Alabama

on the World Today

WHAT one is currently witnessing in the South, one hundred years after Appomattox, is nothing less, really, than the resolution of the Civil War. The military event took just four years, but only now, a century later, is it becoming a political fact.

During student protest demonstrations in Tuskegee, Alabama, last January after the slaying of a Tuskegee Institute student civil rights leader, city police stopped a column of Negro marchers for an hour one bright brisk morning before finally permitting them to proceed downtown. With two hundred Negroes, both students and townsmen, dammed up in the street by a thin blue line of police officers, there occurred one of the most significant conversations of the Negro revolution.

In the peculiarly amicable spirit of the whole confrontation, a young Negro sidled up to the city’s public safety director — a wispy, elderly, and at the moment, rather fidgety little man — and, nudging his elbow, asked in a low, confidential whisper, “Are you nervous, chief? You nervous ‘cause you got all of us stopped out here and you don’t know what to do with us? Well, you smart to be nervous, chief, ‘cause we’re holding your job right in the palm of our hand.” For the benefit of reporters clustered close by, the chief managed to muster a faint smile.

At that point, another young Negro casually strolled through the police lines up to the chief and loudly announced, “You know you gonna lose your job for this, don’t you?” And the first Negro, moved for some reason to come to the chief’s defense, replied, “Ah, he ain’t gonna lose his job. He’s a nice guy, he don’t want to hurt nobody. He’s my boy — ain’t you, chief?”

When that Negro youth referred to Tuskegee’s chief law officer as his “boy,” three hundred years of Southern history seemed to be abruptly reversed. What has wrought this revolution and finally effected the political confirmation of the Civil War in the South is Negro enfranchisement.

“The black Irish”

Described by some sardonic old reporters as “the black Irish,” this new electorate brings with it one great imponderable: Can it be managed and delivered by such establishment Negro politicians as Orzell Billingsley in Alabama or State Senator Leroy Johnson in Georgia, the “coalition” leaders who believe that the only effective implementation of the Negro’s new power is within the established party structures?

The “black Irish” are mostly Negroes whose political instincts differ from those of the old, smaller Negro electorate; generally, they are poorer, more spottily educated, more insular racially, more alienated from white society. And not a few observers think that they will be more susceptible to the radical style of such activists as the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee’s Stokley Carmichael, who passionately insists, “The only way the Negro can be effective is to wreak havoc from without. If he tries to work from within, he’s going to get cheated. When you’re standing out there alone, you can force the people to come to you. They’re the ones who have to do the compromising. You hold a superiority over them.”

While the new Negro electorate will act more directly on the structure of city and county politics in the South, it will also serve on the state level at the least to neutralize racist campaign rhetoric. Another important effect will be to fracture the Republican Party nationally, as the Democratic Party used to be fractured, between a crustily conservative, tacitly segregationist Southern faction and a liberal Northern faction. It will also nationalize the Democratic Party.

Southern Democrats, confronted by an increasingly virulent Republican challenge, tempted also by the potential windfall of Negro votes, are likely to surrender their Dixiecrats to the Republicans and make whatever quick adjustments in posture are necessary to accommodate the new constituency. As Alabama Democratic chairman Roy Mahall advised one outraged Dixiccrat just before the party’s executive committee scuttled its “’White Supremacy” slogan, “Maybe when you go over to the Republicans, you can prevail on them to pick up this slogan. We’re dropping it.”

The Negro as a citizen

It is ironic that nowhere is the final reconstruction of the South more profound than in George Wallace’s Alabama. In more meaningful terms, it consists of the dramatic arrival of the Negro as a citizen. But there is the added irony that Alabama is the Southern state most likely to elect a Republican governor, the first in the South since Reconstruction.

It would be hard to exaggerate the traumatic implications for the average rural while Alabamian of a Negro’s running for sheriff of his county. Yet six Negroes are running for the post in the May Democratic primary in Alabama. And there are fifty-four other Negroes running for the state legislature and such grass roots offices as tax assessor and county coroner.

Wallace is the kind of politician who really believes that he is the embodiment of the people’s will. Several times during recent months, he has felt the earth tremble under him: last November, his amendment to drop Alabama’s one-term limit on the governorship was defeated by the state legislature, and in January his scheme for county Democratic conventions in place of county primaries — a device to avert the impact of the new Negro electorate — was junked by the party’s executive committee before he could even propose it. There was also the election of a majority of national party loyalists to the committee at the same session. Now he desperately hungers to be embraced by the people again.

Running his wife in his stead, however, may be a stunt too bizarre even for the people he considers his own — the farmers, the steelworkers, the filling station attendants and mill hands, the people in the chili cafés. He resorted to this awkward recourse because, among other things, he entertained the naïve fear that if he ran for the Senate and were elected, he would not be seated when he arrived in Washington.

It seems certain that if either Mrs. Wallace or former governor John Patterson, a humorless, baby-faced segregationist who lacks even Wallace’s country charm, wins the Democratic primary, most of the 200,000 Negroes who should vote in the general election will boycott the whole affair or back Republican congressman Jim Martin, who is ill-tempered enough toward the federal government to endear him to the neosecessionists but sufficiently abstract a segregationist to permit Negroes to vote for him while retaining their selfrespect. This prospect should somewhat restrain the racial dialogue between the Wallaces and Patterson.

In fact, right now Wallace and Patterson are Studying and prodding the matter of the new Negro electorate with the meticulous delicacy of a dinner guest tinkering with his fork at a slice of meat just presented him which he suspects is a trifle gamy, but which he knows must sooner or later be tasted. While Wallace insists that “I’m not going to be making any pitch for those votes, the votes of illiterates, because they wouldn’t vote for me anyhow,” he does add, after a pause, “However, I am going to call to their attention all I’ve done for the Nigra.”

