’s case might supply an opportunity for a court challenge to the constitutionality of Montgomery’s bus seating practices, interviewed the young woman, but concluded that her personal situation and the particulars of the arrest precluded using the incident as a test case. Robinson and others met, unsuccessfully, with city and bus company officials to seek dismissal of the charges.

Claudette Colvin was quickly convicted for both assault and battery and violating the segregation statute at a March 18 trial, only three days before the city election. When Colvin’s attorney, young Montgomery native Fred Gray–who had been one of Mrs. Robinson’s Alabama State students before attending law school in Ohio–filed notice of appeal, the prosecutor indicated that he would pursue only the assault and battery charge, not the segregation issue.

On the 21st, Sellers narrowly bested Dave Birmingham, who declined a possible runoff because of bad health, while Frank Parks, who had received black support, defeated Cleere. Disappointed both by the Colvin outcome and Birmingham’s loss, the black leadership hoped for other opportunities.

In June, Mrs. Robinson, Gray and other black representatives met once again with city and bus company officials. Despite Gray’s observations about Mobile’s practices, the white officials, particularly bus company lawyer Jack Crenshaw, adhered firmly to their contention that no changes could be made legally in bus seating practices. Popular complaints about the seating situation and driver abuse remained at high levels, but no further organized initiatives were undertaken.

One relative newcomer to the city, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had succeeded Vernon Johns as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in mid-1954 and accompanied Robinson’s delegation to the early March meeting with the city, attributed a good part of the inaction to what he later termed “an appalling lack of unity among the leaders” and a “crippling factionalism.” More of a problem than competition among the active leaders, King thought, was the pervasive indifference of many middleclass black Montgomerians to any political or civic concern. Economic vulnerability and fear of white retribution understandably inhibited some, but “too much of the inaction was due to sheer apathy,” King later wrote.

Although Mrs. Robinson still husbanded her hope that the WPC could at some point launch a boycott of the buses, the late summer and fall of 1955 passed with relative quiet; the October 21 arrest of one black woman, Mrs. Mary Louise Smith, for refusing to surrender her seat became known to most of the black leadership only several months later.

On Thursday evening December 1, Mrs. Rosa Parks, the NAACP activist who had assisted Claudette Colvin’s defense, felt tired and weary from her seamstress work at the Montgomery Fair department store when she boarded one of the Cleveland Avenue route buses at Montgomery’s Court Square for her regular ride home. One stop later, after taking a seat in the first row behind the ten whites-only seats, Mrs. Parks and the three other black passengers in that row were ordered by the driver, J. F. Blake, to get up so that one newly-boarding white man–who could not be accommodated in the front section–could sit. Although the other three people complied, Mrs. Parks silently refused, and two police officers were summoned to place her under arrest and transport her to the city jail.

Word of the incident spread quickly. E. D. Nixon called the jail to learn about the charges, only to be refused an answer by the officer on duty. Knowing that attorney Gray was out of town for the day, Nixon called white lawyer Clifford Durr, who like his wife Virginia, already knew Mrs. Parks. The Durrs and Nixon drove to the jail to sign the bond for Mrs. Parks’ release. A Monday trial date was set for the charge of violating the city’s segregated seating ordinance.

While attorney Durr explained to Nixon and Mrs. Parks that they could win her acquittal since there had been no other seat available for her to take when driver Blake demanded hers, Nixon argued that the arrest of Mrs. Parks,

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a widely-known and well-respected person in black Montgomery, was precisely the opportunity the black leadership had long-awaited for challenging the entire bus seating situation. With some hesitance Mrs. Parks agreed, and Nixon went home to plan his next steps.

Later that evening Fred Gray returned to town, learned of Mrs. Parks’ arrest and immediately called Mrs. Robinson, who he knew to be the “real moving force” among the black leadership. Mrs. Robinson in turn called Nixon. They quickly agreed that the moment for launching the long-pondered boycott of the buses was at hand.

Nixon would make the calls to set up a black leadership meeting Friday evening; Mrs. Robinson and her WPC colleagues would immediately start producing and distributing handbills calling upon black Montgomerians to stay off the buses on Monday, December 5. “We had planned the protest long before Mrs. Parks was arrested,” Mrs. Robinson later emphasized. “There had been so many things that happened that the black women had been embarrassed over, and they were ready to explode.” They knew immediately that “Mrs. Parks had the caliber of character we needed to get the city to rally behind us.”

Wasting not a moment7 Mrs. Robinson sat down at her typewriter with a mimeograph stencil and typed the same message on the sheet several times:

This is for Monday, December 5, 1955

Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown into jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus for a white person to sit down.

It is the second time since the Claudette Colbert (sic) case that a Negro woman has been arrested for the same thing This has to be stopped.

Negroes have rights, too, for if Negroes did not ride the buses, they could not operate. Three-fourths of the riders are Negroes, yet we are arrested, or have to stand over empty seats. If we do not do something to stop these arrests, they will continue. The next time it may be you, or your daughter, or mother.

This woman ‘s case will come up on Monday. We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial. Don ‘t ride the buses to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday.

You can afford to stay out of school for one day if you have no other way to go except by bus.

You can also afford to stay out of town for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don’t ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off of all buses Monday.

The stencil complete. Mrs. Robinson called one of her Alabama State colleagues, business department chairman John Cannon, who had access to the school’s mimeograph room and readily agreed to join her for a long night of work. By daybreak they had run off thousands of sheets, cut them into single copies, and organized the brief flyers into batches for distribution to dozens of WPC members and their friends. After teaching her first morning class, Mrs. Robinson and two students set out in her car, dropping off the bundles to helpers all across Montgomery. Thousands upon thousands of the leaflets went from hand-to-hand throughout black Montgomery.

While the WPC’s network put the boycott into effect, E. D. Nixon made dozens of phone calls to assemble the black leadership. Like Robinson and her WPC colleagues, Nixon knew that for their protest to win mass support, the city’s ministers, not always in the forefront to black civic initiatives, would have to be convinced to give the effort their full and active support. The WPC’s post-haste distribution of the announcements, Robinson and Nixon knew, ought to short-circuit any arguments that now was not a good time for a boycott, even before they could be voiced. As Fred Gray later emphasized, “the ministers didn’t know anything about those leaflets until they appeared.”

Although the Friday evening leadership caucus had some difficulties in overcoming the autocratic style of one black pastor, agreement was reached on further publicizing the Monday boycott and on holding a Monday evening mass rally to assess the first day’s success. The leadership would meet again Monday afternoon to plan the rally, and amidst scores of weekend phone conversations between the various black activists, a consensus gradually emerged that perhaps a new, all-encompassing community organization ought to be created to oversee this unique effort.

Mrs. Robinson and the WPC membership knew that with the protest going public, their state-payroll positions at Alabama State, and the budgetary vulnerability of the college to white political retaliation, required that they

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remain in the background. As Mrs. Burks later noted in explaining why the origin of the boycott leaflets was treated as a closely-guarded secret well into the 1960s, “the full extent of our activities was never revealed because of the fact that we worked at State.”

Monday morning the amazing success of the protest was readily apparent as onlooker after onlooker observed no more than a handful of black bus riders on Montgomery’s largely empty vehicles.

