On Guard Against Good Intentions.

By George Littleton

Vol. 9, No. 5, 1987, pp. 37-38

The Thanatos Syndrome by Walker Percy. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1987. 372 pp. $17.95.)

In Walker Percy’s latest novel, The Thanatos Syndrome, Dr. Thomas More, a psychiatrist recently paroled from federal prison, uncovers a nefarious scheme to “improve the quality of life” for the unsuspecting denizens of Feliciana Parish in southeast Louisiana. Such improvement is realized through the addition of the heavy sodium ion into the region’s water supply. Dr. More becomes suspicious when his female patients present themselves rearward during analysis, and the hospital’s black janitor, a hunting companion for forty years, addresses his friend with “standard, U.S. politeness, like a drive-up customer at Big Mac’s.”

In typical Percy fashion, this limited plot is carried along by the author’s wry and perceptive analysis of modern America and revealed through his well-wrought but tiny band of characters. Opposing philosophies are offered by the Qualitarian scientists from Fedville, who tamper with the water supply to gather statistical data to support their convictions, and Father Simon Rinaldo Smith, an alcoholic Catholic priest who, isolated in a fire tower above his hospice for society’s rejects, prattles on about his visit to Germany in the late 1930s. Providing the logical and philosophical link between these elements is Dr. Tom, the novel’s detached but keenly observant protagonist.

The story opens when Dr. Tom, fresh out of Fort Pelham Federal Detention Center, notices a variety of unusual occurrences, including the simian sexual behavior of his female patients and their willingness (and ability) to answer questions completely out of context. For instance, Dr. Tom might suddently [sic] inquire as to the exact location of Evansville, Indiana. His patients roll up their eyes, as though reading a computer printout, and provide latitudes and distances from major urban centers. Not knowing whether it is he or his patients who have changed during his detention, he seeks the help of his cousin, Dr. Lucy Lipscomb, epidemiologist, soybean farmer, and computer expert.

Together, they not only discover that sodium is in the water supply, but that it is being put there covertly by a select group of transcendent Qualitarians who plan to reveal their “numbers” just prior to the upcoming national elections. The Qualitarians, led by Drs. Bob Comeaux and John Van Dorn, will show that their project has undeniably improved the quality of life in Feliciana, and that any candidate who opposes their project opposes improved life for all Americans.

In the novel’s vaguely futuristic setting, the Qualitarians are they who believe in death with dignity. They believe it is better to terminate, through pedeuthanasia and gereuthanasia, a life that is a life without quality. They rhetorically ask Dr. Tom if he would condemn a little child to a life without love, or have someone needlessly suffer with AIDS.

When confronted with their colleague’s discovery of the sodium project, Comeaux and Van Dorn smugly defend their plot and invite Dr. Tom to “join the team.” The heavy sodium ion affects certain neurological and psychological traits through cortical suppression, they explain. Results of the project include drastic reductions in crime, child abuse, and homosexuality. Math scores improve 100 percent in schools within the test area, and students have total recall of imports, exports, and geographical relations. Black youths from the Baton Rouge housing projects apprentice themselves at gas stations and factories, and inmates et the Angola State Prison Farm sing spirituals in the fields and refuse to return to the cities upon release. Teenage pregnancies are eliminated by changing the female cycle from menstrual to estrus. How, ask the Qualitarians, can such results be argued with?

Dr. Tom, always the devil’s advocate, mentions civil rights, secret assaults on people’s psyches, and their speech and language function being reduced to two-word utter-

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ances and the inability to write a complete sentence. Furthermore, the Qualitarians do not partake of the ion themselves, and there is the secondary discovery that Van Dorn is running a child pornography ring at his boarding school as part of what he calls the “sexual liberation of the Western world.”

Meanwhile, Father Smith refuses to leave the fire tower. Fixated by the memory of a trip to pre-war Germany, Father Smith recounts, in a twenty-page intermezzo called “Father Smith’s Confession,” how he spent time among the country’s most eminent psychiatrists, and how they argued over a book entitled The Release of the Destruction of Life Devoid of Value.

