
          More Than Steel Mills Are Silent
          By Dowe, KellyKelly Dowe
          Vol. 4, No. 4, 1982, pp. 3-5
          
          Several times, thinking about it all, I've been taken back to the
First Presbyterian Church in Montgomery.
          It is a particular Sunday in the early 1960's that I remember. I
must have been eleven. I was waiting in our pew in the middle section
of the cavernous sanctuary for services to begin, my family nested
around me. My mother and my brother sat on one side, and two
great-aunts, whose husbands, my uncles, were an elder and a deacon in
the church, sat on the other. The air was cool and still, and in the
enormous room with its high ceilings and dim light, where
stained-glass and brass appointments forever needed polishing, I felt
an abiding sense of security. That was when the commotion began.
          Not much happened that I could see, but it centered on the main
entrance behind us and sparked a crackling tension among the
worshippers. Several heads swivelled toward the rear of the church,
only to turn quickly around again. Several of the men strode with
quiet purposefulness toward the rear doors. I could see nothing, but
in a few minutes I knew the excitement had ended. The men returned to
their seats. The organ prelude began on schedule. It was only after
church, probably when we were driving home, that I learned what had
happened: a small group of black_people had tried to attend our Sunday
service. They were turned away at the door. Someone, perhaps one of my
uncles, had simply told them they were not welcome. They left without
incident. Everyone seemed to think the situation had been handled
masterfully. The church had behaved correctly and in the best possible
taste.
          That was twenty years ago. The incident re-emerged in my mind with
startling clarity this spring, when I learned that Birmingham's
Downtown Rotary Club, one of the most exclusive organizations in the
city, had quietly voted to continue its policy of excluding black
members. Specifically, when Rotarian Angus McEachran, editor of the
Birmingham Post-Herald. asked the membership to remove
the word "white" from the Constitution's membership requirements--"Any
white adult male person of good moral character"--he was voted down,
one hundred twenty to ninety. It was the culmination of a three-year
campaign McEachran had waged within the club to bring about the
change. He resigned shortly afterward.
          The club's reaffirmation of its barrier against blacks, erected
when the club was founded in 1913, made national headlines and
prompted an outcry from Rotary International and Rotary clubs around
the globe. On June 3, nearly a month after the original May 12 vote,
the membership reversed itself and voted overwhelmingly to ask its
board to reconsider the ban on black members. But when the Rotary
board of directors met, it voted unanim-

