A Writer's Life

by Gay Talese

  The lowly whites of Alabama needed someone lower than themselves, and this distinction befell the blacks. The miserable lives that both races shared as neighbors in equally shoddy pine-board shacks did not blur the discrimination that gave white people the upper hand, allowing them to retain whatever set them apart from the blacks. Evans’s photographs documented the democracy of white failure in Alabama, and the pale and freckled faces in his book—faces that were somber-eyed, tight-lipped, and lined—were offered as expressions of enduring strength, stoicism, and indifference to suffering. But I have seen similar expressions in newsmagazines on the faces of lynch mobs, such as the mob in the Alabama town of Scottsboro that wanted to hang nine young black men and boys following questionable charges of rape brought against the accused by two white women. Indeed, the physiognomy of the lynch mob prefigured the white faces of law enforcement that I observed as a journalist in 1965 while they stared impassively at black marchers moments before the latter were clubbed and beaten into submission along a highway in Selma, Alabama.

  The marchers were in the forefront of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s civil rights movement, and their attackers—wearing helmets and carrying billy clubs, cattle prods, and gas canisters—were members of the Alabama state police and the sheriff’s posse. They could have been the sons or grandsons of the old sharecroppers Walker Evans photographed, for they were products of the same deprived and undereducated upbringing, and their facial expressions were similarly austere. But in the mid-1960s, these helmeted men personified Alabama’s frontal assault against the Reverend Dr. King’s demonstrators, and the city of Selma had been deliberately chosen by King because there was no place in the South more likely than Selma to become enraged if invaded by out-of-town black marchers advocating change, and the inevitable clash would draw the attention of the media and further publicize his mission. The Atlanta-born and -based Baptist minister knew Alabama very well, having been a pastor in Montgomery and having often traveled through the state preaching against its inequities, doing so once behind bars in a Birmingham jail.

  In 1955, after a black seamstress named Rosa Parks had refused to yield her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, the Reverend Dr. King used the incident to denounce the city’s policy of segregated public transportation, and his subsequent 381-day bus boycott inaugurated the civil rights movement in America. A decade later, as he planned to refocus on Montgomery as the source of the state’s strategy that was depriving black people of their voting rights, he decided to make his case in Selma, an old plantation town of ingrained southern traditions and abuses, located about fifty miles west of Alabama’s capitol building in Montgomery.

  Selma was a serene city in south-central Alabama, perched on a high bluff on a bank of the muddy Alabama River. More than half of its approximately 27,000 residents were black, many of them related to the slaves who had been brought here by planters during the 1820s. By 1840, Selma was the heart of Alabama’s booming cotton economy, and there were considerably more slaves than whites. In 1848, three hundred German immigrants, many of them ironworkers and mechanics, went to Selma and introduced iron casting and gun making, and as the city was served by both river and railroad, it became a major supply depot and industrial center for the Confederate states just before the outbreak of the Civil War. Thus it also became, in the spring of 1865, a key military objective of the Union army. On April 2, Selma was attacked by nine thousand Northern soldiers, who overwhelmed the almost four thousand Confederate defenders and destroyed the city. They burned homes and public buildings, molested women, butchered horses, torched thousands of bales of cotton. Perhaps no part of Alabama was more ravaged by warfare, and was more controlled by its conquerors during the ten postwar years of armed occupation, than Selma, and the town’s white residents cultivated a deep and abiding resentment that extended well into the following century.

  As a result of the United States Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education, Selma became the first Alabama city to organize a White Citizens Council to resist the ruling. The town’s prevailing attitude helped shape the racial views of such local products as Eugene “Bull” Connor, the public safety commissioner who led dogs and directed fire hoses against black demonstrators in Birmingham; Leonard Wilson, the University of Alabama undergraduate who in 1956 spearheaded a campus uprising that discouraged the matriculation of the school’s first black student, Autherine Lucy; and James G. Clark, Jr., Selma’s sheriff and its most stalwart segregationist, who, when asked at a news conference if he had a hero who had influenced his thinking, unhesitatingly replied, “Nathan Bedford Forrest.” Forrest was the Confederate general who tried to defend Selma against its Civil War invaders—and a hundred years later, in 1965, Sheriff Clark claimed a similar aspiration in trying to block the Reverend Dr. King and the latter’s “outside agitators” from crossing the Selma bridge and marching on to Montgomery.

  I was among many dozens of out-of-state journalists and one of a threeman Times team who flew into Alabama during the first week of March 1965 to cover the demonstrators’ five-day procession from Selma to Montgomery, which was scheduled to begin on March 7. Unlike most of the arriving media, I was quite familiar with Selma, having driven through it many times during my college days, and on occasions I had paused to look at its restored white mansions with their wide verandas and fluted Corinthian columns, and its waterfront hotel, erected in the 1840s with French-style ornamented iron filigree balconies, and, across the street, its deteriorating warehouses and other old buildings that had once been the site of Selma’s slave-auction center.

