Read an Excerpt
In the Name of Editorial Freedom
125 Years at the Michigan Daily
By Stephanie Steinberg The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2015 University of Michigan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-12122-9
CHAPTER 1
The Road to Selma
Roger Rapoport
March 1965
"We are on the one yard line. Our backs are to the wall. Do we let them go over for a touchdown or do we raise the Confederate flag as did our forefathers and tell them, 'You shall not pass?'"
— Birmingham Commissioner of Public Safety and Selma, Alabama native Eugene "Bull" Connor
"Keep Out Or Get Shot"
Looking at the crudely written warning painted on the side of an abandoned bus outside Gadsden, Alabama, I felt a small sense of relief. All the way south from Ann Arbor we'd passed signage damaged by countless spelling errors. It was starting to look like the region was badly in need of vowels. Finally we had found a hate group with a qualified proofreader. Glory Hallelujah.
Demonstrators and reporters from Michigan were the last thing the state of Alabama wanted in March 1965. Locals were getting downright weary of civil rights tourists stirring up the black community.
Brand names like the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and his entourage were mouthing off to the "white liberal media" extending an open invitation to hippie demonstrators and Marxists who thought they had the God given right to take on the doctrine of states rights. Whites were happy. Blacks were happy. All you had to do was stop by Governor George Wallace's office in Montgomery to confirm it for yourself.
All that changed when the tragic murders of two civil rights demonstrators suddenly turned Alabama into a national battleground. Among the many news organizations covering the story that warm winter and spring was the Michigan Daily which liked to tell its readers "sometimes we forget we are just a student paper."
At the time it was typical to find a staff reported interview with Selective Service Director Lewis Hershey or Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright voicing his opposition to the war in Vietnam. Of course the Daily never told its readers how we got those big stories.
Because our reporters were unpaid at the time and there was also no expense money, landing one of these plumb assignments was as difficult as putting steam on a mirror. Hitchhiking, sleeping in church basements, and dining with big city reporters kind enough to pick up the tab was all part of the drill.
My journey to the racial battlefield in Selma began unexpectedly in the basement recreation room of South Quad. The catalyst was network coverage of a disastrous civil rights march in this cradle of the confederacy.
While more than half of Dallas County Alabama's 30,000 citizens of voting age were black, just about 300 were registered to vote. This put them at a distinct disadvantage in a county where two-thirds of the white citizenry was registered.
Local registrars used a variety of creative tactics to suppress the black vote. Blacks could only apply to register two days a month with a limit of 15 people approved per day. These applicants had to pass literacy tests and answer questions such as, "How many legislators did South Carolina send to the first U.S. Congress?"
In January 1965 Martin Luther King led the first of a series of protests in Selma prompting many arrests including his own. Among the black prisoners joining him was a 14-year-old-boy who emerged from a two-week sentence to discover his father had been summarily fired.
At the February Selma funeral for murdered civil rights worker Jimmie Lee Jackson plans were announced for a protest march to the state Capitol in Montgomery. Jackson, a 26-year-old church deacon, father, and former soldier, had been shot by a state trooper while attempting to protect his mother and 82-year-old grandfather being assaulted by state troopers in a Marion, Alabama cafe.
While Jackson lay dying at a local Selma hospital from a painful bullet wound in his stomach, State Police Colonel Al Lingo had the young man arrested on assault charges. This event, less than a year after the murder of three civil rights workers struggling to register black voters in neighboring Mississippi, helped inspire the largest protest march in Alabama history. The idea came from a local minister who proposed delivering Jackson's casket to the state Capitol.
On March 7, more than 600 members of the local black community, along with visiting students, civil rights workers, rabbis, ministers, nuns, lawyers, and doctors, set off on a 54 mile march to Montgomery. Soon these protesters were part of biggest local showdown since confederate forces fell a century earlier in the Battles of Ebenezer Church and the Battle of Selma. The difference this time was that the northerners were unarmed.
Heeding the battle cry of Alabama native son Bull Connor (who earned his place in American history by unleashing police dogs and water cannons on black demonstrators in Birmingham), authorities launched a goal line stand that swept the law-abiding marchers back across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Within minutes the state troopers, their deputies, and club wielding mounted police cheered on by white spectators, had brutally beaten about 70 demonstrators, including 17 who were hospitalized.
Coverage of Selma's "Bloody Sunday" turned the city into something Bull Connor could have never imagined. ABC interrupted the movie Judgment At Nuremberg to broadcast footage of the beatings. Selma became Mecca for a multiracial protest community and a parking lot for network television trucks. Federal Judge Frank Johnson Jr. quickly issued a temporary restraining order against further police action and new marches while he reviewed one of the most brutal attacks in American civil rights history.
Among the many clergy who responded to Reverend King's call following the Sunday attacks was a 38-year-old social worker and Unitarian minister, James Reeb. The American Friends Service Committee worker had recently moved to a low income neighborhood in Boston, where he enrolled his children in a biracial public school.
On March 9, Reeb and other ministers joined hundreds of local blacks for a new Selma protest. Following an evening prayer service, he headed to dinner with two fellow ministers. On their way back to their lodgings the men were attacked by a white mob. Convinced that he would be turned away at the city's whites-only hospital, local civil rights leaders rushed Reeb to an infirmary for black patients. He died of head injuries two days later at a Birmingham hospital.