Although he was not particularly taken with the psychiatrists, who as a group were great humanitarians and lovers of children, he recalled their debate over the relative importance of love of self and love of country. He also recalled them scoffing at Hitler’s radio ravings over the presence of the “alien” within the pure organism of “Das Volk.”

The true object of Simon’s fascination was his cousin Helmut, a Brownshirt who aspired to become a full-fledged SS and join the ranks of the German army and fight for the Fatherland in the imminent war. Helmut’s devotion to his cause and country inspired Simon in ways he had never known. Father Smith confesses to Dr. Tom that, had he been a young German at the time, he would have followed his cousin Helmut into the Hitler Jugend. Interestingly, he said, Helmut had little interest in the Jews, saying only that they had volunteered for the Jugend and had been turned down.

Father Smith’s next visit to Germany was as an American soldier liberating a children’s hospital. Its director had been one of the psychiatrists he had known from his earlier visit. A nurse there showed Father Smith a special room where the doctor regularly exterminated children with experimental gases.

Preparing to leave the fire tower, Dr. Tom asks Simon why he became a priest. Simply, says Simon, because one must choose life or death.

The book ends when Dr. Tom returns to the boarding school to rescue his children from the pederasts. In the novel’s funniest scene, the staff of Belle Ame are forced to drink molar concentrations of heavy sodium, whereupon Mrs. Cheney presents rearward to Coach, causing Dr. V. D. to thump his chest, bare his teeth, and attack. Their apelike aggression is mollified with a bag of Snickers until the police arrive to arrest the whole gang and shut off the sodium shunt. The crime rate rises, math scores plummet, and Felicianians engage in their conversation of old, as strange now as ever.

The Thanatos Syndrome is an eminently readable, very funny detective-adventure story peopled by a familiar crew we have all loved and despised. It is also a novelistic prophesy about the fate of modern America. Although the nature of this prophesy is ambiguous–after all, reduced crime and disease control are lofty achievements–we are partially tipped off by the book’s title. Dr. Tom calls the resulting behavior of the sodium recipients a syndrome. The drive towards Thanatos is the drive toward self-destruction. But it is not the unwitting sodium recipients who are self-destructive; they remain intact, carefree as the animals they have come to resemble. It is instead the scientists, the transcendent, magnificent demigods of our age, who have decided to improve the quality of life for those below them, and in so doing lead our society towards death.

An important parallel develops between the Qualitarians planning an improved society high in their Fedville offices, and Father Smith’s consideration, high in his fire-tower, of the transformation of Helmut’s personality. The divergent issue is that Father Smith realizes the best intentions can turn imperceptibly to horror and cruelty. One day the boys in Brown are filled with love of country, the next they are manning the crematoriums. Thinking of the Fedville crowd, Father Smith remarks that compassion is the first step toward the gas chamber.

In an early essay entitled “Notes for a Novel About the End of the World,” Percy acknowledged that his Catholic world view is “informed by a certain belief about man’s nature and destiny that cannot fail to be central to any novel I write.” A certain dose of this view is present here, especially in a general reverence for life and a consideration of man’s free will unfettered by science, heavy sodium ions and the like. But the import of this novel’s prophesy is more than a rehash of familiar principles.

The importance of the individual, already diminished by the enormous killing potential of modern weapons, is degraded even more as the aura of technology mixes with the aura of power. The purveyors of such power become transcendent over the world and truly believe they know what is best for those below them. In The Thanatos Syndrome, Fedville administers a “shotgun prophylaxis” to cure society’s ills, forgetting that what is best for one is not necessarily best for another. Thus, we as individuals must be on guard against those who would become extremists in pursuit of their good intentions. So too must the powerful remain sensitive to what it means to be human. We may be screwed-up, Percy seems to be saying, but it’s better than being dead.

George Littleton is a writer on the staff of the Alabama Commission on Higher Education in Montgomery.