Also on Monday, Mrs. Parks, in a very brief trial, was convicted of failing to obey-the driver’s command to surrender- her seat. Hundreds of black Montgomerians, in a remarkable scene, gathered at the courthouse to show their support. That afternoon, when the black leadership assembled, Rufus Lewis–to be certain that leadership did not fall into unskilled hands–quickly nominated his pastor, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., to be president of their new community group, the Montgomery Improvement Association. A surprised King hesitantly accepted, and the leadership agreed to make continuation of the boycott beyond their one day success, contingent upon mass sentiment at the evening rally.

A huge and enthusiastic turnout for the evening event quickly and convincingly answered that question. Now the community leaders turned their efforts to organizing substitute means of transportation for the thousands of black Montgomerians eager to forsake a transportation system that most had assumed was an unpleasant but unavoidable fact of daily life.

Thursday morning, with the boycott four days old, more than half a dozen MIA representatives, including King, Robinson and Gray, met with city and bus company officials under the auspices of the bi-racial Alabama Council for Human Relations. Even though King emphasized to the whites that “we are not out to change the segregation laws,” but only to win the driver courtesy and first come, first seated front-to-back and back-to-front seating policy that the WPC had been requesting for well over a year, the white officials would not budge from their insistent refusal that no changes in seating practices could be implemented.

The whiles’ complete intransigence, in the face of a black community effort of such impressive proportions, surprised the black leadership, who had entered into those: first negotiations believing that their modest demands ought to make for a quick settlement. Since “our demands were moderate,” King later recalled, “I had assumed that they would be granted with little question.” Only in the wake of that unproductive meeting did the MIA leaders begin to realize that it was the very fact of their challenge, and not the particulars of their demands, that had meaning for white Montgomery.

To the city and bus company officials such as Commissioner Clyde Sellers and attorney Jack Crenshaw, the real issue was not which precise seating plan was legally permissible, but the defense of segregation’s policies as an exemplar of the underlying doctrine of white racial supremacy. On that question no compromise could be possible; there either was superiority or there wasn’t. “They feared that anything they gave would be viewed by us as just a start,” Mrs. Robinson later reflected. “And you know, they were probably right.”

An often shy and resolutely self-effacing person. Jo Ann Gibson Robinson is now almost seventy and lives quietly b. herself in retirement in Los Angeles. Only with some gentle encouragement will she acknowledge herself as “the instigator of the movement to start that boycott.” Even then, however, she seeks to avoid any special credit for herself or any other single individual. Very simply, she says, “the black women did it.” And she’s right.

Sources and Suggested Further Reading

First and foremost, my understanding of Montgomery is based upon my personal interviews with many of the principals–Mrs. Robinson, Mrs. Burks, Mr. Nixon, Mr. Lewis, attorney Gray, Rev. Seay, Mrs. Durr and the late Jack Crenshaw, as well as Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy, Juanita J. Abernathy, Robert D. Nesbitt, Robert Williams, Rev. Robert S. Graetz, Maude Ballou, Lillie Armstrong Thomas (now Brown), Elliot Finley, Rev. Robert E. Hughes, and Jack Shows. I have also benefitted greatly from the interviews with some of the principals that are on deposit in the oral history collections of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. Washington, DC; the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Atlanta; and the Highlander Center, New Market, TN, as well as from the interviews that have been shared with me by David Levering Lewis, Milton Viorst, and Worth Long and Randall Williams. I also strongly recommend the Statewide Oral History Program collection of interviews, compiled in 1973,by the Alabama Center for Higher Education, copies of which are on deposit at all of Alabama’s traditionally black colleges.

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There are a number of invaluable, unpublished manuscripts which shed crucial light on the boycott, particularly Mrs. Robinson’s “The Montgomery Story,” which the University of Tennessee Press will publish later this year, and Ralph D. Abernathy’s “The Natural History of a Social Movement: The Montgomery Improvement Association,” a 1958 M.A. thesis in Sociology at Atlanta University. Also extremely valuable are Sheldon Hackney and Ray Arsenault’s “The Montgomery Bus Boycott: A Case Book”; Peter C. Mohr, “Journal Out of Egypt: The Development of Negro Leadership in Alabama from Booker T. Washington to Martin Luther King,” B.A. thesis, Princeton University, 1958; Thomas }. Gilliam, “The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 19551956,” M.A. thesis, Auburn University, 1968; Gordon L. Hartstein, “The Montgomery Bus Protest 1955-1956: What Precipitated, Sustained, and Prolonged the Boycott,” B.A. thesis, Princeton University, 1973; Lamont H. Yeakey, “The Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott, 1955-1956,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1979; Steven M. Milner, “The Montgomery Bus Boycott: A Case Study in the Emergence and Career of a Social Movement,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1981; and Donald H. Smith, “Martin Luther King, Jr.: Rhetorician of Revolt,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1964.

Among published works, the serious student will benefit from not only chapter two of Dr. King’s Stride Toward Freedom (New York: Harper Bros., 1958), but also Preston Valien, “The Montgomery Bus Protest as a Social Movement,” in Jitsuichi Masuoka Valien, eds., Race Relations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), pp. 112-27; Aleine Austin, “Behind the Montgomery Bus Boycott,” Monthly Review 8 (September 1956): 163-67; and Ralph H. Hines and James E. Pierce, “Negro Leadership After the Social Crisis: An Analysis of Leadership Changes in Montgomery, Alabama,” Phylon 26 (Summer 1965): 162-72. Far and away the most valuable and insightful published analysis of the protest, and the place where anyone with further interest should begin, is J. Mills Thornton, III’s “Challenge and Response in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56,” Alabama Review 33 (July 1980): 163-235.

David J. Garrow is associate professor of political science at the City College of New York and the City University Graduate School. He is the author of Protest at Selma (Yale,1978)and The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Norton, l 981), as well as the forthcoming Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1955-1968, which William Morrow Co. will publish in the fall of l986.

A Day Late?

David J. Garrow — Wed, 01 Mar 1995 05:00:05 +0000

A Day Late?

By David J. Garrow

Vol. 17, No. 1, 1995 pp. 20-23

Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South by John Egerton (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 704 pp. $35.).

John Egerton’s group portrait of Southerners who opposed virulent white racism in their region during the period from 1932 to 1954 is a rich and impressive book, but all too often–as Egerton himself realizes–his narrative bestows excessive praise on white “liberals” who could never quite bring themselves even to publicly denounce racial segregation.

Speak Now Against the Day–Egerton’s title comes from a phrase used by Mississippi novelist William Faulkner in a 1955 speech–is a tremendously valuable book, bringing together into one volume a cast of characters and organizations whose efforts heretofore have been memorialized largely in specific scholarly mono-graphs. Egerton, however, a sixty-year-old white Kentuckian who has long written about the South, is not as tough-minded as he might be in portraying Southern “liberals” limited and often hesitant efforts in the twenty-plus years from the election of Franklin Roosevelt to the revolutionary Brown desegregation decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. Egerton’s subjects were more completely bound and blindered by their times and places than Egerton can bring himself to fully admit, and one must read Speak Now with some care in order to appreciate that Egerton’s bottom-line judgment of his subjects is considerably less glowing than a casual reader might conclude.

Intentionally or not, Egerton’s title highlights both his book’s somewhat excessive attention to writers as well as those writers’ often-ambivalent stances concerning racial justice. William Faulkner’s best statements notwithstanding, the Nobel Prize novelist was anything but an outspoken or committed integrationist, and Faulkner’s uncertainties and inconsistencies with regard to race were fully representative of the other writers, academicians and journalists upon whom Egerton focuses his attention. Georgia’s Lillian Smith may have been a more complete opponent of white racism than any other well-known white Southern writer of her age, but Smith’s somewhat isolated life left her political judgments–such as a 1949 prediction that “in five years there will be little legal segregation left in the South”–dangling far off base.

