Of Caesar, Aeneas, and Selma

This past week I've been dogsitting in the country, and if you've never enjoyed a rural sunset with a glass of wine and Chloe Feoranzo playing in the background, it's an experience I can recommend. While I was away, February ended, and I realized I hadn't commented on either of my classics club readings for the month...mostly because I couldn't think of that much to say about them, really.  I'd already read the 'story' of the Aeneid last year or so, and had been watching videos on it in preparation, and by the time I experienced story in verse I was tired of it.   Of The Conquest of Gaul...well, it's exactly as it says it is, a military history of the invasion of "Gaul", which here means western Europe and a weekend in Britain, with some sociological sketching on the Gauls and Germans by Caesar.  I found that more interesting than the military business, frankly, especially the fact that the German tribes  viewed agriculture with suspicion and frequently uprooted their own people who settled, lest they grow soft and corrupt.

More pleasantly, I re-read a book I stumbled upon ages ago, called The Other Side of Selma.  Though I grew  up here,  I never experienced Selma as a town and place until after college. Before then, I only traveled the commercial sprawl north of the city,  and entered the 'real' city only when I needed to visit the library.  The Other Side of Selma introduced me to it as a beloved city, however -- a place where people lived and loved, not merely a place for politicians to visit prior to elections and make speeches at. Its author, Dickie Williams, grew up in Harper Lee's hometown of Monroeville, but often traveled north to Selma for supplies. When he came of age, he began working at Swift's drug store on Broad Street,, and there began to collect stories he'd heard -- mostly funny,   like of a barber in the Hotel Albert who used to entertain people with sayings and tales from the old country of Russia, only to later be exposed by an actual Russian who visited the city and declared the barber's "Russian" to be  farcical gibberish.  Others are personal, like Williams' account of being asked by a woman in town how these diaphragms for women were inserted and used.  (This was in the fifties, so young Dickie was highly embarrassed to say the least.)    When I first read this, it made Selma come alive for me in a way it never had been: for the first time, I could imagine the Hotel Albert as a place that people went in and out of, where there were businesses and life, instead of  it being just the name of a building what once was and now isn't.  I don't know if that makes any sense, but my interest in re-experiencing that initial joy drove me to find one of two university libraries in the state that have a copy of this book so I could sit and read it. Unexpectedly, it seemed to have more hunting stories than anything else!     Interesting how we can latch on to one aspect of a book and so exaggerate it in our memories.

Yesterday: Memories of Selma

Yesterday: Memories of Selma and her People
© 1940 C.C. Grayson
155 pages

 

(For want of a book cover, I'm including a photograph of Selma's main street in the early 20th century, after 1891 but before 1926.)

In the 1940s, one of Selma's oldest living residents, Claude Grayson, was asked to record his memories of the town. He had made a habit of contributing little recollections to the local paper and apparently created demand for more of the same.  What was produced, in 1940, is an exceedingly rare and personal look at a town from the 1860s to the early 1900s.   It was written in longhand and not organized in the least,  but what interesting times to record! Grayson arrived in Selma as a young lad in 1867,  and found it a town whose two great avenues, Water and Broad,  lay much in ruins from the invading Yankee army of two years before.  He witnessed its revival, as Selma capitalized on its river commerce by investing heavily in railroads.   This was an age when  Selma was one of the leading cities of Alabama, and where Dallas County's massive population gave it a powerful position in state politics. (It wasn't an accident that Selma managed the rare feat of claiming both of Alabama's senators to Washington at one time.)

Much of this is of interest only to locals, of course. I stumbled upon this book while pursuing any and all leads relevant to the Hotel Albert, a historical sketch of which I'm working on on behalf of the city.  (In the photograph above, it's that ornate four-story building.) I quickly learned that Grayson used to walk the third and fourth-floor rafters long before the building was complete shooting pigeons, but I was thereafter fascinated by the myriad of stories Grayson reveals. Some are random, some tender, some weird.  I've only recently learned of a phenomenal man - Goldsby King -- who plowed his fortune into creating and maintaining a private hospital in the city,  who worked himself to death and was hailed as a saint when he perished in his fifties.  King makes an appearance here, but as mentioned the collection is somewhat random -- Grayson gives a full account of the Battle of Selma, and closes with a history of St. Paul's Episcopal Church,  making no attempt at all to be chronological. It's whatever comes to mind, really, so it will probably frustrate an outside reader trying to make sense of it. As a native Selmian and someone whose career involves its history, I was perfectly at home, and found it satisfying to connect the names of buildings and streets to prominent personalities who made Selma such a beautiful and satisfying place to live.  Although since the closing of the Air Force base in the 1970s the town has struggled economically,  so much of the granduer of yesterday still stands, and it's nice to be reminded of it.