‘You Have a Right . . .’ Voices from the Movement in Mississippi

Edited by George Littleton

Vol. 12, No. 2, 1990, pp. 10-14

The following narratives are condensed from interviews conducted by young people from Bloodlines, regroup of black Mississippi high school students with a special interest in the seeds of the Civil Rights Movement in their area. The people they interviewed were all active in the Movement in and around Holmes County, Mississippi, which includes the communities of Lexington, Durant, and Goodman. Holmes County is deep in the Delta, along what is now north/south Interstate 55 above Jackson. The excerpts reprinted here focus on voting rights, although other signs of the times are visible which shed light on the struggle for the ballot. It is worth noting that for some of the interviewees the Civil Rights Movement began in the 1930s, and only came to a head in the Delta in the freedom summers of the early 1960s. These interviews also point up the often overlooked truth that dirt farmers and other grassroots soldiers started the Movement which only later attracted its stars. The interviews were edited by George Littleton.

Mr. T.C. Johnson

Interviewed by Jaqueline Collins & Reginald Skinner July 21, 1989. Lexington, Miss.

When I first got into the Movement, they had me like a so-called leader to encourage the others to come to meetings because a lot of people knew me. I had some influence, and I was puttin that to help where we could get on track to help the entire situation. I had seen a lot of abuse, and this made me make the effort to better conditions in Holmes County.

When I first went up to try to register to vote, it was only three of us but we was met by some of the deputies. This kinds put a little fear in your mind. Old Man Sims, who was practically blind, was in front, and the dogs was just charging at his legs, but he couldn’t see. We still had the courage to proceed into the courthouse. When we go in the courthouse we had to go in the circuit clerk’s office–that’s where we went to try to get the forms and try to fill ’em out to register to vote. We proceeded filling out the forms. It was what grade you were, how old, were you a citizen and a whole lotta questions. Some I thought was just pathetic–how many bubbles in a bar of soap? That was under Henry B. McClellan. We stayed in there so long till I was leaning on the counter, and he asked me did I want to go to jail. And I said, ‘No, the only thing we came up here for was to try to register to vote.’ And he asked me if I wanted to see the sheriff. I told him, ‘No, I didn’t come to see the sheriff.’ Then he messed around; we was in there from about nine o’clock till about two. He would go get coffee and it would take him ’bout two hours and a half to return. You gotta sit and wait. You didn’t feel too good sitting there. That’s how slow and unconcerned they were about you trying to get registered to vote to better your condition.

We went up there several times [to try to register to vote]. The next time, a pretty good bunch was going, and me and my wife and two more ladies went up. They were still giving you the runaround, askin’ you all kinds of silly questions, going through the motion again. It was still dragging feet and wasting time, and only one or two could get in that day.

They would treat you very ugly, talking about throwing you in jail and calling the sheriff. This was an experience I had never felt, trying to do something for your rights and they further misusing and intimidating you. It was awful, and you couldn’t even get a lotta peoples to even go up because they was already fearful; they knew how things were in the county, that white folks was running it and if you didn’t do what they wanted, they would make it hard for you. Or catch you on the road and beat you up. And wasn’t nothing did about it because they wasn’t handling whites for doing anything to blacks.

But after I went, it gave me more courage to go back where I’d be a registered voter. And that’s what’d make me proud; I could tell the young black generation that it’s not so hard now. We were the first three from the east side of Lexington ’cause there was a group ahead of us from down by Mileston, the first fourteen. They took a lotta abuse. I think the sheriff went out and cursed ’em out and made ’em get off the grass.

[The sheriff’s] main purpose was to hinder blacks from coming to the courthouse. He could get you upset and afraid. Lotta people just wouldn’t go if they saw the dogs out there. They would be saying things to you, ‘Get the hell offa that grass.’ They had signs out there: ‘Keep off the grass.’ And if you step on the grass, they would carry you to jail. And this would disencourage a lot of blacks from even going up to try.

