A Writer's Life (36 page)

The man in Selma who seemed to be the most determined to undermine Smitherman's efforts to serve as the town's intermediary between black and white residents was J. L. Chestnut, Jr. When Chestnut got his law degree in the late 1950s, there were only five black lawyers practicing in all of Alabama; by the late eighties, Chestnut had five black partners in
his
office alone—it was the largest black firm in the state—and his clients were located not only in Selma but throughout the region. These included many black-influenced county boards and school boards and other entities that received and apportioned sizable sums in order to operate. When four of Selma's black men first gained membership on the city council, they met in Chestnut's conference room for discussions with Chestnut and his partners
before
they walked across the street to join their five white colleagues at the council meeting. Whenever the Smitherman administration deviated from what Chestnut strongly advocated, especially when it concerned the policies and federal sums being directed toward Selma ostensibly to keep the blacks happy and off the streets, Chestnut would sue the city. In the opinion of the mayor, J. L. Chestnut, Jr., would never be happy until
he
ran the city, not by sitting in Smitherman's chair in City Hall but through ongoing behind-the-scenes maneuverings and utilizing the litigious power of the Chestnut law firm in launching discrimination suits and other actions that threatened or blocked the flow of federal funds into the coffers of the Smitherman administration.

Chestnut's most demonstrative and politically ambitious partners were a husband-and-wife team who had earned their law degrees at Harvard. They were Henry “Hank” Sanders, a member of the state senate since the early 1980s, and his wife, Rose, who had been a student activist at Harvard, calling for more black professors on the faculty, and also a black dean. She was also committed to working with black youth groups in
Cambridge and later Harlem and still later in Selma, after she and her husband had joined Chestnut's firm in 1972. The couple had spent a year in Africa before going to Selma, and Rose Sanders in her off-hours from the firm sought to inculcate in the black ghetto an element of African pride, especially among younger people. She presented street fairs that introduced them to African art, music, and dance, she wrote and staged plays that were relevant to black history, and she also used such occasions to warn teenagers against drug abuse and pregnancy.

A lean and petite woman who had an Afro-style haircut and whose wardrobe was decidedly African, and who could barely abide black women who indulged in heavy cosmetics and who straightened their hair, Sanders was not without her detractors in the black community; but when she began meddling in the political affairs of the city, which she did with increasing vigor after becoming a law partner, she quickly emerged as Smitherman's new nemesis, an outrageous little woman who was willful in manner and whose public speeches attacking his policies and his personal character greatly offended him, unsettled him, and yet also confounded him.

White men in the rural areas of the South, even brutes like Sheriff Clark, sought within themselves a measure of lenience and restraint whenever they came into public contact with loud and assertive black women. With black men, it was another matter. Their aggressiveness might be a prelude to a physical challenge, or something worse; but black women were not perceived to be threatening, and so just as long as their black male kinfolk did not join in any of the cantankerousness toward white men that black women could seemingly get away with, the South usually allowed these women a free-speech prerogative perhaps equal to the conversational liberties commonly heard at highway diners favored by interstate truck drivers.

