A Writer's Life

by Gay Talese

  Then in early February 1990—a month before the silver anniversary remembrance of Blood Sunday, of which she was the project director—Rose Sanders and two of her cohorts barged into the outer office of the mayor and refused to leave, blaming him for his role in the ongoing crisis that had long beset the city’s public school system.

  There was little doubt in Smitherman’s mind that serious problems did exist within Selma’s public schools. But these problems were exacerbated, he believed, by Rose Sanders herself. No matter what efforts were made to give all of Selma’s students an equal opportunity to reach their full academic potential, she would find fault with something and start a public ruckus. Though the schools had been desegregated for decades, she insisted that there was still segregation. In one of her interviews with reporters from the Selma Times-Journal, she declared, “Blacks and whites go in the same school door, but once inside they go to separate and unequal classes.” She was referring to the local trilevel scholastic rating system, whereby pupils who were judged to be the brightest were grouped together, while the supposedly less gifted students were taught separately in classrooms recognized as representing the second or third level. But these levels were prejudicially designated, she insisted, being the result of such factors as unfair testing measures and the tendency to further favor the privileged students (nearly all of them white) with the best teachers, while these white students’ parents reinforced segregation in the classrooms by applying pressure on the schools’ administrators and the faculty to continue the leveling procedure. Although there was a black superintendent at the helm, and an abundant number of black teachers in the system, the city’s board of education was still controlled by white people, Rose Sanders reminded everyone, adding that her young daughter in elementary school had already been subjected to the prejudiced practice of leveling. Her girl would come home after school complaining that she belonged in a higher level, being unchallenged by the classroom work and the undemanding standards of her teachers. After her daughter was privately tested, Sanders said, it was determined that she was an academically advanced student. There were many black parents with similar stories to tell, Sanders went on, but when the black superintendent of schools, Dr. Norward Roussell, finally began to pay attention to these stories, and even indicated that it might be equitable and just to modify the leveling policy, many white parents suddenly became enraged. They saw him—though phrasing it more delicately—as dumbing down academic standards in order to pacify black parents who wanted their children seated in top-level classrooms. In late 1989, there were rumors that the white-majority school board was leaning toward not renewing Dr. Roussell’s contract, which was to expire in June 1990.

  Smitherman was pleased to hear this, although a few years before, in 1987, he had welcomed the arrival of Dr. Roussell as the city’s first black superintendent of schools. Smitherman then believed that it would bring pride contentment to the black people while calming things politically throughout the community; and the fact that Dr. Roussell was coming to Selma from New Orleans meant that he was not part of J. L. Chestnut, Jr.’s local clique of troublemakers. Chestnut himself made no secret of disliking the appointment. Norward Roussell was probably an Uncle Tom, Chestnut thought at the time, an opportunist beholden to the white-majority school board that had hired him. Chestnut had always resented the fact that the people on the board were not elected. They all were appointed, blacks as well as whites, by the white-controlled city council. And it had been a white-led search committee that had eagerly recruited this high-profile educator, presenting him with a fee that was five thousand dollars more than the fifty-thousand-dollar annual salary of Mayor Smitherman himself, and they undoubtedly offered other benefits and concessions to Dr. Roussell in the interest of luring him to Selma, hoping that his presence would perpetuate the myth that the city was becoming progressive. Chestnut saw through it immediately. What they really wanted, he said, was a “black superintendent to hide behind.”

  But what they got was something else, although in the beginning no one could quite agree on what they had gotten because the citizens of Selma—black as well as white—had never before encountered a dark-skinned pedant with the majestic dignity of Dr. Roussell. He spoke English eloquently, quickly but politely emphasizing that the proper pronunciation of his surname was ROU-ssell. He was a slender gentleman of about five-eight, with close-cropped kinky hair and an angular face with deep-set eyes and a mustache; and while not foppish, he dressed in a way that suggested he was comfortable in front of mirrors. Everything about him was just so: His hair and mustache were tidily attended to, his vividtoned silk ties were carefully knotted and centered within the colars of his shirts, and his suit jackets fit him snugly at the shoulders and were never wrinkled. He hardly ever appeared in public without a jacket, a tie, and a genteel manner. Like Rose Sanders, he attracted much curiosity and comment from people throughout the community; but while she was known for stirring things up and causing disorder, he was perceived as an orderly individual who would create an atmosphere within the school system and the city that would foster biracial cooperation and advance the idea that headline-making activism was detrimental to Selma’s economic growth.

