Fifties (91 page)

The editor of the
Advertiser
was Grover Cleveland Hall, Jr., a seeming moderate, then in his mid-thirties. He was on the board of directors of the American Civil Liberties Union, a position which, with the pressure of events, he was soon to resign. Hall bore a famous name in Southern journalism: In the twenties, his father had won a Pulitzer Prize for covering the Ku Klux Klan. Grover Hall was a charming, witty man, much given to white suits, straw hats, and suspenders. He often wore a flower in his lapel, if at all possible a rose from his own prized collection. His foppish dress, arch manner, and
flowery mode of speech and writing seemed calculated to recall another, more genteel, era. Visiting reporters were often much taken with him—“an almost perfect cross between Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken,” said Karl Fleming, who covered the region for
Newsweek
and who took considerable pleasure in Hall’s company.

He wrote archly, with a wicked bite, and little tolerance for fools. He seemed well suited for this particular city as he might so readily have been out of place in the harder, edgier Birmingham. Though on occasion he liked to mock many of his contemporaries in the local establishment, finding that they were not quite worthy of the standards he set, he was very much a member of the country-club set himself. If anything, he seemed to see himself as the voice of a city, which he believed enlightened and gracious; he regarded himself as the journalistic embodiment not only of the city, but of a region and of an age, and he once wrote of Montgomery, “We love our city here in the bend of a yellow river. We venerate its famous past. We cherish the style and the individuality of the present. And we trust not vaingloriously, the city’s sunburst future we take for granted, even though it may mean a bit of factory soot on the magnolia blossoms.”

Prior to the bus boycott, Hall had been able to straddle the contradictions between the pre-industrial South he loved and the new South that was beginning to take shape. The kindest thing that could be said for the
Advertiser
’s coverage of the Movement was that it was erratic and ambivalent. Hall apparently met Martin King just once, largely by accident, when Hall had escorted Peter Kihss, of
The New York Times,
to King’s church. The rise of King baffled him.

The last plantation intellectual, Fleming called Hall. The way he was reared, and the way he saw himself and his region, thought one associate, did not include a place for such proud, increasingly militant black leaders as the Rev. King. Grover Hall could understand what King was doing and, having met him, could appreciate his intelligence; but nonetheless the agenda King represented remained alien to him, and he could never bring himself to like Martin King. He spoke more and more scathingly of him in private. King was, in sum, a threat to everything Hall knew and believed in.

Even though initially Hall urged an acceptance of the first-come, first-served segregated seating arrangement that the black leadership sought, he was soon to find himself allied with people he had once scorned as the implications of what was happening in Montgomery grew and as the black protest became a
movement.
For the situation did not allow a man who would be a great Southern editor to sit on the sidelines: It demanded a certain moral reckoning, as the Rev. Seay had so recently prophesized.

From the start, the
Advertiser
had been weak on the crisis. The first story, by the city editor, Joe Azbell, was written as if merely to let the white community know what the blacks were up to. He had been tipped off by E. D. Nixon. The story ran on page one by mistake. The publisher, Richard Hudson, had called in to order the story be placed inside, but it was too late. That gaffe greatly helped the black leadership publicize the boycott at first. Hudson was furious, and for a brief time Azbell’s job seemed to be on the line. Azbell later said that he caught more heat for that than anything else he had ever done, including putting the death of Hank Williams, the great country singer and songwriter, on the front page (death of so exceptional a man being considered less than page-one news by Hudson). Hall had not fired Azbell, but he made it clear that from then on, there was to be a great deal of caution in how the
Advertiser
reported the boycott. Caught at once between its responsibilities to inform and its fear that honest coverage might embolden an increasingly audacious black leadership, the paper tried to ignore the story as much as possible. Its first in-depth piece on the leaders of the boycott ran some six weeks into the crisis. Its lowest moment was the attempt to trick the black public. (Some seven years later, at the height of the civil rights movement, the
Advertiser
did not even have a reporter cover the great Selma-Montgomery march in which some 25,000 people marched toward the state capitol along with representatives from almost every major journalistic institution in the country. The
Advertiser
used an AP dispatch.)