[We were never threatened] for trying to register at that particular time. It came down later when we started entering children in the white school. It was the county schools, but at that time it was the white schools. And I put my youngest son, Leander Johnson, over there and they

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cut my funds off–what I was borrowing to farm on. They came by and told me a group was comin’ to see me about why was I doin this or was I being paid by the government. And I just told em I wanted my child to get a good education so he’d be able to make it through the world.

Once I was comin’ from a meetin down to Mileston, and I had four or five youngsters with me. The sheriffs and the constables and the game wardens would get across the track and catch us. I knew the routes through the country roads and the hills so I could bring them a different route. Once when we got to Lexington, they had two cars across the blacktop. I just whirled and went the other way. Fear is part of it, but I was trying to shun trouble at that time.

SNCC and CORE was the first to come in [to help blacks register] and was kinda like the freedom riders comin down South. They had a staff and connections with lawyers from the North, and they would come down and help us do sit-ins and go into places where blacks wadn’t allowed. They would help us do these things, getting through the county, gettin’ peoples organized. They could come in and mingle pretty good. They knew partly what they were doing. They could get more of the people together at these meetings than we who were living here.

I guess that’s because people were just really searching for good leadership and somebody to stand up and tell ’em what the whites couldn’t do to ’em. because the blacks here were slow about moving. But they would come in with us and get peoples to promise they would come out and help do things. So they had pretty good connections with the peoples here.

[The white volunteers] would fall in and just fit right on in. They were coming from the North and had a little more hang with ’em than some of the blacks here. Some of ’em came six months, a year, and left. But Sue and Henry Lorenzi stayed on throughout the whole action because when they left most blacks what wanted to register had done been up and registered.

[The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (FDP)] was mostly to help get peoples registered to vote. And it would help you get organized to go in and sit down in a lotta these places where blacks wasn’t allowed in the regular Democratic Party. By 1967 we had enough blacks registered in Holmes County so the FDP ran a group of candidates.

I ran [for supervisor] to help the peoples more, cause I wanted it fairly and squarely with all of ’em. Of course they tried to keep blacks from voting. That was the first priority. They could always get who they wanted to. [On voting day] I went to each polling place, shook hands, and checked out was it being fair and square. We had federal observers, but it didn’t seem like they was much help. They just observed like they was sent to do. We had quite a few disturbances on voting day. Whites and blacks would kinda get uptight to each other or say some violent things.

It was mostly the farmers–the poor farmers, the dirt farmers–that started the Movement. [Their advantage was that] the farmers had a acre or two, or ten or twenty, so he had his own little shack and his farm; he was making his living mostly from the earth. The teachers had to go through the school ‘sociation, and they were always afraid if they got out there, they would hear their name. The Superintendent and the rest of the people would get on ’em, and if they didn’t quit, they would fire ’em. But now we did get one teacher–Mrs. Bernice Montgomery. She was the first teacher that really came out and stuck with the Movement and the peoples. Seem like she had her mind made up. And her husband saw the Movement needed help so he got in it, and that gave her more courage whether she got fired or whatnot. She didn’t care what happened back there at the job. She just came with a full desire to help the people move forward. Later on you had other teachers to come and associate some with it.

There was some tension between the poor farmers who were first involved in the Movement and the teachers and preachers who came later on. They were all tryin’ to work towards one cause, but it would be a little tension because the grassroot people were the first to do anything to get the peoples together, where the preachers was afraid and the teachers was mostly afraid of gettin’ fired from their job; they didn’t wanna be involved at that time. So it was just the grassroot level people. And you get some of these old peoples, they didn’t want you to talk about it or come to see you because they knew what would happen. And we got turned down a lot of times from the black minister. He said he didn’t believe in mixing politics with the Bible, but it was fear is what it was.

William B. Eskridge

Interviewed by Dwayne Buchanan John Darjean August 2,1989. Carrolton, Miss.

