Confederates in the Attic

by Tony Horwitz

  The west side of Selma was mostly white and far more affluent. But the sprinkling of old mansions seemed only to underscore Selma’s fall from antebellum bounty. A cemetery at the center of west Selma added to the doleful atmosphere. Live oaks dripped Spanish moss, shadowing a tall shaft marking the mass grave of 150 unknown rebels. “There is Grandeur in Graves, There is Glory in Gloom,” the inscription read.

  I ended my melancholy tour at the Voting Rights Museum, beside the Pettus Bridge. The walls were lined with photographs of white troopers chasing black marchers through clouds of tear gas. There was one other visitor, a graying black man in a kente-cloth robe and cap. “That’s me, right there,” he said, pointing at a photograph showing a young man in coat and tie, arms linked with other marchers. “We were so young then.”

  Reverend Richard Boone was only twenty when he helped direct the Selma Project, as that phase of the civil rights movement was known. “We used to wear yarmulkes with our overalls,” he said. “We considered ourselves Baptist rabbis.” Later, Boone was arrested while trying to integrate Montgomery’s Empire Theater, where Rosa Parks began her bus protest. “The good old days,” he said. “Everything was clear, black and white, like these pictures.”

  These days, Boone found himself embroiled in much murkier protests. He’d spent the past three months picketing a black radio station in Montgomery that had dropped several controversial programs, including a weekly address by the Nation of Islam leader, Reverend Louis Farrakhan. Ironically, the station’s office stood directly across from the Empire Theater. “You’ve got black faces now doing the white massah’s bidding,” Boone said. “It’s like slave days, with house niggers lording it over field niggers.”

  Some of his former white allies were also now in the enemy camp. Boone had recently gone to the Million Man March in Washington and resented charges of anti-Semitism leveled at its organizer, Reverend Farrakhan. “It’s true what he says about the Jews,” Boone said. “They used to be on our side. But now a lot of them are bloodsuckers.”

  I let this go. We drifted through the rest of the museum, past plaster casts of marchers’ feet and a chapel-like “memorial room” honoring martyrs of the struggle. The museum also hosted frequent civil rights observances, including one that afternoon to honor a veteran Selma activist named Irma Jean Jackson. So I returned a few hours later and joined Boone and about fifty others, almost all of them elderly and late-middle-aged black women.

  “This museum is a place where we honor the foot soldiers,” the master of ceremonies began. “We were once children in the struggle and we must never forget the deeds of Irma Jean and other young fighters.” Then Irma Jackson spoke, recalling her political awakening as a student in college. “The time had come to take a stand for our rights,” she said, before telling the familiar story of the Selma struggle. “We got to the foot of the bridge, they charged and started beating people and throwing tear-gas bombs. The sun eclipsed, there was that much smoke. You could hear skulls cracking as the men opened up heads with their billy clubs. People screamed and splashed in puddles to get water in their stinging eyes.”

  As Jackson went on, a few people in the audience began softly weeping. Then she urged the audience to remember the martyrs and “the cause for which they fought.” I realized I’d heard all this before. Honor the young foot soldiers. Take a stand for our rights. The litany of heroic deeds and fallen martyrs. It was the same mournful refrain that ran through dozens of Confederate observances I’d attended.

  Almost every sentence began to carry familiar echoes. Irma Jackson told of “marching all day and sleeping in the fields” between Selma and Montgomery—just as rebel soldiers had done in Virginia. She recalled other hallowed fields of battle—Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, Little Rock—which resonated with her audience as powerfully as Sharpsburg and Shiloh did for many white Southerners. While working in small towns across the South, Jackson said, “We all suffered from nervous stomachs and sometimes went two days without eating because the restaurants weren’t integrated”—recalling, for me, the tales of lean Confederates foraging for green corn and green apples on their hungry march through Maryland.

  Jackson’s speech ended with the invocation of the sainted leader, in this case Martin Luther King. “All are soldiers but only some are warriors,” she said. “He was a warrior, a warrior for his people, who sacrificed all that they might live free.” The same lines might have been spoken at a Sons of Confederate Veterans meeting about Stonewall Jackson or Robert E. Lee.

