A Writer's Life

by Gay Talese

  I was told that the Times newsroom during the 1930s was dominated by Catholic editors—it was then commonly said among staff members that “the New York Times is owned by Jews and is edited by Catholics for Protestants”—and it was also said that the Catholic editors slanted the Spanish Civil War coverage in ways that favored the Church-supported Spanish dictatorship over the Communist and socialist-led rebel opposition. During my time in the newsroom the two top-ranked editors were both small-town southern Protestants—Turner Catledge from Ackerman, Mississippi; and his favorite underling, Clifton Daniel, from Zebulon, North Carolina, who was the first editor that Catledge elevated to a level higher than Theodore Bernstein’s. Although I would be hard pressed to document it, I believe that my having gone to the University of Alabama did me no harm with the two gentlemen from the South. The socially aloof and dandyish Clifton Daniel, disliked by most staffers, was particularly cordial and accommodating toward me; it had been under his influence—with Catledge’s support, no doubt—that I was able to be transferred quite often from the city staff to out-of-town assignments that I desired, such as going to Cocoa Beach, Florida, in 1960, to describe the crowd scene as the first American astronaut was being launched into orbit, and to be in Chicago in 1962 to report on the Patterson-Liston heavyweight bout, as well as a prefight literary debate in a Chicago auditorium between writers Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley; and to revisit my alma mater at various times between 1963 and 1965 to report on the changing policies and politics on campus, and to write about the voting-rights clashes in Selma and finally the long march of Dr. King and his followers into Montgomery.

  My stories from Alabama brought forth notes of congratulation from Catledge and Daniel, both men commending what they called my “objectivity.” But what I really think they approved of was the fact that I had not followed the lead of most northern journalists in blaming only the South for racist practices that existed nationwide. I had also not failed to mention the sacking and burning of Selma one hundred years before, when nine thousand Northern troops overran Selma’s nearly four thousand defenders who were serving under the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. In General Forrest’s ranks was a soldier named James Turner, the maternal grandfather of Turner Catledge.

  17

  TURNER CATLEDGE AND ALL THE SENIOR EDITORS OF HIS GENERATION were either dead or retired from the Times when I returned to the newsroom in March 1990 to receive my credentials and airplane tickets for my single-story trip to Selma. Catledge had died in 1983, while in his early eighties. The editor currently holding Catledge’s old title was an ex-reporter and contemporary of mine, Max Frankel. My assignment was to write an article of about 2,500 words recounting the changes in Selma since the massacre had prompted Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and to describe as well the silver anniversary festivities and other public events scheduled to take place in Selma, such as the ceremonial march across the bridge, and the reenactment of Bloody Sunday in an unbloody manner that would nonetheless call attention to the suffering sustained by civil rights demonstrators a quarter of a century ago. Using machine-blown smoke to simulate the tear gas that had been inhaled by black protesters, and tape recordings that would reecho the sounds of brutality and anguish that marked that violent time, this 1990 occasion was supposed to make vivid to young blacks what their elders had endured in gaining access to the ballot box.

  Among the honored guests would be Coretta Scott King (widow of the civil rights leader assassinated in Memphis in 1968), the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who currently saw himself as a viable Democratic candidate for the White House, and John Lewis, who as a twenty-five-year-old agitator from SNCC had been flattened on the highway but who now returned as a fifty-year-old member of the U.S. Congress, having been elected as a Georgia Democrat in 1986.

  From my preliminary research, I learned even before arriving in Selma that most of the city’s white residents saw little merit in reviving memories of a situation that had brought such shame and infamy to the community. They wished that the blacks would look ahead rather than back. Much interracial progress has been made since 1965, the whites pointed out in comments to the local press, and this is what should now be remembered and advertised. It would improve the city’s image. It might attract more outside investment and result in the construction of more shopping malls and chain stores, more jobs for black people and economic gains for everyone.

