Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma

Dividing Lines

Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma

J. MILLS THORNTON III

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa and London

Copyright © 2002

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Typeface: Stone Sans and Stone Serif

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The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Thornton, J. Mills, 1943–

Dividing lines F municipal politics and the struggle for civil rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma / J. Mills Thornton, III.

    p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-8173-1170-X (cloth : alk. paper) – ISBN 97-80-8173-8098-4 (electronic)

1. Civil rights movements—Alabama—History—20th century. 2. African Americans—Civil rights—Alabama. 3. Political culture—Alabama—History—20th century. 4. Montgomery (Ala.)—Politics and government—20th century. 5. Birmingham (Ala.)—Politics and government—20th century. 6. Selma (Ala.)—Politics and government—20th century. I. Title.

E185.93.A3 T48 2002

323.1′1960730761′09045—dc21

2002004774

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data available

For Brenda

opus omniaque

Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

2. Montgomery

3. Birmingham

4. Selma

5. Aftermath

6. Conclusion

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

This book had its origins during the academic year 1987–88, when I was a fellow of the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute. I had gone to Virginia to prepare a monograph on the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott, an event I had been studying for some time, but an invitation to participate in a conference the Woodson Institute had organized that spring on the civil rights movement got me thinking about the seemingly anomalous place of the bus boycott in the larger pattern of events that it had in significant part initiated. The paper I prepared for this conference—subsequently published in the volume of conference proceedings, Armstead L. Robinson and Patricia Sullivan, eds., New Directions in Civil Rights Studies (University Press of Virginia, 1991)—and the response of the conference participants to it persuaded me that my ideas were sufficiently out of the mainstream to require a full-scale statement if they were to be entirely convincing to other students of the period, or for that matter, even to me. I therefore undertook the preparation of the present volume, though had I known at the time exactly what I was taking on I might have reconsidered the decision. At any rate, I am now deeply grateful to Paul Gaston and the late Armstead Robinson for having arranged the fellowship and conference that gave rise to these thoughts, and to Jeff Norrell, Bill Chafe, Charles Eagles, Phil Ethington, and others who urged me to develop them. Much of the writing of this study occurred during 1994–95, when I was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. I am equally grateful to the late Charles Blitzer and the staff of the Wilson Center for having created so welcoming an environment for me to begin the process of transforming my ideas into words.

My understanding of this subject rests upon the invariably kind and helpful efforts of numerous archivists. In particular, the rich resources of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, in Montgomery, are the principal foundation not merely of this book but of nearly everything I have ever written. Ed Bridges was always ready to listen to my thoughts and to read drafts of my chapters. Joe Caver and Norwood Kerr often roamed the stacks to locate the documents I needed. But there is not, I think, a single employee of the archives who has not at one time or another gone beyond the call of duty to assist me. Equally obliging were Marvin Whiting and the staff of the Archives and Manuscripts Division of the Birmingham Public Library. The staff of the Archives of the Church of the Brethren in Elgin, Illinois, were especially kind, keeping the archives open for me over a weekend so that I could complete my work there. The staffs of the University of Chicago Library and the Chicago Historical Society were also very helpful. The staffs of the Peace Collection at the Swarthmore College Library, the Amistad Center at Tulane University, the Oral History Collection at Howard University, the Archives Division of the Duke University Library, the Archives Division of the University of Alabama Library, the Oral History Collection of the Alabama State University Library, and the James Madison Library of the Library of Congress did everything possible to assist me. And the staff of the Southeastern Regional Federal Records Center in East Point, Georgia, were particularly accommodating. Finally, I have worked many hours in the quiet and beautiful Library of the Alabama Supreme Court, and I am profoundly thankful for that excellent facility. Three undergraduate research assistants, Jason Cowart, Aaron Kanter, and Joocheol Nam, helped me at various stages of this project, and it is a great pleasure for me to acknowledge their contributions to this final product.

Among my fellow historians, no one has done more to improve this book than Phil Ethington. Always enthusiastic and sympathetic, always ready to give me a swift kick where it hurts, Phil has waded through the manuscript in two different forms with painstaking attention and, what is far more important, with extraordinary intelligence and insight. The structure of the book is much clearer, the prose more graceful, and the argument a great deal more carefully considered thanks to his efforts. Equally supportive for just as long has been Dave Garrow, whose encyclopedic knowledge of this subject and whose faith in this project have stood me in good stead through the years. Sheldon Hackney I have known since my undergraduate days at Princeton. His reading of this manuscript, despite his enormously busy schedule, was especially kind. And my colleague Matt Lassiter, who read this manuscript in the midst of preparing his own excellent new book for the press, was just as gracious. Sheldon’s and Matt’s suggestions for the restructuring of the chapters were decisive in giving the book its final form. Ed and Martha Bridges have believed in the usefulness of this analysis even when I myself had doubts. Ed’s many intellectual contributions to the book I have already mentioned, but his friendship and our many long conversations have mattered even more. Martha typed the manuscript in its next-to-last version, and her interest in it never faltered. Leah Atkins and Glenn Eskew read the Birmingham portions of the book and reassured me that I had not too badly misunderstood their city, alien though it may be to my Black Belt sensibilities. I presented a draft of the Montgomery material to the Cumberland Legal History Seminar at Samford University, thanks to the suggestion of Bryn Roberts, and am appreciative of the advice the participants gave me about it.

I turn finally to what is infinitely my greatest debt. Brenda waited patiently while my research slogged along and my ideas slowly matured, listened to all my qualms and complaints, reassured me and pushed me on. I could not possibly have asked for more. The dedication of this volume is paltry recompense, but it is offered with profoundest gratitude and love.

