A Writer's Life (35 page)

With time, however, I begrudgingly acknowledged my older colleague's
remark. We were not writing for posterity. We journalists seemed at times to be allied with the fast-food industry, being the short-order cooks for consumers of often half-baked information and ideas. What we wrote in haste was frequently incomplete, misleading, inaccurate. While our editors sought to amend these shortcomings by printing correction notices, such notices were never so lengthy or prominently featured as had been the flawed articles that prompted the corrections. Our editors advocated objectivity and impartiality, the presentation of different positions in a manner that was fair and equal to all parties concerned. But achieving this goal was unlikely, if not impossible. Our editors—
all
editors—subjected the news coverage to
their
understanding of what was fair and balanced, of what was very important, or not very important, or of no importance. Their fingerprints were on every article, every headline, every photograph, every layout in the newspaper. Everything that was published, or not published, was traceable to their subjective selves, to their private values, their vanities and battle scars, their ancestral histories, geographical origins, and whatever influence that politics, race, or religion had over them.

I was told that the
Times
newsroom during the 1930s was dominated by Catholic editors—it was then commonly said among staff members that “the
New York Times
is owned by Jews and is edited by Catholics for Protestants”—and it was also said that the Catholic editors slanted the Spanish Civil War coverage in ways that favored the Church-supported Spanish dictatorship over the Communist and socialist-led rebel opposition. During my time in the newsroom the two top-ranked editors were both small-town southern Protestants—Turner Catledge from Ackerman, Mississippi; and his favorite underling, Clifton Daniel, from Zebulon, North Carolina, who was the first editor that Catledge elevated to a level higher than Theodore Bernstein's. Although I would be hard pressed to document it, I believe that my having gone to the University of Alabama did me no harm with the two gentlemen from the South. The socially aloof and dandyish Clifton Daniel, disliked by most staffers, was particularly cordial and accommodating toward me; it had been under his influence—with Catledge's support, no doubt—that I was able to be transferred quite often from the city staff to out-of-town assignments that I desired, such as going to Cocoa Beach, Florida, in 1960, to describe the crowd scene as the first American astronaut was being launched into orbit, and to be in Chicago in 1962 to report on the Patterson-Liston heavyweight bout, as well as a prefight literary debate in a Chicago auditorium between writers Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley; and to revisit my alma mater at various times between 1963 and 1965 to report
on the changing policies and politics on campus, and to write about the voting-rights clashes in Selma and finally the long march of Dr. King and his followers into Montgomery.

My stories from Alabama brought forth notes of congratulation from Catledge and Daniel, both men commending what they called my “objectivity.” But what I really think they approved of was the fact that I had not followed the lead of most northern journalists in blaming only the South for racist practices that existed nationwide. I had also not failed to mention the sacking and burning of Selma one hundred years before, when nine thousand Northern troops overran Selma's nearly four thousand defenders who were serving under the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. In General Forrest's ranks was a soldier named James Turner, the maternal grandfather of Turner Catledge.

T
URNER
C
ATLEDGE AND ALL THE SENIOR EDITORS OF HIS GENERATION
were either dead or retired from the
Times
when I returned to the newsroom in March 1990 to receive my credentials and airplane tickets for my single-story trip to Selma. Catledge had died in 1983, while in his early eighties. The editor currently holding Catledge's old title was an ex-reporter and contemporary of mine, Max Frankel. My assignment was to write an article of about 2,500 words recounting the changes in Selma since the massacre had prompted Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and to describe as well the silver anniversary festivities and other public events scheduled to take place in Selma, such as the ceremonial march across the bridge, and the reenactment of Bloody Sunday in an unbloody manner that would nonetheless call attention to the suffering sustained by civil rights demonstrators a quarter of a century ago. Using machine-blown smoke to simulate the tear gas that had been inhaled by black protesters, and tape recordings that would reecho the sounds of brutality and anguish that marked that violent time, this 1990 occasion was supposed to make vivid to young blacks what their elders had endured in gaining access to the ballot box.

Among the honored guests would be Coretta Scott King (widow of the civil rights leader assassinated in Memphis in 1968), the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who currently saw himself as a viable Democratic candidate for the White House, and John Lewis, who as a twenty-five-year-old agitator from SNCC had been flattened on the highway but who now returned as a fifty-year-old member of the U.S. Congress, having been elected as a Georgia Democrat in 1986.

From my preliminary research, I learned even before arriving in Selma that most of the city's white residents saw little merit in reviving memories of a situation that had brought such shame and infamy to the community. They wished that the blacks would look ahead rather than back.
Much interracial progress has been made since 1965, the whites pointed out in comments to the local press, and
this
is what should now be remembered and advertised. It would improve the city's image. It might attract more outside investment and result in the construction of more shopping malls and chain stores, more jobs for black people and economic gains for everyone.

All the roads in black neighborhoods were now paved. There were also new streetlights, sewer lines, trees, and hundreds of new housing units that were built as part of a multimillion-dollar federal assistance program. About five thousand dollars went to the restoration of Brown Chapel, which the city enshrined as a historical site and listed as a tourist attraction along with a number of antebellum mansions. The principal street in the black quarter, Sylvan Street—which also extended for three blocks downtown into the territory of white shopowners—had been renamed in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Selma's public schools had been desegregated since 1970, and five black appointees served on the eleven-member school board. There were black jurors and police officers, firemen and sanitation workers. Four blacks were on the nine-seat city council, and three of the five seats on the county commission were held by black candidates, and a black resident of Selma, Henry “Hank” Sanders, a partner in J. L. Chestnut, Jr.'s law firm, was now a member of the Alabama state senate.