I been in the Civil Rights Movement since nineteen hundred and thirty-two. But I had to be in it very slowly at that time. I believe the first time I got in the real Civil Rights Movement was in the sixties, Mrs. Blackmon put me in it. I went to a meeting and this young fellow was there named John Allen. Before I left there that night they had made me president of the whole thing. Consequently, I had to go to work and from then on we had quite a few meetings, quite a few run-ins and so forth. But my main role was to try to guide the thing in order to keep down as much violence as we can. Of course I was older than most of the people here that was in the movements.

Way back yon’, in 1928, we were tryin’ our best to get people registered to vote. We went to a state convention in 1928 and came back and got started. And we got about fourteen or fifteen people in the movement. Eventually we

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got that many registered, too.

The state convention was in Jackson, and the main party leader was Perry Howard, a Republican. The onliest way we could get in politics at that time was through the Republicans because the Democratics called themselves lily-white Democrats–you couldn’t get in there. So we decided we’d get a group and go vote. I believe ’twas 1932, we had about four teams go and vote. The day came for voting, I went to the poll in Carrolton. I think I was teachin’ school in Benton. I planned to leave school at that time. They didn’t want me to have a ballot but I told ’em ‘I got to have a ballot.’ And they gave me one and I voted that time. Now, one man was ‘spose to go to McCauley–he went, but the white people told him ‘Now, Uncle, you’re qualified but we advise you not to go.’ And those who were to follow me in Carrolton didn’t. So you had one man voted and you know what position it threw me in just havin’ one man voting.

When I went back to get another contract to teach school, one of them board members told me ‘If I hear of you teachin’ politics in that school, we gon’ put you out the next day.’ I looked at him and said, ‘Now I’m not down there to teach politics, but I do teach civics, and whatever comes up in civics I’m teachin it.’ And that settled it. You had to have, at that time, a way around them. You couldn’t just come out the way we do today. So I got over that hurdle. And after I voted once or twice more, but this was in Democratic–well, some’s Republican–because this was general election. I went to the polls at that time and they didn’t wanna give me a ballot. And we had a lawyer here–mighty fine man, old man Ewell–and they asked him was I qualified. ‘Yeah, Eskridge’s qualified.’ So that settled that. After that, why, I had to quit politics. My reason for quittin’ was if I couldn’t get enough folks to follow me, I wasn’t doin’ nothin but but hurtin myself. Because I knew I would soon be in a place where I wouldn’t have a job. So I pulled back and didn’t vote any more until way on up.

But during that Civil Rights Movement, I believe we went to Carrollton there one day to register people to vote. I told the sheriff and the Chancery Clerk what we was plannin’. Course I knew they didn’t like it, but still they had to accept it. After I told ’em that, he told me how he l gonna put ’em in jail if they keep on like they goin’. And

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I told him, ‘Now, you’re the sheriff, I can’t tell you what to do, but one thing: it may be better if you don’t.’ We stayed around that courthouse all day long and didn’t a single person register.

‘Twas against their religion to let black folks register. A few had a chance, but nobody could pass the literacy test. Back in the thirties we had to pay a poll tax but didn’t have to take no literacy test. That came later. Early on, they figured black folks didn’t have the money to pay a poll tax, and later they had to use the literacy test.

Mr. Mrs. Cooper Howard

Interviewed by Felisha Dixon Jeffrey Blackmon July 28, 1989. Goodman, Miss.

I was in the first march that they had here in Holmes County to get people registered. We had about 200 people, cause the rest of the people was just afred. They was saying what was gain’ to happen was that we was gain’ to get killed, the white people gain’ to kill us. Well, I figure like this: I went to taken my basic training in Aberdeen, Miss., and I marched on that soil and in Illinois, California, and Hawaii. So if I can march in the army where they fightin’ at, surely if this is a free country I can march here.

