A Writer's Life (23 page)

As I ponder this now, more than half a century later, it is remarkable
only in a contemporary context that in those days white-sheeted men, doing next to nothing in public, could be so persuasive for so long in maintaining the status quo in towns like mine, while the rest of my townsmen acquiesced. Perhaps a majority of these townsmen were interchangeable with the people under the sheets. But then again, I recall seeing newsreels in the 1930s showing crowds of Klansmen marching unchallenged through Washington, D.C.; and while the capital of the United States in the 1930s was very different in its democratic spirit and its racial consciousness from what it would be in the 1960s when it welcomed the words of Dr. King, I am reminded by Coach Bryant's later comment that it was Sam “Bam” Cunningham who made the most meaningful impression on people who might otherwise have remained in step with the Klan. In any case, when I left home for college in 1949, I did not find Alabama to be as foreign as I thought it would be from what I had known. I, as an Italianate outsider, attended classes with fellow students whose family history in the American South was in many ways similar to my own family's history in southern Italy. In fact, when I first explored the southern Italian countryside, beginning in the spring of 1955 while on furlough from my army unit based in Germany, I often thought that I was traveling through rural Alabama. It was not only the similarity in climate, the simple beauty of the land, the slow pace of the country people trekking along dusty roads amid the surrounding sounds of farm animals, and the sedate though occasionally festive town squares with their centerpiece statuary—built in Italy to memoralize martyred saints as in Alabama to commemorate fallen Confederate soldiers—and their rows of old men who sat in the shade wearing peaked caps and holding canes, and who with their sun-creased faces stared in quiet wonderment whenever a stranger passed before them, a stranger who was at times myself; no, what most connected these Italian southerners with American southerners was, in my opinion, their lingering sense of separateness.

When the American South was under attack from Northern armies in the 1860s, the southern part of Italy was also under seige from northern militants led by Gen. Giuseppe Garibaldi, who had planned his strategy in northern cities with northern money and troops and then sailed south into the Mediterranean Sea to launch his invasion through the island of Sicily up into the southern peninsula, penetrating my father's native province and finally conquering the southern capital city of Naples. General Garibaldi achieved victory with such expedience that President Abraham Lincoln tried without success to enlist him to lead some of the Union's divisions in their continuing campaigns against the Confederacy.

The capitulation by the people of southern Italy and those of the
American South in the 1860s was followed in both places by periods of military occupation that spawned rabid and ruthless bands of local resisters (led by the Mafia in Italy and the Klan in America) and that in the end did nothing but reinforce the disparity and disunity between the South and the North because natives whose homeland is governed by conquerors are guided by a spirit of defiance. In Italy nearly a century and a half has passed since General Garibaldi's invaders and their northern civilian leaders took over the south, but during my many visits to Italy since the first one in 1955, I have found the average southerner to be stubbornly resistant to change, to be relatively poor and deprived and generally pessimistic. The southern dialect spoken in my father's region during his boyhood lacked a future tense. General Garibaldi's lasting achievement was not national unification but, rather, the destruction of the southern kingdom's autonomy and the resulting departure from Italy of southerners fleeing to America. As they embarked from the port of Naples, they left behind a city distinguished for its chipped and tarnished baroque palazzos built by the aristocracy that Garibaldi drove from power in the 1860s. Many of these buildings have since been renovated and maintained by later generations of old-family southerners who have remained in Naples and who are the spiritual cousins of those Americans in Alabama and elsewhere in the South who continue to restore and revere their antebellum mansions.

When I saw Walker Evans's Depression-era photographs of some of Alabama's poor white sharecropping families—several of these photos appeared in a book that Evans and his collaborator, the writer James Agee, published in 1941 under the title
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
—I thought I was seeing some of the same grim, gaunt faces that I had seen while traveling around my father's area of southern Italy. These faces in Alabama reflected what Agee called “the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings.” While the publishing effort of Agee and Evans presented a memorable and compelling portrait of their subjects, their book, which Lionel Trilling reviewed enthusiastically, did receive a bit of his criticism for its failure “to see these people as anything but good,” and for its underemphasizing the “malice or meanness” that often accompanied the racism that was omnipresent in the share-cropping community as it was throughout the state.