But even though the two Montgomery papers were owned by the same company, they no longer had a monopoly on news. Just a year earlier, on Christmas Day 1954, WSFA-TV had gone on the air. There had been one other local channel, but it did no local programming. From the start, it was announced, there would be active local news and weather coverage—fifteen minutes of news, and fifteen minutes of weather each evening, something almost unheard of locally in those days. Indeed, there was said to be a hot new news director arriving from Oklahoma City. The news director (and star reporter as well, of course) was a young man named Frank McGee, then in his early thirties. He was, in fact, a very good reporter, and he immediately decided that the bus boycott was a very big story. Unlike his local print counterparts, he did not take the protest as a social affront. Rather, he realized it was the kind of high drama that lent itself exceptionally well to television. Nor was McGee, like his counterparts at the two Montgomery papers, part of the town’s white power establishment. He had grown up very poor in northern Louisiana and then in Oklahoma, and he sympathized with all poor
people, white and black. He liked to joke that his father, who worked the oil rigs, might have risen up out of some back country swamp, “and you never know what color there might be in our family if you went back far enough.” In an age when most of the nation’s top journalists seemed to be the product of the nation’s elite schools, Frank McGee had never gone to college and had a high school degree only because he finished a high-school equivalency course while in the service. He was not a particularly ideological man, but like most reporters of that era, he sympathized instinctively with the blacks, whose demands were so rudimentary. He was well aware of the dangers of covering the story, that the television journalists were vulnerable to attack. But although there were constant threats, both in the streets and over the phone, no one ever assaulted him. What surprised him most, he later would say, was that the local station managers never cramped his style, never told him what he could and could not put on the air. Part of the reason, he suspected, was that his bosses thought they needed all the excitement they could get in those early days in order to compete with the local newspapers. Besides, his bosses were too new to be part of the establishment.

Like many of his generation, he was aware that he was riding a very good story. That was particularly true as the whites blindly continued to resist and the story continued to escalate. The NBC network news show, also still in its infancy, started to use McGee with increasing regularity on the network, with a direct feed from Montgomery. It was not only a good story, in which ordinary Americans were asserting their demands for the most basic rights, but it was also helping McGee’s career, which for a young, tough-minded, ambitious reporter was almost an unbeatable combination. (Within a year of the bus settlement, Frank McGee became one of NBC’s first national network correspondents.) Events were soon beyond the ability of the
Advertiser
to control coverage. Montgomery was soon flooded with members of the national press, causing Grover Hall to comment that he was “duenna and Indian guide to more than a hundred reporters of the international press.” The more coverage there was, the more witnesses there were and the harder it was for the white leadership to inflict physical violence upon the blacks. In addition, the more coverage there was, the more it gave courage to the leadership and its followers. The sacrifices and the risks were worth it, everyone sensed, because the country and the world were now taking notice. What was at stake in the
Advertiser
’s coverage of Martin King and the Montgomery bus boycott was, the editors of that paper soon learned to their surprise, not King’s reputation but the
Advertiser
’s reputation.

The national press corps that had coalesced for the first time at the Emmett Till trial only a few months earlier returned in full strength, and its sympathies were not with Mayor Gayle, who appointed a committee to meet with the black ministers and added a White Citizens’ Council member to it, or with police commissioner Clyde Sellers, who publicly joined the Citizens’ Council in the middle of the struggle, saying, “I wouldn’t trade my Southern birthright for 100 Negro votes.” Rather, the national reporters were impressed with the dignity of Rosa Parks, the seriousness of the young Martin King, and the shrewd charm of Ralph Abernathy.