Attempt at coalition

Attorney General Richmond Flowers, Sr., who is also running, quixotically, in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, regards Wallace as a momentary perverse phase in the emergence of what he terms an “urban populist conscience.” The strategy of Flowers and the predominately Negro Alabama Democratic Conference in demanding that the state Democratic Party strike its “White Supremacy” slogan was to drive the party to suicide (they fully expected their demand to be rejected out of hand), and then to rebuild it in the image of the national party, using as its base a new urban populist coalition between laboring Negroes and the kind of whites who up to now have been counted as Wallace’s folk.

They were frustrated, tactically at least, when the executive committee took the realistic action that it did. But strategically, Flowers’ whole political future is still pitched on the hope of such a coalition. Even sympathetic observers, however. reluctantly dismiss that hope as being, for the moment, rather romantic — it will be some time, a long time, they conclude, before common economic interests can transcend naked racial antipathy.

The front of the bus

The Public Accommodations Act of 1964, while not bringing results as precipitously as has 1965’s Voting Rights Act, has still proved to be a vital agent in the new reconstruction of the South. At first, there was a real question whether the mass of Negroes would actually use the rights that had been won in Birmingham and St. Augustine. After the cresting waves of demonstrations, there has seemed to be a backwash, an ebbing of Negroes to the back of the bus again, out of the white restaurants. Little has seemed changed.

Negro attorney C. B. King, who for ten years has been affronting south Georgia juries with his studied condescension — his meticulous pronunciation and ponderous Victorian rhetoric and baroque theatrical gestures — and yet winning cases with surprising consistency, describes the lack of follow-through like this: “Clyde Beatty, you know, used to relate how for years he kept alligators separated from each other with an elaborate system of concrete walls. Then, one day, he completely dismantled these walls and strung up in their place strands of mere tissue paper. But the alligators stayed right where they were.”

Slowly, the Public Accommodations Act is beginning to take effect. Frequently now, one sees Negroes seated with little more than a brief glare by the waitress in restaurants all over the South — not only in Atlanta and Charlotte but also in Birmingham and Jackson and even Selma. Gradually, the integration of the South’s public facilities and schools is becoming a habit.

Hosea Williams, Martin Luther King’s smoldering agate-eyed activist lieutenant, still insists, “If we keep pushing the South now, we can break it down all the way, I think. If we start slowing down now, we’ll have the kind of subtle segregation they have up North, and sooner or later we’ll have to come back down here to get the job finished anyway as we’re having to do up North now.”

Take Lucas Beauchamp in Intruder in the Dust, Negroes in the South are likely to find that freedom and full manhood are colder and lonelier than what they had earlier. And even with full citizenship, Negroes will still be a racial minority — a protected minority, a competitive minority — and as such, like Jews, will presumably always have to endure some hostility.

Discrimination in the South seems likely to evolve into the insidious kind of frustrations that Negroes face in the North. Tokenism, perhaps, will present a more formidable challenge to full Negro citizenship than did segregation. “In the past, the issues were black and white — clean, and I don’t mean just racially, but ethically, too,” admits one SNCC official. “You knew who the enemy was, because, among other things, he bragged about it. But now, things are getting gray. It’s a kind of twilight zone.”

A jaded peace

While one is witnessing the reconstruction of the South, one is also witnessing what might be called the great Northernization of the South — a Northernization of its economy, its problems, and its politics. And with industrialization and urbanization, an urbanization made all the more profound by state legislative reapportionment, the South has suffered a loss of innocence, or at least a loss of provincialism. It is even lamented that the age of the great Southern writers is probably over.

All of this is, of course, the political and social climax of the Civil War, but more immediately it is the handiwork of the Birminghams, the St. Augustines, the Selmas. Predictions are now being ventured that the great swashbuckling days of the movement, the revolution’s great confrontations, are done with. Since Selma, there have been some sporadic skirmishes— Crawfordville, Georgia; Natchez, Mississipppi — but they have had about them the quality of small mopping-up operations, and the movement all over the South seems to have fallen into a state of distraction.

One liberal white Southerner, after touring much of the South for a government agency, reported, “The vote has ended the say-hey, activist days. The vote has ushered it out of its simple crisis-producing mentality into a quieter political absorption. When you go out into the South these days, it’s got that wan, quiescent quality of a deserted battlefield.”

The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the most romantic and existentialist and earthy of all the civil rights fronts, has even betrayed certain bourgeois impulses. Throughout the movement’s days of thunder, SNCC was quartered in a dingy, sagging suite of offices, as hot and stale as a fox’s den, at the top of a narrow staircase over a barbershop on a side street deep in the Negro section of Atlanta. But last summer, a reporter seeking SNCC workers out found the upper-floor roost deserted, finally discovered that they were installed in spacious new quarters on a street of warehouses not far from the glimmering downtown towers of Atlanta. The place had been an import-export firm, but SNCC was elaborately overhauling it. What had been finished was air-conditioned — militantly air-conditioned — with oak-paneled walls and a white TV.

Not only does a certain kind of peace seem to have settled over the movement, but a certain kind of jaded peace seems to have settled over the segs. When the Georgia General Assembly, taking pains to be as nonprovocative as possible, dislodged Representative Julian Bond of SNCC from its midst, SNCC’s executive secretary, James Forman, suddenly materialized out of nowhere like an avenging angel, looking eminently subversive in a denim jacket and drooping, frayed trousers.

But Forman drew very little reaction from the white spectators and legislators milling around him. There were only such whispered comments as “Look at them blue jeans. Don’t he know this ain’t no place for blue jeans? Looks like he could of at least worn a coat and tie.”