  After a group of white businessmen had invited him to join the local Rotary Club, offering him an opportunity that had never before been extended to a black man, Dr. Roussell accepted. But when there was talk around town that he might be a candidate for membership in the Selma Country Club, Dr. Roussell took the initiative to remove his name from consideration. He knew that it was perfectly fine for him to dine and fraternize with white male professionals at Rotary meetings, but he was under no illusion that the elite white men and women gathered around the pool of the Selma Country Club would respond with glee to the sight of his three children splashing and thrashing in the water next to their children, nor would they necessarily enjoy watching him practicing on the putting green while his tan-skinned, freckled wife sat in the shade of the veranda sipping iced tea. Selma’s color line in 1987 was most definitely drawn along the greensward and the chlorinated waters of the country club, and Dr. Roussell did not have to be the scholar that he was in order to understand that, no matter how well-intending those few white folks who contemplated sponsoring his membership might be, it was a bad idea to do so. It would thrust him and his family into the limelight in a way that would distract from his purpose in coming to Selma.

  “I do not want to pay $2,500 to play golf,” he finally announced to the local press, bringing immediate relief to the membership committee of the Selma Country Club—which, incidentally, would continue its whites-only policy into the next century. Dr. Roussell also told reporters, “I did not come to Selma to claw down racial barriers.”

  When Norward Roussell went to Selma in 1987, at the age of fifty-three, seeing the city for the first time, he was put in charge of a system much smaller than his earlier jurisdiction in New Orleans, but it was nonetheless more challenging. Here in Selma he would be entrusted to educate an interracial student body in a very polarized and peevish community, one in which white pupils were a dwindling minority but in which white parents and other adults were striving to maintain, as had long been their custom, a controlling interest in the school system. Except now they were being questioned by black parents, by concerned mothers like Rose Sanders who wanted to be sure that their children were not receiving an education that was second-best. At the same time, Dr. Roussell was politically sensitive and, whenever possible, he would try to avoid, or to compromise or attenuate, the implementation of policies that might drive away from Selma’s schools what was left of the white classroom population.

  White students represented barely 25 percent of the total enrollment of about six thousand youths attending public schools in 1987. On school days, these 1,500 whites intermingled with 4,500 black students in the corridors, cafeterias, gymnasiums, and classrooms of the eleven buildings that constituted Selma’s public school real estate. The largest building was occup
ied by the fourteen hundred students attending Selma High School. There were also two middle-school buildings, one on the east side of town, the other on the west side, which had a combined enrollment of thirteen hundred students who were taught in the sixth-, seventh-, or eighth-grade classes. Finally there was a scattering of eight elementary school buildings that accommodated the more than three thousand younger students who attended classes ranging from kindergarten to the fifth grade.

  Isolated from the public school system were two private schools in Selma that catered only to white children, at an annual cost to their parents or guardians of about two thousand dollars, and the combined number of students attending these two institutions was slightly more than eight hundred. Roussell wanted to prevent this figure from increasing, as it surely would if heightened racial tensions in his schools prompted white parents to transfer their children into one of the private schools. And there were also other places that might attract them. There were public schools in the county that had a higher percentage of white pupils and there were a few private schools (whites only) in the outer boroughs that were less expensive than the two in Selma and were at a convenient driving distance from the city. But where these schools existed was unimportant to him—he saw them all as sites of “white flight,” and this term and its possible consequences both disheartened and perturbed him.

  He had not come to Selma to oversee buildings in which the student body had once been exclusively white, and had then been integrated, and had then become exclusively black. His position would be reduced to that of a ghetto administrator, and it would also be a setback for the civil rights movement, which he had benefitted from and identified with. The movement had finally succeeded during the mid-1950s in enrolling black students in white classrooms, providing young blacks and whites with an equal opportunity for a broader education, and also a chance as classmates to learn more about one another and ideally promote greater understanding and tolerance. What a pity it would be if the victory over school segregation in the 1950s were followed at century’s end by school segregation of another type. He would strive mightly against this happening, wanting neither to see his white students defecting from his schools nor their families relocating their homes to other places, depriving Selma of taxpayers, consumers, and white parents with a vested interest in his school system.

  Having said this did not mean he would allow himself to be subverted by his white supporters, who might raise the issue of white flight as a threat to justify reining him in, to exert pressure on him to behave in accord with the will of white parents in the hope of retaining their children. He knew he could not become the white folks’ hostage. He must maintain his independence from the town’s white leaders as well as the black ones. He was an educator, not a mediator in race relations. He had been summoned to Selma to deal with the city’s troubled schools, which had a 36 percent dropout rate prior to his arrival. He had been assured by the white people who hired him that they believed in integrated public schools as much as he did, letting him know that they could well afford to place their children in private schools but that they nonetheless saw public schools as essential pillars in the pluralistic community they preferred and wished to cultivate. He had been provided with an annual operating budget of $18 million, larger than any agency in the city; and so with this substantial sum of money, and with the biracial backing of many city boosters, Dr. Roussell was confident in the fall of 1987 that he could succeed in upgrading Selma’s schools academically and could create within them a desirable environment that would reduce truancy and encourage a higher degree of prideful participation from the parents and students of both races.