Ann Arbor, Michigan

September 2001

Dividing Lines

Introduction

1

In October 1954, Professor C. Vann Woodward delivered at the University of Virginia the lectures on the origins of southern racial segregation that the following year would be published under the title The Strange Career of Jim Crow. In the years just after Reconstruction, he said, the patterns of race relations in the region were strikingly diverse, varying from town to town and from institution to institution, and the opinions of white southerners about the optimal structure of racial adjustment were correspondingly in flux. It was not until the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth that the governmental enforcement of statutorily defined racial boundaries and the elimination of blacks from the southern electorate by constitutional requirements became the universal regional standard. The source of this development was political. In the early 1890s, Democratic Party politicians had aggressively denounced their Populist adversaries as advocates of racial equality, and therefore as enemies of white security, and the polarization of racial alternatives that had emerged from these campaigns had driven the more moderate, paternalist wing of the Democrats into an acceptance of the leadership of the popular racist demagogues who had made legal segregation and constitutional disfranchisement Democratic Party doctrine. Out of the Populist elections, therefore, had emerged a politically expedient orthodoxy that, because of the demands of political competition, had hardened after the turn of the century into an inflexible regionwide set of legal mandates, embodied in legislative acts and municipal ordinances.

Woodward’s portrait of these events began almost at once to provoke objections. An uncompromising commitment to white supremacy had been general among white southerners since colonial times, his opponents observed; the militant defense of slavery established this fact beyond cavil. Segregated institutions, and in particular segregated churches and schools, had already begun to appear during Reconstruction. Moreover, black leaders seeking the advancement of their race had often initiated their establishment. The new statutory and constitutional commands of the 1890s had merely codified and generalized practices already widespread. But the codification and generalization of these practices formed precisely the point, Woodward replied. During the 1880s alternative patterns of racial contact were to be found throughout the region. There were even prominent white spokesmen, usually radical Populists, who questioned white supremacy. And among the white supremacists there was as yet no single accepted institutional expression of the prejudice. By the 1900s, however, the alternatives had been eliminated and dissent had effectively been criminalized. This momentous transformation had been imposed by governmental authorities as a result of explicitly political calculations.¹

While the controversy about Woodward’s argument was engulfing a portion of the academy, the nation was being engulfed by the conflict surrounding the attempt to extirpate the very ordinances, statutes, and constitutional provisions that had been Woodward’s subject. Indeed, Woodward’s lectures themselves had grown directly out of his efforts during 1953 to assist the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in the preparation of its historical brief to be submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court as a part of the argument of the school segregation cases, which had been decided just five months before he addressed the Virginia audience. But it was the escalating civil rights movement in the decade following the school desegregation decision that, rather ironically, underlay much of the skepticism in subsequent years about his ideas. The black demonstrations seemed so deeply rooted in the most fundamental ethical convictions of Western civilization, and the white resistance seemed so fully to represent the immemorial evil of which that civilization was capable, that Woodward’s depiction of southern segregation as a relatively recent and distinctly contingent historical development came to seem to many observers to be belied by the reality surrounding them. How could a system that incarnated a bigotry as old as the region itself, that was so unmistakably a transmutation of the slavery that had preceded it, that was defended so tenaciously by what appeared to be so nearly unbroken a white phalanx, be properly conceived as a product of a few largely forgotten local elections that had occurred within a six-year period some seventy years before?

In truth, however, if the civil rights movement had been correctly understood at the time, it would have had very different lessons to teach. Three aspects of those lessons began to emerge relatively quickly. In the first place, it became clear that white southerners’ doubts about segregation were both more extensive and more complex than either zealous segregationists or civil rights advocates initially appreciated. In the second place, it became clear that blacks’ desire for civil rights and their enthusiasm for integration were by no means identical sentiments. And thirdly, and most significantly, it became clear that segregation was merely one institutional manifestation of white supremacy, that white supremacy had taken other forms in other parts of the nation, and that the elimination of segregation was not therefore the equivalent of the establishment of racial justice. All three of these discoveries were hard-bought for most disciples of the civil rights movement, and all three worked to diminish the reservations about Woodward’s arguments that the movement had aroused. A fourth aspect of the movement’s lessons relevant to the historiographical controversy, however, still is not typically comprehended today, and it is the subject of this book: just as local politics was essential to the creation of southern segregation, so local politics was the crucial factor in creating the circumstances that ended it. Woodward’s insights into segregation’s origins actually could have clarified the nature of the events that were preparing its destruction. Unfortunately, the whirlwind that the civil rights movement generated obscured this element of its lessons at the time. It is the intention of the following pages to illuminate the essential connection between the intensely local concerns of municipal politics and the vast national and international changes in race relations they wrought during the 1950s and 1960s.²

The key to appreciating the role of municipal politics in the civil rights movement is to ask ourselves twin questions. Why did the civil rights movement manifest itself as mass direct-action campaigns in certain southern cities and towns, and not in others in which social conditions were apparently so closely comparable? Why were there sustained demonstrations in Birmingham rather than in Mobile, in Montgomery rather than in Columbus or Meridian, in Selma rather than in Valdosta, Bainbridge, or Dothan? And too, why did the direct-action campaigns happen in these places when they did, rather than earlier or later in the period? The history of the civil rights movement as it is customarily told, as an episode in the history of the United States, has not been able to deal effectively with such questions. Indeed, they are usually not even broached. The implication in many popular accounts is that the cities in which confrontations would be staged were consciously selected by national civil rights organizations. It is true that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) frequently selected cities in which it would organize demonstrations with an eye to whether or not the city was likely to gain favorable national publicity for the cause. In every case, however, there was an existing local civil rights organization in the city already engaged in protests; the SCLC was always invited to give its help by the local leaders, though it accepted or rejected the invitation for its own reasons. And this explanation is still less applicable to the activities of other components of the movement. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had local branches throughout the nation and ordinarily became involved in litigation when a case came to the attention of local branch officials; it almost never lent its support to demonstrations or direct action. The Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was committed to long-term community organizing at the local level throughout the region; and except for the Freedom Rides, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) attempted, less successfully, to follow the same pattern. The National Urban League was not generally active in the South. The reality about the civil rights confrontations in southern towns during the period, then, is that they were everywhere local in origin, even when they received assistance from sympathetic outside forces.