With the arrival of Rose Sanders in Selma, however, the boundaries of bold-talking black women were extended even further than southern tradition had heretofore condoned. Because of her African clothing, her tribal-crafted accessories, her Harvard credentials, and the self-assurance she seemed to exude as she strode around town on errands or en route to appointments, Rose Sanders had become an object of curiosity and discussion throughout the community even
before
she began uttering unflattering comments in public about Mayor Smitherman. Thus when she
did
begin to criticize Smitherman in her prepared speeches and impromptu remarks, her words were destined to carry weight, to be reported in the local newspaper, to be read and debated by factions within the black and white communities. Rose Sanders instantaneously became a public figure
of potential persuasiveness beyond that of any bad-mouthing black woman in the history of this onetime plantation area of Alabama, and the white men of Selma, and particularly Joe Smitherman, did not know exactly how to react to her. She was a black
woman
, after all, and so he should logically react as if her words did not matter. She was
noise
. Were he to issue statements refuting her own, it would create big headlines in the
Selma Times-Journal
. This is surely what she wanted. Furthermore, the public had
already
heard her list of complaints—her boss, J. L. Chestnut, Jr., had vented them every time he sued the city: The mayor was a closet racist; the mayor was Machiavellian; the mayor helped only those blacks who were his lackeys. Chestnut, however, communicated his chagrin in a relatively formal manner, showing some respect for the office of the mayor, if not for the mayor himself. Chestnut was of the old school, a wily wordsmith with years of experience in southern courtrooms. His partner, Rose's heavyset husband, Hank, was also a smooth speaker. Hank Sanders was reflective. He was quietly determined and rarely abrasive. He had overcome a few political setbacks in his quest for a seat in the Alabama senate before he finally prevailed. But his wife, Rose, was a rant. Smitherman did not know how long he could continue his strategy of avoidance toward her, his crossing to the opposite sidewalk if he caught a glimpse of her approaching, his raising the windows of his car whenever he saw her standing at the curb glaring at him, her mouth moving in ways that made hearing unnecessary. And yet
how
could he continue to avoid her when she practically resorted to stalking him on the steps of City Hall? She also invited black students and other followers to join her in front of the building and led them in roars of disapproval as they waved signs reading
JOE MUST GO
, and
SMITHERMAN MUST GO
.

Then in early February 1990—a month before the silver anniversary remembrance of Blood Sunday, of which
she
was the project director—Rose Sanders and two of her cohorts barged into the outer office of the mayor and refused to leave, blaming him for his role in the ongoing crisis that had long beset the city's public school system.

There was little doubt in Smitherman's mind that serious problems did exist within Selma's public schools. But these problems were exacerbated, he believed, by Rose Sanders herself. No matter what efforts were made to give all of Selma's students an equal opportunity to reach their full academic potential, she would find fault with something and start a public ruckus. Though the schools had been desegregated for decades, she insisted that there was still segregation. In one of her interviews with reporters from the
Selma Times-Journal
, she declared, “Blacks and whites go in the same school door, but once inside they go to separate and
unequal classes.” She was referring to the local trilevel scholastic rating system, whereby pupils who were judged to be the brightest were grouped together, while the supposedly less gifted students were taught separately in classrooms recognized as representing the second or third level. But these levels were prejudicially designated, she insisted, being the result of such factors as unfair testing measures and the tendency to further favor the privileged students (nearly all of them white) with the best teachers, while these white students' parents reinforced segregation in the classrooms by applying pressure on the schools' administrators and the faculty to continue the leveling procedure. Although there was a black superintendent at the helm, and an abundant number of black teachers in the system, the city's board of education was still controlled by white people, Rose Sanders reminded everyone, adding that her young daughter in elementary school had already been subjected to the prejudiced practice of leveling. Her girl would come home after school complaining that she belonged in a higher level, being unchallenged by the classroom work and the undemanding standards of her teachers. After her daughter was privately tested, Sanders said, it was determined that she was an academically advanced student. There were many black parents with similar stories to tell, Sanders went on, but when the black superintendent of schools, Dr. Norward Roussell, finally began to pay attention to these stories, and even indicated that it might be equitable and just to modify the leveling policy, many white parents suddenly became enraged. They saw him—though phrasing it more delicately—as dumbing down academic standards in order to pacify black parents who wanted their children seated in top-level classrooms. In late 1989, there were rumors that the white-majority school board was leaning toward
not
renewing Dr. Roussell's contract, which was to expire in June 1990.