More regrettably, Egerton time and again accords excessive stature to professors and newspaper editors whose full records, in the long eye of history, merit little positive comment. North Carolina sociologist Howard Odum was certainly a cut above most Southern academicians, but Egerton errs grievously in terming the cautious Odum– a man who could never bring himself to attack segregation–“one of the pivotal figures of the twentieth-century South.” However, even much more justly-celebrated University of North Carolina president Frank Porter Graham, whose 1950 defeat in a U.S. Senate race marked North Carolina’s mid-century low point, had refused to support desegregation of his institution when the superbly qualified Pauli Murray, later a well-known lawyer and writer, applied for admission to UNC’s graduate school in 1938.

Egerton writes correctly–and revealingly–that questions involving desegregation “were hardly in the fore-front of any [WHITE!] Southerner’s thinking in the late

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1930s,” but only in passing does he acknowledge the reticence and hesitancy that marked Southern white liberals’ responses to even the most modest racial reforms, such as the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1944 ruling in Smith v. Allwright striking down exclusionary Democratic party “white primaries” all across the South. Not even the most “progressive” of Southern U.S. Senators welcomed Smith, and, Egerton’s repeated commendations for various editors and publishers notwithstanding, “not one newspaper in the region editorialized against Jim Crow segregation laws until after” the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown.

Egerton throws his net so widely that those truly rare Southern whites who actually and explicitly attacked segregation and discrimination head-on, such as South Carolina U.S. District Court Judge J. Waties Waring, come across to the reader as simply one more tree in a very heavily wooded forest rather than as the especially courageous and morally commendable figures they were. History should–and does–judge Waties Waring and Howard Odum very differently, and if readers of Speak Now were to come away from the book believing that what these two men represented was one and the same, that would be very regrettable indeed.

On occasion, when his judgment is most acute, Egerton fully acknowledges the shortcomings that threaten to permeate his approach to the mid-century South. “[I]t is probably an overstatement to call the writers and the rest of the intelligentsia influential, though I have characterized them as such more than once in this narrative,” Egerton rightfully confesses. In truth, he admits, “there is not much evidence that they ever persuaded” anyone to do much of anything, and “Nobody who had the power to lead, as far as I can tell, was truly influenced by the South’s writers to depart from” the old order of heavy-handed racism and explicit segregation.

Egerton’s most powerful conclusion is his repeated judgment that “What the region lacked most grievously was honest, dedicated leadership,” and that the “vacuum of responsible moral and political leadership at the state and local levels” continued right on up through the tumultuous aftermath of Brown.

Speak Now‘s other most frequent assertion is Egerton’s less persuasive contention as to “how favorable the conditions were for substantive social change in the four or five years right after World War II” in the South. Egerton correctly argues that it was indeed World War II, rather than either the Great Depression or the New Deal, that really “ushered in the modern age” in the South, but his desire to believe that the South in 1945-1946 had some significant prospect of substantively reforming its racist superstructure from within is simply not convincing. Egerton asserts that those years represented “a narrow window of opportunity through which the South might have reached both internal social reform and external parity with the rest of the nation,” but Egerton fails to make even the beginnings of a compelling case for this wishfully optimistic view of the South’s post-war prospects.

Egerton’s pronounced desire to imagine some chance that the South could have transformed itself prior to national intervention in the form of federal judicial action does his history little if any harm, however, though it does lead him to further bemoan the dramatic shortcomings of the white South’s civic leadership and to highlight how the exceedingly modest efforts of Southern white dissenters were further hamstrung by their own small-minded personal and organizational divisions.

But Egerton’s focus upon “Why was the moment of opportunity after the Second World War not realized and captured and converted to the South’s advantage?” unfortunately again betrays his imbalanced over-concentration upon the small and largely impotent world of white Southern writers, journalists, and academicians. True, neither Judge Waring nor the most interesting of the region’s elected officials from the 1940s, such as Georgia Governor Ellis Arnall, are by any means absent from Egerton’s story, but Egerton’s over-emphasis upon white word-smiths does his story a double-barrelled disservice: first in understating how the most important and influential developments in the South between 1945 and 1954 involved what was happening (often locally and quietly) among black Southerners, and, second, in further pushing to the narrational sidelines those citizens who weren’t busy leaving behind a record of books, articles, and columns that forty years later could be unearthed in library stacks and newspaper microfilms.

Egerton is by no means blind to these issues and dangers, and especially with regard to South Carolina, where he pays valuable and important attention to such largely unheralded black activists as Osceola McKaine and newspaper publisher John H. McCray, Egerton makes a significant contribution to future historiography. But the question of proportion remains, and in that context, as Egerton himself certainly knows, Speak Now Against the Day devotes more time and effort to the writings of a favored few and considerably less to the thoughts and hopes of the relatively unlettered segments of the Southern populace, both black and white.

Speak Now Against the Day is a considerable achievement, one which to large degree probably–and properly–“closes the books” on a certain segment of privileged white Southerners whom scholars and writers have favored with much–perhaps too much–attention. But,

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just as properly, in the months and years ahead the spotlights of pre- as well as post-1954 Southern history scholarship will turn more and more toward the words and deeds of those citizens–black citizens–whose efforts DID bring about the racial and political revolution that most Southern white liberals before 1954 could only uncertainly imagine.

John Egerton Responds:

It is an occupational hazard among writers that we all tend to like our own books, and earnestly hope that others will like them too. We anxiously await the reaction of critics, and when those of the highest reputation pass judgment, we are sometimes filled with apprehension.

So it was that I read David I Garrow’s review of Speak Now Against the Day with deeply mixed feelings of pride and disappointment. Pride, first, that a writer of his stature would devote as much attention and space as he did to a critical assessment of my book–and then disappointment that he would find it as one-dimensional and flawed as he did.

The weight of his criticism concerns my treatment of Southern white liberals, particularly writers and scholars, in the quarter-century before the mid-1950s. In Garrow’s judgment, my narrative “bestows excessive praise” on these “privileged” and “largely impotent” Southerners, when in his view their “limited and often hesitant efforts…merit little positive comment.”

It is good that I included U.S. District Court Judge J. Waties Waring of South Carolina in my account, Garrow writes, but this “courageous and morally-commendable” jurist was a singular figure–not, as I presented him, “simply one more tree in a very heavily-wooded forest.”

I did also call attention to “such largely-unheralded Black activists” as Osceola McKaine and newspaper publisher John H. McCray in South Carolina, says Garrow. “But the question of proportion remains, and…Speak Now Against the Day devotes more time and effort to the writings of a favored few and considerably less to the thoughts and hopes of the relatively unlettered segments of the Southern populace, both Black and white.”

The point is well taken that public figures who compile a voluminous written record stand a much better chance of being “found” by historians than those who seldom if ever leave a paper trail. Garrow correctly notes that my book draws extensively from this deep well of letters. He names only two or three of the writers (journalists, novelists, scholars) in my narrative, and implies that virtually all of the others I mention are white. Actually, a large number are black, among them W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Charles S. Johnson, Robert Vann, Langston Hughes, J. Saunders Redding, Richard Wright, Frank Marshall Davis, Ralph Ellison, and Ted Poston.

