Reviewed by David J. Garrow
From Southern Changes, Vol.
23, No. 2, 2001
REVIEWS
Diane
McWhorter, Carry Me Home, Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the
Civil Rights Revolution, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2001.
Charles
Marsh, The Last Days: A Son's Story of Sin and Segregation at the Dawn of a
New South, Basic Books, 2001.
S.
Jonathan Bass, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King, Jr., Eight
White Religious Leaders, and the "Letter from Birmingham Jail,"
Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2001.
Jack
E. Davis, Race Against Time: Culture and Separation in Natchez Since 1930,
Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2001.
Birmingham,
Alabama, has symbolized the violent intensity of southern white segregationist
opposition to the Black freedom struggle ever since city Public Safety Director
Eugene "Bull" Connor used snarling police dogs and high-pressure fire
hoses against Black demonstrators in April and May, 1963. When four young girls
were killed in a Ku Klux Klan terror bombing of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street
Baptist Church just four months later, the city's reputation was sealed for
decades to come. But Birmingham in the 1960s was far less unique than many
people nowadays imagine, and a quartet of new books reveals that Birmingham was
far more representative of the white South than most people would care to
remember.
Southern
recalcitrance at desegregating bus seats, lunch counters, and public facilities
ranging from restrooms to golf courses was virtually region-wide until
congressional passage of the public accommodations provisions in the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 finally resolved such issues once and for all.1 But even in the midst
of a region-wide revolt against Black activism and federal authority,
contemporary news coverage presented Birmingham as the southern archetype for
both barbarous law enforcement and unrestrained Klansmen.
Diane
McWhorter's Carry Me Home brings an intensely personal perspective to
Birmingham's year of infamy. As a ten-year-old white girl who had been born
into one of the city's most privileged families, "I knew nothing of what
was happening downtown." Even five years later, despite the fact that her
ne'er-do-well father presented himself to his family as an active Klan
sympathizer, "I was more worried that he was going to bring social shame
on the family than I was worried about the morality of what he was doing."2
Only
in her late twenties did McWhorter develop an active interest in what had
transpired in her hometown two decades earlier, and in part her interest grew
out of her fear that her father's professed friendship with Birmingham's most
notorious Klansman, Robert E. "Dynamite Bob" Chambliss, might mean
that her father had been personally involved in the city's most heinous crime.
"I know Chambliss didn't bomb the church because I was with him that
day" in September 1963, Martin McWhorter told his daughter in 1982.
But
McWhorter's family linkages extended not only downward into the Klan, but also
upwards into the board rooms of Birmingham's dominant corporations. Her two
generations-older cousin Sidney Smyer, once an extreme segregationist, was the
top white power broker who negotiated the interracial compromise that brought
the May 1963 mass demonstrations to an end. McWhorter's paternal grandfather, a
graduate of Harvard Law School, was a political intimate of the city's dominant
mid-century segregationist politician, state senator James A. Simpson, whose
grandson was one of McWhorter's private grade-school playmates but whose most
important descendant was his working-class political protegé Eugene
"Bull" Connor, whom Simpson vaulted into city office.3
McWhorter
is unduly tempted to argue that "My family was simply a metaphor for the
city around it," but her larger argument, that Birmingham's upper-class
leadership knowingly spawned and then for many years supportively condoned both
Bull Connor and Bob Chambliss, rightly pinpoints the core moral truth of why
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was successfully bombed.
"Dynamite
Bob's" career as a bomber of Black homes in previously all-white
neighborhoods began in 1947 under the active sponsorship of Bull Connor and
within a decade expanded to include the residences and churches of Black
activists such as attorney Arthur D. Shores and the Reverend Fred
Shuttlesworth. The city's new nickname of "Bombingham" was the most
visible evidence both of Chambliss's success and of his seeming immunity from
criminal prosecution. McWhorter does a commendable job of describing how the
Birmingham Klan's "vigilante spirit" was a direct outgrowth of the
similar tactics that the city's industrialists had employed against union
organizers in previous decades, but the heavy-handed editing that was deployed
to trim Carry Me Home to its present length has created some gaping
holes in McWhorter's narrative; between her first and second chapters her story
simply jumps from 1938 to 1948, with the intervening years apparently discarded
on some editor's floor.
