A Writer's Life (41 page)

“You
haven't
answered my question,” Truman replied sharply.

I said nothing, walking next to him with my eyes lowered and my ballpoint pen scribbling notes along the folded sheets of paper I held in my left hand.

“Well,” he went on more softly, “she won't love someone who isn't her color. You'll edit the man she goes out with. I did, and mine married the right man.”

He was referring to the assistant managing editor of the
Times
, Clifton Daniel, who had married Truman's daughter, Margaret, in 1956. When I returned to the newsroom, I wondered how this story would be played, and if Daniel might hold it against me for asking his father-in-law such a question. But I heard nothing from Daniel nor from any other editor after I had turned in the story, and on the following morning the paper printed all of Truman's comments. It was not on page one, however, appearing well back in the news section—under a small-size headline:
TRUMAN OPPOSES BIRACIAL MARRIAGE
—and in the second paragraph of my piece some editor or copyreader had added a sentence explaining that Mr. Truman was “long an advocate of integration” in other respects.

“I don't want to marry the white man's daughter. I just want to get the white man off my back,” I had heard James Baldwin say often during the
early 1960s, either when he was speaking out as a black man on television or when he was my dinner guest in New York. In late September 1962, a few days before the Floyd Patterson-Sonny Liston heavyweight fight in Chicago, I drove Baldwin out to Patterson's training camp in Elgin, Illinois, where the two of them met for the first time. I was writing about the fight for the
Times
, while Baldwin was covering it for
Nugget
magazine. After we had spent an hour with Patterson, Baldwin presented him with two of his books—
Another Country
and
Nobody Knows My Name
—inscribing them: “For Floyd Patterson—because we both know whence we come, and have some idea where we're going.…”

A year later, in
The Fire Next Time
, Baldwin wrote:

T
HESE WERE THE OPENING PARAGRAPHS OF THE STORY
I
HAD
typed in my motel room in Selma and then faxed to the national editor in New York, hoping that it would appear in the next morning's
Times
. I did not know until the following afternoon, after buying a copy of the
Times
at the Atlanta airport prior to flying home, that
the editors had published exactly and fully what I had written, printing the first eight paragraphs across the lower half of page one, under a three-column headline:
SELMA 1990: OLD FACES AND A NEW SPIRIT
.

The rest of my 2,500-word article, which described the wedding ceremony and the reception as well as the twenty-fifth anniversary events occurring elsewhere in the city, was spread across a full page inside the paper. I was pleased by the amount of space given to my story, but disappointed that the editors had not used any photos from the wedding. The
Times
had sent a staff photographer from New York to work with me. On the night before the wedding, while dining with Randall Miller and Betty at the Tally Ho and thanking them for adding me to the guest list, I asked if I could bring along the
Times
's photographer, Michelle Agins. An hour before, in the lobby of the Holiday Inn, I had met her for the first time; she was checking in as I was heading out to the restaurant. She was a personable young black woman who had once worked as a city hall photographer for Chicago's first black mayor, Harold Washington. I do not know if this impressed me more than it did Randall Miller, but, after I had mentioned it to him at dinner, he said that it would be okay if Agins came with her camera to the wedding.

She seemed to enjoy herself on the following night as she moved comfortably and unobtrusively through the living room while photographing the guests and the two people who commanded their attention—Randall Miller, dressed in a dark suit with a boutonniere, and Betty Ramsey, wearing a white satin suit of her own design and holding a bouquet of roses and carnations. After the couple had exchanged their vows while standing in front of the fireplace, the Reverend Charles A. Lett raised his arms and proclaimed their union “an act of divine origin.” As Agins's busy camera recorded the ceremony and reception that followed, I was gladdened by the thought that her pictures would provide the
Times
with confirming evidence of what I was planning to write. It was my intention to suggest that even in this city that owed its identity to racial hatred, there was nevertheless space in which black and white residents might find a common cause, and this space and cause had converged on this particular night in this living room where the newlywed couple had been toasted by an interracial gathering of champagne-drinking guests.

Why had the
Times
not used a picture from the wedding? Inside the paper, where my article mentioned the silver anniversary parade and named a few of its prominent marchers and witnesses, the editors
had
run an Agins photo of John Lewis and Hosea Williams, two civil rights veterans, taking a nostalgic walk together across the bridge. They also printed her photograph of sixty-year-old Mayor Smitherman, posed at his desk
with a row of flags hanging behind him, including one representing the Confederacy. But the main photo on page one, instead of visually complementing what I had written, depicted a black woman lying facedown on the highway, surrounded by helmeted white troopers equipped with clubs, guns, and gas masks. It had been taken in 1965 on Bloody Sunday by an Associated Press photographer, and as I looked at it in Atlanta, I wondered why this old wire-service image had been chosen over a wedding picture taken by the
Times
staffer who had been assigned to join me in Selma. Why could they not have shown the city in a nonracist posture for a change? Why continually represent the politics of victimization?

A week later, while attending a reception at the New York Public Library, I met a
Times
editor, who came over to say that he liked my story about the bridal couple in Selma.

“But why didn't you people run their picture?” I asked.

“Oh, I'll tell you sometime,” he said.

“No,” I insisted, “tell me now.”

“Well,” he said, “some negative comment had been made about it at the editors' meeting by Gerald Boyd.”

“Who's he?”