Odd Egg Editor

Odd-Egg Editor
© 1990 Kathryn Tucker Windham
170 pages

Anyone who grew up in Selma, Alabama, prior to 2011 had heard of Kathryn Tucker Windham, and odds were they cherished her.  A master storyteller, she inspired an annual Tale-Tellin' Festival that survives today.  Odd-Egg Editor is a brief memoir of her newspaper days, before she became a local legend.  Beginning with the Montgomery Advertiser in the 1940s,  covering the police beat,  Tucker expanded her career to land a position in Birmingham and later settled in her hometown of Selma just as the civil rights movement was warming up in the 1960s.   This memoir has a lot of little stories, with colorful characters -- a playful judge who once busied himself creating spitballs during testimony,  an inveterate escapee named Billie Jean who counted herself a friend of the cops and her regular judge-- as well as a few sadder stories.  The title of the book comes from Tucker being assigned all the odd stories at the Montgomery Advertiser, and is itself a colorful collection. One could easily read it as two decades of journalism from  mid-20th century Alabama , but I was drawn to it for the author's voice. Although she was too advanced in age to do a lot of storytelling during my youth, I heard her a time or two at Cahaba Day festivals. Even in her last years she was a volunteer at the Selma-Dallas County Library,  firmly ensconced in the town she loved and which loved her back.  I enjoyed this account of her getting started -- of overcoming prejudice against her as a young woman invading male spaces like  the cop beat and the governor's hunting camp -- very well.

Kathryn Tucker Windham, from the second-floor balcony of the Selma-Dallas County Library

Related:

NPR obituary

Testing, testing

Last week I purchased a new phone, one of those modern miracles that can order a custom sandwich, rent a car, check a flight, and read me a book while also allowing Google and the NSA to keep tabs on me.   I bought it for the camera, and today I finally had occasion to try it out when a friend of mine announced he was giving a private cemetery tour to an exchange student from Vietnam who had been staying with his daughter this past week.  Although I've walked the cemetery in question, I'd never heard my storytelling friend do his "ghost tour", and was more than happy to join them.  The ghost tour, which is part of the annual Selma Pilgrimage (a weekend of people touring fine historic homes, hosted by teenage girls in antebellum dresses), uses multiple locals playing the parts of deceased locals to tell the story of Selma. 

This won't be a complete tour of the Old Live Oak Cemetery, which has incredible stonework and an attractive layout, full of live oaks and magnolia trees, but I wanted to share a few photos and/or stories.

We rendezvoused at the "Pigeon House", a small structure in the middle of the cemetary that once was the residence of the caretaker, and was later used as a gathering spot for bands and picnics.  It's called the pigeon house because the eaves housed carrier pigeons. if you click to enlarge the picture you should be able to see the meshed-over cubbies where the pigeons lived.

Elodie Todd Dawson,  sister-in-law to Abe Lincoln,  and partially responsible for the somber beauty that is Old Live Oak.  She and her family purchased the land and organized its layout, with the pattern of oaks and magonlias that creates bountiful shade even in the summer.  According to a local story, Elodie wore carefully-applied wax makeup and  never stood or walked in direct sunlight -- if she had to travel through it, she hiked up her skirts and double-timed her way into the shade. This was called "Elodie's Walk". Her husband commissioned a memorial statue of her for $7000 after death, disliked the hair, and commissioned another for $5000 more.  

Old Live Oak is one of the more spellbinding places in Selma ,between its oaks laden with Spanish moss, the field of stone, and the flowering bushes.

Obelisks and crosses predominate the graves here, but some are particularly ornate. 

(Note to self:  learn to crop images on phone before sending them to my cloud...)  This obelisk has been churched up a little.

A memorial to the fallen. An inscription reads,
 "There is grandeur in graves, there is glory in gloom."    

I first read those words seven years ago, when walking this cemetery and listening to the fallen leaves skitter in the wind, and they clicked. I've never forgotten the expression.  It comes from a poem called "Land Without Ruins"

If you are curious about the Ghost Tour, someone on youtube posted truncated clips of two of the performances. My friend is reprising a role in the first video as a local rogue named George Washington Gayle, who put an ad in a 1864 paper for someone to shoot Lincoln, and a young lady whom I don't know is playing Elodie, the woman whose grave I shared above.   

"Elodie's" accent is more than little exaggerated -- every actresses who does her lays on the southern drawl as thick  as they can.  