ously not to delete the word
"white," but to drop the club's sixty-nine-year-old bylaws and to
adopt the consitution of Rotary International which makes no mention
of race.
          Despite having their feet held to the fire, the Rotarians, like we
Presbyterians years ago, had remained firmly in control and behaved
correctly and in good taste. They could pretend the club had made no
error, not even in basic practicality, and no one had to apologize or
recant. They obfuscated the real issue--their decision, as an
institution, to practice deliberate racial discrimination in choosing
members. Many Rotarians later said they had not voted against having
black members, but against overruling the board of directors. That,
they said, was not how Rotary works.
          The more I thought about the Rotary vote, the angrier I became. I
was angry at the corporate board chairmen, the bank presidents, and
the lawyers who recorded their bigotry. I was angry at all forms of
institutional racism--the all-white country clubs with their columns
and black footmen, the segregated churches, debutante societies and
service guilds. I was especially angry at those Rotarians who knew
better but were too complacent to speak out. Six are ministers or
rabbis. One is president of a Baptist university. Did they feel no
tearing sense of injustice? McEachran had already taken the lead. All
they had to do was add their voices to his.
          I was angry at the Rotarians for obliging all those people who
think Birmingham is the national headquarters for racism. Many
Rotarians do not even live in Birmingham, but in affluent, outlying
communities. The run-of-the-mill Birmingham resident, who might live
in an integrated neighborhood or send his kids to an integrated
school, didn't seem to deserve this new black eye. In the Birmingham
school system, which is seventy-five percent black, test scores are at
and above national averages and integrated PTA's are strong. Through a
network of ninety-three neighborhood organizations, blacks and whites
have come to city government jointly with successful appeals for
improved drainage, better lighting, and more recreational
opportunities. Under Richard Arrington, the city's first black mayor,
the crime rate has dropped, the budget remains balanced, and the city
has worked with developers and merchants to revitalize the downtown
business district. Obviously the city has a long way to go in race
relations, but it has come a long way since 1963.
          After a while my anger gave way to cooler questions. Why had the
Rotarians put their racist posture on paper, when they could just as
easily keep blacks out by the exclusive nature of the club? "Extremely
difficult" was one Rotarian's description to me of the process of
getting any new member into the club. "To get somebody in the
Birmingham Rotary Club would take about six months.
          You must have so many people to nominate you and so many people to
second it. Some of these people pride being in the Downtown Rotary
Club more than they pride being in a country club," he said. And the
chances of a black person's admission by the current membership?
"Practically impossible."
          Why would the likes of the head of the local Merrill Lynch office,
I wondered, the president of the First Alabama Bank of Birmingham, and
the president of the Alabama Power Company find it so difficult to
have lunch alongside a black federal judge or a black insurance
company executive? And in bad economic times, why would Rotarians
jeopardize the city's already shaky image with a written ban on black
members? Unemployment now stands at thirteen percent. Did the members
believe news of their vote would not get out? Displaying awesome faith
in Rotarian discretion, eight former Rotary presidents mailed a joint
letter to each club member a few days before the original vote, urging
defeat of the proposed change. "As everyone knows, it is a very
controversial and complicated subject . . . The fact that it is even
coming before the entire membership is not only damaging to our club,
but also our community," they advised.
          The scuttling about before the vote would have been funny, in
retrospect, had the outcome not been so dismaying. One particularly
prominent parson cornered McEachran at a cocktail party to wish him
luck. "I wrote to the board for you. And I'm going to vote with you,"
he said. McEachran replied, "I'm counting on you to do more than
that." The minister backpedaled. "Angus," he said, "when you've been
here as long as I have, you'll learn that in Birmingham you have to
pick your fights."
          Even the image of Angus McEachran taking on Birmingham's business
upper crust is funny. McEachran, who constantly battles extra pounds,
who routinely hangs up the telephone when kept on "hold" more than
thirty seconds, whose reporters make fun of his stoop-shouldered gait
and grunting speech, hardly seems like a wedge of social
change. Deficient in the skills of small talk, impatient with
diplomacy, he is apt to end prolonged debate by tossing a verbose
dissident from his office. But in the Downtown Rotary Club, where
acceptance of the business elite deterred the voice of objection for
sixty-nine years, McEachran alone was willing to be consistently
recognized as breaking rank.
          You could name a dozen reasons why individual Rotarians might have
wanted to retain their color ban. Many are elderly and longtime
residents of the city where change has never come easy. The average
age of the eight former presidents who mailed the letter, for example,
was seventy-four. Many, with their executive positions, their homes in
all-white suburbs like Vestavia and Mountain Brook, and their
memberships in all-white country clubs and churches, probably expected
to continue their racial isolation. Some, seeing the Downtown Rotary
Club not as a service organization, but as an exclusive social club,
perhaps saw no more reason to admit blacks to it than they would to
their country club.
          The phenomenon is not that a few, wealthy, conservative men are
able to isolate themselves from the realities of a changing world and
insist on systematic exclusion of 

non-whites. Southern history is full
of affluent people who, while they didn't ride in the night with
torches and whips, urged on those who did with their voices of
approval. James Armstrong, a black Birmingham barber who saw his
entire family arrested in the 1960's after attempts at integration,
summed it up best. "The Klansman doesn't always wear a hood. Sometimes
he wears a tie," he said. "It took me a long time to realize that."
          The depressing thing is that racists are allowed to prevail in
1982. That's what makes me most uncomfortable of all. Because the
people who allow it are not confined to Birmingham's Downtown Rotary
Club. They are all of us whites who fail to bring black families to
our churches, who don't ask black couples to consider buying the house
next door, who don't include blacks regularly in our socializing, for
fear of offending our friends who are not so right-thinking as we.
          "The ultimate tragedy of Birmingham was not the brutality of the
bad people but the silence of the good people." Martin_Luther_King
Jr. said it in his 1963 book, Why We Can't Wait. It
still hits too close for comfort.
          
            Kelly Dowe is a freelance writer living in Birmingham,
Alabama.
          
        
