Whitewash

Reviewed by Robert J. Norrell

Vol. 16, No. 1, 1994, pp. 18-20

George Wallace: American Populist, by Stephan Lesher (Addison Wesley, 1994, 587 pages).

“Watch out for George Wallace,” warned Wayne Greenhaw, an Alabama journalist, in his 1976 expose of the four-time Alabama governor’s continuing political ambitions. The warning ought still to be in effect for those who care about how we understand recent Southern history, because Wallace is attempting to manipulate the politics of memory to the same selfish end that he manipulated the politics of race in the 1960s and 1970s.

His newest instrument of manipulation is this biography by Stephan Lesher, a former Newsweek reporter. Once again George Wallace has fooled the public—this time, the bookpublishing and book-reviewing public—into believing his patently misleading view of the truth. Just as he promised frightened, bigoted white folks in Alabama that he could prevent desegregation—when he knew full well he could not—Wallace is now advancing an interpretation of his life that is sanitized to make him appear a clarion of the poor masses, a “populist.”

According to Lesher, Wallace was a racist, but no more so than the average white American of the time, and Wallace has been redeemed from his sin because he admitted it and asked forgiveness. Wallace’s profound cynicism now has been matched by Lesher’s, because anyone truly interested in historical facts knows that there was nothing commonplace about Wallace’s racism, nothing average about the way that he projected that racism onto Alabama and national politics.

Wallace hardly has admitted the extent of his sins, and Stephan Lesher and his publisher have helped to cover for Wallace by presenting us with a so-called “critical biography” when in reality this is not much more than an as-told-to autobiography with a thin and transparent wrapping of the third-person to fool the uninformed reader.

And fool it has:The New York Times Book Review declared it a definitive biography, long overdue. Lesher appeared on C-Span’s influential program, “Book Notes,” a sure path to the bestseller list. Lord, save us from naive Yankees. But even some hard-bitten political reporters in Alabama who should have known better came through with amnesiac reviews, in which they forgot many realities that should have been called to the attention of the apologist-biographer.

It’s a whitewash from the prologue on. Explaining why Wallace cooperated with him when the governor had refused to help other historians and journalists, Lesher wrote that Wallace believed that “I would treat him fairly and respectfully” and that “a biography by someone whom he had considered something of an adversary would carry greater credibility.”

Lesher conveniently neglected to mention that he paid Wallace a large sum of money to “cooperate,” a fact

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that he admitted to in The New York Times when the great gray omniscience, perhaps embarrassed by its creampuff review, backtracked a little. By that time, George Wallace was sitting beside Lesher in Alabama malls autographing “their” book for shoppers.

Paying Wallace also earned Lesher access to Wallace’s papers, which the governor still controls in violation of IRS rules. Wallace took a big tax write-off for donating his papers to a library, and tax regulations about donated papers deny any further control to the donor. At least that’s how it worked for Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey when they donated their papers.

But nobody challenged Wallace when he continued to control the papers after the IRS donations. So, the governor was in the position to allow Lesher, and Lesher only, the use of those papers. That preserved access for the apologist and kept away other, more critical historians and journalists. Nobody was watching out for George Wallace, and thus nobody was watching out for the historical record.

Not that Lesher’s book reveals much interest in serious historical research. He cites almost none of the relevant scholarly books and articles, even the ones that directly pertain to Wallace in Alabama politics. He apparently did not even consider the critical journalism of Michael Dorman. Nor did he cite the Presidential papers of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, or Richard Nixon, which likely contain much relevant material.

There are scores of minor factual errors and distortions of the significance of Wallace’s presidential bids, but the main sins of this author are two interpretive whitewashes, one about race and the other about corruption. Although Lesher acknowledges Wallace’s exploitation of racism in politics, he couches it as an unfortunate reality for all politicians of the time. He ignores the evidence pointing to the singular ugliness of Wallace’s racist connections. He admits there was a “faint whiff” of Klan activity in Wallace’s 1962 campaign; in fact, a “putrid stench” would have been a more appropriate metaphor for the degree of Klan involvement. He distances Wallace from Asa Carter, the notorious Klan terrorist and publicist, by making Carter the tool of a Wallace adviser. He simply leaves out Wallace’s ties to the American Nazis and the John Birchers, thus disconnecting Wallace’s racist political rhetoric from the terrorism and extremism it fostered.