  All the roads in black neighborhoods were now paved. There were also new streetlights, sewer lines, trees, and hundreds of new housing units that were built as part of a multimillion-dollar federal assistance program. About five thousand dollars went to the restoration of Brown Chapel, which the city enshrined as a historical site and listed as a tourist attraction along with a number of antebellum mansions. The principal street in the black quarter, Sylvan Street—which also extended for three blocks downtown into the territory of white shopowners—had been renamed in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Selma’s public schools had been desegregated since 1970, and five black appointees served on the eleven-member school board. There were black jurors and police officers, firemen and sanitation workers. Four blacks were on the nine-seat city council, and three of the five seats on the county commission were held by black candidates, and a black resident of Selma, Henry “Hank” Sanders, a partner in J. L. Chestnut, Jr.’s law firm, was now a member of the Alabama state senate.

  There were now about 7,500 registered black voters in Selma, which was hundreds more than the whites (although a higher percentage of the latter went to the polls), and while the mayor of Selma in 1965 was still the mayor of Selma in 1990, Joseph Smitherman’s political advisers were quick to say that he had learned from his past mistakes, and that the city no longer deserved to be smeared by references to Bloody Sunday. That unfortunate incident had largely been provoked by Sheriff Jim Clark, they claimed, adding that he was no longer among them; he now lived in the Birmingham area and worked in the mobile-home business. The other leading local segregationist from that era, circuit court judge James A. Hare, was now dead. And while former governor Wallace was still alive, at seventy—though ailing and paralyzed since being shot by a twenty-one-year-old white man during Maryland’s 1972 Democratic primary—he continued to say that he had never been the enemy of black people. He boasted instead that it had been the large turnout of black voters that had helped to reelect him repeatedly to govern the state from his wheelchair in the 1970s through the 1980s, and among the people in Selma who had supported him (liking the fact that he had given raises to schoolteachers and free textbooks to students, and had not seemed to be as offensive as the white candidates running against him) had been the mother of J. L. Chestnut, Jr.

  But Chestnut himself had never been swayed by what he saw as George Wallace’s desire to reinvent himself, dismissing him as a political opportunist nowadays matched in Alabama only by Joseph Smitherman, the latter being a longtime Wallace follower who had brought his own folksy style, and the persuasive talents he had earlier developed as the town’s leading appliance salesman, to the mayoral campaign in 1964; with the help of black voters whom he had impressed with his cordiality and satisfied with small pieces of the political pie, Smitherman had remained in office for seven straight terms. In Chestnut’s view, the mayor adhered to the political adage: “If you give just a little, you won’t have to give a lot.”

  I first interviewed Smitherman for the Times in 1965, when he was a skinny, blond, six-foot country boy in his mid-thirties who weighed 145 pounds and wore clothes that always seemed a size too large and who looked as if he had not had enough to eat. This had indeed been the case during his upbringing, he told me, since both of his parents had died before he had reached his teens and since those kinfolk who took turns raising him were as dirt-poor as any of Selma’s blacks living in the city’s nearby shacks or in the boondocks of the county. He worked as a Southern Railway brakeman after graduation from high school, and then moved on to become an appliance salesman a
t the local Sears, Roebuck, selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door and impressing customers as a trustworthy individual who would personally guarantee whatever he sold. Years later, he was a partner in an appliance shop on the main street, selling many refrigerators and washing machines with equal ease to black and white customers, and at the same time selling himself to them as an electable candidate for a seat on the city council. This he would achieve in 1960, and four years later, when he was thirty-five—and living with his wife and three children in a neighborhood near black people in a singlestory house without a burglar alarm—he would win an upset victory in the mayoral campaign, defeating an incumbent who had establishment political connections and old-family status.