The lowly whites of Alabama needed someone lower than themselves, and this distinction befell the blacks. The miserable lives that both races shared as neighbors in equally shoddy pine-board shacks did not blur the discrimination that gave white people the upper hand, allowing them to retain whatever set them apart from the blacks. Evans's photographs documented
the democracy of white failure in Alabama, and the pale and freckled faces in his book—faces that were somber-eyed, tight-lipped, and lined—were offered as expressions of enduring strength, stoicism, and indifference to suffering. But I have seen similar expressions in newsmagazines on the faces of lynch mobs, such as the mob in the Alabama town of Scottsboro that wanted to hang nine young black men and boys following questionable charges of rape brought against the accused by two white women. Indeed, the physiognomy of the lynch mob prefigured the white faces of law enforcement that I observed as a journalist in 1965 while they stared impassively at black marchers moments before the latter were clubbed and beaten into submission along a highway in Selma, Alabama.

The marchers were in the forefront of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s civil rights movement, and their attackers—wearing helmets and carrying billy clubs, cattle prods, and gas canisters—were members of the Alabama state police and the sheriff's posse. They could have been the sons or grandsons of the old sharecroppers Walker Evans photographed, for they were products of the same deprived and undereducated upbringing, and their facial expressions were similarly austere. But in the mid-1960s, these helmeted men personified Alabama's frontal assault against the Reverend Dr. King's demonstrators, and the city of Selma had been deliberately chosen by King because there was no place in the South more likely than Selma to become enraged if invaded by out-of-town black marchers advocating change, and the inevitable clash would draw the attention of the media and further publicize his mission. The Atlanta-born and -based Baptist minister knew Alabama very well, having been a pastor in Montgomery and having often traveled through the state preaching against its inequities, doing so once behind bars in a Birmingham jail.

In 1955, after a black seamstress named Rosa Parks had refused to yield her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, the Reverend Dr. King used the incident to denounce the city's policy of segregated public transportation, and his subsequent 381-day bus boycott inaugurated the civil rights movement in America. A decade later, as he planned to refocus on Montgomery as the source of the state's strategy that was depriving black people of their voting rights, he decided to make his case in Selma, an old plantation town of ingrained southern traditions and abuses, located about fifty miles west of Alabama's capitol building in Montgomery.

Selma was a serene city in south-central Alabama, perched on a high bluff on a bank of the muddy Alabama River. More than half of its approximately 27,000 residents were black, many of them related to the
slaves who had been brought here by planters during the 1820s. By 1840, Selma was the heart of Alabama's booming cotton economy, and there were considerably more slaves than whites. In 1848, three hundred German immigrants, many of them ironworkers and mechanics, went to Selma and introduced iron casting and gun making, and as the city was served by both river and railroad, it became a major supply depot and industrial center for the Confederate states just before the outbreak of the Civil War. Thus it also became, in the spring of 1865, a key military objective of the Union army. On April 2, Selma was attacked by nine thousand Northern soldiers, who overwhelmed the almost four thousand Confederate defenders and destroyed the city. They burned homes and public buildings, molested women, butchered horses, torched thousands of bales of cotton. Perhaps no part of Alabama was more ravaged by warfare, and was more controlled by its conquerors during the ten postwar years of armed occupation, than Selma, and the town's white residents cultivated a deep and abiding resentment that extended well into the following century.

As a result of the United States Supreme Court's school desegregation decision in 1954 in
Brown v. Board of Education
, Selma became the first Alabama city to organize a White Citizens Council to resist the ruling. The town's prevailing attitude helped shape the racial views of such local products as Eugene “Bull” Connor, the public safety commissioner who led dogs and directed fire hoses against black demonstrators in Birmingham; Leonard Wilson, the University of Alabama undergraduate who in 1956 spearheaded a campus uprising that discouraged the matriculation of the school's first black student, Autherine Lucy; and James G. Clark, Jr., Selma's sheriff and its most stalwart segregationist, who, when asked at a news conference if he had a hero who had influenced his thinking, unhesitatingly replied, “Nathan Bedford Forrest.” Forrest was the Confederate general who tried to defend Selma against its Civil War invaders—and a hundred years later, in 1965, Sheriff Clark claimed a similar aspiration in trying to block the Reverend Dr. King and the latter's “outside agitators” from crossing the Selma bridge and marching on to Montgomery.