These Rugged Days

These Rugged Days: Alabama in the Civil War
© 2017 John Sledge
296 pages

Although Alabama was not the site of as many bloody battles as Virginia and Tennessee in the Civil War, it was not a quiet backwater only troubled at the war’s end. From the Confederacy’s birthplace in Montgomery in 1861 to the coup de grâce burning of Selma in 1865, Alabama saw altercations, skirmishes, and at least one major battle throughout the war. These Rugged Days is a personal history of Alabama in the civil war, in which the accounts of battle are made more intimate and entertaining by unique stories from the ground.

When South Carolina seceded from the union, Alabama was one of the first states to follow, and its central location in the deep south seemed to recommend Montgomery as a capital – one supported by two major commercial rivers, no shortage of rich farmland, a secure port, and ample mineral deposits. As an example of like repelling like, however, the politicians who gathered in Montgomery in that humid spring were put off by the clouds of mosquitos. Although the seat of government moved to Virginia, Alabama’s rail lines and rivers were of great interest to the enemy. Union cavalry raided and captured several cities in northern Alabama early on, only to be driven out. Sledge notes that Florence and Huntsville would change hands several times throughout the war. Although many citizens of northern Alabama were unionists, and the first Union troops were careful not to step on toes, the eventual Union reprisals against civilian populations in the wake of guerilla war alienated the military and their civilian hosts against one another. Larger in scale was the siege of Mobile, the port of which  fell in 1864. Mobile was an important port city for the entire South, hosting blockade runners who darted to Cuba and back with supplies long after New Orleans had fallen. The battle of Mobile Bay involved several ironclads, as well as the use of naval mines (or “torpedoes” – this battle gave birth to the expression, “Damn the torpedos, full speed ahead!”).  The city itself, however, would not be taken until 1865.

Sledge opens the book with a story from his childhood, recounting the moment in which history became real: he and a friend discovered a half-buried Spencer carbine along a creek bed, one presumably dropped by an invading Yankee during Wilson’s raid. Throughout These Rugged Days, he draws on stories that add a human touch to the already lively account of daring raids, rebellious farmhands, and steady action. The chapter on Streight’s Raid, for instance, includes several humorous accounts – though the raid was bound for some level of absurdity from the beginning. It was a cavalry raid conducted on mules, who frequently gave their riders trouble and drew amused crowds. The troopers had their own laughs; in one abandoned town, a few newspapermen turned cavalry broke into the town’s news office and printed a broadsheet that presented the arrival of the Yankees as if they were a group of young men come to pay a social call. (“It is unknown how long the general and his friends will stay with us.”) The conclusion of that raid saw the troopers surrender to a force a third of their size after being bloodily harried for days. The rebel commander Nathan Bedford Forrest ‘put the skeer in’ his opponents by sending aides with orders to nonexistent companies and shuffling his two guns to appear like a battery of fifteen. Streight was not amused when he realized how small a force had taken him in. The book concludes with Wilson’s Raid, a large cavalry action that involved a running battle between carbine-carrying Yank cavalrymen fighting against a much smaller Confederate force led by Forrest. They sparred from Montevallo to Selma, where Wilson achieved his aim in burning the city and its naval foundries, which had helped make Mobile such a tough nut to crack. (Selma’s contribution to the naval war were honored in the good ship Selma, which was the last to surrender at Mobile Bay. )

Although there are other books on Alabama in the civil war, These Rugged Days is easily the most entertaining book I’ve read on the subject. The author has obviously inherited his father’s ability to weave a story that keeps audiences spellbound.


Related:
With the Old Breed, Gene Sledge. (Literally related: Gene Sledge is John's father.)
The Yellowhammer War: The Civil War  and Reconstruction in Alabama

Selma 1965: The Photographs of Spider Martin

Selma 1965: The Photographs of Spider Martin
© 2015 University of Texas; photography Spider Martin
128 pages, 80  photographs

During the 50th anniversary of the Selma March back in 2015,  one of the more popular exhibits in the city was a public showing of Spider Martin's photography. Martin, named for his skinny, agile frame -- and perhaps his ability to clamber up a tree for particularly engaging shots -- covered  all three march attempts in 1965,   taking some unbelievably  close to the action.   Selma 1965: The Photography of Spider Martin collects Martin's best material to present a visual history of the entire campaign.   Although virtually all of the shots are available in an online gallery,  here they are presented with both a historical introduction covering the Selma movement, and with captions which explain what is happening  and who is involved. The editor emphasizes John Lewis' role, pointing him out in every picture he appears in.   For those readers who have only seen the movie Selma, Lewis was one of the young Selma leaders who reluctantly ceded the leading position of the local movement to King and his organization.    While the photographs are utterly remarkable first for having captured one of the pivotal moments in Civil Rights history, they also have artistry to them; one challenging photo has Brown Chapel mirrored in a man's sunglasses as he stares at the building. Others capture fleeting  instances. While most photos of Martin Luther King depict him in his role as a Civil Rights Leader,  full of confidence and courage,  in one shot he is caught in a more humbly human expression, one which is  curious and anxious,   Martin's gallery is utterly worth looking at, and below is a selected list of links, the title of which describe the moment for those who need a caption.