There were now about 7,500 registered black voters in Selma, which was hundreds more than the whites (although a higher percentage of the latter went to the polls), and while the mayor of Selma in 1965 was
still
the mayor of Selma in 1990, Joseph Smitherman's political advisers were quick to say that he had learned from his past mistakes, and that the city no longer deserved to be smeared by references to Bloody Sunday. That unfortunate incident had largely been provoked by Sheriff Jim Clark, they claimed, adding that he was no longer among them; he now lived in the Birmingham area and worked in the mobile-home business. The other leading local segregationist from that era, circuit court judge James A. Hare, was now dead. And while former governor Wallace was still alive, at seventy—though ailing and paralyzed since being shot by a twenty-one-year-old white man during Maryland's 1972 Democratic primary—he continued to say that he had never been the enemy of black people. He boasted instead that it had been the large turnout of black voters that had helped to reelect him repeatedly to govern the state from his wheelchair in the 1970s through the 1980s, and among the people in Selma who had supported him (liking the fact that he had given raises to
schoolteachers and free textbooks to students, and had not seemed to be as offensive as the white candidates running against him) had been the mother of J. L. Chestnut, Jr.

But Chestnut himself had never been swayed by what he saw as George Wallace's desire to reinvent himself, dismissing him as a political opportunist nowadays matched in Alabama only by Joseph Smitherman, the latter being a longtime Wallace follower who had brought his own folksy style, and the persuasive talents he had earlier developed as the town's leading appliance salesman, to the mayoral campaign in 1964; with the help of black voters whom he had impressed with his cordiality and satisfied with small pieces of the political pie, Smitherman had remained in office for seven straight terms. In Chestnut's view, the mayor adhered to the political adage: “If you give just a little, you won't have to give a lot.”

I first interviewed Smitherman for the
Times
in 1965, when he was a skinny, blond, six-foot country boy in his mid-thirties who weighed 145 pounds and wore clothes that always seemed a size too large and who looked as if he had not had enough to eat. This had indeed been the case during his upbringing, he told me, since both of his parents had died before he had reached his teens and since those kinfolk who took turns raising him were as dirt-poor as any of Selma's blacks living in the city's nearby shacks or in the boondocks of the county. He worked as a Southern Railway brakeman after graduation from high school, and then moved on to become an appliance salesman at the local Sears, Roebuck, selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door and impressing customers as a trustworthy individual who would personally guarantee whatever he sold. Years later, he was a partner in an appliance shop on the main street, selling many refrigerators and washing machines with equal ease to black and white customers, and at the same time selling himself to them as an electable candidate for a seat on the city council. This he would achieve in 1960, and four years later, when he was thirty-five—and living with his wife and three children in a neighborhood near black people in a singlestory house without a burglar alarm—he would win an upset victory in the mayoral campaign, defeating an incumbent who had establishment political connections and old-family status.

The Joseph Smitherman I had met in the mid-1960s, and would see again at times in the 1970s and 1980s while revisiting Alabama, was very adroit in presenting himself as Selma's middleman mayor, the only officeholder capable of being a buffer between the city's disenchanted black and white residents. Comfortable among black people, he would casually enter their social clubs and churches to discuss with their ministers and
leading members the many favors he intended to bestow, hinting that with their continued support his gratitude would be shown in the form of political appointments to them, and city jobs for their friends, and prompt road repairs and whatever else was needed to improve the quality of life in their neighborhoods. Then the mayor would privately meet with various groups of white people and suggest that the money and efforts he was directing toward the blacks was the minimum amount necessary to encourage their goodwill and forbearance, and their disinclination to protest in the streets in ways that might attract the networks and bring more bad publicity to Selma.

Most of the money that Smitherman was dispensing for allegedly promoting peace and prosperity in Selma was actually federal money that had been earmarked in Washington primarily for the benefit of black people, these funds being authorized by Congress after Bloody Sunday and continuing to filter down into Selma for years thereafter. There were white politicans in the South who shied away from Washington's War on Poverty largesse because it came with many federal controls and restrictions, mandating that black people should share heavily in the benefits, should be employed at all levels of U.S. government-assisted building projects, training initiatives, and reforms, and should enjoy equal opportunities in a social environment devoid of racism. This federal money was thus “tainted,” in the view of some southern politicians, but it was certainly not so regarded by Smitherman, who welcomed every federal dollar he could get his hands on, claiming that the only thing “tainted” about it was there “t'ain't” enough of it—even though the federal sums allocated to Selma during Smitherman's many terms was reportedly close to $40 million. He was therefore well endowed to influence numbers of voters through patronage and to modernize the city in ambitious ways that created many jobs while appearing to conform to government regulations aimed at promoting racial harmony.

Smitherman replaced the slave-built Albert Hotel with a new city hall, and he oversaw the construction of a library in which both races had equal access to books, lecture series, and other services. The downtown shopping area was renovated with brick sidewalks and refaced storefronts, and blacks and whites were now accustomed to drinking out of the same fountains, patronizing the same restaurants, and using the same rest rooms in public buildings and terminals. Smitherman saw to it that his office door was open to all visitors, even those without appointments, and near his desk he kept a small refrigerator filled with cans of Coca-Cola and other soft drinks, which he popped open before serving them to his guests.

Even reporters who had portrayed him negatively in the past were welcomed into his office. He believed that the more they saw of him, the more likely they were to write favorably about him. He was invariably candid with the press; and in an interview with William E. Schmidt of the
New York Times
in 1985, he took issue with the white people of Selma who preferred to blame Sheriff Clark for most of what had gone wrong in 1965. “Our hands are just as dirty as his,” Mayor Smitherman said. He also conceded in conversations with other newsmen that racism was often central to his political strategy, adding, however, that it was other people's racism, not his own. He went on to say that many contemporary black candidates were also guilty of exploiting the issue of race whenever they believed it would advance their political careers.