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

by J. Mills Thornton

Overview

Presents the story of the civil rights movement from the perspective of community-municipal history at the grassroots level

Thornton demonstrates that the movement had powerful local sources in its three birth cities—Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma. There, the arcane mechanisms of state and city governance and the missteps of municipal politicians and civic leaders—independent of emerging national trends in racial mores—led to the great swell of energy for change that became the civil rights movement.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780817380984
Publisher:	University of Alabama Press
Publication date:	04/22/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	752
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

J. Mills Thornton III is Professor of History at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and author of Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama 1800-1860.
 

Read an Excerpt

Dividing Lines

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

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By J. Mills Thornton III

The University of Alabama Press

Copyright © 2002 The University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8098-4

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Dividing Lines by J. Mills Thornton III. Copyright © 2002 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Contents Acknowledgments 1. Introduction 2. Montgomery 3. Birmingham 4. Selma 5. Aftermath 6. Conclusion Notes Index