Down Along with That Devil's Bones

by Connor Towne O'Neill

  Perkins was born in 1952 and grew up in Selma, his father a schoolteacher, his mother a nurse at the city’s Black hospital. In February 1965, after a state trooper shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, a twenty-six-year old deacon taking part in a night march in nearby Marion, Alabama, Etta Perkins was one of his nurses. The march that came to be known as Bloody Sunday was initially conceived of as a symbolic funeral procession for Jackson, headed for the steps of the state Capitol in a rebuke of Governor George Wallace. On the morning of March 7, 1965, some six hundred people gathered at Selma’s Brown Chapel AME, Perkins among them. He was only twelve at the time and remembers that he was under strict orders from his parents to remain at the chapel. So just after two o’clock, he looked on as the marchers departed two-by-two down Sylvan Street. They only made it as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

  Because Selma is built on a bluff overlooking the river, the north side of the bridge sits higher than the south, and the roadway inclines toward the center before descending on either side. In other words, you cannot see one side from the other. This meant that the marchers were halfway over the river before they could see what awaited them: scores of police officers strapping on gas masks, mounting horses, and slapping billy clubs against open palms. Less than an hour after the marchers set off, they had returned to Brown Chapel AME where Perkins was waiting, chased by lawmen, seeking refuge both in the church and in the homes of the housing project surrounding it.

  The day’s violence—the clubs, the tear gas, the state troopers and sheriff’s deputies ruthlessly beating nonviolent demonstrators—was beamed into tens of millions of American homes on that night’s newscast. The subsequent outrage provided sufficient tailwind for the passage of the Voting Rights Act later that year. The Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate general, became an indelible marker of civil rights violence, and of triumph forged out of a symbol of the Confederacy. The city, too, became inextricably linked to the racial violence and subsequent triumph that took place there. As CBS reported soon after the attack, Selma “ceased to be a small Southern town and became a symbol.”

  Joseph Smitherman, a former appliance salesman, had been elected mayor less than a year before Bloody Sunday, running for office on a pledge to “Get Selma moving again” by attracting new business to bolster their flagging economy. Smitherman had won the 1964 election in a town that was roughly 50 percent Black but that allowed just 2 percent of eligible Black citizens to register. Selma was a microcosm of the broader South—both in the barriers to democracy and the violent lengths to which the white power structure would go to maintain the status quo—and thus the perfect city to stage the movement’s push for voting rights. Smitherman, who would later temper his racial views, was at the time an avowed segregationist who, in a press conference after the Southern Christian Leadership Conference arrived in town in January of 1965, referred to the SCLC’s leader as “Martin Luther Coon.”

  The Voting Rights Act, passed that August, prohibited discrimination in voter registration, eliminating literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses, and in effect, finally enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment, by then nearly a hundred years old. In Selma, it transformed the electorate. And yet Smitherman remained in power for another three decades. The demographic realities in town forced Smitherman to ameliorate his segregationist stances. He knew he could rely on the white vote and courted portions of the Black community with public works projects and appointments to city government. He ran a shrewd political machine and followed voting blocks and absentee-ballot counts the way some people follow their credit score or body weight.

  James Perkins, Jr., graduated from Selma High School in 1971, studied mathematics and computer science at Alabama A&M, then worked as a software consultant in Birmingham. He returned home to Selma to helm veteran civil rights activist F. D. Reese’s unsuccessful campaign for mayor in 1984, then left again, this time for an IT job in Washington. “I had been blackballed,” Perkins explained, telling me that after the election he received a message from Smitherman bluntly stating that he’d never work in Selma again.

