Furious Hours

by Casey Cep

  The 1968 Democratic National Convention was an unusually turbulent one, in unusually turbulent times. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated four months before, and Robert Kennedy two months after that. There were violent clashes between Vietnam War protesters and the Chicago police outside the convention center, and very nearly as much tumult inside it. President Lyndon Johnson had announced that he would not seek reelection, so Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Senator Eugene McCarthy were fighting for his job. Robert Kennedy had also been a presidential hopeful, and his assassination that June had left hundreds of delegates uncommitted. On top of that, several southern states had sent competing slates of delegates—some segregated, some integrated. Four years earlier, nearly the entire Alabama delegation had walked out of the convention to protest the seating of integrated delegates from Mississippi; this time, three separate slates of Alabama delegates had shown up, and it took the credentialing committee to sort them out.

  When it did, Tom Radney was among those seated. He promptly pinned a “Draft Ted” button on his blazer and went looking for a camera. “Edward Kennedy has shown a great enthusiasm for the South and its problems,” Radney declared, “and he will be a popular candidate in the South. I cannot support any other announced candidate.” It was a startling enough declaration to get him interviewed from the floor of the convention by CBS News, which is when his problems started. “Walter,” a fresh-faced Dan Rather said to anchorman Walter Cronkite, “you automatically assume that everyone from Alabama is a Wallace man. Not true. There is, in the Alabama delegation, at least one strong supporter of Senator Edward Kennedy. Tom Radney from Alexander City, Alabama, is that man.”

  Looking and sounding as comfortable on national television as Cronkite himself, Tom described Ted Kennedy as “the most formidable Democratic candidate we have” and, somewhere between his smiles and his shucks, predicted that Senator Kennedy would “sweep the South.” After he was done talking with CBS, Tom gave interview after interview, offering himself as an ambassador of the New South for anyone who would listen.

  The Old South immediately went up in arms. That year, George Wallace was running for president as an independent candidate, to the delight of many both in his home state and farther afield. (He would ultimately win Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas, plus a faithless elector from North Carolina, for a total of forty-six electoral votes, the most won by a third-party candidate since former president Theodore Roosevelt ran as a Progressive.) But even if Wallace hadn’t been running, almost nobody watching the convention back home in Alabama wanted another Kennedy in the White House, and they let their state senator know exactly how they felt about him grandstanding on television at their expense. Almost instantly, telegrams began arriving for Tom at the convention hall, and messages started piling up for him back at his hotel. They were nearly all anonymous, and all vicious. One of them, a telegram sent from Birmingham and signed only “Concerned Citizens of Alabama,” read, “Roses are red, Violets are blue. Two Kennedys are dead and so are you.”

  Tom had been mocked for his politics in the past, and made to feel like a traitor to his state and his race, but he had never really been threatened, and never before had he been made to feel afraid. Madolyn was immediately distraught, especially for their children, who were back home in Alexander City. Her parents were staying in the house on Ridgeway Drive with the girls, who were five, three, and ten months at the time, when the phone started ringing there, too. Tom asked the Alexander City Police to send a car to protect his family while he and Madolyn figured out what to do. In the end, they left Chicago early, but not immediately; Tom didn’t want to leave before doing his duty as a delegate, and even though Kennedy refused to be drafted, Tom voted for him anyway.

  The Radneys returned to Alex City and the convention ended soon afterward, but the threats did not. They came mostly by phone now, and they came morning, noon, and night, and the anonymous voices behind them didn’t bother to make sure it was Tom on the other end of the line. They threatened his wife. They threatened his daughters. They threatened him. “I’d pick up the phone at 3 a.m.,” he said, “and a voice would tell me that when I cranked up my car that morning I’d be blown to bits.” After a day or two, Tom stopped counting how many calls he had gotten. He tried to remain sanguine, but he was shaken. He said he knew his actions in Chicago wouldn’t be popular; “however, I do not believe that the hope of popularity should be the criteria by which a public official expresses his convictions. I did what I thought was right and I have no apologies.” He respected the opinions of those who disagreed with him, he said; he just wished they would extend the same respect to him.

  Whoever the anonymous callers were, they did not, and soon they weren’t just calling. Someone stole the American flag from the pole in the Radney family’s yard, and their nameplate out front was smashed. They had a cabin down on Lake Martin, and one day Tom drove the girls down there in his black Simca, a tiny French car that was fast and fun. They took their boat out round the slough a few times, and the girls went for a swim. Then they headed back to their car, but when they got to the top of the hill where they’d parked, there was no Simca.

  Tom distracted his daughters by telling them to look for blackberries so that they could make a cobbler, and as the girls gathered berries, he herded them up toward the highway where he thought he might be able to flag someone down for a ride. At the bend where the dirt road to the cabin met the blacktop, they found the Simca, in the middle of the road, upside down. He told them the wind must have blown it over and laughed with them, then tried to do the same thing when he discovered later that their cabin had been vandalized, and then again when their boat sank because someone had punched a hole in the hull.