But that’s when they had the old dogs. That German Shepherd dog, he was at the door, and he would bite. And see, then people wouldn’t go in there, because they knew the dog would bite. Mr. Henry McClellan know ’bout that. He was the circuit clerk, but he would not help you or didn’t want you to come in there to get registered. And most of our professional people was scared to go into that office. They went down to the Post Office under federal registrars. The grassroot people went up there while it was tough, amongst the dogs and the bad sheriff and those bad people. We went up there and got registered.

We registered by havin’ the Justice Department come in and they told ’em that these people had to register. Then they moved the dog back. But as long as you was in there, they talked to you so bad. Talkin to old people, tellin ’em, ‘I ain’t gon’ help you. You can stay there and look like a coon, old possum!’ He told my daddy that. My daddy were eighty year old. I say not one thang, cause if I hadda open my mouth, he woulda said something to me. Then I would’ve put him across the counter.

The freedom riders came in about this time, but we had already decided we was gonna do it. But we would have went up and got turn away. Never would have got registered. We would have been in the same fix, like back in slavery. But those people had the backin’ of the NAACP, SNCC, COFO. They had a lawyer from the president office.

It helped to own land at that time, and because I did I never did suffer. A lot of people were put out of where they were working. Take the school teacher who could not participate in SNCC or anything concerning civil rights. Bernice Montgomery was the only teacher that stood up. And very few preachers would come out.

Viola Winters

Interviewed by Michael Hooker Tamara Wright August 1,1989, Durant. Miss.

After the trouble we had getting hired at the plant and integrating public facilities, we met at Second Pilgrim Rest Church with the Freedom Democratic Party–the FDP. There wasn’t any black folks here voting. So we went up there in Lexington to the courthouse. We had a hard time; they had a lot of questions to keep you from registerin’. Then when we started to voting, we had a hard time doing that ’cause we had to go round trying to beg them to come out of the house to vote. Black folks wasn’t use to anything like this. We had a hard time. I was sittin’ when the voting happening when we put Representative Clark in what he is now in Jackson [first black in Mississippi legislature since Reconstruction]. We sit down and take names–how many white and colored voting. I was sittin’ there one voting day, and a white man come up and told me ‘Get up and get outta here!’ Then I saw the pistol in his pocket. But, y’see, I didn’t get up. Finally I saw Mrs. Irene Johnson come in and I told her go and get somebody to identify this man, but when she come back he was gone.

The hardest time we had was trying to get registered. They didn’t want color’ folks to vote. They didn’t want equal rights. They had it so long to themselves, they don’t want us with them. They can’t help it now.

It kinda worries me that after all we did to vote, black folks don’t vote today. But black folks ain’t never had nothing. Seem like some don’t even want nothing. They still out there with the white man. A lot of ’em right now will carry messages back to him.

Dr. Martha Ann Davis

Interviewed by Marvin Noel Willa WilliaMiss. November 8, 1989. Brozville Road, Miss.

Along with three young men, I started the Lexington Action Group (LAG) before the civil rights voting vet, as we know, back in Lyndon Johnson’s time. It was also during a time when John F. Kennedy was president, so there were a lot of positive things going on. But before that time there was a lot of die-hard black independent farmers who simply were not pleased with not having a voice in government and not being able to vote. So they challenged the system. And because of our involvement with them, we started going to their little community meetings as they

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planned strategies to try to eliminate some of the barriers to voting.

When we began to get organized and actively involved, we went up and harassed the then-circuit clerk Henry McClellan, to ask him questions such as ‘How do you know what part of the Constitution of Mississippi a person who is trying to register to vote will have to interpret?’ And, of course, he would never give us straight answers to the point that he would try to tell us, ‘Who are your parents? I need to find your parents because you’re out of order.’ This was during a time when most black folks considered white folks as being superior to them. So I guess I, along with the young men, we were sort of militant and sort of crazy, and I think it was because of the way we had been brought up by our parents.

The LAG was like a youth arm to the establishment of the Freedom Democratic Party, and during that particular time in the sixties there was really no formal civil rights organization per se. But there was always somebody–no matter how small or how large the cluster of people–that everybody looked up to. And it was always the independent farmers in the lead, not the folks who worked on plantations.

