Andrew McDowd “Mac” Secrest, September 15, 1923-April 17, 2010
As the
voice of his newspaper, as the conscience of his community, his state, his
country and even the world, and as a federal mediator for civil rights,Mac
Secrest chose roles that—literally and figuratively—set him apart.
By Tom
Scheft
Part 5
Confronting Strom Thurmond
One of the loudest voices in the
preservation of segregation was Strom Thurmond, who ran for President as a
member of the States Rights Democratic Party in 1948. Although beaten handily,
garnering less than three percent of the popular vote, he enjoyed a long tenure
(1954-2003) as a senator from South Carolina. He was against all civil rights
legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Civil Rights Act of
1964. While many people felt he moderated his views in the 1970s, he never
offered any apology for his previous positions. After his death, earlier rumors
that he was the father of a Black child born out of wedlock were substantiated.
At age 22 he had a sexual relationship with his family’s African-American maid,
who was 16 at the time; she gave birth to a daughter. While he had not claimed
the child publicly during his lifetime, it was reported that he provided some
financial support and paid for her college education.
Mac dealt with Thurmond when the senator
visited Cheraw, S.C., in 1967 on a mission to convince local leaders to form
committees that would root out and censor any print materials in schools or
public libraries that “even implied acceptance of integration and thus posed a
threat to ‘our Southern way of life.’ ” Thurmond was invited to be the speaker
at an annual meeting of a medical association and a legal association. As a
representative of Cheraw’s newspaper, Mac was invited and given a seat on the
dais:
I
listened, took notes, wrote an objective story, quoting the Senator carefully.
Then I put on my editor’s hat and wrote an opinion piece titled “A Profile in
Extremism.” To add insult to injury, that article won first place for editorial
writing in the annual South Carolina Press Association contest. Outgoing
governor Donald Russell made the presentation at the banquet in Columbia which
the Senator attended.
Mac encountered Thurmond a year later, after they
shared a flight to Washington, D.C.:
Seeing a familiar
face but clearly unable to place me, Senator Thurmond asked if I would like a
lift into town. “Why, thank you, sir,” I replied. “That is very kind of you.”
To satisfy his curiosity, I identified myself. The Senator stopped abruptly,
peered into my face, shook his head and snapped, “Forget it,” leaving me to get
to Bethesda the best way I could.
While acknowledging that Thurmond’s career was
“remarkable” in terms of its longevity, Mac’s assessment of the Senator’s character
was much considerably more critical:
His defenders say
he mellowed and changed with the times. Why, he even eventually appointed black
people to his staff. But the record will show he was well past fifty when he
first went to Washington, nearing sixty when conducted a one-man filibuster
against a pallid civil rights bill in 1958, and nearing seventy when he
launched his tirade against the First Amendment in Cheraw and sought to
intimidate not only his black constituents but also white progressives with
whom he disagreed. It was a conversion too late in the coming ever favorably to
impress me.
While Mac credits Thurmond for finally
acknowledging his daughter and “lending her affection and emotional support,”
he also describes the Senator’s monetary support as “meager.” Ultimately, Mac’s
opinion of the man remained unchanged: “He was a hypocrite, and he placed his
political ambitions above the good of his progeny and of his country.”
Mediating The Events
in Selma
In June 1964, Mac went to Washington, D.C., to
co-chair a task force that would lead to the formation of the Community
Relations Service, an organization advocated by Sen. Lyndon Baines Johnson. In
the two years Mac worked with the agency, his job was to “settle racial
disputes and disagreements all over the country.” In doing so, his journey
would take him to Selma, Alabama in January 1965, where Mac notes he played “a
small role in an event that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Acts of
1965 and 1966.”
Selma had been targeted by Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr. for voting restrictions, because less than two percent of the Black
population was registered to vote, but in addition to that problem, there were
other concerns Mac mentions in his book: police brutality under then sheriff
Jim Clark, unequal protection of the law, denial of Black representation on
municipal ruling bodies, the refusal by the all-White local government to obey
provisions in the recently passed Civil Rights Act, separate but unequal
schools, and lack of economic opportunity. Joining King were the Southern
Christian Leadership Congress (SCLC), the Student Non-violent Coordinating
Committee (SNICK), the national NAACP, and the Congress of Racial Equality
(CORE). Mac notes that Malcolm X would occasionally visit, although he was in
disagreement with King’s non-violent approach.
In Selma, Blacks had routinely been denied the
right to vote based on unfair testing practices. All one has to do is try
taking one of those “tests” to experience the awkward, convoluted syntax; the
vague, puzzling wording that often included legalese; and the uncommon topics
that would leave most anyone perplexed, frustrated and angered. You can find a
number of examples on the Internet.
King wanted to march to Montgomery, Alabama, to
bring this injustice before the nation and to force an end to the
discriminatory practice. Gov. George Wallace refused to issue a permit for the
march, citing a threat to public safety. Passage across the Edmund Pettus
Bridge was denied by highway patrolmen.
Mac and his colleagues with the CRS tried to reduce
the tension and enlist the aid of Alabama residents, but as he recalled: “I
possessed no carrots, in the way of federal funds, to bribe and sticks, in the
form of legal authority, to coerce anybody to do anything.”
Mac depicts a Sunday in March when marchers—“now
thousands strong, white as well as black with a strong contingent of religious
leaders”—were confronted by a police barricade:
Sheriff Clark’s
men moved forward. The posse, riding their horses and cracking their whips like
Russian Cossacks on some pogrom, attacked the marchers. Blackjacks came out. So
did police dogs. Some cattle prods came into use. The marchers—once a primarily
middle-class crowd, with a sprinkling of intellectual, religious, media and
political elitists among them—became a disorganized and demoralized crowd, running
helter-skelter for their lives. Hundreds were injured, some seriously. John
Lewis had his head laid open. Nuns, other women, and children were among the
casualties. This scene, broadcast on television Friday night, was flashed around
the world.
Mac returned home that night. For two months he’d
been away from his family, except for one weekend. The pressure of the job had
left him physically and mentally drained. As he recounts in his book, he had
been home when the head of CRS called and told him President Johnson wanted him
back in Selma the next day. When Mac returned, he saw the crowd of activists
had grown, and Dr. King was proclaiming the march would take place on Tuesday.
The opposition readied its forces:
Al Lingo, [a
career Alabama highway patrolman, director of the Alabama Department of Public
Safety, and] long-time nemesis of the civil rights movement, lined up hundreds
of highway patrol cars to block passage across the bridge and was authorized to
use whatever force necessary to prevent its crossing. The struggle intensified in
Selma itself and in surrounding rural counties where an occasional body was
found dead in associated conflict. Clark’s posse was ready. So were Baker’s
police.
While tension remained at the breaking point,
Secrest, Gov. Collins (the CRS director), Andrew Young, and Dr. King met.
Earlier, Mac had spoken with Kenneth Goodson, a Methodist bishop in Birmingham,
and urged him to speak with Gov. Wallace and Lingo about restraining the
police:
Young and I met
with march leaders and urged them to agree to halt voluntarily, once they had
made the symbolic move across the bridge. If that were achieved, an agreement
about a march on Montgomery later would be easier to get. The civil rights
leaders agreed. They were worn out. The governor agreed. He and his troopers
were, too. No one really wanted a repeat on Tuesday of the hateful thing that
had occurred the preceding Friday.
Now all Andy and I
had to do was to get Gov. Collins and Dr. King’s approval. We presented our
plan. The governor and Clark and their men would move back several hundred
yards and allow the marchers to cross the bridge. The protesters would in turn
stop voluntarily once they had make their symbolic march, proclaim victory, and
then return to Selma to lay further plans. We got each side to initial the
agreements I had scribbled off on the back of an old envelope.
King conferred with
Young. Collins conferred with me. Then we swapped conferees. “Do you really
think I ought to do this, Secrest?” Dr. King asked me. Yes. I did. Collins
asked the same thing of Young. Yes, he did. Together Young and I, given a
police escort through the crowd, rode back to Governor Wallace. A temporary
solution had been found. Before the end of that month, a permanent one was
reached and the march on Montgomery was held, with Peter, Paul, and Mary leading
the crowd and a host of celebrities in singing “We Shall Overcome” from the
Alabama Capitol steps.
Collins and I flew
back to Washington that night. The President asked us to come to the White
House to thank us for what we had done to “save the nation from another day of
shame.” With astonishing speed the Congress passed and the President signed a
new Voting Rights Act which occasioned an eventual political revolution in the
South and a realignment of the Democratic and Republican parties.
Mac remained in Selma for a while. With the city no
longer a public media stage, the national civil rights groups departed. But
both the struggle for civil rights and the violence remained:
Upon my return to
Selma, a white Unitarian minister, the Reverend Mr. Reeb, was set upon by a
group of young white toughs and beaten so severely he died the next day. It was
my unhappy duty to meet his family at the Montgomery Airport and take them to
Selma and to express the government’s regrets.
A little later a
young white woman—Viola Liuzzo—was shot to death in her car by a group of white
men as she ferried still more civil rights activists. In that car was an F.B.I.
informant who led to the arrest of the killers. I attended the trial of the
young gunman, named Collie, some weeks later.
In offering his view of the historic events in
Selma, Mac explains how the emotional tone was constantly shifting daily:
One hour I might
be on the phone, asking a district or appellate federal judge how to interpret
his latest order. The next I may have been measuring the distance from a store
window to the protesters on the sidewalk and chalking it off, as contesting and
protesting antagonists squared off and shouted at each other.
Typical of Mac, in recounting the
tensions, tragedies and triumphs of Selma, he also juxtaposes two situations in
which he makes fun of himself. On one occasion, he oversleeps, skips washing
his face and brushing his teeth, hastily dresses, slaps on his hairpiece, and
reports for duty at a scene where a protest is scheduled. He arrives before
anything has started. In heat and humidity of a typical Southern day, Mac
starts to sweat:
As
perspiration accumulated under my hair piece, which needed fresh tape, beaded
up on my forehead, and began to roll down my face, I kneeled down to the
sidewalk to illustrate a point with some chalk. As I did so, off slid the hair
piece.
Before Mac could retrieve it, his
partner grabbed it away and flaunted it before the assembled crowd, which
responded with laughs and taunts. Mac sums up the event as “an unusual but
effective way to break tension and get the negotiation process started again.”
He describes another embarrassing event
that resulted from his “irregular hours” in Selma. The long days (often
followed by evening activities like religious rallies), the haphazard eating
schedule, and the constant standing had led him to develop hemorrhoids, which
Mac soothed with Preparation H. While at a street meeting, Mac, his back
suddenly aching, bent over to relieve the pain, and his Preparation H tube fell
to the ground. Again, his partner seized the moment:
He
grabbed the container, danced around before the crowd, and shouted, “Oh look
what I’ve found! Did somebody lose this ointment? Anybody in pain and need
relief?” Again tension gave way to laughter. I had long since passed
embarrassment.
Funny stories, sure. But why include
them in your memoir—especially so closely linked to such a serious, significant
historic event? Part of the answer, I believe, gives us an understanding of and
appreciation for Mac, the human being. In writing about himself, he is not
afraid to share with the reader the good, the bad, and the ugly of life—even at
his own expense. As he did in life, he emerges from the pages of his book as genuine—a
“round” character (as they say in literature classes), not some sanitized
public relations sketch. Typically, the secure person can make fun of him- or
herself, largely because that person understands our follies are not ours
alone. Our faults and faux pas are
hardly unique to us. We share them as human beings. They help connect us.
Mac’s self-awareness, his understanding
of what it means to be human, and his embrace of his own human frailties as
people made Mac both an effective journalist and an effective mediator. He was
motivated through understanding, not disdain or hatred. His tools were not
weapons. He used words—on the page and from his mouth, by way of his heart and
his mind. He did so with eyes wide open. He was no Pollyanna. He was not naïve.
As a student of history, he, like Dr. King, saw the virtue and the practicality
of non-violent protest, the power of reason, and the possibility of people
changing for the better. And he did this living humbly for a cause.
Next Issue: In Part 6, we conclude
our profile of Mac Secrest with reflections by his niece, journalist Bella
English of The
Boston Globe, and his son David, a former journalist with The Atlanta Constitution. We also revisit
the concept of the hero and how it relates to us as individuals.
Reference