Smitherman was pleased to hear this, although a few years before, in 1987, he had welcomed the arrival of Dr. Roussell as the city's first black superintendent of schools. Smitherman then believed that it would bring pride contentment to the black people while calming things politically throughout the community; and the fact that Dr. Roussell was coming to Selma from New Orleans meant that he was not part of J. L. Chestnut, Jr.'s local clique of troublemakers. Chestnut himself made no secret of disliking the appointment. Norward Roussell was probably an Uncle Tom, Chestnut thought at the time, an opportunist beholden to the white-majority school board that had hired him. Chestnut had always resented the fact that the people on the board were not elected. They all were appointed, blacks as well as whites, by the white-controlled city council. And it had been a white-led search committee that had eagerly
recruited this high-profile educator, presenting him with a fee that was five thousand dollars more than the fifty-thousand-dollar annual salary of Mayor Smitherman himself, and they undoubtedly offered other benefits and concessions to Dr. Roussell in the interest of luring him to Selma, hoping that his presence would perpetuate the myth that the city was becoming progressive. Chestnut saw through it immediately. What they really wanted, he said, was a “black superintendent to hide behind.”

But what they got was something else, although in the beginning no one could quite agree on what they had gotten because the citizens of Selma—black as well as white—had never before encountered a dark-skinned pedant with the majestic dignity of Dr. Roussell. He spoke English eloquently, quickly but politely emphasizing that the proper pronunciation of his surname was
ROU
-ssell. He was a slender gentleman of about five-eight, with close-cropped kinky hair and an angular face with deep-set eyes and a mustache; and while not foppish, he dressed in a way that suggested he was comfortable in front of mirrors. Everything about him was
just so:
His hair and mustache were tidily attended to, his vividtoned silk ties were carefully knotted and centered within the colars of his shirts, and his suit jackets fit him snugly at the shoulders and were never wrinkled. He hardly ever appeared in public without a jacket, a tie, and a genteel manner. Like Rose Sanders, he attracted much curiosity and comment from people throughout the community; but while she was known for stirring things up and causing disorder, he was perceived as an orderly individual who would create an atmosphere within the school system and the city that would foster biracial cooperation and advance the idea that headline-making activism was detrimental to Selma's economic growth.

After a group of white businessmen had invited him to join the local Rotary Club, offering him an opportunity that had never before been extended to a black man, Dr. Roussell accepted. But when there was talk around town that he might be a candidate for membership in the Selma Country Club, Dr. Roussell took the initiative to remove his name from consideration. He knew that it was perfectly fine for him to dine and fraternize with white male professionals at Rotary meetings, but he was under no illusion that the elite white men and women gathered around the pool of the Selma Country Club would respond with glee to the sight of his three children splashing and thrashing in the water next to
their
children, nor would they necessarily enjoy watching him practicing on the putting green while his tan-skinned, freckled wife sat in the shade of the veranda sipping iced tea. Selma's color line in 1987 was most definitely drawn along the greensward and the chlorinated waters of the country club, and
Dr. Roussell did not have to be the scholar that he was in order to understand that, no matter how well-intending those few white folks who contemplated sponsoring his membership might be, it was a bad idea to do so. It would thrust him and his family into the limelight in a way that would distract from his purpose in coming to Selma.

“I do not want to pay $2,500 to play golf,” he finally announced to the local press, bringing immediate relief to the membership committee of the Selma Country Club—which, incidentally, would continue its whites-only policy into the next century. Dr. Roussell also told reporters, “I did not come to Selma to claw down racial barriers.”

When Norward Roussell went to Selma in 1987, at the age of fifty-three, seeing the city for the first time, he was put in charge of a system much smaller than his earlier jurisdiction in New Orleans, but it was nonetheless more challenging. Here in Selma he would be entrusted to educate an interracial student body in a very polarized and peevish community, one in which white pupils were a dwindling minority but in which white parents and other adults were striving to maintain, as had long been their custom, a controlling interest in the school system. Except now they were being questioned by black parents, by concerned mothers like Rose Sanders who wanted to be sure that their children were not receiving an education that was second-best. At the same time, Dr. Roussell was politically sensitive and, whenever possible, he would try to avoid, or to compromise or attenuate, the implementation of policies that might drive away from Selma's schools what was left of the white classroom population.