McWhorter's
history jumps back and forth between Birmingham's Black activists and their
Klan and law enforcement opponents. Her Civil Rights Movement segments are
largely derivative of previously published accounts, and her desire both to
appropriately elevate the importance of Fred Shuttlesworth and to unnecessarily
denigrate the role of Martin Luther King, Jr., is rather passé in light of
several other recent books on Birmingham's civil rights history, although these
books were released rather late in the process of McWhorter's writing.4
Carry
Me Home's detailed treatment of
Birmingham's murderous Klansmen is more fresh and original, and is drawn from
local and federal law enforcement files that have long been available at the
Birmingham Public Library Archives and from McWhorter's own interviews. But a
reader of these sections of McWhorter's book must remain at least somewhat
wary, as Carry Me Home makes too many readily visible factual or
interpretive errors for one to be able to accept McWhorter's accounts of less
well known events with complete faith. Future U. S. Attorney General Griffin B.
Bell was not "Georgia's Attorney General-elect" in 1958, as McWhorter
tells her readers; indeed an atrocious racist, Eugene Cook, held the job on a
non-stop basis from 1945 to 1965. And anyone knowledgeable about the
Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1955-56 will be surprised to learn from
McWhorter that New York-based civil rights activist Bayard Rustin "took
charge of the boycott" "[a]s soon as he arrived in Montgomery"
in February 1956.
Relying
on an FBI account of a 1963 interview with a Klansman regarding Governor George
C. Wallace's hope that desegregation of the University of Alabama could be
further postponed, McWhorter naively asserts that "An estimated 50,000
Klansmen were on standby to storm the university" if Wallace called for
assistance. Even in 1963, total Klan membership in Alabama and surrounding
states fell way short of that highly exaggerated figure. And, like others
before her, McWhorter gullibly repeats the utterly fallacious claim that FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover had a "taste for makeup and women's
clothing."5
McWhorter's
worst error of judgment by far occurs when she quotes the elderly Birmingham
civil rights attorney Arthur Shores as telling her in 1991 in what McWhorter
terms an "unguarded moment" that Bull Connor was "a good close
friend of mine." The statement is absurdly erroneous on its face, but only
in an endnote does McWhorter report and then breezily dismiss the fact that
Shores's daughter had warned her that her father "was suffering from
Alzheimer's." McWhorter's portrayal of Shores, whose home was bombed twice
in the fall of 1963, as a secret "Uncle Tom" is inexcusable, and her
ignorance of how well known was Shores's battle with Alzheimer's is
reportorially embarrassing.6
But
McWhorter does enrich our understanding of Bob Chambliss's Klan network and of
law enforcement efforts to gather evidence against him, especially from
informants within his own family. In 1977, when Chambliss was finally tried and
convicted for masterminding the fatal bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist
Church, the decisive surprise prosecution witness against him was his niece
Elizabeth "Libby" Hood Cobbs, who testified how both the day before
the bombing, and six days after it, Chambliss in her presence had uttered
remarks that explicitly incriminated himself in the crime.
Six
years after that trial, in a pioneering article in the New York Times
Magazine, Howell Raines revealed how Cobbs, who first spoke to the FBI a
month after the bombing, had not been the only member of Chambliss's family
cooperating with law enforcement.7 Indeed, as Raines
disclosed, Chambliss's own wife, Flora "Tee" Chambliss, who died in
1980, had also indirectly begun assisting the investigators soon after the
bombing. Tee's information was passed along by yet another female family
member, "Dale Tarrant," who had been working with law enforcement
prior to the bombing and who in the wake of it had also persuaded Libby Hood to
talk to the FBI.
But
Raines employed only the law enforcement pseudonym for "Dale
Tarrant," not her real name, a practice which Elizabeth Hood Cobbs also
followed in her important and emotionally powerful but unfortunately
little-known 1994 autobiography, Long Time Coming.8 In that book Libby
Cobbs foreshadowed a significant portion of Diane McWhorter's own analysis by
contending that Chambliss was "not a singular enigma" nor "a
freak of society" but instead was "a vigilante" who for
"many years . . . was applauded by those in power who could have, but did
not, stop him."9
McWhorter,
however, has gone beyond both Raines and Cobb by explicitly identifying
"Dale Tarrant" as Mary Frances Cunningham, one of Tee Chambliss's sisters.