  When she finished, Reverend Boone gave a short address that echoed the Civil War even more explicitly. “To quote our greatest president, ‘We are met on a great battlefield. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract.’” Boone lit candles to honor the civil rights dead and the audience began singing “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.” It was a rousing tune, but I sensed a mournful cloud hanging over the room. The civil rights celebrants seemed caught in the same ghost dance as so many whites I’d met, conjuring spirits from an exalted past of heroic sacrifice, halo-crowned martyrs, and unfulfilled dreams.

  After the ceremony, I chatted with the museum’s director, Rose Mary Sanders, a striking woman with short-cropped hair who wore brilliant African robes and silver bands that ran halfway up each arm. I asked her if I was wrong in sensing a plaintive nostalgia among others in the audience.

  “You’re right. It’s depressing because so little has really changed,” she said. “We still have the same mayor we had on Bloody Sunday. We don’t worry about being shot by the Klan, but we worry about being shot by one another. We integrated the schools, so now all the whites go to their own. Whites here still make three times as much as blacks. What’s to feel good about?”

  Rose Sanders didn’t look or talk like a Selma native, nor was she one. She and her husband, Hank, were Harvard-educated lawyers who worked in Africa before coming to Alabama in the 1970s. They’d since become Selma’s leading—and most controversial—activists. Hank, elected Alabama’s first black state senator since Reconstruction, had once been arrested while trying to take the battle flag down from the state capitol. Rose had spearheaded a black school boycott to protest the “tracking” of black students into slow classes. The 1990 protest ultimately led to racial brawls, the closure of Selma schools and the summoning of the National Guard—to protect white students. When schools reopened, the remaining whites fled en masse to private schools.

  Sanders’s latest cause was a petition to change the name of the Nathan Bedford Forrest housing project I’d passed outside town. “Can you imagine Jews living in some subdivision named for Himmler?” she asked. But so far, her efforts had met with indifference from blacks. “Most folks don’t know their history enough to be insulted. They’ve never heard of Forrest, unless it’s Forrest Gump. So they just take it. The whites make heroes of killers like Forrest and because of our own ignorance or internalized oppression, we let it happen.”

  Another of Sanders’s causes was faring better. She’d begun an alternative school for black teenagers who had dropped out or been held back because of discipline or learning problems. The students were currently studying African empires, Sanders said, and would soon move on to modern black history in America. When I told her about my own research, Sanders’s eyes lit up. “Why don’t you come back tomorrow and tell my students about it?”

  I agreed, on the condition I could quiz her students about their attitudes toward the Civil War. Sanders laughed. “You won’t have to ask,” she said. “They’ll let you know, loud and clear.”

  THE NEXT DAY, before heading to Sanders’s class, I stopped in to see Selma’s long-time mayor. Joe Smitherman’s career was a minor classic of Southern politics. A former appliance-store owner, Smitherman had risen through the political ranks as an avowed segregationist, served as mayor during the civil rights turmoil, and deftly tacked with the changing winds ever since. He was now in his eighth term as mayor in a c
ity that was 60 percent black and had a black majority on its city council and school board.

  “When running against other whites, I’ve gotten ninety percent of the black vote,” he said. This seemed a curious boast from a man who had once opposed voting rights demonstrators, and who had also once stumbled at a press conference, referring to “Martin Luther Coon.”

  Now a graying man of sixty-four, Smitherman wore a Snoopy tie and sat chain-smoking amidst mementos that mirrored the curious twists during his three decades in office: a Confederate flag, a tommy gun, framed photographs of George Wallace, Lester Maddox, Jesse Jackson, and the black assistant police chief of Selma. He reached into his filing cabinet for a news clip about a recent visit by John Lewis, a civil rights leader who was hospitalized with a severe concussion after Bloody Sunday. “Lewis said the change in Selma is ‘almost unbelievable,’” Smitherman said. “And he had his skull busted open here.”