  Most of the slaves’ descendants who had chosen to remain in Selma after their so-called emancipation found work as white people’s domestic servants, farm laborers, or store clerks, and by the 1950s a few had risen to join a middle-class contingent of black doctors, dentists, morticians, businessmen, teachers, and preachers who catered to their community. But while there was no shortage of black clergymen in Selma, there was not a single black lawyer working in the city when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that segregation by color in public schools was unconstitutional. And among Selma’s approximately fifteen thousand black residents, fewer than two hundred possessed the right to vote, and none of these had ever been asked to serve on a jury.

  This latter situation had been unsuccessfully challenged a year earlier by black people attending a county court trial in which a black defendant stood accused of sexually molesting white women. One woman was the wife of an airman stationed at Craig Field, six miles outside the city. She claimed that her attacker had climbed through the window of her home and, with a knife at her throat, had raped her one night in March 1953. Although he’d worn a mask, she testified that she had been able to see his eyes and knew he was black. A month later, a young married woman whose father was Selma’s mayor reported that a knife-wielding black male with a white towel over his head had entered her bedroom. But she had fought him off, she said, grabbing his knife before he fled. Soon other Selma women were telephoning the police at night and suggesting there were black prowlers near their homes, and suddenly Selma was smitten with some of the hysteria that had characterized Scottsboro two decades earlier.

  A few months after the allegations by the airman’s wife, a black man who lived thirty miles outside Selma, in a small town called Marion, where he had a wife and four children and worked in a gas station, was seen walking one night in an alley near a white neighborhood in Selma. He was detained by two white men, who soon notified the police. The suspect’s name was William Earl Fikes. He was described by a black acquaintance as a barely articulate man who was possibly feebleminded but not inclined to criminality. The man’s white employer also doubted that Fikes was the culprit. But the police, without allowing Fikes to consult with a lawyer, drove him fifty miles away to a prison in Montgomery, claiming that it was necessary to get him out of Selma for his own protection. While in custody, Fikes was interrogated repeatedly for sev
eral days, until he produced what the police called a “confession.” He was said to have admitted raping the airman’s wife and of trying to rape the daughter of Selma’s mayor. Each offense in Alabama could have subjected Fikes to the death penalty.

  When he was returned to the Selma area and later appeared in the county courthouse for the first trial, the one involving the airman’s wife, he was defended by two white lawyers and confronted a jury consisting of twelve white men. He was found guilty. But since one member of the jury opposed the death penalty, Fikes received a prison term of ninety-nine years. This provoked protests from many white people in Selma, who wanted him dead, but it also aroused an outcry from within the black community because the verdict reaffirmed what until then they had more or less been resigned to—the lack of justice for black defendants in a racist courthouse. So they rallied around Fikes prior to the second trial, knowing that this white jury might bury him if the mayor’s daughter had her way; in addition to the money raised in Selma’s black churches for Fikes’s legal defense, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People arranged for two black lawyers from Birmingham to go to Selma and function as Fikes’s counselors.

  The trial was well publicized within the state. I had read about it in the Alabama newspapers during the end of my senior year in college, and the trial was mentioned in some of the phone conversations I had with Alabama friends after I had graduated and moved to New York in the summer of 1953. But I was then not overly interested in William Earl Fikes. I was preoccupied with my work as a news assistant at the Times and was also anxiously awaiting notification of when and where I would begin my two-year military obligation as a second lieutenant in the tank corps. I was twenty-one, had rented an L-shaped room month to month in a Greenwich Village brownstone, and was living a narrowly defined existence on a day-to-day basis, wondering more about where I was going than where I was, or where I had been. Several years would pass before I would be reminded of the name William Earl Fikes and learn that his trial in 1953 had been a prelude to the national civil rights movement begun in Alabama by Martin Luther King, Jr.

  I would be made aware of this through my subsequent interviews with, and from the published writings of, J. L. Chestnut, Jr., a black attorney who was a native of Selma and whose law practice there, beginning in 1958, would in time become heavily engaged in freeing from jail and defending in court a large number of black civil rights activists.

  I first met Chestnut after I had been sent to Selma by the Times in 1965 to help cover the King-led demonstrations. Although I did not then know it, this would be my final year in journalism, and the Selma story my last major assignment as a Times man. I had been a reporter for ten years, having been elevated from news assistant to the writing staff in 1955 shortly after I had returned from Germany upon completing my military tour. A month before arriving in Selma, I had turned thirty-three. I had been married for six years to Nan, then an associate editor at Random House, who was about to publish her first best-seller, Papa Hemingway, and my wife and I were residing in a rent-controlled apartment within a dilapidated East Side brownstone in Manhattan that we would one day buy, sharing space at the time with two Siamese cats, a one-year-old daughter, and her buxom young red-haired governess from Bavaria, whose charms were not lost on the neighborhood’s delivery boys and doormen.

  While I had loved working at the Times, after ten years I was no longer adapting well to the daily space limitations, to the deadline pressures, and to feelings that whatever I had finished writing was not really finished—there was so much more to be learned and written about than what I had researched and published in the Times. This fact frustrated me throughout the weeks of my prolonged assignment in Selma, perhaps because here I was in a familiar part of my past that was no longer so familiar, and I was very curious about why and how it was changing; and here I also realized—and my acquaintanceship with J. L. Chestnut, Jr., heightened this realization—how incomplete had been my education at the University of Alabama and how little aware I had long been of the common struggles and adversities known to Chestnut and the rest of the black people of my generation who had been born in Alabama and been thwarted by the traditions that had dominated southern social life well into the middle of the twentieth century.

