A Writer's Life (25 page)

“I want to get one thing straight with you now,” said the judge after summoning Chestnut into his office. “I want you to be respectful of and treat accordingly each of the ladies in my office. I will not tolerate any abuse of them in the slightest, do you understand?”

“I understand what you're saying,” Chestnut replied. “What I don't understand is why you're saying it.” Chestnut was offended by the judge's presumptuousness and embarrassed as well to be addressed in this way in front of the judge's secretaries and the other white women who observed from an outer office.

“I have never been disrespectful of a lady in my life,” Chestnut replied boldly, “and, unlike you, I also respect black women.”

Chestnut knew immediately that this remark would escalate the situation and result in his being ordered out of the office by the judge, which is what happened. Chestnut also assumed that he had just made a new and important enemy, although he was not greatly concerned. The judge had been his enemy even before he had met him, as were most of the legal authorities in the courthouse. Chestnut was sure that any obsequiousness on his part would have gained him nothing. Courtesy and fairness from white people toward black people was never extended without a struggle. Frederick Douglass had written this, and Chestnut often quoted it: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.… Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will.… Men may not get all they pay for in this world but they must certainly pay for all they get.”

Chestnut later in 1958 found himself facing a judge named George Wallace—who was then four years away from becoming the governor of Alabama, and eventually America's leading symbol of racism—but on this occasion Chestnut discovered Wallace to be surprisingly polite. Wallace
was the first judge ever to address him as “Mr. Chestnut.” Prior to this, other judges reserved “Mr.” for white attorneys, referring to Chestnut in the courtroom simply as “J.L.,” when they were not ignoring him completely. Chestnut had traveled from Selma to the courthouse in Barbour County—Wallace had been elected there as a district judge in 1953—to represent a group of black cotton farmers involved in a financial quarrel with their white overseers. In addition to calling him “Mr. Chestnut,” Judge Wallace insisted that the overseers' white attorneys identify Chestnut's clients as “plaintiffs” rather than the term they were using—“those people.” At the conclusion of the case, Judge Wallace ruled in favor of Chestnut's clients, awarding them even more money than Chestnut had hoped for. “Wallace was for the little man, no doubt about it,” Chestnut wrote in his book, recalling his early impressions of the district judge in Barbour County, when Wallace might rightly have been seen as a populist, or a New Deal Democrat, or a “politician of inborn gifts,” which was how the
New York Times
described him editorially before his career became “blighted by his opportunistic alignment with bigotry.”

The transformation was apparent in 1962 when Wallace, eager at any cost to become the governor, marketed his message to exploit a time when growing numbers of white people in Alabama, as well as elsewhere in the nation, were becoming increasingly concerned that the advancements of blacks were threatening the well-being of whites—especially those poorer whites whose property values were declining as their neighborhoods were darkening and who could not afford to enroll their children in private schools in order to escape integrated public schools, where the student body was becoming predominantly black. George Wallace catered to the fears and fury of white people who could not buy their way out of the problems induced by a federal government altering rules and traditions that Wallace believed were the prerogatives of states righters like himself, and as a first-term governor in 1962, he represented himself as a small but determined defender against the aggressions of big government. He furthermore suggested that black people living in the North had it worse than those in the South, and he touched upon this in a
Times
interview that I did with him on June 2, 1963, during his brief visit to New York prior to appearing on NBC's
Meet the Press
.

I had arranged to see him through his press secretary, Bill Jones, an acquaintance of mine and journalism classmate a decade earlier on the Alabama campus. (Wallace had entered the University of Alabama as a freshman in 1937, receiving his law degree there in 1942.) While in New York, Governor Wallace was staying in a penthouse suite in the Pierre
Hotel on Fifth Avenue, a few blocks from where I lived, and although he was initially very cordial as Bill Jones introduced us—Wallace himself walked across the room to get me a cup of coffee instead of asking Jones or one of his other aides to do it—he was soon agitated after we had sat down and I began to wonder aloud why he was trying to prevent black students from attending our alma mater and why, in his inaugural address as governor, he had declared, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

Governor Wallace denied that he had a racist hatred of black people, claiming that his position on segregation derived from his reading of the Bible and the Constitution and his own belief that segregation augmented most naturally a biracial coexistence. He had always lived in peace with black people, he told me, going back to the days of his youth in the dirt-road town of Clio; and throughout his life he had known and identified with individuals experiencing poverty and deprivation. He had been a nonfraternity member of the Alabama student body, and he helped to support himself there by working as a waiter and cabdriver; as the governor of Alabama, he reminded me, he was living in quarters surrounded on all sides by black residents. Wallace then stood and took me by the arm, leading me to a window that overlooked Central Park and the rows of elegant apartment buildings lined along the east side of Fifth Avenue, and he announced, “
Here
we have a citadel of hypocrisy in America.”

There were no black people living in these buildings or anywhere within a mile of this place, he asserted, adding that this very hotel in New York was as segregated as any hotel in the Deep South. “Oh, I've been in these northern hotels,” he went on, nodding in a knowing way, “and I hear these clerks telling Negroes, ‘Now, let me see. Oh, yes, we're full up,' or ‘Doesn't seem your reservation is here.' Down South, at least, we shoot straight across the board; we tell you how we feel. Here, you practice subterfuge and hypocrisy.”

As I took notes, I guessed that the governor was rehearsing some of what he intended to deal with on
Meet the Press
, but I did not interrupt because I had assured Bill Jones earlier that the
Times
intended to allow Wallace to have his say, and I also was in agreement with some of what Wallace was saying about racism and hypocrisy in New York. As a longtime resident of this area, I had never had a black neighbor, and this would continue to be the case into the twenty-first century.