It is not just writers by any means who make up the “cast of characters” in my book–and it is not just white males who fill the ranks in other fields. The New Deal brought many white women and blacks, both men and women, into public service for the first time, and I include a number of them in this story. In the fields of religion, law, journalism, labor, and academia, many more came upon the Southern stage, and even in the area of social activism–suppressed as it was by the all-white, all-male power structure–there were men and women, black and white, who took the first halting steps toward reformation during these years.

Speak Now Against the Day identifies more of these individuals and connects them with one another and with this “pre-movement” period than any previous account of the times that I have seen. Admittedly, they add up to only a small fraction of the Southern populace–too few in number, too lacking in boldly radical resolve, and too divided among themselves to take the South in a new direction when the moment of opportunity was at hand after World War II.

But these Southerners–black men such as Benjamin Mays and Ira De A. Reid, black women such as Mary McLeod Bethune and Charlotte Hawkins Brown, white men such as Howard Kester and Aubrey Williams, white women such as Lucy Randolph Mason and Dorothy R. Tilly–did stand publicly in opposition to segregation and the crippling myth of white supremacy, and they

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and the others who spoke out with them deserve to be remembered. They are due more space in the history books than they have yet been given–by me, by David Garrow, or by any others seining for truth in the rocky streams of the twentieth-century South.

I do acknowledge, both here and in the pages of Speak Now, that my 1990s speculation about the tantalizing prospect for social change in the South right after World War II was not a reality that ever materialized. My primary motivation in writing the book was to better understand this failure to seize the time. But it seems to me more critical to say the South missed a golden opportunity, as I do, than to suggest, as Garrow does, that the opening never existed at all.

The other principal theme of the book–the failure of leadership–is seen by Garrow as “Egerton’s most powerful conclusion,” and I am glad that he found it ex-pressed time and again in the book. To my disappointment, though, he appears to make no distinction between the political demagogues who enforced the rule of white supremacy and some of the more far-sighted leaders in other fields–men and women of both races who wrote and spoke and acted from a larger and more inclusive vision.

What I think I have said in this book is that some people had this broader vision, that their efforts to give it life were commendable but insufficient, that the demagogues prevailed, and that it took a revolution in the courts and in the streets to bring about substantive change. All of the players in this drama showed human imperfections, but they were not equally flawed; some were courageous and prophetic at times–and by 1954, all of the dissenters, the bold and the meek, had been tagged as the common enemy of the racist white power bloc that reigned in Congress and in the statehouse of the South.

What happened after that is a story already well told by David Garrow and others, and now is being told again in even richer detail by such writers as John Dittmer, Henry Louis Gates, Connie Curry, Clayborne Carson, and Adam Fairclough. My book ends where these others begin. Speak Now Against the Day is a synthesis, a broad and shallow canvass of hundreds of institutions and more than a thousand individuals in the generation before Brown v. Board of Education and the Montgomery bus boycott. All of them–the good, the bad, the ugly–need more examination than I have given them, and I hope the little bit of hoeing I have done will stir others to plow deeper.

As much as I would have welcomed a strongly favor-able assessment from David Garrow, I must acknowledge with appreciation his seriousness of purpose, his skill as a critic, and–certainly not least–his balancing assertions that Speak Now is “a tremendously valuable book…rich and impressive.” I could hardly be disappointed with that. Moreover, it is surely a good and healthy development in the sometimes fractious discussion about race in the national experience for people to express their differing views honestly, without being rancorous or personally insulting. I am pleased and honored to join my esteemed critic in this serious and substantive exchange of views.

John Egerton’s book Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South, excerpted in the Fall 1994 Southern Changes has been chosen for the 1995 Robert F. Kennedy Award.

David J. Garrow is the author of Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade (1994) and Bearing the Cross (1986), a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., which won the Pulitzer Prize and the 1987 Robert F. Kennedy Award.

Walking the Walk

David J. Garrow — Mon, 01 Jun 1998 04:00:07 +0000

Walking the Walk

Reviewed by David J. Garrow

Vol. 20, No. 2, 1998 pp. 23-25

John Lewis with Michael D’Orso, Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.

David Halberstam, The Children, New York: Random House, 1998.

For readers who view the modern Black freedom struggle largely through the prism of Martin Luther King, Jr., both John Lewis’s new autobiography and David Halberstam’s history of the young Black collegians who launched the Nashville sit-ins of 1960 are potential godsends. Most movement scholars have long emphasized that many under-heralded activists like Lewis and Diane Nash, both of whom helped lead the Nashville sit-ins, often deserved far more credit for the movement’s victories than news accounts of the 1960s ever gave them. Anyone who reads either Walking With the Wind or The Children will come away with a clear and salutary understanding of how the civil rights struggle was indeed a “mass” movement, rather than any sort of hierarchical effort commanded by King or anyone else.

For me, any autobiography that’s written “with” or “as told to” some collaborator always has to prove its historical “bona fides”: are the words and recollections really those of the “author,” or are his or her real voice and memories lost among narrative regurgitations strung together by a ghostwriter?

Well, in the case of John Lewis I’m happy-very enthusiastically happy-to report that Walking With the Wind is without a doubt the best “movement” autobiography yet published. Its content is rigorously true to Lewis’s own personal experiences and stories, and its voice is very much the direct and candid timbre that everyone who knows John Lewis immediately will recognize.

Direct and candid also describe the way in which Lewis recounts his feelings toward many of his old allies. No one will accuse Walking With the Wind of pulling any punches, whether with regard to Lewis’s hotly-contested 1986 congressional campaign against fellow movement veteran Julian Bond or with regard to other relationships that also date back to the early 1960s. Lewis says that Congress of Racial Equality executive director James Farmer “struck me as very insincere,” and that Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) executive secretary James Forman “wasn’t quite upfront. There was something about the man that was just not real.”

No one will be surprised by Lewis’s respectful treatment of Martin Luther King, Jr. (“I owe more of myself to him than to anyone else I have ever known,” Lewis confesses), but many eyebrows probably will raise at Lewis’s characterization of his successor as chairman of SNCC, Stokely Carmichael, as “the last person I’d respect.”

Lewis powerfully and poignantly relates his childhood in rural Pike County, Alabama, and how his role in the Nashville sit-ins led to his involvement in both the founding of SNCC and the 1961 Freedom Rides. Lewis identifies the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s defeat at the 1964 Democratic National Convention as “the turning point of the civil rights movement,” and he mourns how SNCC itself began to crumble because of “the growing climate of suspicion and mistrust within our ranks” and “the loss of that unity of spirit and purpose that we had shared in the beginning.”

SNCC’s decline culminated in Lewis’s own replace-

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ment as chairman by the more media-hungry Carmichael in 1966, and Lewis says that “the pain of that experience is something I will never be able to forget.” After a brief sojourn in New York working for the Field Foundation, however, Lewis returned to Atlanta to work for SRC and the Voter Education Project and, in 1981, following a short stint in the Carter Administration, won election to the Atlanta City Council. Ever since his 1986 election to Congress, Lewis-unlike some other civil rights veterans-has demonstrated again and again how the values that first brought him into the movement in 1959 – 1960 have not been forsaken or forgotten.

David Halberstam’s The Children is a huge and sprawling account of the full life histories of eight Black college students-including John Lewis-whose participation in the sit-ins against white-only lunch counters in Nashville in the spring of 1960 helped spark the entire southern protest movement of the 1960s.

