we now have a court that demonstrates respect for the constitution and laws of not only the State of Alabama but also the United States of America. I feel very comfortable in appearing before our appellate courts and arguing state law questions or federal constitutional issues, and I feel that the courts will rule on the issues in accordance with the law, regardless of the parties and regardless of race, creed or national origin . . .
Power has been utilized in the movement to change society from total segregation to one which is becoming ever more just. We are not there yet, but we are moving in that direction. I believe that the success of the legal cases that I have been involved in speaks well for democracy and for the Constitution. It shows that one can use the system, abide by its rules and regulations, and change society.[44]
Similar positive and personal reflections were expressed by J. L. Chestnut Jr., a Selma native and respected pioneer of Alabama’s civil rights battles, in concluding his autobiography, Black in Selma: The Uncommon Life of J. L Chestnut, Jr.:
On the ride home from Opelika that Martin Luther King’s birthday, though, I felt pretty good. I slowly crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge at sunset. There was Selma. The Times-Journal. City Hall. Our law firm. I reflected back on my return to Selma on the same road in 1958. From the vantage point of how things used to be, the present is not so discouraging. When I stop and look back, I see the many barriers that have fallen and the great distance we have traveled. Remember, I started out thinking we’d be making substantial progress if we could just get a string of black-owned supermarkets in the Black Belt. It’s disappointing that we don’t have them, but, in context, this was a modest goal. We’ve gone beyond where I even dared imagine—black people and white people.
I see my own life as helping to realize the dream in my world in Alabama. Though I never imagined I’d spend my whole life in little Selma, I don’t know of a better place I could have taken a stand. Selma is my home. I love Selma. It’s my life.[45]
Now for their criticisms and challenges, comments that soberly frame their positive assessments.
John Lewis:
But there is a mistaken assumption among many that these signs of progress mean that the battle is over, that the struggle for civil rights is finished, that the problems of segregation were solved in the 60s and now all we have to deal with are economic issues. This is preposterous.[46]
Fred Gray:
However, one of the most disheartening observations I have made over the years is that most of the persons who made up what we called the white power structure have never gone beyond doing exactly what the courts have ordered.[47]
And J. L. Chestnut:
We are far from the world envisioned by King in his “I have a Dream” speech. We are closer to it, but getting there will continue to be a struggle. People forget that King said near the end of that speech, “I [now] go back to the South”—meaning to implement the dream of freedom and justice for all by marches, boycotts, and other means the establishment detested. I see King, at the expense of his life, striving to realize the dream, not just pleasantly dreaming.[48]
John Fleming, a native white Alabamian and editor-at-large of the Anniston Star, has spent considerable time exploring and writing about the Black Belt; and he paints a similar picture of civil and subtle change in the hardcore Deep South.[49] After several days in Selma, for example, he said that the struggle for black political empowerment has been won; the city has a black mayor and a majority-black city council. He also describes contemporary race relations there as complex, healing, sometimes festering, forever evolving, never clear-cut, but something worth studying by and for the rest of us.
Today, traveling up U.S. 80 from Montgomery, along the route of the historic march, past the sprawling fields and pastures of the Black Belt, across the bridge and into town, one finds an immeasurably more peaceful Selma. It’s a more civil and subtle place.[50]
Race is still at the heart of the town known as the cradle of racial intolerance, according to Fleming. “It bubbles below the surface; its undercurrents touch nearly every aspect of life.” But he reports that steady progress has been made since the 1960s.
Then, people of authority and those of the street spat the utterances of racism into the faces of fellow humans. Worse, people died for seeking equality and for helping others to achieve it.
In today’s Selma—a place that carries a heavy burden for the injustices and for the behavior of some of its citizens so long ago and that sticks in the consciousness of the nation as a marker of an unacceptable level of inhumanity—a sort of racial healing seems to be taking place among a festering that in many ways can be a lesson to the rest of the world.[51]
Here’s another journalistic perspective—writ large to cover the state generally—from Frye Gaillard, a Mobile native and journalist who had reported the civil rights movement in his younger days:
I write, inevitably, as a person who is white, with whatever limitations that may imply. But I also write as an Alabama native who lived through the times, who covered the civil rights movement as a journalist, and who has attempted to bring a storyteller’s eye to the powerful recollections of the people in the trenches. I have tried to be fair—even to the people with whom I disagree—but I make no claim to objectivity. I am proud of Alabama’s role in the story. A state once known as the Cradle of the Confederacy can now make its case as the cradle of freedom—arguably the most important piece of geography in the most important movement of our times.[52]
Gaillard’s personal observation punctuates a message of harsh lessons and continuing change.
Maybe there was something in the Alabama soil, or maybe there was a certain quality of leadership—white as well as black—that made for a powerful clash of ideas, that made us ask who we really want to be. Whatever the realities of unfinished business, the answer we are able to give today is different from the one of fifty years ago.
All of us ought to be happy about that. But none of us should ever forget what it cost.[53]
“A Message from the Chairman” about Racial Change
Presented here, in its entirety, is a directly-relevant statement of significant change produced by aggressive civil rights action and black-white political partnering. Dr. Joe Reed (one of the region’s most powerful and effective champions of biracial practicality during the reconstructive era) posted the following statement as his chairman’s message on the Alabama Democratic Conference website in 2003. The message relates specifically to the ADC and Alabama; but we suspect it reflects systemic progress wrought by practical black and white leaders, working together, throughout the South.
The rise of the Alabama Democratic Conference (ADC) to a place of preeminence in Alabama has truly been a remarkable one. Founded in 1960 by a small group of committed leaders to support the Kennedy-Johnson presidential ticket, the organization has steadily grown in size, reputation, and influence to become one of the most effective voices in Alabama politics today. Indeed, few political groups can match ADC’s record of success when it comes to bringing about fair and equitable representation of blacks.
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