by Gay Talese
Not only did Chestnut file a lawsuit against the board, claiming that its six white members should not continue to function while its five black members were absenting themselves in support of Dr. Roussell, but Chestnut’s law office proceeded to become the nerve center of many demonstrations and confrontations that would disrupt the city for nearly six months. During this period—from September 1989 into March 1990—there was a high school sit-in, a boycott against the business interests of the white board members, several pro-Roussell rallies in the streets, and a brawling invasion of the office of Mayor Smitherman. This last incident, which occurred on February 5, 1990, had been the handiwork of Rose Sanders.
Chestnut had not been with her at the time, but she was accompanied by two other individuals from his firm. One was his office manager, Perry Varner, and the other was Carlos Williams, one of the five partners at Chestnut, Sanders, Sanders, Turner, Williams & Pettaway. After Mrs. Sanders, along with Varner and Williams and a half-dozen younger followers, had entered City Hall and settled themselves in the hallway near the mayor’s office, Joe Smitherman himself came out to explain that he was too busy at this time to invite them in, but he said that he would try to see them later. After offering them soft drinks, which he laid on the receptionist’s desk in his outer office, which on this day was guarded by a police officer, Smitherman returned to his inner office, where a second policeman was on duty, and closed the door.
Sanders and her group waited in the hallway for the next hour, sitting or standing in or near the outer office’s door while singing civil rights songs or chatting among themselves, and occasionally bantering with some of the city employees who strolled through the corridors. When Rose Sanders saw the city attorney, Henry Pitts, walking in her direction and then quickly turning and heading unhesitatingly through the outer office to within a few feet of the mayor’s door, she yelled out, “I’ve had it”—and immediately she and her people ran forward and fell in line behind Mr. Pitts, doing so with such force that they knocked him headfirst over the outer office’s reception desk. While a police guard bent down to assist him, Rose Sanders and the others slipped past them and proceeded to open Smitherman’s door, pressing it against the buttocks of the three-hundred-pound police officer who was posted inside, and who now turned around, with his elbows raised high, blocking and shoving aside Sanders and her fellow intruders.
As they pushed forward into the office, bodies tumbled to the floor, furniture began to splinter, and the alarm system signaled for the arrival of more security. Joe Smitherman rose angrily from behind his desk and, pointing a finger at Rose Sanders, declared, “You’re going to be charged with obstructing governmental operations and anything else we can come up with.…” She regarded him contemptuously but did not respond. She continued to glare at him in silence as more police officers entered Mayor Smitherman’s office and began to handcuff her colleagues, including Carlos Williams and Perry Varner. Refusing to leave on foot, both men were carried away by the lawmen, with Varner exiting headfirst, and facing the ground, as he was hauled through the corridor of City Hall and then raised into a patrol wagon that was parked at the curb and was headed for the prison.
Rose Sanders also refused to leave voluntarily, kicking and screaming as the lawmen picked her up and shoved her into the backseat of a police vehicle. She would claim that she sustained injuries as a result of her arrest and that the white male officer who had accompanied her in the car to prison had “brutalized” her, committing such offenses as placing his club between her legs. Her condition required immediate medical attention, she insisted; days later, at a news conference that she held in her room at the Vaughan Regional Hospital, she appeared before the press wearing a rose-colored gown and a neck brace. She sat in a wheelchair guided by her husband. Her left arm was in a sling and hooked up to tubes attached to an intravenous trolley. A black physician, her gynecologist, told the press that while she had not broken any bones, she was unable to use her left hand and also suffered from chest, neck, and arm pain. She herself added that the mental anguish and the sexual violation she’d experienced had been equally damaging to her well-being, and she took the opportunity to insist on the dismissal of the white policeman and to emphasize that Mayor Smitherman was the sort of man who “doesn’t give a damn about a black woman” and had handled her “the way slaves were treated by their masters two hundred years ago.”
After the conference, two white reporters who were assigned to the story—one was Alvin Benn of the Montgomery Advertiser, the other Adam Nossiter of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution—were told by one of the hospital’s nurses that Sanders was exaggerating her injuries and performing for the cameras. Within a few hours the reporters had returned to the hospital and, without knocking, opened Sanders’s door. They saw her sitting comfortably on the bed, without wearing her neck brace or her sling or being attached to the IV device, smiling as she spoke on the phone, holding it in her left hand, the one that her doctor said was so weak she could hardly grip anything with it.
Rose Sanders’s mother, seated in a chair near the door, was the first to see the reporters peeking in, and she quickly jumped up to slam the door shut. Sanders and her supporters were enraged by the reporters’ initiative and the articles they subsequently wrote describing what they had seen. Days later, when Alvin Benn was covering a rally honoring Dr. Roussell in a black church, Benn was threatened and shoved out of the building by some black men; and a black woman—not Rose Sanders, but one of her close friends—was overheard referring to him as an “evil Jew.”