I suspect that all careful students of these events would grant that much. At any rate, the three direct-action efforts on which this investigation will focus—those in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma—were beyond question indigenous in their origins. Though all three received significant assistance from national organizations, and the campaigns in Birmingham and Selma would undoubtedly have been considerably less successful without it, the campaigns were not produced by the national organizations. Rather, the national organizations—the NAACP in Montgomery, the SCLC in Birmingham and Selma—built upon movements initiated locally; indeed, they used the local movements for their own purposes, which in each of the three cases were not entirely consonant with local intentions.

It remains nevertheless much too easy for historians of the civil rights movement to think of its several local collisions as having built upon each other, in a mounting crescendo from Montgomery to Selma. Indeed, the very concept of a civil rights movement, when viewed from the perspective of its impact upon national history, encourages us to do so. And a focus upon the movement’s regional and national leaders seems to con-firm it; the SCLC did attempt, for instance, to use lessons derived from Montgomery to understand the challenge of Albany, did worry about the errors committed in Albany when it undertook to assist in Birmingham, and did employ in Selma the strategies it had developed earlier in Birmingham. Students of a maturing movement culture, moreover, are necessarily compelled by the concept itself to emphasize the linkages from one incident to another. In fact, the abstraction is sufficiently powerful that it sometimes betrays its enthusiasts into assuming the importance of prior influences without bothering to establish that they were really at work. Some investigators, for instance, have erroneously attributed to the Baton Rouge bus boycott of 1953 a causative role in the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–56—in part, it would appear, simply on the basis of post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning.³

The notion that the various direct-action efforts in the South after 1955 were particular manifestations of a coherent black protest movement against the southern social system—generated in large part by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 decision declaring school segregation unconstitutional, and southern white resistance to that decision—was pervasive among northern journalists and observers at the time. Moreover, in the eyes of most commentators, it was precisely this belief that lent the various local demonstrations broader social significance. And it was what came therefore to seem, in the press reports on it, a swelling regionwide tide of protest that in great part eventually compelled national political institutions to take the movement seriously. Nor, of course, was this perspective devoid of truth. Certainly black hostility to racial discrimination was virtually universal, and the Supreme Court’s decisions that the Constitution forbade any governmental enforcement of such discrimination had for the first time in many years placed this long-standing hostility into a powerfully national context. Yet a sensitive examination of the local movements themselves allows us to see them from a different, and no less valid, point of view.

The black Selma attorney J. L. Chestnut, Jr., gives us in his memoirs, for instance, this description of attitudes among his black fellow townsfolk at the time of George Wallace’s election as governor of Alabama in 1962:

Wallace reinvigorated white Alabama’s resistance. Each September since [1958] . . . another school system in the South had been forced to desegregate—Little Rock, Richmond, New Orleans. Wallace was elected the fall the courts ordered the University of Mississippi to admit James Meredith, when riots broke out and the Kennedys sent in the National Guard. The walls of Jericho were beginning to crumble and up stepped Wallace saying, Don’t worry, folks. We’ll hold the line. I am the man to do it. These claims stiffened white resolve. . . . In Selma, the Wallace phenomenon was clearly in evidence. . . . From my vantage point, the white community in Selma was reacting to phantoms and in every way oversensitive because there was no counter-development I could see in the black community. It seemed to me they were engaged in a paranoid obsession similar to their belief that white women were in danger from black men. When I looked at the black community, I didn’t detect any threat to white women or to segregation. [Sheriff Clark’s] posse was organized to head off an assault that wasn’t developing in black Selma any damn way.

In Selma in 1962, no black institution or organization, with the exception of the little Dallas County Voters League, was promoting civil rights or organizing black people around any goal except going to heaven, providing a decent education, or having a good time— not the clubs or fraternities, not the churches, not Selma University, not the black teachers’ association. The NAACP was banned statewide, and the local chapter already was demoralized by the fallout from the unsuccessful petition to integrate the schools.

At the bootleg houses, the clubs, the Elks, Selma University, we would occasionally discuss the public issues of the day. It was frustrating to listen to the pessimistic theme song: These [black] folk here won’t get together. They won’t take a chance. In a way, it was more difficult arguing about oppression with black people than it was with white people—and a whole lot more discouraging. . . . I would be trying to prove that while some particular case—like those that outlawed the all-white Democratic primary in Texas—had been decided elsewhere, the court’s decision opened a door nationally. I don’t know about Texas, but I don’t see any doors opening in Selma. Do you? That’s what I’d hear. Many black people in Selma thought and talked only in terms of what George Wallace or white people in Selma were going to permit. They thought the state of Alabama was more powerful than the federal government.

And even though Chestnut was fully informed about the rapidly developing body of national civil rights law, he was actually not much more sanguine himself than were his more parochial neighbors. My concern was whether federal power would be exercised against Southern whites on behalf of blacks, and on this score, in 1962, I was only slightly less pessimistic than the people I was arguing with. . . . I didn’t think anything of great consequence would come out of the White House or the Justice Department.⁴

As we shall see, the principal source of the White Citizens’ Council’s strength in Montgomery and Selma at this period was its confident conviction that, by preventing local white dissent, it was on the verge of winning the battle with the civil rights forces and their federal allies. Nor did black leaders at the heart of the local struggles therefore possess any greater sense of the vast changes that were just about to sweep through their communities. In the summer of 1963, nearly three months after the end of the demonstrations of that spring, Birmingham city councilman Alan Drennen, while campaigning for merger with the city’s suburbs, commented that without it, Birmingham by 1980 could be politically controlled and operated by members of the colored race. Emory O. Jackson, the editor of the Birmingham World, the voice of the black community and one of black Birmingham’s best-informed spokesmen, greeted this assertion with astonishment and ridicule: Mr. Drennen knows better than this. At the present rate of Negro voting [registration], it would take over 40 years for the Negro group to get its potential vote on the poll lists. And even when it had done so, The Negro population is only 38 per cent of the total. In the end, of course, Drennen’s prediction proved quite accurate; Birmingham elected its first black mayor in 1979. But the notion seemed so outlandish to Jackson in 1963 that Drennen’s mere expression of it caused Jackson to rage, The issue of merger is now enmeshed with racial bigotry, it seems to us. Jackson simply could not imagine at that time the capacity of the civil rights movement to sweep aside Alabama’s restrictions on registration completely within two more years, and the social transformations that the achievement would shortly thereafter engender in his city.⁵