1. Lewis and others praying before starting the infamous first march which was attacked in Selmont by State Troopers and a county posse.
2.  The first march, descending to meet a line of troopers.
3. The moment in which charging troopers hit the first ranks of the marchers
4.  The marchers flee for their lives, leaving many of their number behind injured. There were no fatalities, however.
5. State troopers pursued and harried the marchers across the bridge and for several blocks back to Brown Chapel
6.  The Tuesday following, King arrived to lead another attempt. Again troopers met them  at the bridge,  reading out a Federal injunction legally forbidding King to march on the state highway until questions of legality and safety were addressed. King here listens as the injunction is read.
7.  After the first bloody march was broadcast on television, King issued a national call to link arms, asking members of the clergy nationwide to join him. The city was flooded with outsiders, much to the horror of those not interested in the movement.  Here Selmians and those who joined them clear the bridge and  start the long three-day trek to Montgomery.
8.  To ensure the marchers' safety, the Alabama National Guard was used by LBJ to stand guard. This highway is now a much wider link between the cities.
9.  The three-day journey would have been a challenge for anyone, but this man apparently did it on crutches.
10. King delivers the "How long? Not long" speech at the State Capitol building, facing Dexter avenue

Selma Shots

As a followup to my review of a recent history of Selma, I'd like to share some photographs of my hometown I took a few years ago (2010 - 2011) when I was trying to experience it as a tourist might.

Sturdivant Hall, easily in the running for Selma's most picturesque building. Originally a home, it now stands as a museum with gardens around it. There are several private residences that rival it for sheer beauty, but Sturdivant Hall  is often used on tourism brochures.

My favorite house in Selma, sited on Lauderdale street. 

A similar home on Parkman Avenue. 

Brown Chapel, headquarters of the Selma movement during the Civil Rights era. 

Temple Mishkan, testament to a Jewish community that was once considerable. In the late 19th century, Jewish merchants lined Broad Street. The interior of the Temple is unusual for having stained-glass windows depicting David and Esther; images of people are not common in Jewish houses of worship. 

My favorite building in Selma. St. Paul''s Episcopal.  When I began walking around Selma I found St. Paul's particularly irresistible. I believe  part of the magic is its courtyard; partially enclosed from the street by a low brick wall, it's framed by the church on the left, a parish hall on the right, and cloistered administrative offices in the rear. 

The tower of First Baptist edges out its neighbors' -- Cornerstone Presbyterian, St. Paul's Episcopal, and Church Street Methodist. It's a neogothic structure that gives Selma part of its signature skyline. 

Who knew Baptists like gargoyles? 

Curiously,  there are just under a dozen homes in the city that have a marked Spanish-southwestern influence to them; some merely used stucco, and one looks like a hacienda buried in the jungle.  This is a sedate example. 

There is no shortage of fine homes standing in Selma,  and since the obscene destruction of the Hotel Albert, the city's citizens have been more conscience of the need to keep some abandoned beauties in good repair.  Many former residences are now offices for lawyers, dentists, and the like. 

Live Oak Cemetery, running alongside Dallas Avenue, is an eerie place to visit; filled with ornate monuments to previous generations, guarded by Spanish moss. 

Not all of Selma's downtown buildings are in use, but both the government and private foundations do their best to ensure that this kind of heritage is preserved. 

Let's end this little peek at Selma with its most iconic structure, the Edmund Pettus Bridge.  That little yellow building on the right is the Bridgekeeper's house, which formerly controlled another bridge which could pivot to allow ships passage. These days the only ships on this stretch of the Alabama are pleasure craft -- fishing boats and the like -- though bodies like the Black Warrior River still bear the odd cargo ship. 

Selma: A Bicentennial History

Selma: A Bicentennial History
© 2017 Alston Fitts III
384 pages

On December 4th, 1820, the Alabama legislature granted a town charter to a burgeoning community established on a high bluff overlooking the Alabama river. The place, named after a cities of heroes from a Scottish poem in the romantic period, would quickly create its own heroes and stories. In Selma: A Bicentennial History, longtime Selma resident Alston Fitts delivers a celebratory history of the town and its proud yet troubled heritage, in advance of its 200th birthday.  He builds on his initial history (Selma: Queen City of the Blackbelt),  which was published in the 1980s; here, his initial history is greatly expanded, using references to other works to take readers through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the 20th century through one city's experiences. The work never shies away from the city's most controversial moments, but strives to be fair to all parties. For a Selmian, this is a history that does the city justice, with a multitude of fascinating little stories based not just on old records, but interviews with the city's residents. Their many contributions to the book, in interviews and photographs, make it a true reflection of the city rather than just the view of one author.