Lesher has little to say about the rampant corruption of the Wallace administrations, choosing to ignore countless journalistic exposés of kickbacks—to Wallace’s kin, cronies, and campaigns—from liquor agents, bond lawyers, asphalt companies, architects, and construction companies, just to mention a few. Lesher lays what corruption he admits at the feet of Seymore Trammell, Wallace’s close adviser, who was in fact convicted of taking bribes. By his own description the “fall guy” for a federal investigation that stopped short of Wallace and his brother when the governor agreed not to run as an independent against Richard Nixon in 1972, Trammell has subsequently confirmed an all-encompassing pattern of official abuse under Wallace. Lesher simply took the governor’s word that Trammell was a bad person.

For all practical purposes, this is an authorized celebrity biography for which the only true source of information is George Wallace himself. Lesher quotes important

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people—many of them still alive—passing judgment on Wallace, and the footnotes reveal that Wallace’s memory is the source of the quotes. As an as-told-to memoir, Wallace’s views on his life would have been accepted as self-serving because all such books are that, but this masqueraded “biography” is contemptuous.

Why get so exercised about a bad book when lots of bad books get published? Because the politics of memory about George Wallace is important today. His son of the same name is running for lieutenant governor of Alabama this year, capitalizing on his virtually 100-percent name recognition among voters. State politics remains full of people who learned the trade in the Wallace machine and now ply it for other candidates.

For people so apprenticed, politics by definition is simply getting elected by whatever means the times allow and then using the office exclusively for self-aggrandizement. Politics so purely cynical teaches the public that there is no place for idealism or ethics in government. Thus politics and government are immoral—and unworthy of our time, attention, or taxes. It seems to defy logic that citizens might act collectively through government to address serious problems. The cost of political cynicism is a huge penalty we pay every day, and that’s why we must still watch out for George Wallace.

Robert J. Norrell is professor of history at the University of Alabama and a member of the Southern Regional Council.

Charles G. Gomillion

By Robert J. Norrell

Vol. 17, No. 3-4, 1995 pp. 14-15

A few weeks ago I lost my hero–Charles Goode Gomillion, a 95-year-old man of whom relatively few people will have heard. But for me he embodied true greatness, and the meaning of his life speaks clearly to us today.

A sociology professor at Tuskegee University, Gomillion led African-Americans in that small Black Belt town in a thirty-year struggle to gain the right to vote. In the late 1930s he began to organize professors to challenge the local board of registrars, which allowed only a handful of African-Americans to go the polls.

Whites feared that if a significant part of the eighty- percent black majority got the franchise, white political control would be lost. Gomillion and his group confronted a solid wall of white opposition, but it was no pistol-packing, Rebel-flag-waving mob as one could find in some parts of Alabama during the civil rights years. They met a genteel dismissiveness– enunciated in the elongated vowels of the Black Belt aristocrat–toward any black interest.

When well-educated black people tried to register to vote they were told they did not own enough property. If they owned property, they were told they did not know enough about the U.S. Constitution. If they met both prerequisites, black people were required to have two whites “vouch” for their good character. If a black person somehow got vouchers, the registrars often lost his or her application.

One day in 1941 Gomillion, frustrated over the registrars’ dishonesty to a young professor, looked the all-powerful county probate judge in the eye and issued an ultimatum: Register this man to vote or we’ll sue you in federal court. At that moment the civil rights movement began in Tuskegee.

For the next twenty five years, Gomillion and his Tuskegee Civic Association kept an unrelenting pressure on local officials to register qualified blacks. It was fourteen years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus. It proved to be a tedious, frustrating struggle. Through the 1940s and ’50s, Gomillion’s group pursued the registrars as they lied to applicants, hid from them, rejected them for no cause. Gomillion was committed for the long haul. As a child he had adopted as his personal motto, “Keep everlastingly at it.” A colleague of his told me years later: “Gomillion is a very obstinate man. He will follow anything through.”

That obstinance finally paid off. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 created a commission to investigate denials of voting rights, and the very first place scrutinized was Tuskegee. It was hardly an accident. The methodical Gomillion and his organization had kept a record of every black person who had tried to register for the past fifteen years, and thus they knew everyone who had been turned down.