It is precisely this aspect of the events of the period that the assumption of a coherent regionwide civil rights movement obscures: the capacity of what seemed always to have been to limit understandings of what could be. Very few participants in the civil rights movement were able to conceive the shape of thoroughgoing reform. The movement actually proceeded through tiny revelations of possible change. The Montgomery bus boycott initially sought only to obtain the pattern of seating segregation in use in Mobile; the Albany movement was inaugurated simply in an effort to compel the city’s bus and train stations to abide by the Interstate Commerce Commission’s nondiscrimination order, issued in response to the Freedom Rides; the Birmingham demonstrations had as their goal just the desegregation of the lunch counters in the five downtown department and five-and-ten-cent stores; the Dallas County Voters League asked merely for an evenhanded administration of the state’s literacy standard for registration, not its elimination. It is not that blacks in these cities would not ideally have wished for more. It is that even the belief that this much was attainable was itself a momentous achievement—an achievement that may not be presumed, but instead requires an explanation.

If we abandon—as we must—the notion that the cities in which direct-action campaigns occurred were consciously selected for them by national civil rights leaders and organizations, then the conception of a civil rights movement in which each episode leads to the next at once reveals a fatal logical flaw. It is certainly true that black resentment of discriminatory treatment was ubiquitous, and black exultation at civil rights victories elsewhere, whether in the courts or in the streets, was general, if usually tempered profoundly by generations of disappointment. But exactly for that reason, the conception offers no real way of understanding why the accomplishments in Birmingham should have generated a response in Selma, rather than, as I have said, in Dothan, Meridian, or Valdosta. The explanation we seek must be able to distinguish one southern town from all the others and must allow us to comprehend how the black citizens of that town—or at any rate, a significant element among them—came to conclude that the reality all around them, that formed the very substance of their daily existence, was in fact capable of being changed.

Part of the answer, of course, is that the South in the decades after World War II was caught up in an immense economic transformation, one that brought new prosperity and new opportunities and institutions to black communities as well as—if on a rather more modest scale than— white. Viewed from this long-term perspective, the civil rights movement was unquestionably a revolution of rising expectations; blacks were able to believe that reality could change for them because it actually was changing, and very rapidly too, throughout these years. But again, this observation, however accurate, is no less true for towns in which direct-action campaigns did not develop than for those in which they did. Another part of the answer is that integration in other places, once it occurred, proved that it was possible; there is no doubt, for instance, that Fred Shuttlesworth was moved to seek the integration of Birmingham’s buses because of the successful integration of the buses in Montgomery. But no such answer can be fundamental, because in that case it would obviously be circular. And probably of even greater significance than the logical objection is the historical one: as a matter of fact, an achievement by blacks in any one town was ordinarily taken up by blacks in other towns, if at all, only very slowly, haltingly, and with enormous hesitation and difficulty.

Another possible explanation, and one that doubtless contains more than a grain of truth, would turn on the quality of local leadership. It would seem reasonable to maintain that racial conflict was more likely to arise in a community when it contained particularly forceful or militant black leaders, or particularly insensitive or brutal white leaders, or both. And the characters around whom the municipal encounters of the decade tended to organize themselves do very often seem to fall into the one or the other category. But the historian who investigates these collisions closely is likely to come to a rather different conclusion. In the first place, before the outbreak of racial strife in a town, black leadership was frequently divided and weak. There might be a small group of energetic leaders, but there was a much larger group of eviscerated figureheads speaking for a timorous and quiescent mass. It was ordinarily the events of the crisis themselves that concentrated the passions of the black population upon the programs of the few dynamic black notables in the community, turned these individuals into spokesmen, and pushed them to the fore. Indeed, the examination of southern municipalities in which open racial conflict failed to appear may well disclose the presence in them of leaders even more vigorous than those to be found heading demonstrations elsewhere. It would seem plausible to suggest that a community that had managed to develop active and effective black leaders, whose remonstrances were at least sometimes heeded by those in power, was less, rather than more, likely to be a community in which blacks would feel compelled to turn to direct action. One clear example of this process at work is Mobile, where the indefatigable president of the NAACP branch, postman John L. LeFlore, together with the powerful dockworkers’ union leader Isom Clemon and others, cooperated with the liberal white city commissioner Joseph Langan to transform the patterns of race relations in the city without significant public confrontations.⁶

In the second place, the study of local racial clashes will reveal that the white socioeconomic and political power structures in the towns in which the explosions occurred were not at all uniformly intransigent and oppressive in their racial attitudes. On the contrary, the common denominator that links the white leadership groups in all these cities is that they put out mixed signals, some elements of them offending blacks with their undisguised racism, other elements frustrating blacks with their oblivious indifference to black residents’ plight, but still other elements giving clear indications of an openness to reform and a willingness to seek some new modus vivendi within the community. In such circumstances, black spokesmen could be led to conclude that if they could just succeed in communicating to whites how seriously they took matters of particular concern to them, they would find many whites willing to cooperate. Blacks could come to believe, therefore, that the time to press their demands had arrived.⁷

In sum, then, if we are to understand why specific towns developed direct-action movements when others that were apparently similarly situated did not, our explanation must attend to local perceptions, assumptions, and interests. Something in one city must have given a crucial number of blacks there a sense that blacks elsewhere did not share, of the immediate malleability of their world. That something, I argue, was the structures of municipal politics. The following three chapters will offer detailed analyses of the events surrounding the significant direct-action movements in three Alabama cities. Before turning to these narratives, however, I have thought that some summary remarks might prove useful to emphasize the common traits that the stories seem to me to exhibit. These remarks inevitably include allusions to incidents and personalities that the reader will not yet have encountered. The temporary suspension of a degree of puzzlement will therefore be necessary. In the next several pages, the goal is to clarify the governing patterns; the clarification of the particulars will come later. Let me begin with a simple statement of the causes of the three direct-action movements, as I understand them.