To those only familiar with Selma's modern history, as a small city only remembered for being the site of the Civil Rights movement's crowning moment, Selma  reveals another place -- a center of industry and trade that rivaled Montgomery for prosperity and political influence; a city sure enough of its future to argue for its selection as the Confederate capital during the war between the States.  Selma and its mother county, Dallas,  contained some of the richest soil in Alabama, and both civic and business leaders made the most of that wealth by aggressively pursuing railroads; long after the great river had ceased to be the chief commercial artery of the state, Selma's network of banks and railroads were poised to prosper further in the 20th century. Its rails and river made a commercial center, but it was no slouch in regards to industry:  Selma housed an arsenal rivaling Richmond's as well as a principal naval foundry during the war, making it a target for Union troops; still later, during World War 2, Selma hosted an air force base that survived into the 1970s.    Selma's wealth was not merely monetary, however; her citizens were truly dedicated to the city, pouring themselves into creating civil institutions like schools, hospitals, and the library. They created block after block of magnificent buildings, many of which still stand today: the historic district of Selma is one of the nation's largest. 

Selma's past as an agricultural titan would bear unexpected fruit throughout the 20th century, however. The economic culture of the antebellum South meant that Selma and Dallas County' wealth came from fields worked by slaves,  to the degree that Dallas County  has maintained one of the largest black populations in Alabama for generations. When Reconstruction began in the postwar South, it contributed many black businessmen and politicians.  These gains would fade and be reversed by the end of the 19th century, however, culminating in the establishment of Jim Crow segregation laws and the 1901 Alabama Constitution. The latter document established barriers to voting which included poll taxes, property holdings, and the explication of Constitutional articles; these requirements together reduced the black voting population in Dallas County from several thousand to under a hundred.  These barriers, disenfranchising poor blacks and whites alike -- and flying in the face of Alabama's original constitution, which incorporated universal white male suffrage -- would not fall for over sixty years.   Selma entered the national spotlight again in 1965, when a local voting league invited Martin Luther King, Jr. to help draw attention to the cause of suffrage in the city. Fitts notes that the league was able to accomplish what it did largely because the black community in Selma was so healthy, with a strong middle class supporting several hospitals and two colleges. One of the most dramatic moments of the Selma campaign, for instance, was the mass support black teachers lent to it when they absented themselves from teaching to march instead.  Visiting in 1968, King himself was astonished by the progress of the black community, and the strengthening relationship between it and the city's white population.  Legendary mayor, Joe Smitherman, had just been elected to the office in '65, and continued to sit the big seat throughout the rest of the century in part  because he made himself a ready ally of of the black community. Unfortunately, racial harmony would be disrupted as Selma entered the 1990s,  as a certain group of lawyers created such a hostile atmosphere in the city that one of the state's most integrated systems fell to pieces.  Still, the city is doing what it can to move past that episode, as the actors involved are now dying off. Perhaps their bitterness will buried with them.  The city now has a young mayor in Darrio Melton who has already demonstrated  a strong intent to scrape away the old barnacles and begin making progress once more. 

As a modern history of Selma, Dr. Fitts has done a superb job of presenting the most essential elements of previous histories, connecting them to broader histories of the South and southern institutions (black churches, for instance, via use of Wilson Fallin's Uplifting the People),  His heavy use of interviews and the photographs of Selma citizens make it a community story, almost, and one that the generations are able to contribute to given that he references one older history written by a Selma mayor.   As a native son of the Queen City, I found quite a few questions answered here, learned some interesting tidbits along the way, and finished the book feeling ever more affectionate toward this, my storied hometown.


Related:
Selma 1965, Chuck Fager
Reporter: Covering Civil Rights...and Wrongs in Dixie, Al Benn