  And jobs were becoming harder and harder to come by in Selma. In 1977, the Air Force decommissioned Craig Air Field, resulting in a loss of tens of millions of dollars in annual payroll, along with the money the base spent each year on services from local business, an event from which the city has never fully recovered. And economic decline was followed by more racial unrest. In 1987, the city school district hired Norward Roussell as the city’s first Black superintendent. Roussell had grown up in New Orleans, earned a Ph.D. from Wayne State University, and arrived in Selma as a reformer full of ideas to improve the city’s schools. But in December 1989, the school board, voting on racial lines, opted not to renew his contract. All five Black members of the board immediately walked out in protest. The board claimed that Roussell was “dictatorial” and “abrasive,” but many speculated the real reason was Roussell’s attempt to formalize the school’s “leveling” process, a previously discretionary system of tracking students into college prep or vocational tracks that placed the large majority of students of color in lower levels, with white students in higher ones. “When he came here, children were being put in classes without regard to their abilities. When he did away with tracking, that was the beginning of the trouble,” Sheila Okoye, a school board member, said at the time.

  “They want a Black here, but they don’t want a Black exercising the authority of the office of the superintendent,” Roussell, who died in 2014, told People magazine. “All this business about being dictatorial and abrasive—when a Black takes a stand, you’re ‘dictatorial.’ When you are aggressive, you’re ‘abrasive.’ There’s a different standard for looking at Black personalities in a leadership role.” Outrage ensued. Faya Rose Toure (who then went by Rose Sanders), a prominent and controversial civil rights attorney and activist in Selma, had pushed for leveling to be eliminated completely. After Roussell was fired, she led a boisterous march through the halls of Westview Middle School, interrupting the school day. Then student protesters, Toure’s daughter Malika among them, occupied the high school cafeteria, prompting the principal to cancel classes for the duration of the protest. When classes resumed a week later, the governor called in the National Guard. White parents were aggrieved, unnerved by the upheaval. So they fled. By the end of the school year, some 250 white students had withdrawn from Selma High, six hundred from the school system in general. What began three years earlier as a sign of progress ended with the de facto resegregation of Selma’s public schools.

  Perkins’s parents still lived in Selma, and he followed the news in his hometown with interest and dismay. Wanting to be closer to his folks but not yet ready to return completely, Perkins and his family moved back to Birmingham. In early 1992, he left town for a business presentation in Slidell, Louisiana. On the trip he experienced what he can only describe as a “calling.” Four days later, as if walking in from the desert, he walked into his kitchen in Birmingham and told his wife they had to move back to Selma—he was going to run for mayor. His wife asked if he had lost his mind. “Except she didn’t say it that kindly,” he told me.

  “It was a very difficult time,” Perkins said of the move back to Selma and the ensuing mayoral campaigns. In 1992, Perkins lost the election by 600 votes. In 1996, he lost by just 300. Perkins was discouraged, ready to throw in the towel. It was his supporters, he told me, who encouraged him in 2000 to take one more run at it. By the late 1990s, Selma’s unemployment rate was at 12 percent, about three times that of the state average. Then an embezzlement scandal plagued the Smitherman administration when the former police chief, the former city clerk, and Smitherman’s nephew all pled guilty to siphoning off $700,000 through fraudulent billings. Smitherman considered stepping down after finishing the term, but at the last minute (“Perhaps by force of habit,” as historian Alston Fitts speculated to me) he opted to go for his tenth term. That September, for the third consecutive election, the names Perkins and
Smitherman would appear on the ballot.

  Mayor of Selma was a coveted seat. Perkins, one of the “Freedom’s Children,” represented Selma’s future and a redemption of its past. He would be the first Black mayor in the city to be in the epicenter of the voting rights movement, and was someone who many hoped, given his background in technology, could jumpstart the economy. Smitherman, meanwhile, didn’t just represent the old order, he was the old order. Faya Rose Toure captured the public sentiment, at least in Black Selma, with her slogan: “Joe’s Gotta Go.”

  Perhaps sensing his days were numbered, Smitherman ran a desperate campaign, one that a white banker in town described in apocalyptic terms and that further stoked Selma’s always-on-edge racial divide. “Selma’s their Mecca,” Smitherman, who died in 2005, said at the time. “They want Selma because this is where it all happened, where people got the right to vote.” But look at other cities that have elected Black leadership, Smitherman told the Times, “the towns have gone down . . . You need white inclusion, you need diversity in city government. Let’s face it, the whites have the money, the white business people. They tend to pull back when it all goes Black. So that’s what I’m trying to get across to the Blacks.”