In Montgomery, the disintegration of the Gunter machine after World War II in response to the rising political consciousness of lower-middle-class whites in the eastern precincts, the election of the stridently antimachine east Montgomerian Dave Birmingham with black support in 1953, Commissioner Birmingham’s hiring of black policemen, and his resultant defeat in the racially charged city election of 1955 form the essential background to the decision of black leaders to call for a boycott of the buses following the arrest of Rosa Parks. In Birmingham, the increasing doubts among business progressives after World War II about the very significant economic and social costs of the stable municipal political order that the business community had itself played a principal role in putting in place in 1937 culminated, after the Freedom Rider riot of May 1961 and the decision to close the city’s parks and playgrounds at the end of that year, in a direct assault on the city commission form of government. The business progressives’ attack on the city commission led to interracial contacts that exacerbated the deep rivalries between black activist and moderate leaders and triggered the specific events that produced the demonstrations of 1963. In Selma, the dominance of the Burns-Heinz machine and the success of the White Citizens’ Council in discouraging any divisions among whites were both challenged in the fall of 1962 by the creation of the Committee of 100 Plus and its attempt to gain control of the board of the chamber of commerce. The insurgent business progressives carried their campaign into politics in 1964, when they united behind the candidacy of Joe Smitherman to defeat Mayor Heinz. In the meantime, the emerging division among prominent whites had already encouraged Edwin Moss and his allies in the Dallas County Improvement Association to seek in August 1963 to use the Retail Merchants Association to outflank Heinz’s adamant refusal to consider alterations in the status quo. And the willingness of the new Smitherman administration to discuss racial reform so emboldened black leaders that their impressive courage and enthusiasm was able to convince the SCLC to agree to assist them in renewing voter registration demonstrations.

The role that race relations played in the three sets of events was not at all similar. In Selma, the young businessmen who formed the Committee of 100 Plus had no particular interest in improving the community’s racial climate; the committee’s goal was simply to attract new industry to their city. The fact that their efforts had an adventitious racial impact proceeded, quite ironically, from the achievement of the Citizens’ Council in imposing so rigid an orthodoxy upon the white citizenry that the appearance of any discord among them had the most startling implications for the community at large. In Birmingham, the comparable group of business progressives was similarly primarily interested in industrial expansion, but despite their common acceptance of white supremacist assumptions, they understood that their city’s notoriety for execrable race relations formed a barrier to attaining their economic goals. Thus they eventually overcame their fears and initiated biracial consultations. In Montgomery, the nearly equiponderant electoral rivalry between whites in the eastern and southern sections in the early 1950s had allowed black voters, though few, to exercise a measure of political influence. But Clyde Sellers’s use of the race issue to defeat Dave Birmingham in the spring of 1955 compelled black leaders to search for a mechanism beyond the electoral process to force white politicians to take blacks’ principal concerns seriously. The bus boycott was the result of this quest.

Nor were the three cities any more uniform in the general style of the white supremacy that characterized them. The Gunter machine had left Montgomery with a heritage of a comparatively gentle and protective paternalism, marred however by a police force rendered quite callous by the machine’s persistent tolerance of social corruption. Industrial conflict and a long tradition of Klan influence stained Birmingham’s race relations repeatedly with episodes of brutality and violence. Paternalism in Selma was marked by a distinctly hard edge of white contempt and fear, derived in large part from the keen white awareness that they were greatly outnumbered in Dallas County by poor and poorly educated blacks.

It is not, then, the precise shape of race relations in the community that proved crucial to producing the resort to direct action, but rather the existence of a historic moment of political transition. The essence of the psychological inertia that had to be overcome if the black community were to abandon passivity was the widespread, largely unspoken assumption that the community had always fundamentally been as it was and was not likely ever really to change. In the three communities that we will examine, the drama of municipal politics had long worked powerfully to reinforce this belief. The stability that had come to characterize Birmingham’s political culture following the city elections of 1937, after two decades of constant conflict and a rapid turnover of officials, and the intimate connection between the achievement of that stability and the triumph of white supremacy in the area’s mills, mines, and unions played the same role in the Magic City that the dominance of the Gunter and Burns-Heinz machines did in Montgomery and Selma. And then, quite suddenly, the white political, economic, and social leadership, which had for a generation or more seemed to be essentially monolithic—especially to community residents who were not themselves among the leaders, as was the case with the black population—commenced to display vulnerability, to reveal sharp internal divisions, to send out, as I have said, quite mixed signals. Precisely because the community had for so long appeared immobile, these developments seemed to have extraordinary significance, to disclose a malleability in the social order of which few before had even dreamed. In a town whose political life had traditionally been more dynamic, the outcome of a mayoral election or a referendum on the form of municipal government would doubtless have appeared to have had implications limited chiefly to politics. But for politically aware blacks in towns theretofore apparently confined to a protracted political and social stasis, the revelation of genuine change—the commissionership of Dave Birmingham in Montgomery, the campaign to abolish the city commission in Birmingham, the creation of the Committee of 100 Plus and the defeat of Chris Heinz in Selma—caused them to believe that their world, which had seemed incapable of being altered, was in fact undergoing a fundamental transformation and was therefore subject at this moment to being molded by pressure.