The Children is a valuable book but far from a perfect one. One of its two most glaring weaknesses is its very title, for twenty or twenty-one year-olds were not then and are not now usually spoken of as “children.” Halberstam’s rationale for his title is that the label originated with one of Nashville’s most supportive Black ministers, Reverend Kelly Miller Smith, but it’s a usage that may be misleading even if it is not actually demeaning. Three years later, when King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) did indeed recruit junior high school students to take part in protests in Birmingham, Alabama, “children” were indeed in the forefront of the movement, but the Nashville collegians were young adults whose courageous choices were carefully considered, not teenagers out on a lark.

Halberstam invests considerable energy in detailing his characters’ childhoods long before they arrived in Nashville. Some readers may wonder whether these Black young people, as distinct from others, came to nonviolent activism in part because of what Halberstam portrays as well-above-average parenting, but Halberstam never pauses to analyze the larger possible meaning of the individual stories he richly relates.

Another major influence in moving these particular young people to challenge Nashville’s racial discrimination was James M. Lawson, a young Black clergyman whose own spiritual commitment to nonviolent activism instructed and motivated others. Many people may not know the extent to which spiritual and religious faith sustained young activists like John Lewis, but Halberstam’s narrative captures that aspect of their lives powerfully and impressively.

One thing Halberstam does not capture, however, is his characters’ own voices, and this is The Children’s greatest disappointment. No matter who the person or what the context, Halberstam describes their thoughts and feelings exclusively in his own voice, rather than in theirs. This is both puzzling and, as the book proceeds, increasingly infuriating.

The problem is most starkly displayed in the book’s final paragraph, where Halberstam recounts a 1995 commemoration of the Nashville sit-ins’ thirty-fifth anniversary. “Of the many speeches that day, perhaps the most moving was given by Diane Nash,” Halberstam writes. Nash spoke “with a rare kind of modesty and elegance. She had been proud, she said, to be a part of something noble and generous, something which was larger than herself.” It sounds wonderful, but Halberstam never quotes a single word of it.

The absence of Nash and Lewis’s own voices from Halberstam’s account deprives The Children of added emotional power. It also sometimes leaves Halberstam repeating his own renditions of his characters’ feelings over and over again. For Curtis Murphy, one of the least known Nashville activists, the sit-ins “had been the most exhilarating and fulfilling experience of his life,” Halberstam writes. One hundred pages later almost the exact same description “the most compelling experience of his life”-again reappears.

Halberstam often reiterates the valid and emotionally crucial observation that for all the activists, not just Curtis Murphy, “their days in this cause would remain the most exciting and stirring of their lives.” Some early reviewers have criticized Halberstam for devoting the final third of his very long book to the “post-movement” lives of his main characters, but those chapters have at least as much emotional power as those that relate the sit-ins themselves. Readers will find themselves rooting for Curtis Murphy to overcome several post-movement years of depression and heavy drinking, as indeed he does. They also will be deeply drawn into the subsequent challenges successfully endured by Rodney Powell and Gloria Johnson

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Powell, two Meharry Medical College graduates whose marriage eventually ended after Rodney realized late in life that he was gay.

Halberstam’s willingness to report the private as well as the public lives of his characters is perhaps The Children’s greatest strength. All of us who have written extensively about the movement know full well that private life developments such as the marriage and subsequent divorce of Diane Nash and James Bevel (whom Halberstam correctly characterizes as “a considerable womanizer”), are important pieces of the movement’s interior story, but no one has come close to doing as good a job as Halberstam with this portion of the history.

The Children also does a commendable job of presenting Martin Luther King, Jr., from the vantage point of other activists whose private feelings about King sometimes were highly ambivalent. King intentionally avoided taking part in any of the 1961 “Freedom Rides,” and in the wake of that avoidance young student activists such as Nash came to doubt King’s courage and commitment. As Halberstam writes in relating Nash’s feelings, “leaders were not truly leaders unless they were willing to do everything that they asked of others.”

Relying on Lawson, Halberstam also accurately conveys what he calls King’s “increasing awareness that he had been selected by forces outside his reach for a task far larger than any he had either sought or wanted.” King always knew that sooner or later his task would end only with his own assassination, and Halberstam also faithfully depicts the despondency that overcame the entire movement after King’s 1968 murder.

But the emotional core of The Children is Halberstam’s wonderful ability to capture how all of the early activists never lost their profound and defining attachment to the days and events that overshadowed the entire balance of all their lives. For Diane Nash, “nothing she did ever quite equaled the sheer sense of fulfillment she had gotten in those early days.” She “missed desperately,” Halberstam writes, “not just the sense of purpose . . . but that of their selflessness” too.

Nash “often wondered if the Movement had attracted exceptional people, or whether instead had been a magnet for ordinary people who had been transformed into uncommon people because of their cause.” In the end she rightly decided that it had been “a little of both.”

David J. Garrow, Presidential Distinguished Professor at Emory University, is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Bearing the Cross.

Many Birminghams: Taking Segregationists Seriously

David J. Garrow — Fri, 01 Jun 2001 04:00:06 +0000

Many Birminghams: Taking Segregationists Seriously

Reviewed by David J. Garrow

Vol. 23, No. 2, 2001 pp. 26-32

REVIEWS

Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home, Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2001.

Charles Marsh, The Last Days: A Son’s Story of Sin and Segregation at the Dawn of a New South, Basic Books, 2001.

S. Jonathan Bass, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2001.

Jack E. Davis, Race Against Time: Culture and Separation in Natchez Since 1930, Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2001.

Birmingham, Alabama, has symbolized the violent intensity of southern white segregationist opposition to the Black freedom struggle ever since city Public Safety Director Eugene “Bull” Connor used snarling police dogs and high-pressure fire hoses against Black demonstrators in April and May, 1963. When four young girls were killed in a Ku Klux Klan terror bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church just four months later, the city’s reputation was sealed for decades to come. But Birmingham in the 1960s was far less unique than many people nowadays imagine, and a quartet of new books reveals that Birmingham was far more representative of the white South than most people would care to remember.

Southern recalcitrance at desegregating bus seats, lunch counters, and public facilities ranging from restrooms to golf courses was virtually region-wide until congressional passage of the public accommodations provisions in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 finally resolved such issues once and for all.1 But even in the midst of a region-wide revolt against Black activism and federal authority, contemporary news coverage presented Birmingham as the southern archetype for both barbarous law enforcement and unrestrained Klansmen.

Diane McWhorter’s Carry Me Home brings an intensely personal perspective to Birmingham’s year of infamy. As a ten-year-old white girl who had been born into one of the city’s most privileged families, “I knew nothing of what was happening downtown.” Even five years later, despite the fact that her ne’er-do-well father presented himself to his family as an active Klan sympathizer, “I was more worried that he was going to bring social shame on the family than I was worried about the morality of what he was doing.”2

Only in her late twenties did McWhorter develop an active interest in what had transpired in her hometown two decades earlier, and in part her interest grew out of her fear that her father’s professed friendship with Birmingham’s most notorious Klansman, Robert E. “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss, might mean that her father had been personally involved in the city’s most heinous crime. “I know Chambliss didn’t bomb the church because I was with him that day” in September 1963, Martin McWhorter told his daughter in 1982.