Behind-the-scenes controversy over Cunningham's 1963 relationship with the law
enforcement officer to whom she was passing information, and over how
Cunningham on one occasion told investigators a spurious story, apparently in a
bungled effort to falsely attest to something that Tee Chambliss herself may
have witnessed, has kept Cunningham from ever testifying publicly about the
1963 tragedy. Today Cunningham lives quietly in Birmingham and refuses to speak
with journalists or historians.
McWhorter's
Carry Me Home is thus in the end a valuable book, but her attempt to
tell Birmingham's racial story through the prism of her own family is
unsuccessful. In large part it fails because McWhorter eventually and rather
reluctantly concludes that her father's claims of friendship with Chambliss and
his cohorts were simply braggadocio. McWhorter nonetheless wants to believe
that her father was doing something political during those years, that he
"was not simply looking for a noble excuse to get away from his family at
night," but readers may well conclude that her daddy was actually engaged
in far more prosaic pursuits.
McWhorter's
effort to come to terms with her memories of her father are mirrored in Charles
Marsh's The Last Days, an intimately personal memoir of a young white
boy's life in the Klan stronghold of Laurel, Mississippi, during the late
1960s. Marsh's father Bob was named pastor of Laurel's First Baptist Church in
mid-1967, just a few months before the federal criminal trial of eighteen white
men charged with conspiring to kill civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael
Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman in Neshoba County in the summer of 1964 got
underway in nearby Meridian. Perhaps the most notable of the defendants was
Mississippi Klan commander Sam Bowers, a Laurel resident who had ordered the
killings and who also had orchestrated other mayhem and bombings in and around
Laurel. Bowers's regular hangout was the Admiral Benbow Coffee Shop, and on
Sunday evenings, Marsh relates, Marsh's father would take the family to the
Admiral Benbow for dinner, where he would see Bowers sitting with his cohorts
at the counter. "I didn't know much at the time about what it meant to be
in the Klan, since my parents never said anything about it."
The
day Bowers's trial commenced, Marsh's father delivered a civic club luncheon
speech without feeling any need to mention what was a national, front page
story; as Marsh confesses, "the Neshoba murders and the trials were the
furthest thing from his mind." A month later, soon after Bowers and six
other defendants were found guilty, the home of one of Laurel's most prominent
Black ministers, the Reverend Allen Johnson, was bombed, and Marsh's father
joined with other local white clergy in a public statement condemning the
terrorism.
One
evening in early 1968, however, Reverend Marsh presented the Jaycee Man of the
Year Award to a local citizen named Clifford Wilson and heartily extolled
Wilson's civic virtues. Just one hour later Wilson was arrested as one of a
dozen of Bowers's Klansmen who had carried out a murderous January, 1966
firebombing assault on the home of Hattiesburg NAACP activist Vernon Dahmer,
who was fatally burned in the attack.
The
public ignominy of having honored Wilson just moments before he was taken into
custody for an infamous crime (for which he later was convicted) was more than
the Reverend Marsh could bear. An attempt to offer his apologies to a Black
Laurel minister resulted only in Reverend Marsh being told he was a cowardly
hypocrite, and following that experience, Marsh writes, "My father lost
his nerve. He despaired, broke down."
A
reader of The Last Days expects the story to culminate with the Reverend
Marsh becoming an explicit supporter of the Black freedom struggle, but no such
transformation ensues. That absence, coupled with Marsh's own inability to
criticize his father's failure, leaves The Last Days as a rather unsatisfying
book indeed. Four years ago, when Marsh's first book, God's Long Summer:
Stories of Faith and Civil Rights,10 was published, an
unusually personal "Charles Marsh Biography" enclosed with review
copies characterized Marsh's father as "a Southern Baptist preacher who
was instrumental in desegregating the church in the South." In the wake of
The Last Days, that assertion appears to be based more on wishful
thinking than on fact.
Yet
Marsh's childhood in Laurel was inescapably a searing experience. Five years
ago Marsh authored a stunningly superb magazine portrait of Klan leader Bowers
after successfully pursuing an interview with him,11 and a year later
Marsh devoted a full one-fifth of God's Long Summer to an erudite but
oddly even-handed treatment of Bowers's worldview.12 The following year
Bowers, who had served only six years in prison for his
Chaney-Schwerner-Goodman conviction, was found guilty of orchestrating Vernon
Dahmer's assassination and sentenced to life imprisonment.13
Thinking
back to his family's self-cloistered world at Laurel's First Baptist Church,
Marsh accurately confesses that the Klan's bombs "exploded in a separate world"
from that of white clergymen like Marsh's father. And Marsh's conclusion of
course applies not only to Laurel but to Birmingham as well, as a new study of
the eight white city clergymen whose public criticism of the Black community's
April 1963 demonstrations led Martin Luther King, Jr., to reply to them with
his "Letter from Birmingham Jail" tellingly demonstrates.