  But Smitherman didn’t want to dwell on his city’s civil rights turmoil. “People say, ‘Oh Selma, that’s where they set the dogs on people.’” He groaned. “We didn’t even have dogs here. The dogs were in Birmingham.”

  Smitherman, though, was more than happy to talk about Selma’s recent decision to market its civil rights history. “The idea was, what happened at that bridge, we’ve been stigmatized because of it for so long, why don’t we sell it, too?” It was only recently, too, that Selma had become broad-minded about its Civil War history. “You have to remember the Yankees won the battle here and burned the town. Older folks in Selma naturally don’t like making a big deal out of that.”

  I asked Smitherman about his own attitude toward the Confederacy. He responded by telling me about his childhood in the Depression, as the son of sharecroppers. “We were dirt poor,” he said. “My father died when I was a few months old and my mother raised the six of us on welfare. For us, the Civil War was pride. It was all we had to hold onto. The rich whites, they had ancestors who were colonel this or general that. But we didn’t know anything about that. It was just pride in having once been something.”

  These days, the city helped sponsor an annual reenactment of the Yankee victory at Selma, and also supported an annual commemoration of Bloody Sunday. Smitherman had even joined returning marchers on the bridge and awarded a key to the city to Reverend Joseph Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with King.

  Even so, fresh clashes over race kept cropping up, including Rose Sanders’s recent demand that the name of Nathan Bedford Forrest Homes be changed. “Everyone just calls it N.B.F. for short,” Smitherman said of the housing project. “If you live at 118 N.B.F., do you really want to change to 118 Magnolia Gardens? We’ve got a Lee Street, a Jeff Davis Avenue, a Martin Luther King Street. We should be beyond that sort of thing.”

  As Smitherman walked me to the door, I told him I’d send a copy of whatever I wrote about Selma. He chuckled. “I don’t give a damn what you do. Y’all always do the same, come in here smiling and then go home and write a dig at us.” He clapped me on the back, straightened his Snoopy tie, and headed back into his office.

  Several months later, I received two newspaper clips in the mail from a friend in Alabama. One told of a vote by Selma officials, including the mayor, to rename the Nathan Bedford Forrest Homes after a local civil rights leader. The other story reported that Joe Smitherman had outpolled a black candidate by just 52 votes to win his ninth term in office as Selma’s mayor.

  ROSE SANDERS’S CLASSROOM, adjoining the Voting Rights Museum, was decorated with pictures of Rosa Parks, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, and a Klansman hunched over a bleeding black man. A large poster declared: “I Need Respect, I Want Respect, I Will Give Respect.” Fifteen kids, most of them sixteen and seventeen, straddled chairs or sprawled across desks. I’d just begun telling them about my travels when a student named Jamal raised his hand. “You got a name for your book?”

  “Not yet.”

  He went to the blackboard and wrote in large block letters, REDNECKS OF THE SOUTH. The others laughed and started shouting their own suggestions. “Crackers of the South!” “Bigots!” “Peckerwoods!”

  I smiled and ran the eraser across the blackboard. “What’s the Civil War mean to you?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” several students sang out in unison.

  “It’s his-tory,” a teenager named Percy said. “As in his story, the white man’s, not mine.”

  I pointed out this wasn’t really so. “Blacks fought in the War and slavery ended because of it.”

  “No it didn’t!” a girl named Ni’key declared. “We just don’t call it slavery anymore.”

  I changed tacks. “When I say the words ‘Abraham Lincoln,’ what’s the first thing that comes into your head?”

  “Benevolent racist.”

  “Just racist.”

  “He had slaves.”

  “That’s not true,” I said.

  “He was probably paying blacks so little that they might as well have been slaves!” Ni’key shouted. Several other students came over and gave her high fives.

  “What about the Emancipation Proclamation?” I asked.

  “What about it?” Jamal said. “These Southern crackers were farm boys and slave hunters, so of course they were whipping those nerds from up North. Lincoln had to free the slaves so he could use them as soldiers.”

  We went back and forth for half an hour. In essence, the students were saying that the Civil War had nothing to do with race or slavery—much the same argument made by neo-Confederates who saw the War through the prism of states’ rights.