“He's in charge of the Metro staff,” he said, adding that Boyd was a rising young African-American executive in the
Times
news department, and that it had been Boyd's lack of enthusiasm for the wedding photos that led his white fellow editors to agree with him.

I would not have pursued the matter further had I not accepted an invitation a few years later to participate in a noonday symposium about the
Times
's news coverage, sponsored by the Center for Communication in Manhattan. With me onstage were four other members of the panel; two seats away from me, on the far side of the moderator, was Gerald Boyd. He was a soft-spoken, round-faced gentleman in his forties with a receding hairline, horn-rimmed glasses, and a thin mustache, and he wore a blue blazer with a white shirt and a dark tie knotted tightly under his throat. He was impressively articulate during his opening remarks, speaking softly and authoritatively in an unhurried manner. Toward the end of the program, prior to soliciting questions from the audience, the moderator invited the panelists to query one another; and that is when I turned to Gerald Boyd and asked: “Are you the man who blocked the photo of my Selma wedding story from getting onto the front page of the
Times
?”

He seemed stunned. There was rustling throughout the audience.

“Yes,” he said finally.

“Why?” I asked in a raised voice.

“It was boring,” he said.

“Boring!” I said.

“To show an integrated couple on the front page
wasn't
news,” he explained. “The picture didn't represent anything
new.”

“In
Selma
?” I asked.

Gerald Boyd turned away from me, and the moderator, perhaps sensing Boyd's discomfort, changed the subject. Other topics were discussed and debated for the next hour or so, and then, at the conclusion of the program, after shaking hands with the moderator, Gerald Boyd headed directly for the exit.

I
N LATE
O
CTOBER OF 1993, WHILE
I
AND HUNDREDS OF OTHER
members of the alumni were gathered at the University of Alabama for the homecoming football game and other weekend festivities, I learned that an eighteen-year-old white female student from Selma had been abducted in her dormitory's parking lot days earlier by an armed black man, who, after driving her in her car six miles from the campus and then forcing her to the ground in a secluded area off the highway, had raped her.

A seven-paragraph account of this had been published in the
Birmingham Post-Herald
on the day I had flown into Alabama from New York, on Thursday, October 28. The story was unprominently displayed on an inside page under a quarter-inch headline:
UA STUDENT TAKEN FROM PARKING LOT AND RAPED
. The article did
not
mention that the female student was white and a native of Selma, nor did it specify the race of her attacker. In her testimony to the police, however, she did say that the crime had definitely been committed by a black man in his twenties, adding that he was approximately six feet tall and weighed two hundred pounds, and that he had used a handgun in gaining access to her car as she was parking it at about 1:15 a.m., upon returning to her dormitory. After he had driven her away and raped her, she said, he drove her back to the dormitory parking lot, left the car keys on the pavement under the rear bumper, and then disappeared.

The decision not to identify the race of the victim or the rapist in the
Post-Herald
had been made by the reporter and the desk editor who had written the headline. The two journalists were male and white. The reporter was actually a twenty-year-old journalism student from the University of Alabama, a blue-eyed, blond junior named Sean Kelley, who, in addition to his editorial role on the campus newspaper,
The Crimson White
, served as the college correspondent for the
Post-Herald
, which was
a position that I had also held during my undergraduate days at Alabama forty years before.

My purpose in returning for the 1993 homecoming weekend was not only to join other old grads at a football game and enjoy their companionship at reunion parties but to participate in the centennial celebration of
The Crimson White
and speak at a banquet to be attended by past and present members of the staff. Since Sean Kelley wanted to interview me beforehand for a piece he was preparing for the college newspaper, he had met my flight in Birmingham, and, during our hour-long drive together from the airport to the campus in Tuscaloosa, I was able to interview
him
about how he had covered the rape story in that morning's
Post-Herald
.

I began by postulating that the
Post-Herald
management would have presented the story very differently had the incident occurred when I had been the correspondent. In 1953, instead of being buried inside the paper, it would have appeared on page one and would have revealed, rather than concealed, the fact that it had been an interracial rape, and this disclosure would have probably aroused the anger and fear of white readers in ways similar to what had been experienced in Selma in 1953 during the William Earl Fikes case.

“I won't argue with you that my story in this morning's paper was buried,” Kelley said, steering his car along the highway. “But I still think it was properly handled.” It was not a story about
race
, he insisted; it was a story about
rape
. He did concede, however, that his news judgment had been guided by his racial sensibility, by his reluctance to “stain the black race by identifying the rapist as a black man.” He said that he took pride in being among the first generation of white southerners who had grown up in a desegregated society. As a boy, he had attended public schools with black youths, had joined them on athletic fields and in movie theaters, and had swum with them in public pools. He had been born in Birmingham in 1973—ten years after Dr. King had written his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”; ten years after two black students, escorted by federal officials, had stridden past a displeased Governor Wallace to enter the University of Alabama—and while Sean Kelley's parents and grandparents had been forced to conform to changes imposed upon them by outside forces, he himself had no quarrel with his inherited circumstances. The troubled sixties were part of the past. He was part of the present. He had gone out on dates with a black girl in high school. He had many black female and male friends at the University of Alabama. There were black staff members working with him on
The Crimson White
. Although he acknowledged that a vast majority of his
fellow students tended to socialize along racial lines in their private lives—the fraternities and sororities on the campus were either exclusively black or white—the dormitories were fully integrated, and of the school's nineteen thousand undergraduates, more than two thousand were African-American.