  A year later, his efforts had earned him a praiseworthy report from the school board and congratulatory comments throughout the community. Parents were pleased that he had quickly introduced their children to the new technology, installing computer labs in the schools, thanks to a $1.2 million federal grant he had requested and received not long after he had assumed his duties. He also brought professional counselors into the schools to meet and assist the needs of pupils whose low or failing grades and habitual truancy were thought to be linked to their crises at home, or their drug use, or their dyslexia or other physical disorders and personal problems. In a move intending to improve the efficiency of the members of his faculty, he often granted them free time so they could attend workshops and lectures that were held outside the city and featured prominent educators. While he kept abreast of the latest teaching methods being advocated elsewhere, Dr. Roussell kept a vigilant watch over what was going on within his jurisdiction, and the people of the town became accustomed to seeing him driving around in his maroon Cadillac, visiting one school after another. After greeting his principals he would make the rounds, observing his teachers at work in their classrooms, and he noted how the students were responding.

  At the completion of the first year, some teachers were transferred from the high school to one of the middle schools, or from the middle schools up to the high school, although it was not always made clear to them why they were being moved. These teachers began to complain among themselves. There was also some grumbling being expressed around town by the proprietors of those businesses that had long done work for the schools—as printers, as maintenance contractors, and as providers of other services—and now learned of other firms taking over these contracts. Roussell was making changes, decisively but arbitrarily, it seemed to some people. Their criticisms were muted, however, until his popularity began to wane, which it did during the middle of his second year, when certain unfortunate happenings within the schools began to call into question the autonomy that he had assumed was his due.

  Among these incidents were a number of publicized interracial quarrels involving students, one of which began after a group of white youths took exception to those black classmates who appeared in school wearing African medallions, and a fistfight erupted after a white was overheard to say, “Hey, nigger, go back to Africa.” There were also allegations of unfairness in the amount of punishment that a white faculty member had meted out against the black boys on the track team who were accused of boisterous “partying” as compared to what the whites on the debate team had received for a similar offense. After a white member of the school board had become displeased by Dr. Roussell’s tardiness in replying to an inquiry relating to the curriculum, which the latter believed was beyond the former’s right to review, the board member began to circulate a memo indicating that Dr. Roussell was showing signs of “arrogance” and “excessive independence”—and this opinion soon drew concurring nods in the black community as well as the white. Members of the town’s leading black businessmen’s club had already been unpersuaded by his explanation that he was too busy to attend one of their social functions and deliver a speech. And the white couple who had held a cocktail party in his honor at their home had been offended when he arrived one hour late.

  His difficulties in Selma came to the forefront, however, when he decided to discontinue the schools’ trilevel scholastic rating system, which Rose Sanders had been complaining about. It was not that Dr. Roussell had chosen to ally himself with the Chestnut-Sanders anti-Smitherman faction, but, rather, that after the eleven-member school board had decided not to renew his contract (six white members had voted to replace him; five black members voted to retain him) the Chestnut group saw Roussell’s plight as a racial issue that might arouse black passion and promote unity in the ghetto. Roussell himself was not pleased to find himself in this situation, being caught in the middle of a polarized community, and yet it made him more receptive to those who might possibly help him hold on to his job.

  J. L. Chestnut, Jr., was clearly the ascending black power broker at this time, one who was starting to pull the political strings in the ghetto so effectively that he had all but delegitimized the black leaders who were accepting patronage from Mayor Smitherman; and Chestnut had already demonstrated that he had the influence to help black candidates overcome
white incumbents at the polls. This had happened in the recent countywide election, which saw his choices garnering enough votes to gain control of the county government, setting the stage for his own triumphant entrance into the courthouse on January 16, 1989—Martin Luther King, Jr. Day—to congratulate those commissioners whose campaigns his law firm had helped to manage. One of the newly elected commissioners was, in fact, the office manager of Chestnut’s law firm—Perry Varner, who earned his law degree at Boston College and was a brother-in-law of Rose Sanders. What was additionally gratifying to Chestnut on this day was the festive and spruced-up presence of those many black men who had brought their wives and children to observe the swearing-in ceremony. It reminded Chestnut of the crowds of black families he had seen in this same courtroom back in 1953 when they had assembled to watch the performance of Peter Hall, the first black attorney ever to try a case in Selma. That was the rape case involving William Earl Fikes—the one that had influenced J. L. Chestnut, Jr., to return to Selma in 1958 after getting his law degree. The Fikes case had convinced Chestnut that “Alabama was where the action was,” and this action would engage him for the rest of his working life, bringing him in 1989 into open conflict with Mayor Smitherman and the school board that was trying to oust his new friend, Norward Roussell.