Images of America: Selma

Images of America: Selma
© 2014 Sharon Jackson
168 pages

When I heard that the Images of America series had commissioned a book on Selma, I stood midway between excitement and dread. The series offers a pictoral recounting of small-town America, an experience overlooked by standard histories, but Selma for most is less a town and more an image -- a memory of violence.  This collection of photographs was done by an author who loves the town, however, and accords her a just tribute.  While not overlooking the role of Selma in the Civil War and the Civil Rights movement,  Images renders a view of the town itself, a booming center of agriculture and wholesale commerce, a place that generations have cared for and loved.   Long before nation-wide political movements decided to use the town to make history, Selma had its own proud history.  Sited upon the bluffs of the Alabama river, it found early success as an agricultural boomtown, and the aggressive pursuit by city fathers of railroads ensured it commercial prosperity throughout the 19th century, surviving even the arson of an invading army during the Civil War.  Selma's industrial importance to the Confederacy was then second only to Richmond, a fact lost on modern residents who  see it as a chronic small fry.  Selma attracted its fair share of immigrants during the gilded age, especially Jewish families from central Europe, whose shops lined the stretch of the city's central Broad Street. The city these residents across the generations built was utterly beautiful, and though some of that has faded through the years -- the trees lining Broad Street lost to utility poles, the magnificent Hotel Albert deemed too costly to maintain and bulldozed -- the city still boasts one of the largest intact historic districts in the nation. There is no shortage of homes whose stately columns and beautiful cornices make one feel like a Goth wandering amid the ancient beauty of Rome.    Selma is not merely a celebration of beautiful architecture and booming enterprise, however. Like another book in this series, Montevallo, this is something of a family album.  People, not buildings, dominate the pages -- from city fathers to contemporary politicians, each with their story. Jackson integrates the lives of Selma's citizens with nation-wide social movements, particularly women's suffrage and the Civil Rights movement.  Jackson does not shy away from the darker side of Selma's history, its agricultural expanse going hand-in-hand with a massive population of people held in slavery,  people whose ancestors remained held back by Jim Crow legislation for a full century after the war. Those who fought in '65 -- in both centuries -- are honored for defending their homes and and personhood.  Images of America: Selma is markedly balanced and contains photographs that even someone who collects them -- someone like me -- hasn't seen.

Selma 1965

Selma 1965: the March that Changed the South
© 1974, 1985, 2015 Chuck Fager
257 pages (2nd edition),

Last weekend, my hometown suddenly became host to two presidents, a hundred members of Congress, and enough people to see it swell over ten times in size.The event was the 50th anniversary of the Selma march. In 1965 over half the population of my hometown couldn’t vote; its black populace. Though guaranteed suffrage by the US Constitution,  local registrars threw up impediments in the form of extensive literacy tests and limited registration times to keep the vote restricted. Although  these tests limited poor blacks and whites alike, the effects were especially manifest in the black community: less than 1% of the same were registered to vote. The greatest obstacle in the face of full citizenship, local voting-rights activists thought, was not the scheming of the elite or even the lack of concern of the city's white population: it was the utter resignation of the city's poor blacks, who seemed to have given up hope.  With the aim of inspiring the same, local voting rights leaders, working with national organizations like the Students Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, invited Martin Luther King, Jr. to add his energy and talent to the campaign. That invitation put Selma at the center of a national crisis on Sunday,  March 7th, when King's strategy of provoking responses drew the wrath of the Alabama State Troopers onto a peaceful mob marching towards Montgomery.   Weeks later, another far larger march crossed the bridge and trekked three days to the Capitol, and among its numbers was young Chuck Fager. His history of the Selma movement covers the road from despair to jubilation in a manner respectful of the fact that Selmians, black and white alike, had found their city as the site of the American nation's final attempt to work out its salvation from a history of racial strife.

King, following the dictium of Gandhi that the function of a civil resister is to provoke a response,  launched a series of actions designed to thwart being ignored.  The status quo would be strained, the establishment would be pushed, and either it would give way or fight back in such a way that the sin within could not help but be exposed. A series of increasingly aggressive displays, including night marches on the courthouse, followed.  City leaders fumbled for an appropriate response; they knew pushback was exactly what King wanted, but something had to be done. Nothing good would come of mobs wandering about at night.  Under such stress, rationality proved a poor opponent for human nature; thoughtful indecision gave way to the unfortunate authority invested in Sheriff Jim Clark. Clark was a swaggering lawman whose bellicosity was such that the Council was attempting to divert away his power into a new public safety manager, but in that late winter of  '64-'65, he still had his teeth -- and he knew how to respond to any challenge, with the baton.

On March 7th, the growing movement within Selma began what was to be a march to Montgomery to plead for the Governor to intercede. It didn't matter that the registrar's office and the city council were making timid attempts to appease the movement; this was a drive gaining power, and only sweeping changes would satisfy.  Across the bridge, in Selmont, were waiting a formation of Alabama State Troopers, and a roughneck posse led by the the sheriff. What followed was war, pure and simple. While King had wanted to expose the violence inherent in the system, he awoke the violence inherent in the human animal at war. When the six hundred marchers were ordered to turn back and refused, horror was released. There were no peace officers subduing unruly subjects that day, only Mongols in police uniforms,  striking into the mass with the ferocity of a warband and routing them. Not content to simply turn back the march,  the State's troopers chased the gas-stricken crowed across the bridge and into the city, block after block, hunting down and beating any man, woman, or child on the street around the movement's epicenter within the projects, Brown Chapel.