Ironically, it was the white leaders of Montgomery who first helped to create the singular importance of Martin King. Convinced that ordinary black people were being tricked and manipulated, they needed a villain. If they could weaken, discredit, or scare him, then their problems would be solved, they thought. Gradually, he became the focal point of the boycott. “I have the feeling,” Bayard Rustin, the nation’s most experienced civil rights organizer, told him at the time, “that the Lord has laid his hands on you, and that is a dangerous, dangerous thing.” Still, King had no illusions about his role: “If Martin Luther King had never been born this movement would have taken place,” he said early on. “I just happened to be there. You know there comes a time when time itself is ready for a change. That time has come in Montgomery and I have nothing to do with it.”

For a time the role was almost too much for him. The amount of hate mail was staggering, and it was filled with threats that he had to take seriously. His father pleaded with him to leave Montgomery and return to Atlanta. “It’s better to be a live dog than a dead lion,” Daddy King said. The pressure on King was such that he was getting little sleep, and he was truly afraid. He realized for the first time how sheltered his existence had been, how ill prepared he was to deal with the racial violence that was waiting just beneath the surface in the South. One night, unsure of whether to continue, he thought of all his religious training and he heard the voice of Christ: “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth’ ... the fatigue had turned into hope.” (That was, Grover Hall noted acidly, Martin King’s “vision in the kitchen speech.”)

The boycott continued. The white leadership was paralyzed; in late February, it cited an obscure state law prohibiting boycotts and indicted eighty-nine leaders, including twenty-four ministers and all the drivers of the carpools. The real target, however, was King. He happened to be in Nashville lecturing when the indictments were announced. Back in Montgomery, many of the other leaders were giving themselves up in groups to show their defiance. King flew
back to Montgomery by way of Atlanta. In Atlanta, his father pleaded with him not to go back. “They gon’ to kill my boy,” he told the Atlanta police chief. He brought over some of Martin’s oldest friends, including Benjamin Mays, the president of Morehouse, to help talk him out of returning. But Martin Luther King, Jr., was firm now. Not to return, to desert his friends at this point, would be the height of cowardice, he told them. “I have begun the struggle,” he said, “and I can’t turn back. I have reached the point of no return.” At that point his father broke down and began to sob. Benjamin Mays told him he was doing the right thing, and he returned to Montgomery.

On November 13, 1956, almost a year after the boycott had begun, King went to court to defend himself and the carpools against the local authorities who had declared it “a public nuisance.” King was hardly optimistic about the outcome in a Montgomery court, but suddenly, during a recess, an AP reporter handed him a note that included an AP bulletin reporting that the Supreme Court had judged the Montgomery bus-segregation law to be unconstitutional. The blacks had won. King, always aware of the need to include rather than exclude people and the need to be magnanimous in victory, spoke at a mass rally to point out this should not be viewed as victory of blacks over whites but as a victory for American justice and democracy. On December 21, the city prepared to desegregate its buses. An empty bus pulled up to a corner near Dr. King’s home. Martin Luther King, Jr., boarded it. The white driver smiled at him and said, “I believe you are Reverend King.” “Yes, I am,” Martin Luther King, Jr., said. “We are glad to have you with us this morning,” the driver said.

So the battle was won. But the war was hardly over. It was a beginning rather than an end; the boycott became the Movement, with a capital
M.
The blacks might have alienated the local white leadership, but they had gained the sympathy of the white majority outside the South. In the past the whites in Montgomery had been both judge and jury: Now, as the nation responded to the events there, they became the judged.

Grover Hall, a man of considerable abilities, became with the passage of time an ever sadder figure. He turned on the Movement and become more conservative. His humor became bitter, his manner a caricature of what it had once been. The peer esteem he valued so greatly inevitably dwindled as the nation’s consciousness on race
changed. He was replaced in 1963 as editor of the
Advertiser
when the paper changed hands. He went for a time to Virginia, where he replaced James Jackson Kilpatrick as chief editorial writer on the
Richmond News-Leader.
That job did not last long; he did not blend in as well in Richmond as he had at home, and his health was failing. He returned to Montgomery, where he became ever more conservative, becoming extremely close to George Wallace, virtually becoming Wallace’s resident intellectual during Wallace’s national campaigns.