  Smitherman’s white-knighting fit a pattern in Selma. General Forrest is remembered by the city’s white citizens as the Defender of Selma. One hundred years later, Selma’s infamous sheriff Jim Clark had pugnaciously defended Selma’s (and by proxy the country’s) racial hierarchy by denying Black Selmians the vote. Now, Smitherman, who had first come to power under that apartheid system, was vying to keep his seat on the notion that he was saving the city from a Black mayor.

  It was to no avail.

  On election night, Perkins told a standing-room-only crowd that “this campaign has been about faith and fear, and faith won this campaign.” He promised to be a force for rapprochement: “I will not be a mayor for Black Selma,” he told the crowd. “I will be a mayor for all Selma. It’s time to put the Civil War and civil rights history into a museum.”

  The new mayor brought a new hope for new possibilities. Could Selma finally get out from under the weight of the past? The answer came just five days later, when the Friends of Forrest erected a statue of one of the Civil War’s most infamous figures. Though the monument was conceived of and cast months before the election, and thus not an immediate reaction to its outcome, the statue still spoke to the racial schism that defined the town—evidence that the city’s festering racial tension had once more gone septic. Pat Godwin responded to the outcry over the statue by saying they already had permission from the mayor, which turned out to be true. Smitherman corroborated the story, issuing a statement, explaining that “On Friday January 14, 2000, I called Pat Godwin at her office at 4:30 p.m. and told her that I approved the monument project pending the approval of the Smitherman Building Museum Board of Trustees.”

  Approving the Forrest statue became one of Smitherman’s last decisions in office.

  Faya Rose Toure’s law firm, Chestnut, Sanders and Sanders, is just a half-block down Union Avenue from where the Forrest statue first went up. In 2018, we sat in wicker chairs in the firm’s conference room and discussed her reaction to the statue. Toure is now in her seventies, with graying braids and a voice that veers into falsetto when aggravated or impassioned. Her former law partner, J. L. Chestnut, once described Toure as “sensitive, volatile, emotional, and idealistic. She has a tendency to fight every war.”

  Toure remembered that she was on her way to work that Monday after the dedication when she discovered the statue. “Just think how a Jew would feel with a statue of a Nazi in their community,” she told me. “What the statue said to me was that we were still property. We were still chattel, our lives didn’t matter, that our history didn’t matter.”

  So she headed for City Hall to demand that Mayor Perkins remove it. And she wasn’t alone in that demand. Perkins told me that constituents from many different groups were telling him to take it down. The business community, he remembers, said, “Get rid of it, Perkins, as fast as you can.” One told him to just throw the bust in the river. But others were more moderate, telling him to leave it alone. It was history, wasn’t it? And you can’t change that. Then, of course, there were the Neo-Confederates, adamantly opposed to any change.

  Because it was the city council, and not the mayor, who could determine what could take place on city property, Perkins huddled that Monday night with the nine-member council. Afterward they issued a statement acknowledging Forrest’s fraught history and his military acumen, then set forward three options: that the statue be either 1) moved inside the museum without its pedestal; 2) moved to Riverside Park, where reenactments of the Battle of Selma take place; or 3) taken down.

  The Friends of Forrest balked at all three options, protesting that they had been given permission by the previous mayor to place the statue where it was. “I remember Mayor Perkins saying that we need to put the Civil War and the civil rights movement in the museum,” Pat Godwin added. “That’s exactly what we are doing.” The controversy dragged on for months. In January, Toure led an offshoot from the Martin Luther King Day march to the statue. She tied a rope to the statue and tried to topple it. The rope broke before the bronze yielded, but she promised to return every day until the statue was taken down. “If you want to maintain white supremacy a hundred years after the end of slavery, you need monuments and statues and the names of streets to remind people subliminally that [white people] are still in control,” Toure told me. “They are trying to perpetuate the past forever.”