After the church event had been concluded, a pro-Roussell parade was formed outside, and soon more than 2,500 black people—led by Rose Sanders, wearing a neck brace—were marching through town singing, chanting, and denouncing the mayor. This routine was repeated in the days and weeks that followed, but, unlike the situation in 1965, the lawmen who surrounded this crowd controlled their tempers and did nothing in public that could expose them to incrimination either by the demonstrators or the media.
“C’mon, beat us, beat us,” a black marcher taunted a white state trooper one evening as the parade proceeded past the middle school on the east side of town. The trooper pretended he did not hear. He and the other state troopers (some of whom were black) wore soft hats instead of riot helmets. They came with pistols but not clubs, gas canisters, or flak jackets. When the marchers would pause in the street to kneel and pray, the troopers would remove their hats and lower their heads. These black marchers were now unaccompanied by the villains of law enforcement who had helped to create Bloody Sunday, and in order for the protesters to make the national headlines at this time, said one observer, “they’re going to have to find another Jim Clark.” This comment was made by Bryan Woolley, a fifty-two-year-old senior reporter for the Dallas Morning News who was in town to write an updated story about Selma after having come in 1965 as a Harvard divinity student partaking in the voting-rights march to Montgomery. “What happened then appealed to the conscience of the country, including white Southerners like me,” Woolley said in an interview published in the Montgomery Advertiser in mid-February 1990. The demonstrators in 1965 “were led by ministers,” he emphasized. “This one is being led by lawyers.”
When I arrived in Selma during the first days of March 1990, it was a foregone conclusion that Dr. Roussell would soon resign. Despite the support he had received from Rose Sanders, J. L. Chestnut, Jr., and the others, he saw his situation as untenable, his purpose in coming to Selma no longer practical nor possible. He had aspired to guide and improve upon an integrated school system; but due to the political infighting and the interracial rancor, his worst fears had been realized: White flight had swept through his classrooms like a windstorm, and in recent weeks approximately five hundred white students had left his system to attend one of Selma’s private academies or the private or public schools outside the city. The ratio of black students to whites had been 75:25 when he arrived in 1987; it would be 90:10 when he resigned in 1990, a
greeing to a $150,000 contract buyout and surrendering his position to a local black educator, Dr. James Carter, who would distance himself from local politics but would nevertheless see additional numbers of white students abandoning his schools.
At century’s end, Dr. Carter’s public schools, and the city as well, would be as segregated in many ways as had been the case before Bloody Sunday. Although current law made it possible for blacks and whites to dine in the same restaurants, to register in the same hotels, and to send their children to the same public schools, it could not prevent white flight, nor legislate goodwill and trust between the races, nor integrate the guest lists at private dinner parties and social events, nor mandate what had been advocated long ago by Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, which was full inclusion by black people in the American experience. The color line was perhaps more opaque than it had previously been, but it was still discernible in twenty-first-century Selma and throughout the United States, and national surveys reflecting this uneradicable separatism between black and white people, a separatism most clearly and immediately evident in the lives of the school-age children of both races, would be regularly reported in the press. In an article in the New York Times—under the headline SEGREGATION GROWING AMONG U.S. CHILDREN—a sociologist named John R. Logan, from the State University of New York at Albany, was quoted as saying, “The problem for minority children is that, on average, they’re growing up in neighborhoods where they are the majority, and that’s not the world they will live in.”
But what interested me most after I had arrived in Selma for the Times in March 1990 was not the exodus of white children from the city’s school system, nor the intensified estrangement being experienced by black and white adults; it was, rather, that in the middle of this tumultuous mingling and discord there was in progress a private love affair between an attractive white woman who had worked in one of the town’s interior-decoration shops and a black man who was employed in City Hall as Mayor Smitherman’s director of personnel. And this couple planned to publicize their romance with a wedding ceremony that would take place on Saturday, March 3, in the groom’s home, during a weekend when, some blocks away, Rose Sanders and J. L. Chestnut, Jr., would be overseeing a number of programs and a parade that would hark back to the racial hatred that had prevailed here twenty-five years ago on Bloody Sunday.
18
I LEARNED OF THE LOVE AFFAIR WHILE INTERVIEWING JOE SMITHERMAN, although it had not been his intention to tell me about it. I had gone to his office shortly after arriving in Selma, walking past two policemen who were posted on the steps of City Hall to keep an eye on the picket line of black teenagers who were strolling along the sidewalk and the front lawn, singing civil rights songs and carrying signs reading JOE MUST GO.
