Fighting the Devil in Dixie: How Civil Rights Activists Took on the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama - Hardcover

Greenhaw, Wayne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1569763453 ISBN 13: 9781569763452

Verlag: Zephyr Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Shortly after the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Ku Klux Klan--determined to keep segregation as the way of life in Alabama--staged a resurgence, and the strong-armed leadership of governor George C. Wallace, who defied the new civil rights laws, empowered the Klan's most violent members. As Wallace’s power grew, however, blacks began fighting back in the courthouses and schoolhouses, as did young southern lawyers like Charles Chuck” Morgan, who became the ACLU’s southern director; Morris Dees, who cofounded the Southern Poverty Law Center; and Bill Baxley, Alabama attorney general, who successfully prosecuted the bomber of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and legally halted some of Wallace’s agencies designed to slow down integration.

Fighting the Devil in Dixie is the first book to tell this story in full, from the Klan’s kidnappings, bombings, and murders of the 1950s to Wallace running for his fourth term as governor in the early 1980s, asking forgiveness and winning with the black vote.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

For nearly 17 years, Wayne Greenhaw covered Alabama state government, the Wallace administrations, and civil rights for The Alabama Journal and The Montgomery Advertiser. From 1965 until 1977, he interviewed governors, civil rights leaders, and Ku Klux Klansmen throughout the South. Many of these stories were published in The New York Times and in national magazines. In 2006 he was presented the Harper Lee Award as Alabama’s distinguished writer. Mr. Greenhaw passed away in spring 2011.

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Fighting the Devil in Dixie

How Civil Rights Activists Took on the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama

By Wayne Greenhaw

Chicago Review Press Incorporated

Copyright © 2011 Wayne Greenhaw
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-56976-345-2

Contents

AUTHOR'S NOTE, 
PREFACE * Death on the Highway: A Recollection, 
1. Willie's First Day, 
2. The Legacy of Willie Edwards, 
3. Klan on Trial, 
4. Hound-Dog Determined, 
5. "Fight Everything Segregated", 
6. The Making of a Segregationist, 
7. The Pair from Howard, 
8. "Segregation Forever!", 
9. Education of a Liberal, 
10. Country-Boy Lawyer, 
11. The Alabama Story, 
12. Requiem for Jimmie Lee Jackson, 
13. Don Quixote of the South, 
14. The Southern Courier, 
15. The Rise of John Hulett, 
16. Southern Poverty Law Center, 
17. The People's Attorney General, 
18. Breaking the Klan, 
19. "Forgive Me, for I Have Sinned", 
20. "Like a Mighty Stream", 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 
SOURCES, 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

WILLIE'S FIRST DAY

On the morning of January 23, 1957, Willie Edwards Jr. and his family had many reasons to be happy. He had worked hard and gotten a raise. Today he would make his first trip as a truck driver for Hudson-Thompson, delivering supplies to Winn-Dixie, the largest supermarket chain in the Southeast. Edwards would drive from the warehouse in north Montgomery to Talladega in east-central Alabama, stopping along the way at every little town on his route.

Willie Edwards Jr., known affectionately to his family as Mookie, had witnessed many changes taking place in his world over the past year.

More than a year earlier, on Thursday night, December 1, 1955, a small-built black seamstress named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus to a white man. Parks was arrested and charged with violating the city's ordinance requiring segregated seating on buses. Bailing Parks out of jail that night was Edgar Daniel Nixon, a Pullman car porter who had been leading voter registration drives in Alabama's capital city for decades and who had served as state president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It had been Nixon's dream that a courageous and steadfast black person would refuse to sit in the back of the bus, be arrested, and challenge the segregation law.

On Sunday morning following Parks's arrest, black preachers told their congregations that there would be a boycott of the buses. On Monday morning, the buses were empty. Later that morning Parks was found guilty in city court. Representing her was attorney Fred D. Gray. Standing by her side was Nixon. She appealed the ruling.