Anyone
puzzled as to whether the Birmingham of 1963 described in Jonathan Bass's Blessed
Are the Peacemakers is actually the same city as the one portrayed in Diane
McWhorter's Carry Me Home should be forgiven, for "Dynamite
Bob" Chambliss is mentioned only once by Bass, just as four of the eight
white clergy upon whom Bass focuses are entirely absent from McWhorter's
copious narrative. Bass rues how the eight clergymen have been "written
out of history and deemed irrelevant figures" who are remembered only as
"misguided opponents of Martin Luther King," but he is most eager to
rebut how "many misinformed northern liberals concluded that the eight
were reactionary spokesmen of the segregated South."
Bass
is willing to acknowledge that Birmingham's white clergy, like Charles Marsh's
father in Laurel, were utterly typical of southern white churchmen's silent
failure to acknowledge the moral justice of the Black freedom struggle. But
Bass's most serious problem lies in how at least two of his eight Birmingham
clergymen do indeed seem to have been reactionary advocates of racial
segregation. Alabama Episcopal Bishop Charles C. J. Carpenter "denounced
the 1954 Brown decision" and condemned the 1965 Selma to Montgomery
voting rights march as "a foolish business and sad waste of time." In
1965 an Episcopal clergy supporter of the movement called Carpenter a
"chaplain to the dying order of the Confederacy," and even Bass calls
Carpenter "hypocritical" and laments his "failure to comprehend
racial injustice."
Bass
also acknowledges that Methodist Bishop Nolan B. Harmon's "position on
segregation never evolved," but Bass is more outspoken in recognizing what
he terms Harmon's "outstanding contribution to Methodism" and in
repeatedly decrying the "crusading mentality and sense of moral
superiority of many white northerners." Regional pride and defensiveness
appear to inhibit the otherwise obvious and undeniable conclusion that on the
issue of racial justice, the "crusading" white northerners who came
South to support the movement simply were at that time more morally
perspicacious than their southern brethren.14
While
Bass, like McWhorter, wrongly seeks to dismiss the transformative impact of
Martin Luther King's involvement in Birmingham,15 the best sections of Blessed
Are the Peacemakers are those that describe how being among the recipients
of King's famous "Letter" did have a reformative if not
transformative effect upon some of the more moderate of the eight clergymen.
When Bass asked Methodist Bishop Paul Hardin, Jr., about King's Letter in 1992,
Hardin replied that "I think most of his arguments were right. White
ministers should have taken a more active role." And far and away the most
powerful and moving section of Bass's book is his treatment of Baptist Reverend
Earl Stallings, who welcomed Black worshippers into his First Baptist Church at
the height of the 1963 protest and who "publicly blamed Birmingham's white
churches for much of the climate of unrest in the city." Bass's account
makes one think that Earl Stallings was exactly the sort of southern Baptist
minister that Charles Marsh wishes Bob Marsh could have been.
The
extent to which Birmingham's Klansmen were in reality no more unique than
Birmingham's ministers is brought home by an especially impressive and
insightful study of Natchez, Mississippi, a small city whose bloody civil
rights history traditionally has received no more than a few pages' worth of
attention in even the most comprehensive accounts of the Mississippi movement.16 Jack E. Davis's Race
Against Time recounts how a new generation of Black activism emerged in
Natchez between 1963 and 1965, led not by ministers or professional people but
by two working-class employees of the Armstrong Tire and Rubber Co., George
Metcalfe and Wharlest Jackson. In mid-August of 1965 Metcalfe presented a
petition calling for school desegregation to the local school board, and eight
days later a KKK bomb exploded in his automobile, breaking two limbs and
permanently damaging one eye but otherwise remarkably leaving Metcalfe alive. Membership
in the local NAACP branch "increased tenfold" in the wake of the
attack, but local white officials remained as unresponsive as Bull Connor had
been in Birmingham. Eighteen months later, in early 1967, a car bomb targeted
Metcalfe's fellow activist, Wharlest Jackson, and this time the results were
fatal.