When the commission held nationally televised hearings in Montgomery in 1958, a parade of professors recounted the registrars’ shenanigans. National opinion registered shock at such undemocratic behavior. In the meantime city officials in Tuskegee, alarmed at the small but steady rise in black voters, had gotten the Alabama Legislature in 1957 to redraw the city limits to put out almost all of the town’s 400 black voters.

The gerrymander was the final insult to Gomillion and his group. They organized a three-year boycott of city businesses, and they sued the city to reclaim their voting rights. In 1960 the United States Supreme Court ruled in Gomillion v. Lightfoot that a gerrymander designed explicitly to deny black people the right to vote was unconstitutional. The case brought Gomillion a moment of fame, but he never registered much interest in it.

He was focused on a new suit brought by the Justice Department under legislation shaped by the testimony taken earlier about Tuskegee discrimination, which resulted in Judge Frank M. Johnson’s angry 1961 order telling the Tuskegee registrars exactly who they would register and exactly where he would put them if they failed to obey him.

Blacks soon gained a political majority in Tuskegee, and in 1964 they elected the first black city councilmen. They had gained political power before the passage of the

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1965 Voting Rights Act, which for the South as a whole was the starting point for black political power.

But the triumph of democracy would be bittersweet for Gomillion. He was committed to interracialism, which meant in the 1960s he wanted to share power with whites in Tuskegee–even though they had refused all along to share power with him. Every February during the 1940s and 1950s, while the registrars were visiting one indignity after another on black people, Gomillion and his organization had held “Race Relations Sunday,” at which they observed the need for racial reconciliation. Usually no more than one or two whites showed up, but he kept at it year after year because he believed his community would be made better by the cooperation of blacks and whites.

Interracialism became a hard sell to some African-Americans in Tuskegee in the mid-1960s, because it seemed naive and unmanly to share power with segregationists. Gomillion was challenged by both local activists who wanted a turn at the throttle and Tuskegee Institute students who thought his interracialism was out of date, Uncle Tomish.

The challenge angered many older activists who felt unappreciated for their long years of work, but perhaps the least bothered was Gomillion. He saw that the times had turned against his leadership and he quietly stepped aside and watched Tuskegee become a black-run town by the early 1970s. That was when I met him and began to try to understand the meaning of his life.

It ultimately dawned on me that I thought of him in heroic terms–much like how I think of Abraham Lincoln. Gomillion was an American hero, a man who believed in something bigger than himself–the ideals of freedom, equality and democracy–and worked for them with no guarantee of success, no assurance of favor, no expectation of fame.

Charles Gomillion lived a long life and witnessed vast improvements in American race relations, but all his 95 years were seasons of conflict between blacks and whites, and they ended on a day I was depressed about race in America, the day after the O.J. Simpson verdict. My hero would not want me paralyzed by pessimism. “Keep ever-lastingly at it” is the message of his life.

Americans must keep at the business of improving race relations even as we endure one of our periodic surges of suspicion and alienation. Blacks and whites must act together and look for common ground, but with the understanding that we are unlikely ever to see things exactly alike.

There is no guarantee that race relations will get better tomorrow, and it’s a sure bet we won’t solve the problem. But the life of Charles Gomillion shows how we can face the future.

Robert J. Norrell is professor of history at the University of Alabama and author of Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee. He wrote this article for The Birmingham News.

A Highway Up From Darkness

Reviewed by Robert J. Norrell

Vol. 25, No. 1-4, 2003 pp. 17-18

J. Mills Thornton III, Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2002.

At the end of the Selma march, Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a kind of valedictory address of the Civil Rights Movement near the front of the Alabama state capitol in which he reflected on the sequence of events that had brought them to that moment in history. King recalled the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56, and then the Birmingham demonstrations which made “the conscience of America begin to bleed,” and finally Selma, the most honorable and inspiring “pilgrimage of clergymen and laymen” in the nation’s history. Over the past decade, King concluded, the Civil Rights Movement had gone “from Montgomery to Birmingham, from Birmingham to Selma, from Selma back to Montgomery, a trail wound in a circle long and often bloody, yet it has become a highway up from darkness.”

