Memorializing Civil Rights in Montgomery

At the Visitor Center on North Hull Street, a centerpiece in an evolving historical district in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, the introductory video strikes the theme of “surprising Montgomery.” They’re right about that.

The first time I paid a substantial visit to the city (in 1982), I entered the public library and encountered a scrawled note informing patrons that the library would be closed that Monday (Jan. 19) to honor Robert E. Lee’s birthday.

Aha, I mused to myself, what a natural opportunity for a Festival of Reconciliation—a joint birthday of two idealists, Lee and Martin Luther King, who suffered divergent tragic fates. I made the proposal the keynote of my Deep South visit—“A Not Entirely New South”—an article, which, alas, alienated both blacks and whites who read it. Reconciliation is a tougher sell than strategic hates and fears.

Well, Montgomery had some pleasant surprises in store for me on my latest visit—to participate in the dedication of Maya Lin’s Civil Rights Memorial in front of the Southern Law Poverty Center.

I vowed to track down Joe Azbell, the Montgomery Advertiser reporter praised as crucial to keeping the lid on violence by the sane even-handedness of his coverage of the civil rights era (if he’s still around, I thought, expecting some ancient figure long since sent to pasture).

It turns out he was only 26 at the time, the precocious city editor on the city’s main daily. He says the reporters he kept sending out were, to put it bluntly, scared shitless. So he had to cover the mess himself.

Black Selma University had already awarded him an honorary doctorate at the tender age of 24 for organizing a home for Negro syphilitics who were often blind and so disgustingly sore-ridden that the local health community averted their eyes.

Joe now works for the weekly Independent, where he sounds off in his column and runs political campaigns for those who are interesting enough to command his attention. And he pioneered another bit of political journalism recently when he ran a “How Sweet It Is” ad affirming his jubilation at managing the election of a long-shot probate judge.

Joe is kind of a Jackie Gleason with hominy grits, come to think of it. Fleshly (I have never seen a man enjoy Southern fried chicken and black-eyed peas and collard greens with so much relish) and jocular, he hides the depth of his seriousness with a devil-may-care insouciance.

“You see those guys sitting over there?” he asked as we sat at Charlie’s, a Joe Six-pack beanery. “Black and white, and never any problem. But go a half hour into the countryside, and it’s still as segregated as it ever was.

“Downtown is nothing but black stores,” he continued, affirming something I had noticed in my Southern travels: Interstates and shopping malls allowed a kind of segregation but just as psychologically isolating.

His palaver turned to Morris Dees, head of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who commissioned 30-year-old Maya Lin to follow up her Vietnam Memorial with a second act. For $700,000 (only $25,000 of which went to Lin), he got an emblem that will go down in history as an aide de memoire as powerful as the participatory Vietnam Memorial.

Dr. Carol Goodman, mother of one of the three civil rights martyrs murdered in Philadelphia, Miss., got it exactly right: “It’s poetry in granite.” It was more than touching to see some of the 600 relatives of the martyred trace their fingers on the names chiseled into the clockwise disc that intersperses important dates in the movement—from Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) to King’s assassination (1968)—with the 40 honorees.

A thin sheath of water turns the memorial into a mirror, increasing the respect-payer’s sense of unfinished business we all need to contribute to. Lin is a genius. The black altar-like center rests on a forecourt of white granite, a visual metaphor for the segregation that keeps us all from fulfilling the American Dream together.

“How did you choose the 40?” I naively asked the Center’s press aide. “Choose them?” he replied. “Most of them were unknown because the media didn’t think a black murder was worth recording. We discovered the 40 in our research.”

That’s not the only history that’s gradually emerging from the obscurantist mists of the crisis. Joe Azbell told me how he was witness to an instance of King’s non-violent philosophy in action when he went over to King’s home after it had been firebombed.

An angry mob of outraged blacks was moiling with chains and clubs and firearms. “But Martin calmed them down, reminding them how dangerous it would be to stoop to the enemy’s tactics in achieving the movement’s aims.”

Joe doesn’t suffer fools gladly—or make heroes easily. But Morris Dees is clearly a titan to him. “He’s a genius,” Azbell exclaimed. “When he was still an undergraduate at Tuscaloosa, he and Millard Fuller dreamt up a birthday cake scheme for undergraduates that grew to a direct mail marketing company that was the envy of national media.” Ultimately Dees sold out to the Times-Mirror syndicate and, with the millions he received, he has started doing good as he sees it.

Perhaps the most noted recent success of his Center was its obtaining a judgment against the Ku Klux Klan for murdering a black in Mobile. The dead man’s mother got the Klan’s headquarters buildings in Tuscaloosa and a multimillion-dollar settlement. The Center’s Klanwatch is a kind of B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League monitoring racist activities in the South.

When a Washington reporter asked a shirt-sleeved Julian Bond why the Memorial should be in Montgomery, he grew impassioned, waving his arm at landmarks in the vicinity.

“Down the street is where the Confederate Army high command telegraphed Beauregard in Charleston to fire on Fort Sumter. And over there as well in Court Square is where Rosa Parks boarded that fateful bus that led to the boycott.

“And over there is Dexter Avenue Baptist Church where King preached. And a few streets away is the Confederate White House. This is the best place in the world for the Memorial. History was made here. Let’s make some more.”

Morris Dees wants to do just that. In the Sunday Advertiser, he had an op-ed piece urging the creation of a Tourism District combining Civil War with Civil Rights History. He’s staking $100 million to turn the moribund downtown into a high-I.Q. theme park.

As much as I loved the idea (it even echoed my hostilely received outsider’s suggestion of a join Lee-King Holiday) I had my doubts, which I shared with Joe Azbell. But don’t be surprised if soon downtown Montgomery becomes the Disneyland of a Once Divided America. That would really be making lemonade out of historical lemons.

From Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, January 31, 1990