A community is, perhaps above all, defined by its capacity to shape beliefs and aspirations. It might seem, given the fact that the vast majority of blacks in the three cities were excluded from the franchise in these years, that they would have been mere passive observers of the local political scene. Certainly—despite the influence of what whites called the bloc vote on the outcome of elections, in Birmingham and Montgomery at least—municipal officeholders at this period almost always proceeded as if politics were exclusively white man’s work. And it is true as well that a great many blacks, particularly poorer ones, remained highly dubious of the notion that political activity could eventually bring genuine change to their world. Nevertheless, the community’s political culture reached below white supremacist obtuseness and wounded black cynicism to bind virtually all of the community’s residents with its implications. In the first place, of course, the officials chosen in the municipal elections, even if most blacks had no voice in selecting them, made decisions that directly influenced the daily lives of all citizens, black and white. Black residents therefore were quite likely to be fully aware of and concerned about the identity and attitudes of local officeholders—and indeed, more likely to be familiar with local than with state, and far more likely than with faraway federal, officials. Hence the local face of power, which blacks knew intimately, would ordinarily seem to them the reality of power, whatever they may have heard about unrealized national or judicial policy pronouncements or social practices in other states or cities. It is this fact that is reflected in J. L. Chestnut’s frustrations with the resignation of his Selma neighbors, quoted earlier.

But even more significantly, the community’s political culture created, for residents of both races, the limits in their minds of what seemed possible. It is not that they were anesthetized against all reform, of course. Change might—indeed, often did—seem highly desirable. White businessmen could dream of industrial development. Blacks in Montgomery could press for the adoption of the pattern of bus segregation in use in Mobile, and blacks in Selma could believe the evenhanded administration of the voting registration laws a matter of simple fairness. But below such concerns was a level of assumption that would at once have defined truly thoroughgoing reform as impractical and absurd, as proceeding from utopian fascinations or quixotic crusades. And even deeper were the assumptions about social and institutional arrangements and power relationships within the community that, because they were so subtle and so seldom consciously examined, seemed simply to be natural. All of these assumptions were in fact subject to evolution; as changes came to the community, the frontiers of what appeared achievable in the future were gradually moved. But at any historical moment, the limits created by the local political culture were real and powerful.

It is precisely for this reason that the handful of black leaders in the three cities whose experiences and personality permitted them to some degree, at least, to transcend these limits and to envision alternatives not discernible in the imaginations of their fellow townsfolk—Edgar D. Nixon and Jo Ann Robinson in Montgomery, Fred L. Shuttlesworth in Birmingham, and S. William and Amelia P. Boynton in Selma—are such striking figures. But however remarkable these men and women and the few other leaders like them may have been, if circumstances had not created the union of a substantial part of the black citizenry behind their views, their insights by themselves could have had no social consequences. The ability of a tiny number of outstanding residents at a given time to see beyond the limitations imposed by local conditions therefore requires less explanation from history than does the infinitely rarer capacity of thousands not so gifted suddenly to find the impulse to use such perceptions. It is to this latter problem that our observations are intended to speak. An authentic alteration in what had long seemed the fixed structure of local political power—because such an alteration necessarily drew into question also the deeper, and apparently natural, assumptions that had been founded upon that structure—therefore had liberating implications far beyond the ordinary bounds of politics.

In Montgomery, the long-standing hatreds between Edgar Nixon and the working-class blacks of west Montgomery on the one hand and Rufus Lewis and the middle-class blacks generally connected with Alabama State College on the other had for more than a decade before the beginning of the bus boycott made black unity exceedingly difficult to achieve. Yet the boycott was marked by an unprecedented degree of solidarity, across deep divisions of class, sex, denominational affiliation, and personal jealousy and loathing. Of course, the shared antipathy to the insulting treatment that blacks too often received on Montgomery’s buses in part accounts for this unification, but it was largely poorer blacks whose experience of such indignities was frequent; middle-class blacks who owned an automobile had sometimes not even been aboard a bus since World War II, when gas rationing had made the use of public transit more general. Yet the extent of the solidarity that the middle class and working class manifested was the source of much of the good feeling that the boycott generated in the black community, and it caused considerable comment at the time. It would seem clear—indeed, the resolutions adopted by the black mass meeting on the first evening of the boycott virtually say as much—that the background of repeated frustrations in attempting to get the municipal authorities to take blacks’ bus seating grievance seriously, culminating in the prominent role that the seating proposal had played in the city commission candidates’ forum at the Ben Moore Hotel and in the meetings that followed Claudette Colvin’s arrest, formed a large part of the middle-class black anger that surrounded this issue. Thus the events of city politics and the attitudes of city politicians—and in particular, the municipal elections of March 1955—led directly to the prompt and ardent mobilization of the middle-class black leadership after Rosa Parks’s arrest. For them the boycott was, as Clausewitz says of war, political relations carried out by other means.

In Selma there was only a handful of black voters, and before 1964 city elections had in any case not been competitive for thirty years. But municipal politics nonetheless played an essential role in generating the unwonted black solidarity during the demonstrations of 1963 and 1965. Amelia Boynton’s initial contacts with the Southern Regional Council, SNCC, and the SCLC had all proceeded primarily from intensely personal considerations: her anguished attempts to sustain the decades-long but now faltering efforts of her dying husband to ameliorate the conditions under which Dallas County’s blacks were compelled to live. With the rise of the White Citizens’ Council, S. W. Boynton had adopted the strategy of trying to outflank local authorities by securing outside aid, and Amelia Boynton therefore sought to pursue this tactic. The arrival of SNCC’s Bernard Lafayette in the fall of 1962 was, however, coincident with the organization of the Committee of 100 Plus by white advocates of industrial development and the committee’s public endeavor to take control of the board of directors of the chamber of commerce. This first revelation of genuine white opposition to the leadership associated with the Burns-Heinz organization apparently strengthened the conservative black belief that it would be possible to procure progress through negotiation with sympathetic Selma whites, reinforced by federal court action when necessary. At any rate, Amelia Boynton’s and Frederick Reese’s enthusiasm for cooperating with Lafayette provoked initial opposition from the more moderate element within the Voters League, eventuating in the resignation first of Robert Reagin and later of Jackson C. Lawson from the league’s leadership, and produced, once the moderates in the league had been reconciled, the organization of the alternative Improvement Association by more conservative blacks led by Edwin Moss, Claude Brown, Marshall Cleveland, and others of like mind. The Improvement Association actively sought to forestall the 1963 demonstrations by inducing either the city government or the Retail Merchants Association to enter discussions. The complete solidarity that characterized black Selma during the demonstrations of late September and early October 1963 derived from twin sources: Judge Daniel Thomas’s refusal to see the conduct of the board of registrars for what it was, which seemed to have foreclosed a judicial remedy for the blacks’ plight; and the zealous insistence of the White Citizens’ Council and the Burns-Heinz machine upon preserving absolute and uncompromising white unity, which made negotiations with blacks a step too dangerous, both socially and economically, for white moderates to take. This situation drove the black moderates, against their preferences, into the arms of the activists.