But McWhorter’s family linkages extended not only downward into the Klan, but also upwards into the board rooms of Birmingham’s dominant corporations. Her two generations-older cousin Sidney Smyer, once an extreme segregationist, was the top white power broker who negotiated the interracial compromise that brought the May 1963 mass demonstrations to an end. McWhorter’s paternal grandfather, a graduate of Harvard Law School, was a political intimate of the city’s dominant mid-century segregationist politician, state senator James A. Simpson, whose grandson was one of McWhorter’s private grade-school playmates but whose most important descendant was his working-class political protegé Eugene “Bull” Connor, whom Simpson vaulted into city office.3

McWhorter is unduly tempted to argue that “My family was simply a metaphor for the city around it,” but her larger argument, that Birmingham’s upper-class leadership knowingly spawned and then for many years supportively condoned both Bull Connor and Bob Chambliss, rightly pinpoints the core moral truth of why Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was successfully bombed.

“Dynamite Bob’s” career as a bomber of Black homes in previously all-white neighborhoods began in 1947 under the active sponsorship of Bull Connor and within a decade expanded to include the residences and churches of Black activists such as attorney Arthur D. Shores and the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth. The city’s new nickname of “Bombingham” was the most visible evidence both of Chambliss’s success and of his seeming immunity from criminal prosecution. McWhorter does a commend-

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able job of describing how the Birmingham Klan’s “vigilante spirit” was a direct outgrowth of the similar tactics that the city’s industrialists had employed against union organizers in previous decades, but the heavy-handed editing that was deployed to trim Carry Me Home to its present length has created some gaping holes in McWhorter’s narrative; between her first and second chapters her story simply jumps from 1938 to 1948, with the intervening years apparently discarded on some editor’s floor.

McWhorter’s history jumps back and forth between Birmingham’s Black activists and their Klan and law enforcement opponents. Her Civil Rights Movement segments are largely derivative of previously published accounts, and her desire both to appropriately elevate the importance of Fred Shuttlesworth and to unnecessarily denigrate the role of Martin Luther King, Jr., is rather passé in light of several other recent books on Birmingham’s civil rights history, although these books were released rather late in the process of McWhorter’s writing.4

Carry Me Home‘s detailed treatment of Birmingham’s murderous Klansmen is more fresh and original, and is drawn from local and federal law enforcement files that have long been available at the Birmingham Public Library Archives and from McWhorter’s own interviews. But a reader of these sections of McWhorter’s book must remain at least somewhat wary, as Carry Me Home makes too many readily visible factual or interpretive errors for one to be able to accept McWhorter’s accounts of less well known events with complete faith. Future U. S. Attorney General Griffin B. Bell was not “Georgia’s Attorney General-elect” in 1958, as McWhorter tells her readers; indeed an atrocious racist, Eugene Cook, held the job on a non-stop basis from 1945 to 1965. And anyone knowledgeable about the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1955-56 will be surprised to learn from McWhorter that New York-based civil rights activist Bayard Rustin “took charge of the boycott” “[a]s soon as he arrived in Montgomery” in February 1956.

Relying on an FBI account of a 1963 interview with a Klansman regarding Governor George C. Wallace’s hope that desegregation of the University of Alabama could be further postponed, McWhorter naively asserts that “An estimated 50,000 Klansmen were on standby to storm the university” if Wallace called for assistance. Even in 1963, total Klan membership in Alabama and surrounding states fell way short of that highly exaggerated figure. And, like others before her, McWhorter gullibly repeats the utterly fallacious claim that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had a “taste for makeup and women’s clothing.”5

McWhorter’s worst error of judgment by far occurs when she quotes the elderly Birmingham civil rights attorney Arthur Shores as telling her in 1991 in what McWhorter terms an “unguarded moment” that Bull Connor was “a good close friend of mine.” The statement is absurdly erroneous on its face, but only in an endnote does McWhorter report and then breezily dismiss the fact that Shores’s daughter had warned her that her father “was suffering from Alzheimer’s.” McWhorter’s portrayal of Shores, whose home was bombed twice in the fall of 1963, as a secret “Uncle Tom” is inexcusable, and her ignorance of how well known was Shores’s battle with Alzheimer’s is reportorially embarrassing.6

But McWhorter does enrich our understanding of Bob Chambliss’s Klan network and of law enforcement efforts to gather evidence against him, especially from informants within his own family. In 1977, when Chambliss was finally tried and convicted for masterminding the fatal bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the decisive surprise prosecution witness against him was his niece Elizabeth “Libby” Hood Cobbs, who testified how both the day before the bombing, and six days after it, Chambliss in her presence had uttered remarks that explicitly incriminated himself in the crime.

Six years after that trial, in a pioneering article in the New York Times Magazine, Howell Raines revealed how

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Cobbs, who first spoke to the FBI a month after the bombing, had not been the only member of Chambliss’s family cooperating with law enforcement.7 Indeed, as Raines disclosed, Chambliss’s own wife, Flora “Tee” Chambliss, who died in 1980, had also indirectly begun assisting the investigators soon after the bombing. Tee’s information was passed along by yet another female family member, “Dale Tarrant,” who had been working with law enforcement prior to the bombing and who in the wake of it had also persuaded Libby Hood to talk to the FBI.

But Raines employed only the law enforcement pseudonym for “Dale Tarrant,” not her real name, a practice which Elizabeth Hood Cobbs also followed in her important and emotionally powerful but unfortunately little-known 1994 autobiography, Long Time Coming.8 In that book Libby Cobbs foreshadowed a significant portion of Diane McWhorter’s own analysis by contending that Chambliss was “not a singular enigma” nor “a freak of society” but instead was “a vigilante” who for “many years . . . was applauded by those in power who could have, but did not, stop him.”9

McWhorter, however, has gone beyond both Raines and Cobb by explicitly identifying “Dale Tarrant” as Mary Frances Cunningham, one of Tee Chambliss’s sisters. Behind-the-scenes controversy over Cunningham’s 1963 relationship with the law enforcement officer to whom she was passing information, and over how Cunningham on one occasion told investigators a spurious story, apparently in a bungled effort to falsely attest to something that Tee Chambliss herself may have witnessed, has kept Cunningham from ever testifying publicly about the 1963 tragedy. Today Cunningham lives quietly in Birmingham and refuses to speak with journalists or historians.

McWhorter’s Carry Me Home is thus in the end a valuable book, but her attempt to tell Birmingham’s racial story through the prism of her own family is unsuccessful. In large part it fails because McWhorter eventually and rather reluctantly concludes that her father’s claims of friendship with Chambliss and his cohorts were simply braggadocio. McWhorter nonetheless wants to believe that her father was doing something political during those years, that he “was not simply looking for a noble excuse to get away from his family at night,” but readers may well conclude that her daddy was actually engaged in far more prosaic pursuits.

McWhorter’s effort to come to terms with her memories of her father are mirrored in Charles Marsh’s The Last Days, an intimately personal memoir of a young white boy’s life in the Klan stronghold of Laurel, Mississippi, during the late 1960s. Marsh’s father Bob was named pastor of Laurel’s First Baptist Church in mid-1967, just a few months before the federal criminal trial of eighteen white men charged with conspiring to kill civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman in Neshoba County in the summer of 1964 got underway in nearby Meridian. Perhaps the most notable of the defendants was Mississippi Klan commander Sam Bowers, a Laurel resident who had ordered the killings and who also had orchestrated other mayhem and bombings in and around Laurel. Bowers’s regular hangout was the Admiral Benbow Coffee Shop, and on Sunday evenings, Marsh relates, Marsh’s father would take the family to the Admiral Benbow for dinner, where he would see Bowers sitting with his cohorts at the counter. “I didn’t know much at the time about what it meant to be in the Klan, since my parents never said anything about it.”