One of the most scariest moments that I can recall was after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, we were getting people that lived on plantations that joined the independent farmers down in the Delta to come to Lexington, to the courthouse, because at that time that was the only place you could register to vote. Everybody had come to the circuit clerk’s office. And I recall very well, we had to do it like in the late evenings or by dark, because usually you couldn’t talk back to black folks in the daytime because they were busy working in the fields or taking care of the big house, as they called it. And most blacks was afraid to talk to you if you mentioned the words ‘civil rights.’ That was just something you didn’t want to identify with because people had no other alternative for survival except to stay on these white peoples’ plantations. So now here we are saying that ‘You need to be men and women. You’re of age. You need to go and register to vote. You have a right to have a say in what happens.’ And then after that the slogan ‘One-man one vote’ evolved.

But on this particular plantation past Tchula we were trying to explain to the people what they had to do when they went to the circuit clerk’s office to register to vote. And here comes this white man up with a double-barreled shotgun and he cocks it at us teenagers. And we just stood there. We were scared to death, don’t get us wrong, but we just stood there to the point where he said ‘I don’t wanna catch ya’ll on my place no more.’

In the Mileston area we were successful at organizing to the point that people from the north that were sympathetic to the causes of voter rights, justice and equality for black folks, sent us large sums. of money, to put together this basically black community in Mileston and Homes County.

As a result of organizing the LAG a lot of opportunities came my way–thanks to people like Reverend J.J. Russell and T.C. Johnson, who would take us the back way through Hebron to the Mileston Community Center. And Reverend Willie James Burns stands out because he gave me an opportunity to go to Macintosh, Ga., (to the Citizens Education Program, headed by Dr. Martin Luther King) and really learn how to train people in voter education. I worked with people like Hartman Turnbow who was one of the first people to take on Henry McClellan, and people like Julian Bond, Joe Lewis, Andy Young, Dorothy Cotton, and C.T. Vivian. As a result of that training we would come back and train the next group of young people. We were on a mission. Before that the older people had to depend on the freedom riders or other outsiders. So for the old people this was a new avenue.

When the first challenge was made to the Democratic Party after the FDP was formed, I had an opportunity to be there for that first convention in Atlantic City, N.J. where we challenged them to say that, ‘Hey, this Democratic Party from Mississippi doesn’t represent the people of Mississippi, cause we got all these black folks in Mississippi and they have no representation.’ And at that time the Democratic Party was basically lily-white in Mississippi, and therefore it’s kind of ironic ’cause seemingly the tides are turning. But my mother reminds me that when she was a child, what black folks that could vote outside of areas that called themselves sort of ‘liberated’ did was vote Republican. They were not Democrats. And I thought that was interesting and asked her the other day did she think as young people we should be training them to be Democrats or Republicans? And she said, ‘Neither one. Instead we should be training ya’ll to be thinking.’

Bull and ‘Bombingham’

Reviewed by George Littleton

Vol. 13, No. 3, 1991, pp. 27-28

Until Justice Rolls Down: The Birmingham Church Bombing Case by Frank Sikora. (Tuscaloosa University of Alabama Press, 1991. 175 pp. $22.75).
Bull Connor by William A. Nunnelley. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1991. 225 pp. $19.95).

On September 15. 1963, in Birmingham. Alabama, there occurred “the most sickening act of terrorism” of the civil rights movement in the American South. On an otherwise-quiet Sunday morning a bomb exploded in the basement of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four young girls.

The church bombing was the deadly culmination of a summer-long turmoil over the court-ordered desegregation of Birmingham’s all-white public schools. Although just five black children were scheduled to enroll in those schools, Birmingham’s pro-segregation power structure, led by Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor, reacted violently.