  The statue hung like a 400-pound bronze millstone around Perkins’s early days in office. There were major issues to address in town: the unemployment rate, the schools, the dwindling tax base. But he had to do something about that Forrest monument. All three of the initial proposals had proved nonstarters, so Perkins tried another tack: What if they moved the statue to Confederate Memorial Circle? A month later, the council voted 5–4 in favor of the move. Perkins remembered that the swing voter, Jean Martin, received death threats and a brick through her window.

  “She was a nervous wreck following that, but it was a courageous vote,” Perkins said.

  So Forrest took up his new residence amidst the gloomy shade of Old Live Oak Cemetery in the spring of 2001. The Friends of Forrest sued the city, but a federal judge threw out the case in 2003.

  During the election, Smitherman had predicted that if the city elected a Black mayor, Selma’s economy would suffer. The morning after Perkins’s election, the Montgomery Advertiser wrote that Perkins’s tenure would be judged by “how successfully he harnesses political and economic power—which aren’t held by the same hands in Selma—for the good of the city.” But the controversy over the Forrest statue only heightened the divide. He had pledged to be a uniting force, a feat that was already a challenge in Selma and became nearly impossible with such a bitter, public debate over a figure like Forrest.

  During Perkins’ first term, the white flight only accelerated. In 2000, the town’s population was about 65 percent Black. Today it is approximately 80 percent. After the school protests in 1990, many white families moved, headed for the county school system. More joined them after the election. Residents of Valley Grande became anxious that Perkins might annex them into the city as a revenue source, so they incorporated as a town in 2003.

  Coming at a moment of rapid resegregation, the message sent by the Forrest statue was clear to Joanne Bland: “That racists are still here. That [they] still have the same power.” Every time she sees the statue, she swears she sees the lips move: “You’re so mad but I’m still here.”

  “Ain’t that a blip?” Bland asked me. To her, the white flight, and resultant hit to the city’s tax base, was like the economic equivalent of erecting a Forrest statue in a Black neighborhood. “It’s like they’re trying to let us die,” she lamented. “That’s what I’m trying to understand: why are you trying to kill Selma?”

  At the very
least, Bland said, “If you don’t want to spend money here, live here, then take [Forrest] with you.”

  “Selma is a battleground,” Perkins told me. “April of 1865, the last significant battle of the Civil War, was fought on that ground. That makes Selma iconic. . . . So the battle to regain Selma never stopped. This was a continuation of a battle that started way back in the 1800s. And they had the same general.”

  Two

  The First Battle of Selma

  After Rev. Perkins told me that the dispute over the Forrest monument in 2000 was a continuation of the same battle from 1865, I felt compelled to see that first battlefield for myself. It was, according to Google Maps, just west of downtown, a half-mile past the cemetery on Dallas Avenue. What I found, though, was your basic city park: a baseball field, a walking trail, some concrete grills. Totally unassuming stuff. Nothing there to suggest a battlefield, much less the hallowed ground of the “Wizard of the Saddle.” I had to interrupt several morning joggers, inquiring about the location of the battlefield, before I knew to meander down a narrow, cracked concrete path off the main road that runs through the park, past the pavilions, to its end, at the foot of a rotting red covered bridge. I crossed over and emerged onto a nondescript meadow, long and sloping, which extended down from the ranchettes high above on Riverside St. to the muddy beach where the creek meets the Alabama River.

  Where the hillside evens out onto the meadow, there’s a line of fortifications, a zigzag of timber that runs along the field. It was brambled through with privet, wisteria, and switchgrass and looked like the ragged net of a long-neglected tennis court. Fortifications like these, miles of them, had surrounded the city during the war. The city was so well fortified because there was so much to protect. Before the war, Selma—known as the Queen City of the Black Belt—was a financial center in that fertile strip of soil that cinches the middle sections of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. The city was officially incorporated in 1820, and that year’s census reports 3,324 white people in Dallas County, who had brought with them 2,679 enslaved Africans. After that, the city took off. Cotton plantations sprang up across the Black Belt. Selma became a major railroad crossing and, on the banks of the Alabama River, a well-situated port for river trade. Plantations sent daily shipments of cotton down the river to Mobile and on to textile mills in Boston and Providence. By 1860, there were 7,780 white people and 25,840 enslaved people living in Dallas County.