she met that Christian gentleman Big Jim Folsom,
And she had a child by him.
Now he sits in the governor’s chair,
Makin’ laws for all mankind
While she walks the streets of Cullman, Alabama
Sellin’ bits of her behind.
We also listened to the popular idol of the fifties, Elvis Presley—and we hated him. Only when his death in 1977 set off a shock wave of grief did I begin to understand the tragedy and the enduring power of the man. Elvis’s fans don’t see the fat man who died alone in his bathroom a generation ago. They only see the slim, hip-pumping boy with the glistening pompadour, heavy sideburns, and outrageous clothes who was both vaguely threatening and vulnerable. They crowned him King: sovereign in the kingdom of rock and roll, rhythm and blues, country and pop. They’ve made him into a memorial, a statue, totem, icon that has rendered the real man-boy unknowable. But the image fills a need in those who have to remember him a certain way. As always, those to whom we give symbolic power tell more about us than they do the object of our love or scorn.
Elvis Presley is a symbol for millions: of being born poor and making it? of fantasized fame and celebrity? Perhaps more of innocence lost. Thomas Wolfe was half right—you can’t go home again. If Elvis had survived his fame, he might have gone to the fiftieth reunion of Humes High School, his high school in Memphis, Tennessee, but at seventy, he couldn’t be that teenaged boy, raging with energy and mischief. Nor can the women who surround themselves with Elvis memorabilia go home again and revive the aching tenderness and insecurities of teenaged love, so they play the old records and blow on the dying embers, trying to recall how it was, enjoying the delicious sorrow of lost youth and innocence.
Elvis and I were the same age, and I thoroughly disliked him. I loathed what I took to be a sneering mouth—resented the attraction his rebellion had for girls our age, just as I was vexed by the appeal that the local “baaad boys” had for some girls I knew. Elvis was a shock, a threat to me and the well-protected cocoon in which I had been nurtured. We were from the right side of town—a family his people would call “rich.” He was from the wrong side of town, violated every convention I knew, and he was getting the girls. I hated that.
Now, having ventured far and wide on the discovery craft of journalism, learning the values of other worlds, plain and fancy, Elvis’s honeyed voice crooning “Love Me Tender” and the film clips of the girls squealing and swooning strike home with the combined power of innocent charm and nostalgia.
Elvis was an emotional force that attracted two small-town Southern presidents. When Elvis performed at the Omni in Atlanta in 1973, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter went backstage to meet him. In the White House, Carter took a call from the singer just weeks before he died. Presidential hopeful Bill Clinton appeared on the “Arsenio Hall Show” in 1992 and paid a musical tribute to Elvis with a saxophone performance of “Heartbreak Hotel.” The American presidency is a unique office, respected everywhere, but presidents’ popularity doesn’t match that of a dead singer. We have always needed to create heroes and kings, but we exact a terrible price from them. We demeaned Carter and Clinton, and bestowed such high-voltage charisma on Elvis that it killed him.
Our adolescent resentment of Elvis was a more potent emotional presence than the great events unfolding in Montgomery. Like a war on another continent, the first skirmish of full-scale civil combat, the Montgomery bus boycott, occurred beyond our notice on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat on a city bus to a white man. The story of the determined passenger in the Montgomery bus has been told and retold so many times, it need not be repeated here, but one picture from that historic episode still surprises. It is a picture of the leader of the boycott, Dr. Martin Luther King, so slender, and so very young. Could it have actually happened? That slight, serious, twenty-six-year-old in the picture, young Martin King, could he actually have caused the sinking of an antique civilization and the rise of a wholly new society! It seems shockingly out of proportion until you remember that the Founding Fathers were mainly young men. Thomas Jefferson was thirty-three when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Another young man in his early thirties remade much of the world, a young Jewish man with revolutionary ideas—Jesus of Nazareth.
What even fraternity boys could not avoid noticing for a few days in February 1956 at the University of Alabama was Autherine Lucy, the first Negro admitted to an all-white Southern university, and Leonard Wilson, an intense young man who led student protests against her enrollment. As student protesters’ ranks swelled with the addition of some of the state’s most diabolical racists, striking rubber workers, Ku Klux Klansmen and their allies from out of state, the crowds became more and more vehement and violent. On the morning of February 6 in New Orleans, where a fraternity brother and I had taken dates for the weekend, we awoke to radio news about the commotion on campus. We decided Tuscaloosa was more interesting than New Orleans and drove back. That night, the trustees met and decided to “exclude Autherine Lucy until further notice,” for the safety of the students. She had been a student for five days. The mob had won. Lucy later married and moved to Texas. Leonard Wilson was expelled from the university for his role in the riots, but became a celebrity racist as executive director of the Alabama White Citizens Council until it expired, along with the civilization that spawned it, in 1969.
At the time, I wasn’t stabbed by sympathy for Lucy or burning with moral indignation against the mob. I just wondered what all the fuss was about. She was just another student, a momentary celebrity whom I never saw but would have liked to have met. An amusing irony from that time, told to me by a girl from Anniston, was the real story behind the two-page photo spread in Life magazine of what appeared to be a racist thug stomping the roof of a Cadillac. As it turned out, the boy trampolining atop the car had been partying all weekend and was so drunk he didn’t know—or care—who was in the car: frightened black tourists, unaware of what had been unfolding on campus. Historian Culpepper Clark in his indispensable account of the times, The Schoolhouse Door, confirmed the true story. Historical accounts of those few days now, when African American students are so ubiquitous as to be invisible, have the texture of a distant reality like Dickens’s London or Hugo’s Paris—events from a past century, a past civilization, which in fact they were.
The White Citizens’ Council is a blur in my memory—the Klan in a business suit, with a college degree. If it had many members in Anniston, Dad was certainly not one of them. I recall his criticism of the white resistance movement, and by the time I returned to Alabama, such middle-class bigotry had been marginalized by real-man racists such as our famous fellow townsman, Asa “Ace” Carter, one of the authors of George Wallace’s 1963 “Segregation Forever!” speech. But I’m getting ahead of my story. It is 1956, and the place is Montgomery.
These were serious times, but my awareness of them remained dim as I engaged in fraternity house frivolity. Novels and trendy nonfiction such as Phillip Wylie’s sardonic Generation of Vipers fed my intellectual appetite rather than textbooks. My grades were passable, but class attendance wasn’t, and those were the days of in loco parentis—university administrators who treated us as their children. The university “family” reached an instant consensus about my value to the academy, and the next thing I knew, I was at the U.S. Naval Training Center in Bainbridge, Maryland, in a boot-camp company under the tender care of a man named Tarango, said to be the all-service heavyweight boxing champion.
After two years in the peacetime Navy, I returned to the University, a more serious student. The seeds of social conscience sown by family and the Wooster School were nourished and began to take root in discussions with Dr. Donald Strong. He was a political science professor who had been one of the two main researchers for Harvard professor V. O. Key’s classic, Southern Politics. Dr. Strong’s graduate course of the same title began to shape my intellectual and ideological foundation. A foundation stone was set when I asked