In April 1963, following a failed attempt to desegregate the public life of Albany, Georgia, Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference turned its attention toward Birmingham as a symbol of hard-line Southern racism. Under the leadership of King and Birmingham minister Fred Shuttlesworth, thousands of blacks raffled throughout the spring, and gathered daily to march from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

Connor’s all-white fire and police departments grew increasingly anxious over this black presence in Birmingham’s streets and arrested King and other black leaders. It was at this time that King wrote his “Letter From the Birmingham Jail.”

During the first week of May, Connor ordered the use of high-pressure firehoses and police dogs against the demonstrators, and even deployed a police department anti-dot tank. The familiar images of these encounters erased once and for all Birmingham’s image as the “Pittsburgh of the South.” A few weeks later, just as school was starting, the city cemented its image as “Bombingham,” the most violent and segregated city in the South.

From these days of violence, courage, and cataclysmic social change, the bombed church and Bull Connor became symbols of all that was wrong with antiquated segregation codes and racial hatred. Two recent books from the University of Alabama Press examine the events leading up to these days and their aftermath.

In Bull Connor, William A. Nunnelley shows us Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor as a man who had much in common with other Deep South politicians of his day. From humble origins, Connor first gained attention as a colorful radio announcer for the Birmingham Barons, a minor league baseball team. Propelled by this notoriety into the public eye, he ran for a seat in the 1934 Alabama House of Representatives. He won the seat, although he said at the time he had “no more idea of being elected than I did of beating Lou Gehrig out for first base with the Yankees.”

Connor ran as a reformer, opposing higher taxes of any sort and strict civil service laws, emphasizing merit over political favoritism.

Nunnelley’s book details Connor’s eventual alliance with the “Big Mules” and his rise in the political ranks over a thirty-year career, how he survived an early sexual scandal, and how his prejudices gave way to violent efforts to uphold local white customs in the face of a changing legal landscape.

The book’s most absorbing description is how Connor, unlike wily Albany, Georgia, police chief Laurie Pritchett, chose to respond violently to demonstrators in his city.

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The effect of these tactics was perhaps best summarized by President John Kennedy who, upon viewing television reports of the fire hose-police dog incidents, said, “The civil rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln.”

Connor, then, was largely responsible for setting the volatile racial mood which choked Birmingham in that summer of 1963. Until Justice Rolls Down: The Birmingham Church Bombing Case details the aftermath of those demonstrations and white resistance to them, which ended in the gruesome death of four innocent children.

Sikora, whose book credits include Selma Lord, Selma, only sketches the turbulent historical background which is fully drawn in Nunnelley’s book. What Sikora gives instead is a complete examination of the bombing itself–including portraits of the slain girls and their families–and an introduction to a young Alabama law student, Bill Baxley, who on the day of the bombing vowed to become a prosecutor and convict the guilty party.

Using court records, FBI reports, oral interviews, and newspaper accounts, Sikora shows how Baxley followed a decade-old trail to fulfill that promise. Hundreds of FBI and Justice Department officials descended on Birmingham in 1963, and traced hundreds of leads, but failed to get a conviction.

It took Baxley, who in 1970, at the age of twenty-eight, bad been elected Alabama’s attorney general, to reopen the case and move it forward. With the help of ace investigator Bob Eddy and women associated with the 1960s Ku Klux Klan and their families–especially Elizabeth Hood Cobbs–Baxley succeeded in having indicted and convicted Robert Chambliss, then seventy-three years old, of the heinous deed. Chambliss went to prison in 1977, fourteen years after the bombing, and died there, still maintaining his innocence.

Sikora’s book reads like a detective story, which in a way it is, and is hard to put down. Nunnelley’s book, meanwhile, is a more sober, less passionate analysis of a man whom he presents as neither saint nor sinner, but simply a power-hungry product of his time who feared and opposed racial equality. Together, the books paint a picture of a city which was torn apart one summer by events that Sikora suggests led directly to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The University of Alabama Press has done readers and scholars a great service by bringing these books out at the same time.

George Littleton is publisher of the Eclectic Observer, a weekly newspaper in Elmore county, Alabama.