I was among many dozens of out-of-state journalists and one of a threeman
Times
team who flew into Alabama during the first week of March 1965 to cover the demonstrators' five-day procession from Selma to Montgomery, which was scheduled to begin on March 7. Unlike most of the arriving media, I was quite familiar with Selma, having driven through it many times during my college days, and on occasions I had paused to look at its restored white mansions with their wide verandas
and fluted Corinthian columns, and its waterfront hotel, erected in the 1840s with French-style ornamented iron filigree balconies, and, across the street, its deteriorating warehouses and other old buildings that had once been the site of Selma's slave-auction center.

Most of the slaves' descendants who had chosen to remain in Selma after their so-called emancipation found work as white people's domestic servants, farm laborers, or store clerks, and by the 1950s a few had risen to join a middle-class contingent of black doctors, dentists, morticians, businessmen, teachers, and preachers who catered to their community. But while there was no shortage of black clergymen in Selma, there was not a single black lawyer working in the city when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that segregation by color in public schools was unconstitutional. And among Selma's approximately fifteen thousand black residents, fewer than two hundred possessed the right to vote, and none of these had ever been asked to serve on a jury.

This latter situation had been unsuccessfully challenged a year earlier by black people attending a county court trial in which a black defendant stood accused of sexually molesting white women. One woman was the wife of an airman stationed at Craig Field, six miles outside the city. She claimed that her attacker had climbed through the window of her home and, with a knife at her throat, had raped her one night in March 1953. Although he'd worn a mask, she testified that she had been able to see his eyes and knew he was black. A month later, a young married woman whose father was Selma's mayor reported that a knife-wielding black male with a white towel over his head had entered her bedroom. But she had fought him off, she said, grabbing his knife before he fled. Soon other Selma women were telephoning the police at night and suggesting there were black prowlers near their homes, and suddenly Selma was smitten with some of the hysteria that had characterized Scottsboro two decades earlier.

A few months after the allegations by the airman's wife, a black man who lived thirty miles outside Selma, in a small town called Marion, where he had a wife and four children and worked in a gas station, was seen walking one night in an alley near a white neighborhood in Selma. He was detained by two white men, who soon notified the police. The suspect's name was William Earl Fikes. He was described by a black acquaintance as a barely articulate man who was possibly feebleminded but not inclined to criminality. The man's white employer also doubted that Fikes was the culprit. But the police, without allowing Fikes to consult with a lawyer, drove him fifty miles away to a prison in Montgomery, claiming that it was necessary to get him out of Selma for his own protection.
While in custody, Fikes was interrogated repeatedly for several days, until he produced what the police called a “confession.” He was said to have admitted raping the airman's wife and of trying to rape the daughter of Selma's mayor. Each offense in Alabama could have subjected Fikes to the death penalty.

When he was returned to the Selma area and later appeared in the county courthouse for the first trial, the one involving the airman's wife, he was defended by two white lawyers and confronted a jury consisting of twelve white men. He was found guilty. But since one member of the jury opposed the death penalty, Fikes received a prison term of ninety-nine years. This provoked protests from many white people in Selma, who wanted him dead, but it also aroused an outcry from within the black community because the verdict reaffirmed what until then they had more or less been resigned to—the lack of justice for black defendants in a racist courthouse. So they rallied around Fikes prior to the second trial, knowing that
this
white jury might bury him if the mayor's daughter had her way; in addition to the money raised in Selma's black churches for Fikes's legal defense, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People arranged for two black lawyers from Birmingham to go to Selma and function as Fikes's counselors.