The day Bowers’s trial commenced, Marsh’s father delivered a civic club luncheon speech without feeling any need to mention what was a national, front page story; as Marsh confesses, “the Neshoba murders and the trials were the furthest thing from his mind.” A month later, soon after Bowers and six other defendants were found guilty, the home of one of Laurel’s most prominent Black ministers, the Reverend Allen Johnson, was bombed, and Marsh’s father joined with other local white clergy in a public statement condemning the terrorism.

One evening in early 1968, however, Reverend Marsh presented the Jaycee Man of the Year Award to a local

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citizen named Clifford Wilson and heartily extolled Wilson’s civic virtues. Just one hour later Wilson was arrested as one of a dozen of Bowers’s Klansmen who had carried out a murderous January, 1966 firebombing assault on the home of Hattiesburg NAACP activist Vernon Dahmer, who was fatally burned in the attack.

The public ignominy of having honored Wilson just moments before he was taken into custody for an infamous crime (for which he later was convicted) was more than the Reverend Marsh could bear. An attempt to offer his apologies to a Black Laurel minister resulted only in Reverend Marsh being told he was a cowardly hypocrite, and following that experience, Marsh writes, “My father lost his nerve. He despaired, broke down.”

A reader of The Last Days expects the story to culminate with the Reverend Marsh becoming an explicit supporter of the Black freedom struggle, but no such transformation ensues. That absence, coupled with Marsh’s own inability to criticize his father’s failure, leaves The Last Days as a rather unsatisfying book indeed. Four years ago, when Marsh’s first book, God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights,10 was published, an unusually personal “Charles Marsh Biography” enclosed with review copies characterized Marsh’s father as “a Southern Baptist preacher who was instrumental in desegregating the church in the South.” In the wake of The Last Days, that assertion appears to be based more on wishful thinking than on fact.

Yet Marsh’s childhood in Laurel was inescapably a searing experience. Five years ago Marsh authored a stunningly superb magazine portrait of Klan leader Bowers after successfully pursuing an interview with him,11 and a year later Marsh devoted a full one-fifth of God’s Long Summer to an erudite but oddly even-handed treatment of Bowers’s worldview.12 The following year Bowers, who had served only six years in prison for his Chaney-Schwerner-Goodman conviction, was found guilty of orchestrating Vernon Dahmer’s assassination and sentenced to life imprisonment.13

Thinking back to his family’s self-cloistered world at Laurel’s First Baptist Church, Marsh accurately confesses that the Klan’s bombs “exploded in a separate world” from that of white clergymen like Marsh’s father. And Marsh’s conclusion of course applies not only to Laurel but to Birmingham as well, as a new study of the eight white city clergymen whose public criticism of the Black community’s April 1963 demonstrations led Martin Luther King, Jr., to reply to them with his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” tellingly demonstrates.

Anyone puzzled as to whether the Birmingham of 1963 described in Jonathan Bass’s Blessed Are the Peacemakers is actually the same city as the one portrayed in Diane McWhorter’s Carry Me Home should be forgiven, for “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss is mentioned only once by Bass, just as four of the eight white clergy upon whom Bass focuses are entirely absent from McWhorter’s copious narrative. Bass rues how the eight clergymen have been “written out of history and deemed irrelevant figures” who are remembered only as “misguided opponents of Martin Luther King,” but he is most eager to rebut how “many misinformed northern liberals concluded that the eight were reactionary spokesmen of the segregated South.”

Bass is willing to acknowledge that Birmingham’s white clergy, like Charles Marsh’s father in Laurel, were utterly typical of southern white churchmen’s silent failure to acknowledge the moral justice of the Black freedom struggle. But Bass’s most serious problem lies in how at least two of his eight Birmingham clergymen do indeed seem to have been reactionary advocates of racial segregation. Alabama Episcopal Bishop Charles C. J. Carpenter “denounced the 1954 Brown decision” and condemned the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights march as “a foolish business and sad waste of time.” In

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1965 an Episcopal clergy supporter of the movement called Carpenter a “chaplain to the dying order of the Confederacy,” and even Bass calls Carpenter “hypocritical” and laments his “failure to comprehend racial injustice.”

Bass also acknowledges that Methodist Bishop Nolan B. Harmon’s “position on segregation never evolved,” but Bass is more outspoken in recognizing what he terms Harmon’s “outstanding contribution to Methodism” and in repeatedly decrying the “crusading mentality and sense of moral superiority of many white northerners.” Regional pride and defensiveness appear to inhibit the otherwise obvious and undeniable conclusion that on the issue of racial justice, the “crusading” white northerners who came South to support the movement simply were at that time more morally perspicacious than their southern brethren.14

While Bass, like McWhorter, wrongly seeks to dismiss the transformative impact of Martin Luther King’s involvement in Birmingham,15 the best sections of Blessed Are the Peacemakers are those that describe how being among the recipients of King’s famous “Letter” did have a reformative if not transformative effect upon some of the more moderate of the eight clergymen. When Bass asked Methodist Bishop Paul Hardin, Jr., about King’s Letter in 1992, Hardin replied that “I think most of his arguments were right. White ministers should have taken a more active role.” And far and away the most powerful and moving section of Bass’s book is his treatment of Baptist Reverend Earl Stallings, who welcomed Black worshippers into his First Baptist Church at the height of the 1963 protest and who “publicly blamed Birmingham’s white churches for much of the climate of unrest in the city.” Bass’s account makes one think that Earl Stallings was exactly the sort of southern Baptist minister that Charles Marsh wishes Bob Marsh could have been.

The extent to which Birmingham’s Klansmen were in reality no more unique than Birmingham’s ministers is brought home by an especially impressive and insightful study of Natchez, Mississippi, a small city whose bloody civil rights history traditionally has received no more than a few pages’ worth of attention in even the most comprehensive accounts of the Mississippi movement.16 Jack E. Davis’s Race Against Time recounts how a new generation of Black activism emerged in Natchez between 1963 and 1965, led not by ministers or professional people but by two working-class employees of the Armstrong Tire and Rubber Co., George Metcalfe and Wharlest Jackson. In mid-August of 1965 Metcalfe presented a petition calling for school desegregation to the local school board, and eight days later a KKK bomb exploded in his automobile, breaking two limbs and permanently damaging one eye but otherwise remarkably leaving Metcalfe alive. Membership in the local NAACP branch “increased tenfold” in the wake of the attack, but local white officials remained as unresponsive as Bull Connor had been in Birmingham. Eighteen months later, in early 1967, a car bomb targeted Metcalfe’s fellow activist, Wharlest Jackson, and this time the results were fatal.

Over the intervening three decades, millions of people have remembered the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, but outside of Natchez few people other than family members and a handful of historians have ever heard of Wharlest Jackson. Davis notes how “no one has ever been arrested for the Metcalfe and Jackson bombings,” but Davis’s conclusions about why white Natchez was no more concerned about its less-heralded string of Klan terror bombings than was white Birmingham echo the themes that pervade McWhorter’s and Bass’s books. In Natchez, whites of all classes were responsible “for creating an environment ripe for Klan terrorism,” Davis writes. “When the black churches burned, when the beatings escalated, and when the murders recurred, silence dropped over the white community. . . . Perhaps

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most whites were too ‘busy with their lives, trying to make a living,’ as one white recalled, to pay much attention.”