The horror of that day is remembered  as Bloody Sunday, but it is what followed afterward that makes it one of the pivotal movements in American history. The black people of Selma were beaten, but not broken, by the State's retaliation. King and other leaders upped the ante, calling for ministers and volunteers throughout the nation to join them.  And they came, by the hundreds. Fager places particular importance on the swelling numbers of white 'outside agitators' who joined Selma's black community in fighting for full voting rights:  taking their perspective, Fager writes that the black populace was astonished and moved by so much white support. Here at last was hope that racism  need not forever exist.  Eventually they marched again, though it took several weeks: an immediate attempt on March 9 ("Turnaround Tuesday") was stopped by the State troopers again, but by March 26th the Federal government had moved. It couldn't help but do so:  scenes from March 7 had been broadcast throughout the country which was now demanding action. With National Guard troops  present and the eyes of the nation upon them, King led a third march across the bridge, this time to Montgomery.

Selma 1965 succeeds wonderfully in bringing together two dramas; the struggle of the city's poorer classes to claim the franchise that was their right, under the law, and the culmination of the national Civil Rights movement, being its last and best publicized campaign. Although it began as a local movement, and King aside was being maintained by Selma's own black leaders, after Bloody Sunday it became the object of national attention. Crowds formed in other American cities to 'march with Selma', and three of the four people who lost their lives in connection with the Selma campaign were out-of-state visitors who answered King's call. Some were accidents --  While transporting protesters and supplies,Viola Liuzzo  had the luck to encounter a carload of Kluckers from Birmingham, who seized the opportunity to shoot her down. Other casualties included Jonathan Daniels, a seminarian who defended a young girl from an aggressive lawman in Haynvesville, and another young man named Jimmie Lee Jackson in Marion who shielded his grandmother from the constable's bullets. Only James Reeb died in Selma those dark hours; another clergyman,  he took a wrong turn and was beaten in the streets outside a roughneck bar.  These deaths increased the tensity, and slowly control trickled out of the hands of local governance and into federal courts.

The original version of this work was a triumph, I think, an impassioned history of the Selma march which managed to be fair to its citizens, whose own failures were not extraordinary and who certainly did not ask to become the poster children for racial hatred. The city fathers were just as contemptuous of the Kluckers following King to stir up trouble their way as they were of him stirring up trouble his way.  They were raised in a tradition that was wrong; the bridge forced them to own up to the injustices. Fager notes in his original version that the progress that followed the violence was extraordinary. The additional sections added for the 50th anniversary, however, are not not nearly as strong, dedicated as they are to the noisy fight between  two lawyers and a special interest  group over the placement of a Civil War bust in a cemetery that can only be seen if you go looking for it. It's an ugly fight on the margins, one the city's people are utterly sick of seeing publicized regardless of skin color. This was certainly a worthy read for me, connecting stories I've heard since childhood into a coheisve hole, and filling my home's streets with historical actors.

Related:
A Power No Government Can Supress, The Zinn Reader; Howard Zinn

Selma

Selma: A Novel of the Civil War
© 2008 Val McGee
396 pages

On the cover: Sturdivant Hall, a local home-turned-museum.

Today, Selma, Alabama is a small town on the Alabama river, largely forgotten save for its role in the Civil Rights movement. But once it was a great city, a commercial boomtown whose city fathers boasted of its many rail connections and steamboat landings. During the Civil War, Selma was an industrial powerhouse -- and Val McGee has produced a story set during those years, one which follows a father and son team of attorneys and their friends through the war and beyond, on the stage that was the Queen City of the South.

Years ago, the curator of the local history museum (Jean Martin) produced a pictorial history of Selma under the name Selma: from Civil War to Civil Rights.  McKee could have very well used that as a subtitle, for he uses his characters to explore issues within slavery (its role in the war, its legality, its effect on the economy) and ends with an epilogue set in 2000, where President Bill Clinton visited the city to observe its storied role in the Civil Rights movement. The lead characters are as sympathetic as can be believable: anti-slavery unionists who believe slavery should be phased out. They rarely voice these views, however, for fear of disrupting good relations with their neighbors. As much as they dislike the path Selma takes, it is their home; for that reason, the son joins the Selma Rifles to fight against the Union which he would  would prefer to see kept intact. The other characters run the gamut, from businessmen and aristocrats to freedmen and slaves.