After Heinz’s defeat and the consequent opening of consultations between black leaders and white moderates and, later, with the new Smitherman administration as well, the united white phalanx which the machine and the Citizens’ Council had enforced so relentlessly for a decade began to break down. But the remnants of the earlier intransigence were themselves sufficient to generate equal black solidarity behind the 1965 demonstrations. Smitherman’s victory and the tentative steps toward concessions to blacks that followed it proved that internal change was not impossible, but they also revealed clearly the vast gulf that now separated the attitudes of the city and county authorities and at the same time made it seem reasonable to believe that the policies of the county government could be transformed as those of the city had been. Events in the summer and fall of 1964 made the new differences between the city and county seem particularly sharp; Sheriff James Clark’s intemperate conduct during the brief demonstrations in early July, along with Judge James Hare’s indiscriminate injunction that ended them, were immediately followed in August and September by the white moderates’ first efforts to establish interracial amity. The extraordinary transition in municipal affairs represented by the outcome of the spring city election and the actions of Smitherman and his supporters in the fall thus made the recalcitrance that lingered at the county courthouse all the more infuriating for blacks, because for the first time it genuinely appeared to be behavior that was subject to being altered. It is for that reason, primarily, that once Mrs. Boynton had succeeded in persuading the SCLC to assist the Voters League in its registration efforts, virtually all of Selma’s black leadership, across the entire ideological spectrum, united in support of the renewed demonstrations. Even the black public school teachers—elsewhere notoriously the black community’s most thoroughly cowed occupational group—joined to march on the courthouse. Smitherman’s triumph over Heinz had made electoral actions seem to be the key to progress. Because the changes at city hall had convinced doubters that the polling booth really could produce change; because the policies of the county authorities now appeared to reflect not a universally implacable white will, but merely the beliefs of one faction within the white community; and because voter registration had thus been revealed to local blacks, in a way that actually spoke to their own local situation, to be crucial to realizing black aspirations—for all these reasons, breaking the resistance of the board of registrars became a goal about whose priority all black Selmians suddenly could agree. Heinz’s defeat succeeded in giving blacks a new optimism and a new willingness to commit themselves to the struggle because it seemed to establish that the final elimination of the white supremacist hegemony was no mere chimera, that with sufficient boldness it could, in fact, be even now within their grasp.

The situation in Birmingham was somewhat more complicated because the demonstrations of 1963 generated a solidarity among blacks that was in reality only paper thin. Arthur Gaston, Arthur Shores, and the other blacks allied with the Inter-Citizens Committee were committed to awaiting the new city council’s assumption of power before pressing for racial reforms, having been assured that reforms would be forthcoming shortly thereafter. Had it not been for the willingness of Martin Luther King, Jr., at his meeting with them of April 8 to cede to the black moderates a very substantial role in any future negotiations with whites, it seems certain that Gaston and Shores would have sought to suppress the spring demonstrations, just as they succeeded in doing the following October. Shuttlesworth’s rivals for black leadership cooperated with the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and the SCLC, therefore, only because by doing so they would be able to shape to their liking any agreement that the Christian Movement’s efforts might produce. If no such agreement were forthcoming, they would still be the blacks to whom the new city administration would turn once the demonstrations had played themselves out. In either case, they expected that they could thus emerge on top in their competition with Shuttlesworth himself. Equally crucial to the achievement of black unity in the 1963 demonstrations was eliminating the hopelessness of the vast numbers of poor blacks who were not involved with the Christian Movement. When black bystanders responded to Eugene Bull Connor’s police and firemen by hurling bottles and bricks, it was a blow to nonviolence, but it was also proof that the mass of the city’s ordinary blacks had been aroused to identification with the marchers. This response was elicited by the drama of the demonstrations themselves, and particularly by the SCLC’s use of schoolchildren and the violence of Connor’s countermeasures. By the beginning of May 1963, then, the black community of Birmingham had indeed achieved a kind of solidarity, but it was a solidarity composed in significant measure of calculated maneuvers for advantage on the part of the black business and professional interests and emotional communication with the impassioned events in the streets on the part of the black masses; the demonstrations’ formal goals inspired chiefly the Christian Movement’s own authentic membership.