  Tom’s daughters were placable; his wife was not. While he tried making light of everything that was happening, Madolyn grew more worried and insisted on bringing the girls into their bedroom at night. She had them sleep on the floor, below the windows, where she hoped they’d be safe from anything that might come crashing through the glass. “George Wallace has planted a seed of fear around here and it’s frightening,” she told The Washington Post, which, together with The New York Times and many other newspapers, covered the harassment of the Radney family after the convention. “My husband is being condemned simply because he disagrees with those in power here, because he refuses to be a rubber stamp.”

  She was right, of course, about Wallace and the vitriol he had stirred in so many Alabamians. As the Radneys knew, a tragic roster of activists and innocents had died for the crime of being black or supporting blacks in their state. There was Willie Edwards Jr., the truck driver forced off a bridge to his death by four Klansmen in Montgomery. There was William Lewis Moore, the man from Baltimore shot and killed in Attalla while trying to walk a letter denouncing segregation 385 miles to the governor of Mississippi. There were four young girls, Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, killed by the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. There was thirteen-year-old Virgil Lamar Ware, shot to death on the handlebars of his brother’s bicycle in the same city. There was Jimmie Lee Jackson, beaten and shot by state troopers in Marion while he tried to protect his mother and grandfather during a protest. There was the Reverend James Reeb, the Unitarian minister beaten to death in Selma. There was Viola Gregg Liuzzo, shot by Klansmen while trying to ferry marchers between Selma and Montgomery. There was Willie Brewster, shot to death while walking home in Anniston. There was Jonathan Myrick Daniels, a seminarian registering black voters who was arrested for participating in a protest and then shot by a deputy sheriff in Hayneville. There was Samuel Leamon Younge Jr., murdered by a gas station owner after arguing about segregated restrooms.

  Alabama had seen the martyrdom of so many, and the attempted martyrdom of so many more, often for a lot less than what Tom stood accused of doing. As the threats worsened, Tom started to wor
ry as much as his wife about his family’s safety. “At night,” he said, “I’d take out my gun, look under the bed, search the closets and then lock the bedroom door.” He was horrified when his oldest daughter answered the telephone to hear someone shouting, and when she started having nightmares, he decided he was done. “I saw what it was doing to Madolyn and the children—what it was doing to us as a family, living in fear all the time,” he said. “I decided the price was too high.” To protect his family, Tom announced that he would leave politics after his term was up. “My wife and I have prayerfully decided upon the future course of our lives,” Tom told The Montgomery Advertiser. “My three daughters are too precious to me to allow their safety to be in doubt.”

  * * *

  —

  Hoping that people would stop threatening him, Tom began spreading the word that he was no longer a threat. “I only wish I could express myself in Alabama without fear of my life,” he told one reporter, but because he couldn’t, he was emphatic about his decision “never again to be a candidate for any public office.” The safety of his family, Radney insisted, was more important than his political career.

  After the news reports came the editorials, in all sorts of newspapers, decrying the lack of civility in politics, lamenting the cost of dissent in Wallaceland, and praising Radney’s courage. The Birmingham News, which Tom had delivered as a young paperboy in Wadley, called for “freedom from abuse,” praised Tom’s “openly expressed position,” and said he deserved respect whether or not his politics “matched the prevailing temper of political thought in this state.” The Alabama Journal wrote that his “decision to leave politics could only result in Alabama’s further isolation in the political spectrum.” “Radney can hardly be faulted for such a decision,” declared another newspaper down in Louisiana, “but the same cannot be said for an apathetic Alabama citizenry that casually shrugs off the loss of precisely the kind of man needed to guide the state’s politics out of the dark ages into the light.”

  These public expressions of support were accompanied by private ones—not always for Tom’s politics, but always for him. Nearly two hundred telegrams piled up at his law office, and almost a hundred letters arrived at the family home. Some were brief notes bearing a simple message: “I was proud of you.” Others were longer handwritten cards, saying that Tom was entitled to his opinions, even though “your views are not mine.” Some came on typed letterhead, reassuring Tom—“There are a lot of people who feel as you do”—or imploring him: “We so hope that these evil days will someday pass and you will be able to return to public life to make the wonderful contributions which only you can.”

  The letters came from cities and towns around Alabama. They came from Massachusetts and New York, from students at Kent State University and reporters in Illinois. They came from Missouri and Michigan and a woman in Pennsylvania who wanted Tom to move and run for office there. They came from Iowa, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Georgia, Florida, Virginia, Texas, Arkansas, and the Office of the Vice President of the United States of America. They came from a student in Texas who closed his handwritten letter by saying, “I am a Negro and am able to understand the type of fear that you now experience,” and from one of Tom’s own constituents, a former leader in the NAACP who described his own history with harassment: “So bad were the telephone calls and threats that for nearly twenty years, I was forced to have an unlisted telephone. In my files here at Tuskegee, I have nearly a hundred copies of anonymous letters filled with filth and threats.”