And just as in both Laurel and Birmingham, the white clergy was missing in action. In 1963 two Natchez churchmen, Elton Brown and Summer Walters, had joined two dozen other white ministers from across the state in publicly declaring that Christianity “permits no discrimination because of race, color, or creed,” but that modest number of signatories left the courageous few so easily targetable that two-thirds of them were driven from their churches. The bottom line in Natchez, as in Birmingham and Laurel, was that local Klansmen proved to be more civically influential than local churchmen. “White southern Protestantism was unable to serve as a unifying bridge between the races,” Davis rightly concludes, “and in some cases perpetuated rather than prevented racial violence.”

Birmingham was unique only in its notoriety, not in the murderousness of its Klansmen or the pusillanimity of its preachers. And Davis’s Race Against Time probes more deeply than McWhorter, Marsh, or Bass as to why that was so. What both energized southern Klansmen and immobilized white clergy was a “fundamental fear of cultural commingling” between the two races based upon a deep-seated white loathing of Black culture. “Associating race with culture made the idea of race more real. The very idea of race took sustenance from those everyday things considered the very stuff of culture.” Davis tellingly concludes that, to whites of all classes and in all cities, “segregation was imperative, for in a fully open, commingling world, whites feared that they themselves could descend into blackness.” Race Against Time does not discuss whether whites’ expectation that desegregation would allow aspects of Black culture to be absorbed into white life indeed turned out to be quite correct, although not with all of the doleful effects that whites had imagined. Only a region-wide African-American uprising would show both the Klan and the clergy that racial equality would enrich and liberate the white South, not harm it.

Endnotes

Notes

1. A new volume offers an admirable account of the two constitutional test cases in which the U. S. Supreme Court upheld Title II of the 1964 Act: Richard C. Cortner, Civil Rights and Public Accommodations: The Heart of Atlanta Motel and McClung Cases (University Press of Kansas, 2001). Katzenbach v. McClung, 379 U.S. 294 (1964), involved a well-known Birmingham restaurant, Ollie’s Barbecue, operated by one Ollie McClung, and it continues in business today (albeit in a different location) under the management of Ollie McClung, Jr.

2. McWhorter on National Public Radio’s “Weekend All Things Considered,” April 22, 2001. When she learned of Martin Luther King’s assassination, “I remember thinking that the problems of the South would be over now . . . I really thought that he had caused all this trouble in the South. So that was-you know, I was pretty old by then.”

3. Bull Connor may not be quite as infamous as we generally assume. See Carol Polsgrove, Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement. (W.W. Norton, 2001), p. 174: “When Birmingham Police Chief Bull Durham unleashed his dogs and fire hoses….”

4. Andrew M. Manis’s biography, A Fire You Can’t Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth (University of Alabama Press, 1999) is a superb portrait which offers much information about the Birmingham movement that McWhorter has been unable to fully incorporate. McWhorter’s antipathy towards King resembles the argument of Glenn T. Eskew’s But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (University of North Carolina Press, 1997), which some historians have found highly unpersuasive. See for example Adam Fairclough’s review in Alabama Review, July 1999, pp. 229-32, noting that “The most serious weakness of But for Birmingham is the author’s undisguised hostility towards Martin Luther King, Jr.”

5. Athan G. Theoharis’s J. Edgar Hoover, Sex, and Crime: An Historical Antidote (Ivan R. Dee, 1995) is an utterly comprehensive rebuttal of such claims by a highly knowledgeable historian. The Hoover-as-cross-dresser image, which is regrettably widespread in popular culture, falsely leads people to think of Hoover as a batty queen rather than a viciously dangerous yet exceptionally skillful ideological bureaucrat.

6. See for example an article by a family friend who attended law school with Shores’s grandson Arthur Shores Lee, who “would mention with pride his grandfather, now crippled with Alzheimer’s.” Paul South, “30 Years After Selma, We Must Continue to March Against Hate,” Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, March 12, 1995, p. B1.

7. Howell Raines, “The Birmingham Bombing,” New York Times Magazine, July 24, 1983, pp. 12ff.

8. Elizabeth H. Cobbs/Petric J. Smith, Long Time Coming: An Insider’s Story of the Birmingham Church Bombing that Rocked the World (Crane Hill Publishers, 1994). Long Time Coming went virtually unreviewed in any print media. As the author’s name itself signalled, soon after her 1977 testimony against Chambliss, Cobbs underwent sex change surgery and changed her name to Petric J. Smith. “Pete” Smith died in 1998 at age fifty-seven. See also Frank Sikora, Until Justice Rolls Down: The Birmingham Church Bombing Case (University of Alabama Press, 1991), a book lacking both source notes and bibliography, and which spoke erroneously of “Gail Tarrant.” Diane McWhorter gave the Sikora book an appropriately dismissive brief notice in the New York Times Book Review, September 22, 1991, p. 53.

9. 9 Cobbs also said of Chambliss that “At least two of my young cousins were victims of his inappropriate fondling, and a male cousin told me, ‘I think he has tried to molest every child in the family-boys and girls.” Long Time Coming, p. 54. Interestingly enough, similar allegations have been voiced against Bobby Frank Cherry, Chambliss’s still-surviving Klan colleague whom most investigators believe personally planted the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bomb, by both his stepdaughter, Gloria Ladow, and his granddaughter, Teresa Cherry Stacy. See Lee Hancock, ” ’63 Bombing Suspect Says Kin Are Lying; He Denies Bragging of Role in Death of 4 Girls During Civil Rights Struggle,” Dallas Morning News, July 3, 1999, p. A1, Pamela Colloff’s superb article on Cherry and his family, “The Sins of the Father,” Texas Monthly, April 2000, pp. 132ff, and Carlton Stowers, “The Good Neighbor,” Dallas Observer, May 25, 2000. Indicted in May 2000 along with fellow surviving Klansman Tommy Blanton for the Sixteenth Street bombing, Cherry’s trial was severed from Blanton’s, and postponed indefinitely, on the grounds that Cherry allegedly no longer possesses the mental capacity to assist in his own defense. See Kevin Sack, “A Bitter Alabama Cry: Slow Justice is No Justice,” New York Times, April 13, 2001, p. A12 and Sack, “Church Bombing Figure Found to Be Incompetent,” New York Times, July 17, 2001, p. A12. Blanton was found guilty after a remarkably quick trial. See Kevin Sack, “Ex-Klansman is Found Guilty in ’63 Bombing,” New York Times, May 2, 2001, p. A1.

10. (Princeton University Press, 1997).

11. Charles Marsh, “Rendezvous With the Wizard,” Oxford American, October/November 1996, pp. 22-32.

12. Marsh’s treatment of the Klansman includes apparent regard for what he terms “the level of theological realism in Bowers’s analysis.” God’s Long Summer, p. 80.

13. Rick Bragg, “Jurors Convict Former Wizard in Klan Murder,” New York Times, August 22, 1998, p. A1.

14. In 1965 in Alabama alone, two visiting white clergymen, Episcopalian Jonathan M. Daniels and Unitarian James J. Reeb, were killed by white racist assailants. See Charles W. Eagles’s excellent Outside Agitator: Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama (University of North Carolina Press, 1993), and Duncan Howlett, No Greater Love: The James Reeb Story (Harper Row, 1966).

15. “Meaningful change” in Birmingham, Bass contends, “occurred only at a gradual and moderate pace,” and “inevitably, it was [local] citizens, both black and white, and not Martin Luther King and the SCLC [King’s organization], that brought about the real transformation of the city.” Blessed Are the Peacemakers, p. 226.

16. See John Dittmer’s excellent Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (University of Illinois Press, 1994), pp. 353-62.