Despite the quite fragile nature of the unity that Birmingham’s blacks finally attained, municipal politics was nevertheless at the heart of the events that produced the demonstrations. The fervid white supremacist pronouncements during the municipal elections of May 1961, and particularly the nature of Arthur Hanes’s runoff campaign against Thomas King, made inevitable the decision to close the city’s parks when Judge Hobart Grooms ordered them integrated in October. The insouciance of the police in the Freedom Rider riot in May 1961, along with the city commission’s decision to close the parks in October, united the sentiment of most of the business community behind the chamber of commerce’s plan to replace the commission with a mayor and council. The search for a compromise on the closure of the parks that might be acceptable to the commissioners led business interests to begin consultations with the black moderates. The failure of these negotiations induced black college students, with the support of both the black moderates and Shuttlesworth’s Christian Movement, to call for a boycott of the downtown merchants, and the boycott’s eventual collapse intensified the competition between the moderates and the Christian Movement for the students’ allegiance. Shuttlesworth’s determination to launch street demonstrations in conjunction with the SCLC convention in September 1962, in order to prove to the students, and to blacks in general, the efficacy of his theory of agitation, threatened to defeat the white business progressives’ campaign to abolish the city commission. Merchants therefore agreed to an unannounced removal of the segregation signs from facilities in the downtown department stores in order to preserve calm in advance of the change-of-government referendum. When this agreement became known to city authorities in mid-November, however, the merchants backed out of the arrangement. Shuttlesworth felt betrayed; he had forfeited his most promising means of coercing concessions from the whites, and it seemed likely that once the new city government took office the very concessions he sought would be delivered instead to his black moderate rivals. In an effort to recapture the initiative, he persuaded his friend Martin Luther King to join him in organizing demonstrations—timed to follow the election of the first mayor and council, in order to avoid delivering the mayoralty to Bull Connor, but to precede the new city administration’s inauguration, in order to ensure that credit for any subsequent reforms would flow to the Christian Movement rather than to the Inter-Citizens Committee. The settlement negotiated by the black moderates and white business leaders, however, was careful to condition all advances on Albert Boutwell’s and the council’s final assumption of power. Shuttlesworth initially vehemently objected to these accords, but he was persuaded to accept them, though quite reluctantly, by King and agents of the Kennedy Justice Department. Thus local political considerations shaped these events at every stage of their development. As was the case also in Montgomery and Selma, a fundamental alteration in the existing municipal political culture was crucial to generating the black community’s resort to direct action in Birmingham.

Local politics was not only an essential factor in the calculations of black leaders; it was also frequently an important, and sometimes a decisive, motive in the actions of segregationist officials. Clyde Sellers’s adamant opposition at the beginning of the boycott to the Montgomery Improvement Association’s proposal that the bus company adopt the Mobile seating plan certainly was influenced by his rejection of the plan during the municipal election campaign of the preceding spring, when it had been included on the questionnaire distributed at the Ben Moore Hotel meeting. L. B. Sullivan’s reluctance to extend police protection to the Montgomery Freedom Riders in May 1961 almost beyond question derived from his relentless attacks upon Sellers during the campaign of 1959 for having paid Martin Luther King’s loitering fine. Bull Connor’s agreement to allow Klansmen to assault the Freedom Riders in his city was demonstrably a product of his efforts to attract Klan support in his race for reelection against T. E. Lindsey. Sheriff Jim Clark’s intransigence during the 1965 demonstrations was to a substantial extent determined by considerations derived from what seemed virtually certain to be a renewal of his old and bitter rivalry with Wilson Baker for the shrievalty in the May 1966 Democratic primary: his electoral dependence upon the support of James Hare, Blanchard McLeod, and Bernard Reynolds and his desire to prove to voters the superiority of his forceful methods of dealing with dissent, as opposed to Baker’s and Smitherman’s more temperate ones.

Such examples could be multiplied; the point doubtless is already clear. Both political competition and the local civil rights movements reflected the rival efforts of elements of the community to shape the community’s destiny, to define the structure of policies and power within it. It cannot be surprising, therefore, that they were intimately and inevitably intertwined. Politics in great measure created the limits upon the citizenry’s sense of social possibilities. Politics created those limits whether or not— indeed, in important part, precisely through whether or not—individual citizens felt themselves permitted to influence the course of political developments. A moment of historic transition in the community’s political culture therefore could unleash—had almost inescapably to unleash—a powerful new understanding of what the community could become. It was this circumstance that underlay the willingness of blacks in Montgomery, Selma, and, through a bit more convoluted process, also in Birmingham to attempt to compel concessions through direct action; the cities were in the midst of transforming the politics that had characterized them for decades, and blacks from all sorts of backgrounds and attitudes were thus enabled to believe that firm demands could force a suddenly malleable situation to take account of their aspirations. Politics, as well, codified the structure of power in the community. Because segregationist officials understood themselves at a fundamental level to be defenders of the legitimacy of existing power relationships, it is certainly no wonder that they were intensely sensitive to all evidence of the electorate’s approval and sought constantly to depict themselves as spokesmen for a community consensus. It was precisely their allegiance to the established structure of power, indeed, that so often betrayed them in a time of transition, when past experience was losing its validity as a guide to present action. Politics, then, provides a key to understanding the actions of all participants in the local civil rights movements, whether black or white, integrationist, moderate, or white supremacist, because both politics and the civil rights movements formed aspects of the community’s contests for power.

Montgomery

2

1. The City before the Boycott

At the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, Montgomery’s municipal politics was in the midst of a fundamental transformation—a transformation that, as we shall see, played an essential role in shaping the course of race relations in the city.¹ For essentially the preceding half century, Montgomery had been ruled by the Gunter machine, headed for most of that time by William A. Gunter, Jr., the city’s mayor from 1910 to 1915 and from 1919 to his death in 1940. Mayor Gunter had come to power after more than a dozen years of bitter factional warfare between a group of wealthy families headed by the Gunters, who had been leaders in the area since the antebellum period, and the Hill family, whose local prominence dated only from the postbellum years. The abolition of the city council form of government in 1911 and its replacement by the city commission was a central incident in this struggle. After Gunter returned to the mayoralty in 1919, he managed to turn back all challenges to his rule. He could always rely upon the unwavering support of the city’s morning newspaper, the Montgomery Advertiser, whose editor, Grover C. Hall, Sr., was one of his closest advisers. He had the allegiance of the majority of Montgomery’s older families. And in the final two decades of his life, he also commanded the unanimous support of city employees, whom—as a result of an act which he pushed through the state legislature during a term as state senator—he could in effect hire and fire at will.²

If there were no successful challenges to the machine after 1919, however, the unsuccessful challenges were many. The Hills continued as Gunter’s uncompromising opponents, allying themselves in the various elections with whatever other elements were dissatisfied with the machine’s rule. Though they never won city office, the Hills