  At the end of September, a few weeks into this avalanche of support, Tom called in to a national radio program produced by the Methodist Church. He was interviewed along with former congressman Lawrence Brooks Hays of Arkansas, who had lost his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives after declining to fight the integration by President Eisenhower of Central High School in Little Rock. When the two men talked about “the race question” in their home states, the one from Alabama seemed more humbled than hopeful. Although the national convention had been only a month before, Tom sounded infinitely aged. He didn’t say anything about men like Kennedy sweeping the South, or men like himself moving into the Governor’s Mansion on South Perry Street. Instead, the state senator from Alabama told Night Call’s host, Del Shields, about going around to college campuses, telling the students that “there’s been some people that I picked up from that left off” and asking them to “pick up where Tom Radney left off.”

  Having left off, Tom Radney was finally left alone. As the summer of 1968 slowly cooled, so did everything else; the abuse stopped, the threats ended, his whole family exhaled. When Tom answered what turned out to be the last of all the anonymous telephone calls, he heard someone laughing into the line: “Well, we wanted to get you out—and we did.”

  | 9 |

  The Fight for Good

  You can’t keep a Yellow Dog down. Tom threw away all of the threats, but he saved every single card, letter, and telegram encouraging him to stay in public service. He read them over and over again. He also read biographies of famous men both good and evil, immersing himself in the lives of Jesus, Jefferson, and Hitler. He learned the Tennyson poem that Harry Truman kept in his wallet (“There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, / And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law”), and he memorized the last words of Stonewall Jackson and quotations from the speeches of Jefferson Davis. That fall, he wrote an essay about turmoil on college campuses; the next spring, he wrote a guest editorial for the University of Alabama at Huntsville, placing the chaos of the 1960s in the context of other crisis periods in world history. He was reading widely, thinking about the past, and praying about the future. Late in the spring of 1969, after passing a season and a half that way, he began pointing out to Madolyn that the next year’s race for lieutenant governor was wide open.

  Lurleen Wallace had died in office, leaving Albert Brewer, her lieutenant governor, in charge. Brewer had already announced that he would try to keep the seat by running for governor in the next election, but George Wallace, having taken his mandatory term off, was planning to run again, too. The race was one of the nastiest in Alabama’s history. Brewer was buoyed by secret infusions of cash from Richard Nixon’s Committee to Re-elect the President, which was trying to keep Wallace from regaining a platform from which to launch another presidential campaign. Wallace, meanwhile, was lobbing the kinds of attacks that were cheap in both senses: for a pittance and a huge payoff, he spread rumors that Brewer was gay, that his wife was a drunk, and that his daughter slept with black men. But Brewer wasn’t backing down, and he wouldn’t settle for lieutenant governor, so the number two spot was there for the taking.

  For weeks, Tom pestered his wife about the race. At first, he talked her ear off about why it would be perfectly safe to run this time; then he started counting off all the reasons he thought he could win. Although another campaign was just about the last thing in the world she wanted, she could tell how much he wanted it, and in ways that were utterly ordinary for that time, she was used to bending to his will. All of Tom’s children cherished his company, but he wasn’t the kind of father who went to cheerleading practice or parent-teacher conferences; he liked it best when his kids came along to whatever he was doing. It was Madolyn who readied their daughters for school, while Tom sat in the living room making his way through three newspapers every morning, and Madolyn who managed the schedule for all of them like an air traffic controller arranging layovers and approving flight plans. In the end, he chose to run without her blessing, and she went along with his decision, knowing that even if it would be worse for their family, it would be better for Alabama.

  Alabama, though, had already bid Tom a very grand good-bye. Which left him facing a problem: How does a man who has publicly bowed out of politics gracefully climb back onstage? Tom knew that some people were likely to accuse him of overplaying the threats to his family to win the pity vote, so h
e started by explaining that his decision to withdraw had been not opportunism but overreaction. “I did not make it as some cynics may have thought to create sympathy for me or my family,” he explained; rather, he had responded to the barrage of threats “as a mere man might do.” “I am not defensive about changing my decision,” he said, but “I think I have matured; I hope I am a better man because of the difficult days of the past year.”

  Tom announced his candidacy on September 6, 1969. “This time I am in the fight for good,” he told the press that gathered to cover his entry into the race. “I’m in the fight for honesty and integrity in all branches of state government….I’m also in the fight for rational and progressive reform and for brotherhood and justice for all our citizens.” The Democratic primary was the following May, leaving Tom eight months to charm a vote out of everyone he could in Alabama’s sixty-seven counties. He went out first thing and had those Kennedyesque pictures of his family taken in Montgomery and then blanketed the state with color brochures and billboards of the resulting photographs beneath the slogan “Tom Radney Cares About You.” He went to every fish fry and pig roast and county fair he could find and addressed the breakfasts, luncheons, and suppers of any civic club that would have him.

  It didn’t take long for Tom to start earning endorsements. The teachers’ unions and labor unions backed him, as did newspapers in Alexander City, Heflin, and Anniston. In March, he promised a group of black students at Miles College to contribute his own “blood, sweat, and tears as we continue to right the wrongs that have been a hindrance to our full and complete development.” In April, his hometown of Wadley celebrated Tom Radney Day, feting their favorite son with music and speeches. By May, he’d exhausted himself and his budget. The billboards alone had cost him eighteen thousand dollars. The campaign in total cost fifty thousand. Tom contributed twenty thousand dollars of his own money and accepted another ten thousand from Madolyn’s parents; friends and supporters provided the rest.