Over
the intervening three decades, millions of people have remembered the bombing
of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, but outside of Natchez few people other
than family members and a handful of historians have ever heard of Wharlest
Jackson. Davis notes how "no one has ever been arrested for the Metcalfe
and Jackson bombings," but Davis's conclusions about why white Natchez was
no more concerned about its less-heralded string of Klan terror bombings than
was white Birmingham echo the themes that pervade McWhorter's and Bass's books.
In Natchez, whites of all classes were responsible "for creating an
environment ripe for Klan terrorism," Davis writes. "When the black
churches burned, when the beatings escalated, and when the murders recurred,
silence dropped over the white community. . . . Perhaps most whites were too
'busy with their lives, trying to make a living,' as one white recalled, to pay
much attention."
And
just as in both Laurel and Birmingham, the white clergy was missing in action.
In 1963 two Natchez churchmen, Elton Brown and Summer Walters, had joined two
dozen other white ministers from across the state in publicly declaring that
Christianity "permits no discrimination because of race, color, or
creed," but that modest number of signatories left the courageous few so
easily targetable that two-thirds of them were driven from their churches. The
bottom line in Natchez, as in Birmingham and Laurel, was that local Klansmen
proved to be more civically influential than local churchmen. "White
southern Protestantism was unable to serve as a unifying bridge between the
races," Davis rightly concludes, "and in some cases perpetuated
rather than prevented racial violence."
Birmingham
was unique only in its notoriety, not in the murderousness of its Klansmen or
the pusillanimity of its preachers. And Davis's Race Against Time probes more
deeply than McWhorter, Marsh, or Bass as to why that was so. What both
energized southern Klansmen and immobilized white clergy was a
"fundamental fear of cultural commingling" between the two races
based upon a deep-seated white loathing of Black culture. "Associating
race with culture made the idea of race more real. The very idea of race took
sustenance from those everyday things considered the very stuff of
culture." Davis tellingly concludes that, to whites of all classes and in
all cities, "segregation was imperative, for in a fully open, commingling world,
whites feared that they themselves could descend into blackness." Race
Against Time does not discuss whether whites' expectation that
desegregation would allow aspects of Black culture to be absorbed into white
life indeed turned out to be quite correct, although not with all of the
doleful effects that whites had imagined. Only a region-wide African-American
uprising would show both the Klan and the clergy that racial equality would
enrich and liberate the white South, not harm it.
Endnotes
1. A new volume offers an admirable
account of the two constitutional test cases in which the U. S. Supreme Court
upheld Title II of the 1964 Act: Richard C. Cortner, Civil Rights and Public
Accommodations: The Heart of Atlanta Motel and McClung Cases (University
Press of Kansas, 2001). Katzenbach v. McClung, 379 U.S. 294 (1964),
involved a well-known Birmingham restaurant, Ollie's Barbecue, operated by one
Ollie McClung, and it continues in business today (albeit in a different
location) under the management of Ollie McClung, Jr.
2. McWhorter on National Public
Radio's "Weekend All Things Considered," April 22, 2001. When she
learned of Martin Luther King's assassination, "I remember thinking that
the problems of the South would be over now . . . I really thought that he had
caused all this trouble in the South. So that was-you know, I was pretty old by
then."
3. Bull Connor may not be quite as
infamous as we generally assume. See Carol Polsgrove, Divided Minds:
Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement. (W.W. Norton, 2001), p. 174:
"When Birmingham Police Chief Bull Durham unleashed his dogs and fire
hoses...."
4. Andrew M. Manis's biography, A
Fire You Can't Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham's Reverend Fred
Shuttlesworth (University of Alabama Press, 1999) is a superb portrait
which offers much information about the Birmingham movement that McWhorter has
been unable to fully incorporate. McWhorter's antipathy towards King resembles
the argument of Glenn T. Eskew's But for Birmingham: The Local and National
Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (University of North Carolina Press,
1997), which some historians have found highly unpersuasive. See for example
Adam Fairclough's review in Alabama Review, July 1999, pp. 229-32,
noting that "The most serious weakness of But for Birmingham is the
author's undisguised hostility towards Martin Luther King, Jr."