  The Joseph Smitherman I had met in the mid-1960s, and would see again at times in the 1970s and 1980s while revisiting Alabama, was very adroit in presenting himself as Selma’s middleman mayor, the only officeholder capable of being a buffer between the city’s disenchanted black and white residents. Comfortable among black people, he would casually enter their social clubs and churches to discuss with their ministers and leading members the many favors he intended to bestow, hinting that with their continued support his gratitude would be shown in the form of political appointments to them, and city jobs for their friends, and prompt road repairs and whatever else was needed to improve the quality of life in their neighborhoods. Then the mayor would privately meet with various groups of white people and suggest that the money and efforts he was directing toward the blacks was the minimum amount necessary to encourage their goodwill and forbearance, and their disinclination to protest in the streets in ways that might attract the networks and bring more bad publicity to Selma.

  Most of the money that Smitherman was dispensing for allegedly promoting peace and prosperity in Selma was actually federal money that had been earmarked in Washington primarily for the benefit of black people, these funds being authorized by Congress after Bloody Sunday and continuing to filter down into Selma for years thereafter. There were white politicans in the South who shied away from Washington’s War on Poverty largesse because it came with many federal controls and restrictions, mandating that black people should share heavily in the benefits, should be employed at all levels of U.S. government-assisted building projects, training initiatives, and reforms, and should enjoy equal opportunities in a social environment devoid of racism. This federal money was thus “tainted,” in the view of some southern politicians, but it was certainly not so regarded by Smitherman, who welcomed every federal dollar he could get his hands on, claiming that the only thing “tainted” about it was there “t’ain’t” enough of it—even though the federal sums allocated to Selma during Smitherman’s many terms was reportedly close to $40 million. He was therefore well endowed to influence numbers of voters through patronage and to modernize the city in ambitious ways that created many jobs while appearing to conform to government regulations aimed at promoting racial harmony.

  Smitherman replaced the slave-built Albert Hotel with a new city hall, and he oversaw the construction of a library in which both races had equal access to books, lecture series, and other services. The downtown shopping area was renovated with brick sidewalks and refaced storefronts, and blacks and whites were now accustomed to drinking out of the same fountains, patronizing the same restaurants, and using the same rest rooms in public buildings and terminals. Smitherman saw to it that his office door was open to all visitors, even those without appointments, and near his desk he kept a small refrigerator filled with cans of Coca-Cola and other soft drinks, which he popped open before serving them to his guests.

  Even reporters who had portrayed him negatively in the past were welcomed into his office. He believed that the more they saw of him, the more likely they were to write favorably about him. He was invariably candid with the press; and in an interview with William E. Schmidt of the New York Times in 1985, he took issue with the white people of Selma who preferred to blame Sheriff Clark for most of what had gone wrong in 1965. “Our hands are just as dirty as his,” Mayor Smitherman said. He also conceded in conversations with other newsmen that racism was often central to his political strategy, adding, however, that it was other people’s racism, not his own. He went on to say that many contemporary black candidates were also guilty of exploiting the issue of race whenever they believed it would advance their political careers.

  The man in Selma who seemed to be the most determined to undermine Smitherman’s efforts to serve as the town’s intermediary between black and white residents was J. L. Chestnut, Jr. When Chestnut got his law degree in the late 1950s, there were only five black lawyers practicing in all of Alabama; by the late eighties, Chestnut had five black partners in his office alone—it was the largest black firm in the state—and his clients were located not only in Selma but throughout the region. These included many black-influenced county boards and school boards and other entities that received and apportioned sizable sums in order to operate. When four of Selma’s black men first gained membership on the city council, they met in Chestnut’s conference room for discussions with Chestnut and his partners before they walked across the street to join their five white colleagues at the council meeting. Whenever the Smitherman administration deviated from what Chestnut strongly advocated, especially when it concerned the policies and federal sums being directed toward Selma ostensibly to keep the blacks happy and off the streets, Chestnut would sue the city. In the opinion of the mayor, J. L. Chestnut, Jr., would never be happy until he ran the city, not by sitting in Smitherman’s chair in City Hall but through ongoing behind-the-scenes maneuverings and utilizing the litigious power of the Chestnut law firm in launching discrimination suits and other actions that threatened or blocked the flow of federal funds into the coffers of the Smitherman administration.

