Alabama Voices:
Old civil rights journeys recalled in new book
http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/article/20101209/OPINION0101/12080375/1006/OPINION
December 9, 2010
By Wayne Greenhaw
During the writing of my latest book, "Fighting the Devil in Dixie:
How Civil Rights Activists Took on the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama," I
felt as though I was once again sitting with old friends who were
telling me their secrets.
Ever since I was a reporter in the 1960s in Alabama, covering civil
rights from various points of view, sitting in the governor's office
and listening to George Wallace rant and rave, and meeting with Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. in the conference room of the Albert Pick
Motel, I had an up-front and friendly place from which to write about
what was happening.
In "Fighting the Devil" I write about white Birmingham attorney
Charles Morgan Jr., who became a great friend to journalists from
across the world. I sat up late at night and drank whiskey with Chuck
Morgan and listened to his tales of bringing equal justice to the
South. He was proud of his work and I was proud to be his friend.
Later we sat on a pier behind his house on the Choctawhatchee Bay at
Destin, Fla., and he recalled what he'd done, how he'd done it, and
who did what to whom.
Another old friend was African-American attorney Orzell Billingsley,
who sat in my apartment in an old antebellum house in Montgomery and
told stories about his days of driving through Alabama's Black Belt
and filing lawsuits with other black lawyers. When he returned to
Alabama in the mid-1950s from law school Up North, he said, he was
one of only five black lawyers practicing in the state. Although he
joked about some of the situations he and others faced, there was a
sharp edge to his humor. He cut sharply to the truth.
The history of the civil rights movement in Alabama is dark, often
dreary, filled with morose happenings, like the night three Ku Klux
Klansmen took young Willie Edwards Jr., a truck driver for Winn-Dixie
supermarket wholesalers, on a ride to a rural bridge, where they made
him jump. Months later his body was found floating in the Alabama
River. I make no bones about the way I felt and feel about these happenings.
This book's roots go back to long before I wrote my first novel, "The
Golfer," published by J.B. Lippincott in 1967. Growing up in
Tuscaloosa, one of our neighbors operated a service station down the
road. His son was the Grand Dragon of the United Klans of America,
Robert Shelton, who distinguished himself by wearing a red silk gown
with a fire-breathing dragon stitched across the chest. In "Fighting"
there is a photo of him in his get-up, smoking a cigarette while a
huge cross burns in the background. I saw Bobby many times in his
outfit, along with my own distant cousins in their white gowns and hoods.
In February 1956, only days before my 16th birthday, I was riding
home from work at The Tuscaloosa News, where I wrote short paragraphs
describing Friday night football games. On University Avenue the
photographer with whom I was riding pulled to the side because a mob
was filling the broad street. He got out and began shooting pictures
of the crowd protesting the integration of the University of Alabama
by a young black woman named Autherine Lucy. The mob was screaming,
"Hey, hey, ho, ho, Autherine's got to go!"
When a car approached, the mob surrounded it. They beat the roof and
hood with sticks. They climbed onto the bumpers and jumped up and
down. As I watched I saw the face of a small black boy in the back
window. His frightened face stayed with me. Even today, I can see
him. His image watched over every word that I wrote in this book.
Later, a scrawny little white woman approached me on a downtown
street in Prattville. I had gone there to cover a civil rights
demonstration. That day I carried a new camera with me. I wanted to
get a shot of Stokely Carmichael, who was scheduled to appear.
As I walked down the sidewalk, the woman stepped up to me with a
large purse, swinging it over her head. She hit me in the shoulder
and shouted, "You a Yankee photographer, down here causing trouble!"
When she swung again, I covered my head. Finally a policeman stopped her.
Years later, after Wallace was shot by an assassin and was paralyzed,
I sat at his bedside in his suburban home and listened again. He
talked about how he had been wrong to promise "Segregation forever!"
in his first inaugural address. He had grown, he said, to respect
many black people, especially leaders like John Lewis, Jesse Jackson
and Edgar Daniel Nixon, a Pullman porter who'd preached equal rights
for years before the bus boycott.
Before Wallace ran for his fourth term as governor, he was wheeled
into the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, where he asked
the black congregation to forgive him. In the election he received
the majority of black votes to beat his opposition.
Through all of this I watched as local attorneys Morris Dees and Joe
Levin Jr. put together the Southern Poverty Law Center. I wrote about
these two young men changing the social geography of Alabama,
integrating the YMCA, high school athletics, state troopers, and
bringing the Klan to its knees financially after filing suits in
north and south Alabama on behalf of poor black clients while
expanding their legal reach across the nation.
When my good friend Bill Baxley became state attorney general in
1970, I knew he had been haunted by the deaths of four little girls
in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in September
1963, while he was a student in law school. No one had ever been
prosecuted for that crime, and Baxley was determined to find the
perpetrator. As his chief investigator Baxley hired Jack Shows, who
with his partner had investigated burnings, bombings and shootings in
the mid-1950s during and after the boycott in Montgomery. After
staying with the case and finally prying information from the FBI
that J. Edgar Hoover had hidden, Baxley brought to trial and
convicted Klansman Robert "Dynamite Bob" Chambliss in a Birmingham courtroom.
It was with a burning desire that I tackled these old cases, not
discovering them for the first time but I hope bringing them to life
with passion and purpose.
--
Wayne Greenhaw is a Montgomery writer. He will sign copies of
"Fighting the Devil in Dixie: How Civil Rights Activists Took on the
Ku Klux Klan in Alabama" from 4-6 p.m. Dec. 14 at Capitol Book & News.
.
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