Dividing Lines takes us up this highway and gives anyone interested in understanding the Civil Rights Movement our most sophisticated explanation for activism in arguably the three most important places for understanding what the movement did and did not accomplish. It contains three separate studies of communities–Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma–in the Civil Rights Movement. Although connections between the communities are made occasionally, J. Mills Thornton treats each one’s history as unique and autonomous.

His central point is that civil rights activism emerged in each place when city politics developed “cracks” in the entrenched order and presented African Americans with opportunities to seek improvements in their conditions. Out of the dynamic of white political fracture and black political opportunism grew the movement that ended segregation and disfranchisement.

Thornton’s method offers a chronological description of developments that reveal the contingency of events-how one occurrence in a particular circumstance begat another set of actions in a slightly altered context until, after many such cycles, the community had been transformed. Readers must make a commitment to the book, with well over 300,000 words and extensive detail about each place. The author assumes that the reader knows the larger narrative–the “Eyes on the Prize” story line–and he mostly ignores historiographical debates in the text, even with those authors he flatly contradicts.

Several distinctions set this work apart from the existing literature. Readers familiar mainly with the King-centered narratives of David Garrow, Taylor Branch, and Adam Fairciough will find here far more hard-nosed criticism of King’s motives and actions, at least as they pertained to these cities. A fiercely independent mind, Thornton does not defer to King’s heroism, explores his failures as a leader and the inconsistencies of his decision-making, and frankly does not give him his due until the end of the book. Fred Shuttlesworth, the courageous Birmingham ally of King, is at the center of Birmingham story, but he also is held to much stricter account than he got in Diane McWhorter’s 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning Carry Me Home.

Certainly no history of the movement has dealt more seriously with white conservative attitudes toward civil rights activism, which until now has been a glaring lacuna in the literature. He explains how white attitudes toward blacks hardened when challenged but also how splits among segregationists emerged as white violence threatened economic progress. Nor have the so-called “moderate” whites been so precisely and sympathetically characterized. Similarly, he demonstrates sensitive understanding of the black middle-class in the three cities, especially when they were at odds with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s national strategy for change.

Better than anyone else, Thornton explains the crucial relationship between black activists and the posture of the individual federal courts in Alabama and reveals how the emerging symbiosis between street protests and particular judicial rulings represented one of the most important contingencies in the civil rights story.

Some of Thornton’s boldest analysis comes when he carries his story past 1965, especially as he dissects

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attitudes in Selma. Positing that politics usually finds a practical settlement to disputes through compromise, even if it creates much ill will, he writes that “in Selma, as in other southern communities like it, the historical division of race can seem so completely to submerge other distinctions, and the fears and resentments surrounding race can remain so powerful and so obdurate, that the capacity of political institutions to locate an acceptable accommodation is severely diminished.” Blacks then sought favorable solutions from an external source, the federal courts, and whites were left believing that “federal power was engaged in an essentially vindictive persecution of their region and city, requiring a series of revolutions in social and political practice.” Moreover, the younger generation of African Americans lacked the sense that their parents gained during the civil rights struggle that they could change their world. Thus on both sides, people believed “that their destiny was no longer theirs to determine,” and Selma and other communities like it “lost the will to make its own compromises.”

Notwithstanding this great admiration for the work, two notes of dissent must be made. Thornton argues so vigorously for a political explanation for why activism emerged in these three cities that he does not acknowledge that some of his evidence supports alternate explanations. For example, at crucial points in all three cities, white businessmen challenged the harshest forms of white supremacy as a detriment to future economic progress. Thornton provides the facts but does not entertain analytically the possibility that economic motives had overridden political concerns. Nor does he address the sociologists’ “mobilization” argument-that the movement followed the accumulation of blacks’ resources in improved education, communications, and group institutions-for which he also provides abundant support.

Similarly, the focus on the internal political developments in the three cities is not connected to Martin King’s powerful ideological appeal. His invocation of American democratic values and Judeo-Christian morality moved national politics and the federal government to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Events in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma were crucial in making King’s ideological appeal. As Thornton suggests at one point, the highway up from darkness was lighted by King’s ability both to show the contradiction between segregation and American democratic values and to attract the attention of people far beyond Alabama’s borders to that reality.

Robert J. Norrell holds the Bernadette Schmitt Chair of Excellence at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is author of the award-winning Reaping the Whirlwind: the Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee, and other books.