Returning to his seat, the governor lit up a cigar. “And then there's the northern press,” he went on. “They come down and blow up everything to sell papers. You can have gang killings in New York, but it's immaterial.”
Holding up a May 14 copy of the
Chicago Tribune
from the coffee table, he pointed to a headline. “It says, ‘5,000 Stone Cops in Shooting' after the police shot and wounded a fourteen-year-old Negro boy. But they don't send no federal troops into Chicago. And in Washington, D.C., after that Thanksgiving Day football riot—there were 485 hurt, and they used dogs to control the crowd. Yet when
we
use dogs in Birmingham, they make it sound like using dogs is a terrible thing.…

“After the Civil War,” he said after a pause, “our land was burned down to the ground, and every chicken and every cow and every mule was slaughtered. And instead of getting Marshall Aid and Lend-Lease, we got carpetbaggers and scalawags. We got the Reconstruction. And in the Alabama legislature, they were all black folks or carpetbaggers. The South then was treated just the opposite of Japan, Italy, and Germany after World War II. Now don't get me wrong—I'm glad we rehabilitated Italy, Germany, and Japan because they've become Western friends and are against communism. But the South after the war was stripped down, and we had to pull ourselves up all alone—greatest comeback in history—hell, we pulled ourselves up, and pulled the Negro up with us. He lived. He ate. Who else pulled him up? We did. Or else he'd have starved to death.”

The next day's
Times
printed what he had told me, together with his photograph and a headline that read
WALLACE SCORNS CITIES OF NORTH
. Within a week, his photo was on front pages nationwide after he had traveled to the University of Alabama campus to voice his opposition to classroom integration, even though President Kennedy had already federalized the Alabama National Guard and had made it clear that nothing would now delay the registration of black students. Although Governor Wallace would finally yield, knowing that he would go to jail if he defied a federal court order, he insisted on making a speech in which he condemned the ruling as a “trend toward military dictatorship in this country,” and before he departed with his entourage, he declared, “I am returning to Montgomery to continue working for constitutional government to benefit all Alabamians—black and white.”

But his definition of what was constitutional was unrelentingly challenged in Washington, and he was never able to condone the annoying black voter-registration program that the federal government was then encouraging in the old plantation lands of Alabama, and especially in Selma, which had been co-opted by Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1964 as the launching site for his national voter-registration campaign.

Dr. King's Atlanta-based Southern Christian Leadership Conference was actually not the first civil rights group to adopt Selma as its stomping
ground. The first activists in Selma were affiliated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, also based in Atlanta, but inspired in Greensboro, North Carolina, where, in 1960, four black college freshmen had refused to vacate their seats at the Woolworth's lunch counter after being denied service. This highly publicized incident substantiated the tactical use of the sit-in style of protesting, and it was followed in other college towns by black students who soon banded together under the identity of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—commonly referred to as SNCC, and pronounced “Snick.” While it professed to be influenced by the tranquil tactics of Mohandas Gandhi, SNCC was nonetheless motivated by what one of its leaders, John Lewis, called a “moral urgency,” which manifested itself at times in an impatient and confrontational approach to problem solving that went beyond what was deemed prudent by many white liberals in the North and on the West Coast, whose financial contributions underwrote so much of civil rights work in the South. The young and idealistic members of SNCC were cause-led, not clergy-led; and as the writer Diane McWhorter described them in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book about Birmingham (
Carry Me Home
), the people at SNCC played “picador” to the “sluggish matador” of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

It was an activist from SNCC, not one from Dr. King's SCLC, who had entered Selma in 1963 to assume a leading role in the black people's voting-rights drive. He was twenty-two-year-old Bernard Lafayette, from Nashville, and not long after he arrived he was ambushed one night by two white men, who beat him over the head with a rifle butt and left him bleeding along the road. After he had recovered days later and rejoined his fellow demonstrators on the steps of the town's courthouse—wearing his bloodstained clothing—the voting-rights campaign in Selma attracted longer and louder lines of protesters, and this, in turn, drew more television coverage, which added to the resentment being felt by Sheriff James G. Clark, Jr., and others in law enforcement and the white community at large.

While the town's newly elected mayor, Joseph T. Smitherman—a political acolyte of Governor Wallace—was not privately enamored of Sheriff Clark's manner in dealing with protesters, the mayor offered no counterstrategy and therefore succumbed to the whites who supported Clark's aggressiveness. Clark was a large burly man in his early forties who was six-two and weighed 220 pounds, and he had blue eyes and a pale-skinned round face that was fleshy and soft. Except for a brown curl just below his forehead, he had lost most of his hair, but he usually covered his
head with a snap-brimmed fedora or a military-style cap with a scrambled-egg bill. His gold sheriff's badge was always highly polished, as were his shoes, and the trousers of his tailored brown uniform were sharply creased and his shirt was tapered at the waist and triple-pleated in the back. He had been born on a farm in the Alabama hamlet of Elba, and after joining the army air force and serving during the 1940s as an engineer-gunner, he returned to Alabama and a career in law enforcement that brought him quick notoriety when he began having altercations in public with black demonstrators.

“Look, I'm a peace-lovin' guy ordinarily,” he once explained to me during an interview in Selma, “but some of these people'll stop at nothing.” He then removed from his desk a wire-service photograph in which he was shown wrestling on the ground with an obese black woman. “I'm really mad about this,” he said, holding it in front of me. “This shows Annie Lee Cooper, and she hit me
first
, caught me unaware. She'd stolen a club from one of my deputies and all I was doing in this picture was trying to get it out of her hand. Those damned newspaper fellows made it look like I was beating
her
. She's
bigger
than me. That Annie Lee Cooper's two hundred and twenty-six and a half pounds, six and a half more than me. I know this because, after we arrested her, I had her weighed.”