On Monday afternoon a meeting of local black leaders formed the Montgomery Improvement Association and elected the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., the twenty-six-year-old minister at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, its president.

That night a mass meeting was held at the Holt Street Baptist Church, where Reverend King spoke for the first time as the leader of the new movement, telling more than a thousand people that it was time to use "the tools of justice" to bring about a "day of freedom, justice, and equality." His voice rose to the rafters as he challenged: "We must stick together and work together if we are to win — and we will win by standing up for our rights as Americans."

That was the first of many mass meetings throughout a year when a legal battle in U.S. District Court filed by Gray, Browder v. Gayle, ended in the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the local ordinance requiring segregation was unconstitutional.

In December 1956, little more than a month later, the town's black leaders — Reverend King, Parks, Nixon, Reverend Ralph David Abernathy, and a few out-of-town white ministers — stepped onto a legally integrated Montgomery City Lines bus for the first time.

During the yearlong boycott there had been a distinct change in the manner in which black people carried themselves in Montgomery. They no longer walked on city sidewalks with their heads hanging, gazing downward, afraid to look into a white person's face, dragging their feet as though they were plowing a field behind a tired mule. They held their heads high, squared their shoulders, picked up their feet and put them down in a cadence, like they knew exactly where they were going and what they were going to do when they got there.

* * *

Although he was far from a leader of his people, Willie Edwards Jr. felt like he was moving up in his world. For the past few months, Edwards had worked in the yard of Hudson-Thompson's wholesale warehouse on Jackson Ferry Road in north Montgomery. If he worked hard and tended to the customers on his route, soon he would be making enough to move his family out of the dirt-poor section of west Montgomery where they lived in a four-room, unpainted clapboard with no underpinning. They would find a place far from Rice Street, where the shacks were built forty years ago by the Gulf, Mobile & Ohio Railroad for its workers. He told it all to his daddy, Willie Edwards Sr., who expressed pride in his son.

As he prepared to leave, Willie Jr. told Sarah Jean, pregnant with their third child, that he would be late coming home that day. The dispatcher had warned that his first day would be a long one.

As Edwards stepped into the cold outdoors, pulling his heavy green jacket around his body and his old gray felt hat down to his ears, he took his new cigarette lighter from his work pants. He was proud of the lighter that Sarah Jean had given him on Christmas morning. As the door closed behind him, he lighted an unfiltered cigarette.

* * *

In a pocket of low-lying land between downtown and the Alabama River known as Ward Five, the Little Kitchen on Jefferson Street was the regular meeting place for a group of white men.

Raymond C. Britt Jr. was a twenty-seven-year-old salesman for a flooring store. Britt sat at the large round table in the Little Kitchen every morning, talking with his fellow members of the secret society of the Ku Klux Klan about what they would be doing and where they would be going that night. Here, they felt their importance, believing the white community of Montgomery depended on the Klan to keep the black revolutionists, the Communist intruders, the Jewish hordes, and any other ethnic outsiders from taking over the world as they knew it. Their duty, they believed, was to protect the "Southern way of life."

James D. "Jimmy" York was a veteran of World War II. He worked for Montgomery's street department, drove a city truck and heavy road-building equipment, and took time off for a coffee break every morning. In Europe, he had fought under the command of general George S. "Ol' Blood and Guts" Patton, and he bragged that he had killed more Italians than Germans in the war.

As they sat together, they waited for another Klansman, Henry Alexander, who had called ahead that he had "some important news."

Above the table, an image of Jesus hung on the yellowed wall next to a framed notice: WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE — THE MANAGEMENT.

Ray Harrelson had operated the Little Kitchen since the end of the war. He lived next door on the corner of Jefferson and Hull, where he ran an on-again, off-again, all-night poker game upstairs.

The Little Kitchen was a half-dozen blocks from the center of town near the Court Square fountain at the western end of six-lane Dexter Avenue. Six...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Zephyr Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1569763453
• ISBN 13: 9781569763452
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 316
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar