Many Birminghams: Taking Segregationists Seriously

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.

7. Howell Raines, "The Birmingham Bombing,"New York Times Magazine, July 24, 1983, pp. 12ff.

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.

10. (Princeton University Press, 1997).

11. Charles Marsh, "Rendezvous With the Wizard," Oxford American, October/November 1996, pp. 22-32.

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.

 

U.S. Supreme Court Considers Critical Issues of Racial Justice

The Supreme Court heard two cases during this term and agreed to review another next term that may result in setbacks for voting rights and affirmative action. One case involves voting rights, another focuses on affirmative action. The third case will consider "political structure Equal Protection" which prohibits state and local governments from imposing special burdens on minority groups' participation in the electoral process.

Voting Rights: Shelby County v. Holder

On February 27, 2013, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Shelby County v. Holder. The case involves a challenge to the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). Jurisdictions "covered” under Section 5 of the VRA must obtain authorization from the Justice Department before they can change their voting procedures. This requirement was  imposed on jurisdictions with long histories of severe voting abuses. In 2006 Section 5 was extended for 25 more years.

Shelby County claims the legislative record of the VRA's 2006 reauthorization lacks sufficient evidence of systematic voting discrimination in covered jurisdictions. The argument is conditions now are not what they were in the 1960s; that Section 5 is unconstitutional because it is no longer "congruent and proportional" to the problem it seeks to cure.

 In a 2009 case, Nw. Austin Mun. Util. Dist. No. One v. Holder, Chief Justice John Roberts declared the "exceptional conditions prevailing in certain parts of the country justified extraordinary legislation" in 1965, but those barriers no longer exist. Justice Clarence Thomas agreed. This prompted several challenges  to the VRA including this litigation.

In Shelby County the lower courts reviewed the evidence on which Congress relied when it reauthorized Section 5 in 2006. That evidence included thousands of pages of testimony, reports and data regarding racial disparities in voter registration, voter turnout, and electoral success; the nature and number of Section 5 objections; judicial preclearance suits and Section 5 enforcement actions. This included some old tactics and many new, "second generation" violations that are disenfranchising minority voters.

This record would ordinarily be sufficient to affirm the validity of Section 5. The well-established principle that the Supreme Court should "invalidate a congressional enactment only upon a plain showing that Congress has exceeded its constitutional bounds." That is hardly the case with Section 5. However, during the oral arguments Justice Antonin Scalia dismissed this doctrine saying “[t]his is not the kind of question you can leave to Congress.” He also disparaged Section 5 as a "racial entitlement."

Pronouncements like these suggest the case could end with a majority striking down Section 5, although it is difficult to predict which side Justice Anthony Kennedy will join. Unlike Roberts, and Thomas, Kennedy may not be willing to strike down an act of Congress that does not plainly exceed the powers granted to Congress by the Fifteenth Amendment. His vote will likely determine the outcome of the case.

 
Affirmative Action: Fisher v. University of Texas

On October 10, 2012, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas. The challengers in Fisher are Texas residents who were denied admission to the class entering the University of Texas (UT) in 2008. They contend UT’s race-conscious admissions policies are unconstitutional because they go beyond promoting the educational benefits of diversity and seek to achieve a student body that reflects the of State of Texas' racial composition. This, they claim, is an unconstitutional effort to achieve racial balance.  

The challengers also argue that Texas did not give adequate consideration to race-neutral alternatives. Their other argument is minorities have already achieved a "critical mass" under the "Top Ten Percent" law, making additional efforts to promote diversity unnecessary.

Texas' admissions process divides applicants into three groups: Texas residents, domestic nonresidents, and international students. Students compete for admission against other students in their respective pools. Texas residents are allotted ninety percent of all available seats.

Under Texas' Top Ten Percent law, students with grades in the top tenth percentile of their high schools' graduating classes are automatically admitted. Applicants who are not in the top ten percent compete for admission based on their academic and personal achievement indices. The academic index is based on SAT scores and grades.

The personal index is based on a score awarded for of two required essays and a "personal achievement score" which represents a "holistic" evaluation of the applicant’s file. Race is considered as one element of the personal achievement score, but that is only one component of the total personal academic index.

To survive "strict scrutiny," the legal standard that applies to policies that classify on the basis of race, the government must have a "compelling justification" for doing so and the means chosen must be "narrowly tailored" to achieving a legitimate governmental interest. In 2003 in Grutter v. Bollinger, the Supreme Court applied strict scrutiny to affirm the constitutionality of University of Michigan's affirmative action admissions program.

Anthony Kennedy dissented from the outcome in Grutter because he believed Michigan's admission program was not narrowly tailored, but he made clear his support for efforts to promote student body diversity. He wrote "there is no constitutional objection to the goal of considering race as one modest factor among many others to achieve diversity."

In a 2007 case, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District, Justice Kennedy cast the deciding vote in a decision that struck down diversity plans for elementary and high schools in which race could be a “tie breaker” in determining who was assigned to a given school. Kennedy concluded that the assignment plan was not narrowly tailored but he wrote a separate opinion in which he affirmed his belief that governments can use race-conscious policies designed to promote diversity.

What Kennedy does not seem to like are selection procedures that allow race to be the deciding factor in who is admitted and who is not. At UT an admission decision could be different when applicants have identical attributes except for race. In such a case, race could be the deciding factor.

The final outcome in Fisher is difficult to predict. Since Justice Elena Kagan recused herself  only eight justices will participate. Four of them, Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Chief Justice John Roberts have made it clear that they are opposed to all forms of affirmative action. This means the outcome depends on Kennedy, who has been unwilling to go that far.

A 4-4 tie would leave the Fifth Circuit’s decision upholding affirmative action intact. Another possible outcome would be similar to Parents Involved with Kennedy voting to strike down UT’s program as not narrowly tailored, but supporting affirmative action policies in which race is not the deciding factor. If Kennedy does not change his outlook on diversity, UT could lose but in a decision that would not outlaw all forms of affirmative action.

Political Structure Equal Protection: Schuette v. Michigan Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action

On March 5, 2013, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Schuette v. Michigan Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action. This case does not address the constitutionality of affirmative action policies. This is a political structure Equal Protection claim. The question in this case is whether a State Constitutional Amendment prohibiting the consideration of race in university admission decisions violates the Equal Protection Clause because it imposed a special burden on racial minorities in the electoral process.

The Michigan Civil Rights Initiative ("Proposal 2") amended the Michigan Constitution to prohibit "preferential treatment to any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin." A civil action was filed claiming that Amendment impermissibly altered the political process in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Relying on Hunter v. Erickson (1969) and Washington v. Seattle Sch. Dist. No. 1 (1982), the Sixth Circuit held that Proposal 2 imposed a special burden on racial minorities in the electoral process that is not borne by other groups.

The Equal Protection Clause prohibits measures that require racial minorities to overcome more formidable obstacles to achieve their electoral objectives than those that apply to other groups. The "political structure" doctrine prohibits the government from creating an electoral structure that purports to treat all individuals as equals but distorts governmental processes in a way that imposes special burdens on the ability of minority groups secure beneficial legislation.

In Hunter v. Erickson, the Akron City Council enacted a fair housing ordinance prohibiting racial discrimination. The ordinance was subsequently amended to require approval by a majority of the City's voters before it could become effective. Under the city's normal legislative process, an ordinance took effect at specified time after its passage unless 10 percent of the electorate petitioned for a referendum. The challenged amendment made fair housing  ordinances more difficult to enact than other types of housing measures. The Court ruled that the amended ordinance violated the Fourteenth Amendment because it imposed a special burden on racial minorities that was not placed on other groups.

A similar conclusion was reached in Washington v. Seattle Sch. Dist. No. 1. In that case a statewide initiative was adopted to terminate mandatory busing to promote school desegregation. The initiative removed the authority of school boards to address racial problems in a way that burdened minority interests. Those favoring the elimination of de facto school segregation were required to seek relief  from the state legislature or from the statewide electorate. The authority over all other student assignment decisions remained with the local school board. The Supreme Court held the initiative violated the Equal Protection Clause because it imposed a special burden on racial minorities in the electoral process that was not borne by other groups.

The same reasoning was applied in Shuette. The Sixth Circuit ruled that when Proposal 2 amended Michigan's Constitution, it removed the authority to adopt affirmative action policies from Michigan’s universities and placed it at the state constitutional level. Proponents of race-conscious admissions policies are now required to obtain the approval of the Michigan electorate and, if successful, they must persuade university officials to adopt affirmative action policies. Proponents of other admissions policies need only obtain the support of the state's universities. This different and more difficult route for Michigan's racial minorities means they do not have an equal opportunity to participate in the policy making process.

 

This case will be decided during the next Supreme Court term which will begin on the first Monday in October in 2013. Given the record of the Roberts Court and Civil Rights, I am not optimistic. Identical challenges to Proposition 209, which outlawed affirmative action in California, were  rejected by the Ninth Circuit a number of times including, most recently, in Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action v. Brown (9th Cir., 2012). The Ninth Circuit found that Proposition 209 was constitutional because it addressed, in a neutral fashion, race-related and gender-related policies. The Court reasoned that Proposition 209 prohibited preferential treatment, not equal protection rights. The Supreme Court will probably take the same approach in Shuette.

About the Author

Leland Ware, a member of the Board of the Southern Regional Council, is Louis B. Redding Chair and Professor for the Study of Law and Public Policy at the University of Delaware.He is the author of numerous publications, and he served as co-editor of the recently-published volume, Choosing Equality: Essays and Narratives on the Desegregation Experience.

John Inscoe Receives Lillian Smith Book Award for 2012

John C. Inscoe is the Albert B. Saye Professor of History and University Professor at the University of Georgia, the Secretary Treasurer of the Southern Historical Association, and editor of The New Georgia Encyclopedia. He has published several works, Mountain Masters, and The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: Race, Ware and Remembrance in the Appalachian South.  But the book which attracted the attention of our jurors is Writing the South through the Self: Explorations in Southern Autobiography.

 

In a time when people tend to discount the regional authenticity of the South, Dr. Inscoe has let Southerners, African, Native, and European Americans speak for themselves. In the process they define themselves as being from distinct Southern regions and cultures. And who better to tell about who and what those are.  This endeavor relates so well to Lillian Smith’s quest to be heard as a Southern woman and human person. As each writer strives to give voice to self and region, we have to acknowledge Dr. Inscoe’s contributions to interethnic relationships and their importance in an ever-expanding world.

 

In highlighting the autobiographers’ establishing their voices and identities, Dr. Inscoe makes an important addition to showing the many faces of an identifiable South.  Teaching a course with this volume as textbook, one would move well beyond the duality of WEB DuBois’ dictum of 1903. Through the writings of the present authors, we gain the knowledge to move ahead in the changing South. And contemporary America which is exactly what Lillian Smith wanted us to do. In accepting the Lillian Smith Book Award, Professor Inscoe shared the following observations:

 

 

This book grows out of a course that I have long taught at UGA on Southern Autobiography as Southern History. Both the book and the course are based on the premise that autobiographers are or can be among the most astute chroniclers of the South, in part because Southerners are, I believe more so than most Americans, intrinsically linked to place and region, and they find their identity in both.  Lillian Smith certainly epitomizes that linkage more fully than most. Her classic Killers of the Dream, first published in 1948, s hardly a conventional memoir as such.  In fact, what makes it so compelling and so teachable is that she had such a flair for metaphor, for analogy, for parables, anecdotes, and other forms of literary expression, including references to her own childhood and adolescence, but used all of it to probe the Southern psyche - even as she so heartily condemned the region’s institutions and social practices at the time she was writing, to an extent that no other white Southerner in the mid-century was willing to do to the ex ent that she was. And she did it all with such great insight, passion, emotional fervor and often anger. And yet there was also a human humane dimension to her work that continues to make it so relevant and teachable.

But Smith is hardly alone in writing the South through the self.  Dozens of writers, black, white and both — I have a whole chapter on mixed-race identity and the struggles that authors have in identifying themselves with one race or another – together they found that they could make themselves and their identities better understood by setting their experience in the broader context of place – whether that meant the South as a whole, or more often through the particularities of households, families and communities. Thus, to read Southerners’ life stories is to find ourselves in churches, courtrooms and country stores, in classrooms, playgrounds, locker rooms, college campuses, in cotton, tobacco fields, plantation porches and slave quarters, tenant shacks, mountain cabins, trailer parks, and urban slums. We hear not only an author’s own voice; we also hear those of his or her parents, the grandparents, siblings, teachers, professors, employees, co-workers, both benefactors and oppressors.

Friends and foes, are brought vividly to life in the most skillfully constructed of these narratives. And through this cacophony of voices and viewpoints, we are exposed to a range of temperaments and perspectives well beyond those of the writer himself.  We can learn a great deal about white rationales for slavery or Jim Crow from the viewpoint of black authors who lived under those regimes. Poor whites often come to life through the words and deeds of their socio-economic betters. And women can tell us an awful lot about men, whether they raise them, marry them, exploit them or support them. I’m not sure that men do as well with women.

The other key factor that makes these works so accessible and so memorable is that Southerners tend to privilege storytelling, dramatic turning points, and cathartic and revelatory moments and pack them with meaning, insight and feeling, sometimes well beyond anything intended by the authors. As Flannery O’Connor once noted, “The Southerner knows he can do more justice to reality by telling a story than he can by discussing problems or proposing abstractions. It’s actually his way of reasoning and dealing with experience.”   And again, no one did so more deftly or to fuller effect than Lillian Smith, who used her story-telling skills to fuse self with South in such creative and often startling ways.

But many others have done so as well, and I try to use their writings to get at a variety of subtle and not so subtle truths about the region and the society that they claimed as their own.

Just a few examples: Where else except through autobiography could we get Pat Conroy’s account of how his black students at Beaufort, South Carolina, High School all but attacked him in expressing their grief and anger over the news or Martin Luther King’s assassination  in April, 1968?

Or of Dianne McWhorter’s discovery that her father was a Klansman in Birmingham who may well have been involved in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963 that killed four young girls attending Sunday school?

Or of Morris Dees, who tells of his attempt, only one week after that, to lead a prayer for the souls of those little girls I      n his home church in Montgomery, Alabama, which led to a massive walk-out by most of that congregation?

In the descriptions by Maya Angelou, by Jimmy Carter, by Russell Baker, of local African American celebrations of radio broadcasts of Joe Louis  1930s victories over white opponents, as they witnessed them in Plains, Georgia, Stamps, Arkansas, and Baltimore, respectively?

Anne Moody, John Lewis, Virginia Spencer, William Morris and others have recounted how traumatized they were as adolescents to the news of the brutal lynching of fourteen year old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, and yet no two of their responses were remotely alike. Lillian Smith, who was hardly an adolescent in 1955, in some ways had the most unique response to that crime, at least that I know if.

Where else could we see Seventh Grader Charles March on the first day of the 1970 school year in Laurel Mississippi as his junior high school integrated for the first time, wearing his most fully-padded winter coat to guard against the attacks he anticipated from his new black classmates, and the reasons he found out that he didn’t have to bundle up on the second day?

Or see sharecropper Mae Bertha Carter collapse on her bed and pray every day for several weeks as she sent several of her children off on a school bus to enroll as the only black students in the white schools of Sunflower County, Mississippi in 1965, and only come to life again as she counted all seven as they got off that bus at the end of the day, as she related to Connie Curry in Silver Rights, her classic account of that ordeal?

Or to hear Henry Louis Gates admit that there are aspects of segregation that he and his family missed when it ended, most notably the sense of security and camaraderie and even cuisine, that the Jim Crow railroad cars offered, where they freely ate the sumptuous picnics they brought, played cards, sang and socialized, all of which was lost when they gained the privilege of sharing that space with white passengers?

Or to read Walter White’s harrowing account of being caught up in downtown Atlanta at age thirteen with his postman father as the infamous 1906 race riot broke out, and of their preparations to defend their home as the white mob moved into their neighborhood the following day?

Or Catherine Dupree Lumpkin’s admission of ambivalent feelings, including sheer exhilaration, upon seeing the Birth of a Nation while a student at Breneau College in Gainesville?

Or the intrepid Delaney Sisters, Sadie and Bessie who, at over 100 years of age, recall their own participation in NAACP protests over that same film’s re-release n New York City in the 1930s?

Or to walk with Charlayne Hunter-Gault through the Arch at the University of Georgia on that January day in 1961, and follow with her the highs and lows of her first few days and those of Hamilton Holmes as they became the first African Americans to attend the State’s flagship university?

Or hear Ralph McGill admit that the two most effective though decidedly unofficial mentors he knew during his freshman year at Vanderbilt in the late 1940s were black men, one the janitor in his dormitory, and the other a part of a road crew with whom McGill worked on a summer job in Chattanooga?

Or Rick Bragg’s revelation in covering the Susan Smith story in South Carolina that his mother realized well before he the journalist did that no mother would abandon her two small children to a black man ordering her out of her car, as Smith claimed before the truth ultimately came out that she killed them herself, and all for a chance to move up a bit in the social strata of a sleepy mill town?

Or to see the impact of Katrina brought home through Natasha Trethewey’s beautifully rendered account of her Gulfport-based brother and grandmother, and the very different trials and tribulations it inflicted on each of them? 

Each of these episodes makes for eminently teachable moments, both individually and collectively, and they never fail to engage students and generate lively classroom discussions about race, class, kinship, place, justice and injustice. As a genre, memoir and autobiography alone can render so much of our shared history as Southerners in such personal, intimate, and ultimately profound ways.  

I’ll let Lillian Smith have the last word here. In response to critics who suggested that she was too passionate in her analysis of Southern society, she wrote to her publisher regarding the revised edition of Killers of the Dream in 1961:  “Too much feeling,” she wrote, “perhaps. I could strip off a little of the pain, rub out a few words, but no, let’s leave it. For this may be the most real part of the book.”  There is, indeed, the most real part of many of these narratives, in large part because they can face so fully what Richard Wright once called his “crossed up feelings,” his “psychic pain.”   Or what Fred Hopson has so aptly termed “the Southern rage to explain.” It is the emotional resonance, the psychological subtext and, again, the sheer humanity that pervades these self-told narratives that allows for levels of empathy, sympathy and understanding on the part of students in ways that no textbook or scholarly monograph can duplicate.  I always hope that, through their exposure to a wide range of these works, students will come to see and appreciate the South and its past in far richer and more compelling ways. It is what I also hope that readers will take from this book.

 

Tomiko Brown-Nagin Receives Lillian Smith Book Award for 2012

In 1966 Julian Bond, in the face of blistering criticism for his opposition to the Vietnam War, said “I hope that throughout my life I shall always have the courage to dissent." It is from this statement that Tomiko Brown-Nagin takes the title of her Lillian Smith award-winning book, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement.

 

Tomiko Brown-Nagin is a professor of law and history at Harvard University, and she previously held appointments at the University of Virginia and Washington University. Dr. Brown-Nagin earned her Ph.D in history from Duke, a law degree from Yale (where she served as editor of the Law Review), and a Bachelor’s Degree from Furman.

 

Tomiko Brown-Nagin has written a remarkable and highly praised book in Courage to Dissent. It is a bottom-up narrative, illuminating the parts played by local activists and attorneys. These were people whose courage to dissent applied, not only to the white establishment, but also to the traditional black leadership of Atlanta, the national civil rights movement, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s high-profile attorneys.  Their dissention, Dr. Brown-Nagin argues, created an intra-racial tension that helped to energize the movement in Atlanta.

 

In a review of Courage to Dissent, Kathryn Naistrom writes that the book succeeds brilliantly, both as narrative history and legal analysis.  For Lillian Smith Book Award winner Ariela Gross, Brown-Nagin’s work heralds a new kind of constitutional history – that it’s a book that tells the stories of the good fight waged by ordinary people who, whether or not they actually won, had their day in court and became agents of change.

 

In March 2012 Columbia University announced that Courage to Dissent would receive the 2012 Bancroft Prize.  In accepting the Lillian Smith Book Award, Professor Brown-Nagin shared the following observations:

The book is subtitled Long History of the Civil Rights Movement, which means that it hopes to complicate the narrative of the civil rights movement that we have grown accustomed to – a narrative that centers on the brilliance of Thurgood Marshall and the Legal Defense Fund and the heroics of the Warren Court. When I started this work many years ago a lot of people were resistant to the thrust of the work. They said: Brown v. Board of Education was American’s finest hour; Why would you want to tell a story in which that case is not central to the story? But I think it takes nothing away from the brilliance of Thurgood Marshall and the heroics of the court to talk about people on the left and the right who thought in terms of something more complicated than integration when they thought about equality, people like Julian Bond, Lonnie King, Lynn Holt, and Ethel Mae Matthews.  It’s important to realize the agency that they had and how they, along with these national institutions helped to form a more perfect union. 

Although I eventually came around to thinking of all of the wonderful people in this book as dissenters, when I first started this book I was just as beholden to the traditional narrative as anyone else. I went to law school because of Thurgood Marshall.  I am a child of Brown v. Board of Education. And so the process of writing this book was a conscious effort on my part to be fair to all of the characters in my book, despite their many perspectives, some of which I originally couldn’t understand and didn’t necessarily like.

Len Holt, a lawyer with the Lawyers Guild, an organization that was tainted as a Communist organization, hasn’t received his due.

 

Ethel May Matthews was a warrior for civil rights whom I interviewed in the housing projects of Atlanta, who taught me more than virtually anyone about the struggle against Jim Crow and the class dynamic.

One person in the book who symbolized my professional struggle was A.T. Walden. The son of slaves and one of the South’s first African America lawyers, Walden had been understood as a conservative, a foil of the students and progressives.  He was called an Uncle Tom and, when I first came to this work, I frankly understood why he would have been called those names.  He was skeptical, and he never embraced school desegregation or direct action. 

 

But as I wrote the book, as I went to the archives and did a lot of digging, I learned his history: that he was a complicated man who had been moved to go to law school after seeing the lynched body of a black man in his home town.  I learned that he was a student of W.E.B. DuBois, a man whom he considered a prophet and a seer. I came to understand that his critique of the struggle for integration as only being about integration and school desegregation was in many ways similar to Dubois’ critique.  Over time, I came to understand that, in order to write a nuanced narrative of the civil rights movement, it is important to appreciate how much history is biography.