Selma's greatest appeal for me, as a native son, is imagining life on its streets when it was a much more successful city. In my walks through its streets, I often imagine them as it were -- my mind's eye can see the trolleys on Broad Street, the lights in the upstairs windows of now-abandoned buildings, suddenly by my imaginings restored to life, full of people living and working in them.  The Selma of McKee's story is a young, energetic city, where cotten bales slide down the long ramps from the bluff to the landing, where back streets are thick with  trade carts,  where men in suits and ladies in massive dresses boarded carriages for Sunday picnics out in the country, enjoying the fresh air where is now a rather large parking lot in front of an abandoned Winn-Dixie.  (Some of this romanticized, of course...I doubt anyone would want to return to wearing so much clothing these days, especially given the life-sucking humidity around here in August.)   But the rose of history has thorns, and in Selma's case that's slavery.  Those bales crashing down to the landings were picked by slaves. Dallas County was then and is now predominately agricultural, and owned by the cotton trade, and that dominates its destiny.  The townsfolk eagerly embrace the planters' revolt -- and pay the price when the Union army arrives to burn the foundry.

I suspect the book's primary audience is Selmians themselves, though it was received poorly, and probably because McKee doesn't romanticize the Old South, Gone with the Wind style. The culture of slavery was brutal, and that's not shied away from here. Slaves are beaten and raped, abandoned in their age while the 'good Christians' of town champion slavery as an institution sanctioned and favored by God as a way of civilizing Africans. The lead characters are against secession, against slavery, and against the war -- and while they may hide this from their contemporaries, their arguments between themselves are in full view of 21st century Selmians who don't like being reminded of the dark side of history.  Like most people, we prefer to imagine our ancestors as noble, not base. But history is what it is, and every city has its sewers.  As a lifelong scalawag who nevertheless owns being 'southron', I found the book's greatest weakness to be the stiltededness of the dialogue between characters. I don't know if McKee went for the loquaciousness of Austen and came off sounding inauthentic (rather like Mr. Collins), but his characters sound like ideologues in their back-and-forth exchanges.  They don't speak in ways that anyone in reality ever would: when a society man is hinted at as having fathered several children by slaves, a young socialite remarks that it's a shame, but an unavoidable side effect of the socio-economic system in which they live -- sounding rather like King Arthur's noisy peasants.   I also wish he'd paid more attention to Selma during the war years: the book is set in 1860-1861, and then 1864-Reconstruction, jumping over most of the war after throwing Selma's sons into an opening battle or two.

Selma is an enjoyable book, for the most part, and a treat in its author imagining the city in more prosperous days.

Reporter

Reporter: Covering Civil Rights...and Wrongs in Dixie
© 2006 Alvin Benn
388 pages

When a young Alvin Benn left the Marine Corps to beome a civilian editor working with United Press International,  he was asked by UPC's vice president where he wanted to work, "Where the action is," Benn replied, and so they sent him to Birmingham, Alabama, during the most violent years of the Civil Rights movement. Months after his arrival in the Deep South, Benn covered a Ku Klux Klan rally, where his tires were slashed and he and his fellow reporters tailed by a carload of Kluckers. Benn got the action he wante -- and perhaps more than he bargained for, then and throughout his life as a journalist. Reporter is a part-biography and part-journalistic history of Benn's decades of coverage as a reporter, editor, and one-time publisher; coverage for which he recently won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Alabama Press Association.



Although Benn wrote it to capture his memories for his family, this collection of yarns should be of interest of anyone from the Alabama area, especially those living in Selma. While Benn has moved all over the state -- covered in a section called 'Newspaper Nomads' -- the last few decades have been spent  in the city where King and his marchers began their journey to Montgomery to fight for equal rights.The turbulent period of the Civil Rights movement still marks Selma, as many of its most prominent personalities (especially the colorful characters Benn delighted most in recovering) were shaped by those events and still count them as influences as they attempt to lead Selma into the 21st century -- or keep it stuck in the 1960s, varying. Among the people Benn profiles is famed mayor "Joe T." Smitherman, who ran Selma for 35 years, finally losing a mayoral election in 2000. Smitherman is remarkable in Benn's eyes for rising from a working class background to effectively ruling a city, without a college background and armed only with an uncanny ability to get what he wanted done accomplished.

There's no doubt that Benn knows how to tell a story, although the organization of this work was a bit questionable. He opens up with his introduction to journalism and then provides an overview of his career before returning to his childhood and his life in the Marines. After leading the reader back to his start as a reporter, Benn then shares the most memorable stories of his career; these constitute the bulk of the book.  This format does have the benefit of leaping into the action and then giving readers context for the stories that follow, but I was left feeling that this is a book composed of three sections that don't flow as well as they should. The liveliness of the writing more than makes up for this, though. Whoever chose the pictures for this volume did a great job; there's an especially fun one of Benn -- who is a Jewish reporter -- standing behind a poster that exhorts people to beware the lies of the evil Jewish media.  I've heard a few of these stories in person, and given his wicked sense of humor I wouldn't be surprised if Benn set up that shot on purpose.