5. Athan G. Theoharis's J. Edgar
Hoover, Sex, and Crime: An Historical Antidote (Ivan R. Dee, 1995) is an
utterly comprehensive rebuttal of such claims by a highly knowledgeable
historian. The Hoover-as-cross-dresser image, which is regrettably widespread
in popular culture, falsely leads people to think of Hoover as a batty queen
rather than a viciously dangerous yet exceptionally skillful ideological
bureaucrat.
6. See for example an article by a
family friend who attended law school with Shores's grandson Arthur Shores Lee,
who "would mention with pride his grandfather, now crippled with
Alzheimer's." Paul South, "30 Years After Selma, We Must Continue to
March Against Hate," Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, March 12, 1995, p.
B1.
8. Elizabeth H. Cobbs/Petric J.
Smith, Long Time Coming: An Insider's Story of the Birmingham Church Bombing
that Rocked the World (Crane Hill Publishers, 1994). Long Time Coming went
virtually unreviewed in any print media. As the author's name itself signalled,
soon after her 1977 testimony against Chambliss, Cobbs underwent sex change
surgery and changed her name to Petric J. Smith. "Pete" Smith died in
1998 at age fifty-seven. See also Frank Sikora, Until Justice Rolls Down: The
Birmingham Church Bombing Case (University of Alabama Press, 1991), a book
lacking both source notes and bibliography, and which spoke erroneously of
"Gail Tarrant." Diane McWhorter gave the Sikora book an appropriately
dismissive brief notice in the New York Times Book Review, September 22, 1991,
p. 53.
9. 9 Cobbs also said of Chambliss
that "At least two of my young cousins were victims of his inappropriate
fondling, and a male cousin told me, 'I think he has tried to molest every
child in the family-boys and girls." Long Time Coming, p. 54.
Interestingly enough, similar allegations have been voiced against Bobby Frank
Cherry, Chambliss's still-surviving Klan colleague whom most investigators
believe personally planted the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bomb, by both
his stepdaughter, Gloria Ladow, and his granddaughter, Teresa Cherry Stacy. See
Lee Hancock, " '63 Bombing Suspect Says Kin Are Lying; He Denies Bragging
of Role in Death of 4 Girls During Civil Rights Struggle," Dallas
Morning News, July 3, 1999, p. A1, Pamela Colloff's superb article on
Cherry and his family, "The Sins of the Father," Texas Monthly,
April 2000, pp. 132ff, and Carlton Stowers, "The Good Neighbor," Dallas
Observer, May 25, 2000. Indicted in May 2000 along with fellow surviving
Klansman Tommy Blanton for the Sixteenth Street bombing, Cherry's trial was
severed from Blanton's, and postponed indefinitely, on the grounds that Cherry
allegedly no longer possesses the mental capacity to assist in his own defense.
See Kevin Sack, "A Bitter Alabama Cry: Slow Justice is No Justice," New
York Times, April 13, 2001, p. A12 and Sack, "Church Bombing Figure
Found to Be Incompetent," New York Times, July 17, 2001, p. A12.
Blanton was found guilty after a remarkably quick trial. See Kevin Sack,
"Ex-Klansman is Found Guilty in '63 Bombing," New York Times,
May 2, 2001, p. A1.
12. Marsh's treatment of the Klansman
includes apparent regard for what he terms "the level of theological
realism in Bowers's analysis." God's Long Summer, p. 80.
13. Rick Bragg, "Jurors Convict
Former Wizard in Klan Murder," New York Times, August 22, 1998, p.
A1.
14. In 1965 in Alabama alone, two
visiting white clergymen, Episcopalian Jonathan M. Daniels and Unitarian James
J. Reeb, were killed by white racist assailants. See Charles W. Eagles's
excellent Outside Agitator: Jon Daniels and the Civil Rights Movement in
Alabama (University of North Carolina Press, 1993), and Duncan Howlett, No
Greater Love: The James Reeb Story (Harper & Row, 1966).
15. "Meaningful change" in
Birmingham, Bass contends, "occurred only at a gradual and moderate
pace," and "inevitably, it was [local] citizens, both black and
white, and not Martin Luther King and the SCLC [King's organization], that
brought about the real transformation of the city." Blessed Are the
Peacemakers, p. 226.
16. See John Dittmer's excellent Local
People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (University of
Illinois Press, 1994), pp. 353-62.
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