“It don’t bother me a bit,” Smitherman assured me as he rose from his chair to shake hands and then waved me into a seat across from his desk. Behind him was a Confederate flag as well as one representing the United States, and hanging on the walls were several photographs showing him discharging his official duties, which in 1988 included greeting the black Democratic candidate for president, Jesse Jackson, and presenting him with a key to the city. Smitherman was now sixty, a compactly built six-footer wearing a tan suit and a white shirt with a maroon silk tie. He had a full head of sandy gray hair that was carefully groomed and parted on the side, and his blue eyes were framed by tortoiseshell glasses that rested high on his straight nose. He had gained more than fifty pounds since taking over the job, but I thought he appeared to be in better shape now (though I knew he smoked three packs a day, and liked his vodka at night) than he had been as an undernourished 145-pound newcomer to City Hall in 1965. After offering me a Coke and a cigarette, he removed his jacket, loosened his tie, and sat down.
“No,” he said, “this protesting don’t bother me because I know there’s some people you’ll never satisfy, no matter what you try to do. But the blacks are doing the same thing we did twenty-five years ago. We hollered for ‘segregation,’ and played on the white people’s fear of integration—and this got us elected. Now, twenty-five years later, the black elected officials, and black leaders not elected, are hollering ‘white racism’ and ‘de facto segregation’ and ‘economic oppression’ to get elected, and they’re doing a good job.”
His tone was one of equanimity, not stridency. He had spoken in this tone earlier in the day while appearing on a network morning show to discuss that weekend’s memorial march. Marching was fine with him, he had said; he’d be on the sidelines watching. The march would also be a sign of Selma’s progress, he added, pointing out that the town’s police force was 35 percent black, and the fire department was 25 percent black, and the postmaster was black, and that several important jobholders within his administration were black.
Smitherman expanded upon this in his interview with me, and while I took notes, wanting to give the impression that I was interested, I was not. This was recycled material that I had read and heard before, and I wanted to change the direction of our talk toward something I might like to write about. As yet, I had nothing specifically in mind, but I knew that I did not want to write about what I was hearing from the mayor. Still, it is not always easy to redirect conversations when dealing with individuals who are very experienced and skillful in using the press as their sounding boards. The technique I have occasionally used to derail such people’s trains of thought is to politely but abruptly ask them a question that they might initially think is stupid. Or, if not stupid, so completely out of context and surprising that they are rendered momentarily speechless.
During such times they may stare at me, indicating bewilderment, and I can imagine them asking themselves, Is this interviewer serious? Is he really expecting an answer to this ridiculous question? Some people become quite irritated, and they not only refuse to answer but immediately terminate the interview, which is one way of answering. Other people request that I repeat the question, which I always do in my customarily sincere and respectful manner, even though I know that what I am posing is intended to fluster them, to catch them off guard, to confront them with an unanticipated question that might be awkward for them to respond to.
It seemed to me that it would be very awkward for Mayor Smitherman to address questions concerning interracial sex and the possibility that secret liaisons were currently taking place somewhere within his polarized city, and that it might be commonplace in future decades for Selma’s black and white people to marry one another and be accepted socially by the community at large. I had probably been thinking along these lines ever since I’d recently read in a magazine, or had heard on the radio, that Alabama was one of only two states in the entire nation (South Carolina being the other) that still outlawed interracial marriages. The Alabama constitution, as written in 1901, not only prohibited a black person from marrying a white person but it ruled against the descendants of black people intermarrying with whites.
“Mr. Mayor,” I began, “I don’t want to seem frivolous, but you’ve been saying that the blacks and whites of Selma are more integrated than ever, and you gave Jesse Jackson a key to the city, and I’m wondering how far this will go and whether you see good things happening if black people and white people could get married without a hassle and settle down in Selma.”
The mayor’s face assumed a look of disgruntlement, as if I’d hit him over the head with a piece of fruit. Saying nothing, he glanced over my shoulder toward his office door. We two were alone in the room, but the door to the outer office was open slightly. A policeman was posted out there, and so was the mayor’s secretary, a middle-aged woman who liked to eavesdrop while seated at her desk.
The mayor turned back to me. In a soft voice he asked, “Are you bringing all this up because of Randall Miller?”
“Who’s Randall Miller?” I asked.
“He’s the black fella that’s my director of personnel. He’s got an office in this building that’s bigger than mine. He’s getting married tomo
rrow.…” After a pause, Smitherman added, “To a white woman.”
Now I was silent. I had heard nothing about this.
“Was this in the papers?” I asked.
“No,” said the mayor.
“Where’s the wedding going to be?”
“Few blocks from here, at Randall Miller’s house.”
“Do you think he’ll talk to me?”
“I don’t know,” the mayor said, reaching for his phone. “I’ll call him.”
The secretary in personnel said that Randall Miller was in Montgomery and would not be returning until later in the evening. After hanging up, the mayor obliged me with Miller’s home address and phone number and told me a few things about him. Randall Miller was a very capable individual of about fifty, tall and well mannered. His late father, Ben Miller, had opened a funeral parlor in the black quarter many years ago, and Randall, after acquiring a mortician’s license, inherited it and still oversaw it, in addition to holding down his position in personnel.