  I referred previously to the “lingering sense of separateness” endemic to my southern Italian forebears and the families of my southern classmates at the University of Alabama, but what I did not take into account was the separateness in the extreme that had been historically inherent in the lives of black southerners in such places as Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma, and my old college town of Tuscaloosa. If J. L. Chestnut, Jr., and I had been born a generation later, we might have been classmates at the University of Alabama. After meeting him in 1965, and continuing to correspond with him and visit him after I had left the Times, it was apparent to me that he and I had much in common, had many shared aspirations and standards, and had we been classmates and friends, my education at the University of Alabama would have been less deprived and I would have no doubt been a wiser reporter and writer than I was when I arrived to cover the Selma story in the spring of 1965.

  Chestnut was then nearly thirty-five, the only black attorney in Selma—a short, stockily constructed, somewhat remote, and always formal man invariably dressed in a manner appropriate to the court, meaning mainly white shirts with dark suits and ties and well-shined black shoes. He gave the impression that he was taller than his five-foot-eight-inch frame because of his broad chest, his commanding demeanor, and his booming baritone voice. His close-cropped kinky head of shiny black hair was receding to the crown of his head in a way that resembled a skull cap; however, his penetrating bright-eyed expression, ever inquiring yet withholding judgment, was his most salient characteristic. Though he was less than two years older than myself, I privately deferred to him as if he were much older and more mature, a situation that had nothing to do with our respective ages and everything to do with who he was, and what he had been forced to overcome in order to become who he was. He was well known only in Selma, where the black people admired and depended upon him and the white people saw him as a notoriously irrepressible force in their legal system. He was nevertheless the only black man in Selma who thought highly enough of himself to write about himself, and his memoir—Black in Selma, coauthored with Julia Cass—takes the reader inside the head of a native son who was influenced by Selma’s traditions but whose perceptions were altered by the circumstances of the Fikes trial, and who finally lived out his life in Selma long after the city had ceased to attract national headlines and had been abandoned by the last procession of out-of-state demonstrators singing “We Shall Overcome.”

  When the case of the attempted rape of the mayor’s daughter was brought to trial in 1953, J. L. Chestnut, Jr., was a twenty-two-year-old law student attending classes at Howard University, a black college in Washington, D.C.; but he returned home to witness the performance of Fikes’s defense counselor from Birmingham, Peter Hall, a black attorney whose impressive prior efforts with NAACP-sponsored cases were known to Chestnut and to his fellow students and the faculty at Howard. Chestnut stayed at his parents’ home in Selma. His father formerly owned a grocery store in the black quarter. His mother performed many chores for white people, and knew how to maneuver herself socially and productively without ever seeming to be crossing the color line. She had scrupulously set aside her savings for the college education of her son and only child, J.L., who had inherited his only-initials name from his father, J. L. Chestnut, Sr., who had been so named by his mother because she had once been acquainted with a prominent white banker in Selma who had these initials.

  J. L. Chestnut, Jr., did not intend to resettle in Selma after getting his law degree, assuming that to open a practice in his hometown would lead only to frustration and starvation. Other black professionals in Selma—physicians, dentists, educators—could make a living catering to the needs of their own kind, but blacks in trouble
with the law were better off having a white attorney, inasmuch as they would be appearing in front of a white jury and judge. So Chestnut thought he would hang up his shingle in Harlem or Washington, D.C., or somewhere else far from Alabama, and he would return to Selma primarily for family visits—or, as in this instance, to see how William Earl Fikes’s lead lawyer, Peter Hall, would fare in a courthouse where people were accustomed to seeing black men working only as janitors.

  On the eve of the trial, at a social club for black people in Selma, Hall sat on a bar stool, slowly sipping whiskey and explaining to the well-wishers who surrounded him (in the crowd was young Chestnut) how he intended to attack Selma’s rigged legal system and its policy of blocking black residents from serving on juries. Hall was a handsome, slim, light-skinned, mustachioed man in his late thirties. He wore a well-cut suit, which Chestnut admired up close, wondering what it had cost. “I don’t know if Fikes is guilty,” Hall was saying, speaking in a clear and authoritative voice without a trace of a southern accent, although he had been raised in Birmingham, “but it is damn certain that the system is guilty. And I intend to try the system while the circuit solicitor is trying Fikes.”

  These were very bold words coming out of a black man’s mouth in Selma in 1953, and it occurred to Chestnut that Hall was maybe emboldened by what he was drinking and might turn into a shrinking violet when facing the white judge and jury. But on the following morning, it was the same Peter Hall—stouthearted, articulate, and clearly confident—who entered the courtroom a few minutes late, and then at his own pace headed toward the elevated desk of the judge to introduce several pretrial motions that advocated, among other things, the dismissal of the jury due to their prejudicial selection and the freedom of Fikes, since his confession had been extracted via “Gestapo-like tactics.”