  Chestnut’s most demonstrative and politically ambitious partners were a husband-and-wife team who had earned their law degrees at Harvard. They were Henry “Hank” Sanders, a member of the state senate since the early 1980s, and his wife, Rose, who had been a student activist at Harvard, calling for more black professors on the faculty, and also a black dean. She was also committed to working with black youth groups in Cambridge and later Harlem and still later in Selma, after she and her husband had joined Chestnut’s firm in 1972. The couple had spent a year in Africa before going to Selma, and Rose Sanders in her off-hours from the firm sought to inculcate in the black ghetto an element of African pride, especially among younger people. She presented street fairs that introduced them to African art, music, and dance, she wrote and staged plays that were relevant to black history, and she also used such occasions to warn teenagers against drug abuse and pregnancy.

  A lean and petite woman who had an Afro-style haircut and whose wardrobe was decidedly African, and who could barely abide black women who indulged in heavy cosmetics and who straightened their hair, Sanders was not without her detractors in the black community; but when she began meddling in the political affairs of the city, which she did with increasing vigor after becoming a law partner, she quickly emerged as Smitherman’s new nemesis, an outrageous little woman who was willful in manner and whose public speeches attacking his policies and his personal character greatly offended him, unsettled him, and yet also confounded him.

  White men in the rural areas of the South, even brutes like Sheriff Clark, sought within themselves a measure of lenience and restraint whenever they came into public contact with loud and assertive black women. With black men, it was another matter. Their aggressiveness might be a prelude to a physical challenge, or something worse; but black women were not perceived to be threatening, and so just as long as their black male kinfolk did not join in any of the cantankerousness toward white men that black women could seemingly get away with, the South usually allowed these women a free-speech prerogative perhaps equal to the conversational liberties commonly heard at highway diners favored by interstate truck drivers.

  With the arrival of Rose Sanders in S
elma, however, the boundaries of bold-talking black women were extended even further than southern tradition had heretofore condoned. Because of her African clothing, her tribal-crafted accessories, her Harvard credentials, and the self-assurance she seemed to exude as she strode around town on errands or en route to appointments, Rose Sanders had become an object of curiosity and discussion throughout the community even before she began uttering unflattering comments in public about Mayor Smitherman. Thus when she did begin to criticize Smitherman in her prepared speeches and impromptu remarks, her words were destined to carry weight, to be reported in the local newspaper, to be read and debated by factions within the black and white communities. Rose Sanders instantaneously became a public figure of potential persuasiveness beyond that of any bad-mouthing black woman in the history of this onetime plantation area of Alabama, and the white men of Selma, and particularly Joe Smitherman, did not know exactly how to react to her. She was a black woman, after all, and so he should logically react as if her words did not matter. She was noise. Were he to issue statements refuting her own, it would create big headlines in the Selma Times-Journal. This is surely what she wanted. Furthermore, the public had already heard her list of complaints—her boss, J. L. Chestnut, Jr., had vented them every time he sued the city: The mayor was a closet racist; the mayor was Machiavellian; the mayor helped only those blacks who were his lackeys. Chestnut, however, communicated his chagrin in a relatively formal manner, showing some respect for the office of the mayor, if not for the mayor himself. Chestnut was of the old school, a wily wordsmith with years of experience in southern courtrooms. His partner, Rose’s heavyset husband, Hank, was also a smooth speaker. Hank Sanders was reflective. He was quietly determined and rarely abrasive. He had overcome a few political setbacks in his quest for a seat in the Alabama senate before he finally prevailed. But his wife, Rose, was a rant. Smitherman did not know how long he could continue his strategy of avoidance toward her, his crossing to the opposite sidewalk if he caught a glimpse of her approaching, his raising the windows of his car whenever he saw her standing at the curb glaring at him, her mouth moving in ways that made hearing unnecessary. And yet how could he continue to avoid her when she practically resorted to stalking him on the steps of City Hall? She also invited black students and other followers to join her in front of the building and led them in roars of disapproval as they waved signs reading JOE MUST GO, and SMITHERMAN MUST GO.