  I asked if any of the students attended Selma’s annual Civil War reenactment. Percy laughed. “We got some crazy rednecks here. They could use all that shooting as an excuse to shoot us and say it was an accident.”

  “Hypothetical question,” I said. “My great-grandaddy was in the Civil War, fighting for the South. How should I remember him?”

  “Forget him. He’s all bad.”

  “Those crackers did wrong. Why honor them?”

  “Rednecks!”

  “Peckerwoods!”

  Rose Sanders finally stepped in. “The Vietnam War was evil,” she said, “but we don’t feel everyone who fought in it was evil.”

  The students went silent for a moment. “You got a point,” one student said. “My uncle fought over there.”

  Then Sanders banged a desk. “But no monuments! We’re trying to change criminal behavior among our young people. You can’t do that and at the same time honor Confederate criminals.”

  “Right on!”

  “The Civil War is still going on,” Sanders said. “The only difference is that the Union army has betrayed us, too. So we’re fighting a confederacy up North and down South.”

  “Tell it!”

  “And why should we go watch some reenactment that honors the Southern way of life?” Sanders said. “The money I pay for that just goes into a pot that continues to oppress us. Only a few whites come to our bridge reenactment. They’re signaling that our history isn’t important. So why should we join in theirs?”

  I listened silently. Sanders’s message was the same refrain I’d heard across the South. My history and his-story. You Wear Your X, I’ll Wear Mine. Both races sealing themselves off from each other. I was relieved when the class finally ended.

  “You can see for yourself now,” Sanders said, leading me back to the museum, “that there’s a lot of fear and anger in these kids about that whole Civil War crowd.”

  I suggested this might not be so if they had more contact with the “Civil War crowd,” some of whom, like Will Hill Tankersley in Montgomery, regarded themselves as progressives when it came to race.

  Sanders frowned. “I prefer to deal with someone who admits their racism than with white liberals who hide it.” Then she launched into a tirade against white civil rights workers, black “sellouts” like Julian Bond, and “Jews who knock down men like Farrakhan.”

  “Jews d
on’t like Farrakhan because he calls them bloodsuckers,” I replied. “If you’re fighting racism, you shouldn’t have a leader who says racist things.”

  “Don’t tell us who our leaders should be,” Sanders snapped. “If you give up on a leader because of a few things he says, you can’t follow anyone.”

  “A few things?” I snapped back. “He says Hitler’s a great man. As a Jew, I’ve got a problem with that.”

  “Oh, here we go again. Jewish suffering. What about our suffering? Our holocaust? What about the holocaust of Indians?”

  We argued for half an hour before shouting ourselves out. I glanced around. We were surrounded by photographs of Bloody Sunday and the Selma to Montgomery March. Looking at these same photos the day before, I’d wished myself there on the Pettus Bridge, or marching behind Martin Luther King. “The good old days,” Reverend Boone had called them. In a way he was right.

  Sanders’s thoughts seemed to travel along a similar plane. She walked me to a window and looked out through the rain as traffic crawled over the Pettus Bridge. “I guess I wanted to have this museum to add some clarity to history, or at least to remember a time when there was some clarity,” she said. “It’s gotten so complicated ever since.”

  I DROVE OUT OF SELMA through the late-afternoon gloom, past King’s “I Had a Dream” bust, feeling lower than at any time during my long Southern ramble. If the Civil War infused my boyhood imagination, it was the racial dramas of the 1960s that had molded my political consciousness. I was five when King made his Dream speech a few miles from my home. The March on Washington was my first political memory—mainly, I suspect, because my parents fought over whether my mother should go. My father, a liberal but cautious man, feared trouble. In the end my mother stayed home.

  Five years later, I sat on a friend’s rooftop and watched Washington burn during the rioting sparked by King’s murder. It was about this time that I began drifting away from the Civil War. Thinking back, I couldn’t remember why. But perhaps it was my growing awareness of the race-charged city around me; at some point, cool-looking Confederates didn’t seem so cool anymore. And Union soldiers, to me, had always seemed like a bore.