The murder of this white minister had far more national impact than the killing of black demonstrator Jimmie Lee Jackson weeks earlier. President Lyndon B. Johnson called Reeb's widow to offer his sympathy and arranged for a plane to fly the victim's father in from Wyoming.
On March 15, President Johnson proposed a new Voting Rights Act:
"There is no issue of States rights or national rights," he told a joint session of Congress. "There is only the struggle for human rights ... We have already waited a hundred years and more, and the time for waiting is gone ... Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome."
Hours after Johnson's speech, a federal district judge issued a permit approving a Selma demonstration the following day. Among the news organization on scene for that historic event was the Michigan Daily.
My overnight drive to Alabama on March 15 was made courtesy of University of Michigan students eager to join the protest. Traveling light, with only a change of clothes and a toothbrush, this journey in the back of a cramped Ford was a quick introduction to national reporting. Everywhere we went people were asking similar questions.
At a McDonald's in Lexington, Kentucky, a clerk couldn't understand why I was trying to get directions south to Birmingham. Didn't we realize there were no spring break beaches in Birmingham.
"What the hell you wanna go down there for?"
In Harriman, Tennessee, a gas station attendant took one look at our Michigan plates and gave us his thumbnail view of the Yankee news media.
"I think it's mostly those damn outsiders causing all the trouble — it's like Governor Wallace says: 'You can't trust the newspapers. They always leave out the stuff about a bunch of n---- raping a white woman.'"
Our group left without bothering to wait for free green stamps.
At our first gas stop in Alabama, a queue gathered to stare at our Michigan plates. Down the road billboards asked: "What's wrong with being right? Join the Birch Society and fight Communism and Socialism."
Rolling past "It's Nice to Have You In Birmingham" signs I noticed a number of passing motorists staring at us. There were quick side glances, long glaring looks, short smirks, and many frowns.
At another stop we looked away when a gas station attendant asked, "Where you going, Fort Lauderdale?"
My biggest concern was being pulled over by police and missing out on the big story. Only when we reached Selma — "a great place to visit, a better place to live" — was it clear why we hadn't seen an Alabama state trooper for six hours.
Most of the force had been assigned to a blockade set up on Sylvan Street in the heart of Selma's black community. Beige state police cars displaying confederate flags were everywhere. One front bumper had a picture of a grizzled confederate veteran. "Hell no, I ain't fergettin'."
These officers were supplemented by gray and brown vehicles from the city and state police. Heading the battalion was a red '52 Chevy sound truck occupied by a sleeping driver.
When I inquired about a press pass a stranger suggested it might make more sense to board a train leaving Selma. Inside the restroom green Dallas courthouse I was handed my pass in a plastic holder along with a fictitious smear article contending that Martin Luther King was a communist and his top aide, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, had recently seduced a 15-year-old girl.
On the desk of Sheriff Jim Clark was a photo showing him wrestling with a plus size black woman. Two bulletin boards were filled with telegrams about his successful Bloody Sunday effort to whip, club, and gas law-abiding demonstrators into submission. They ran the gamut from "Way to go Jim, Give 'em Hell" to "I protest your Gestapo tactics, you are worse than Hitler."
Claiming he had been threatened by local blacks, the sheriff was temporarily living at the county jail for his own safety. Among his critics was Wilson Baker, the city's public safety director who told me that he had almost quit after the Bloody Sunday beatings.
"I don't want anyone to get hurt," he said. "We're going to play this thing by ear. I will always obey any court order."
That hot afternoon I reported on Reverend Martin Luther King's eulogy for Reverend Reeb at the packed Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church:
"His crime was that he dared live his faith ... He was murdered by the timidity of a federal government that can spend millions of dollars a day to keep troops in South Vietnam, yet cannot protect the lives of its own citizens seeking constitutional civil rights."
Shortly before the service ended, U.S. District Judge Daniel H. Thomas approved an eight block march through the center of town. Over 3,000 demonstrators from Selma and across the country were given state and local police protection. This voter rights demonstration was applauded by United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther who had also come down from Michigan to call for the entire country to mobilize behind these demonstrators.
"We must mobilize people from Michigan to Mississippi to give the right to vote to all people," he said.
On March 21, a federal court sanctioned a new march from Selma to Montgomery under National Guard protection. Camping in the back yards of their local supporters, serenaded by singers such as Harry Belafonte and Lena Horne, the demonstrators were joined en route by three assistant U.S. Attorney Generals. Governor Wallace and local police were enjoined from harassing the marchers.
By the time a crowd of 25,000 voting rights demonstrators reached Montgomery on March 25, Rev. King sensed victory: "We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience."
That night, while driving a Selma demonstrator back home from the capitol, Michigan volunteer and activist Viola Liuzzo was murdered by four Ku Klux Klansmen.
Five months later Congress responded to the tragic events in Selma by passing the Voting Rights Act.
Four suspects were arrested in the murder of Rev. James Reeb. One did not have to stand trial, while the others were acquitted by a jury of white men.
In the Liuzzo murder case, all four suspects were acquitted by a state jury. Two were subsequently convicted on federal charges while a third entered a witness protection program on a plea bargain.
James Fowler, the state trooper who shot unarmed Jimmie Lee Jackson in the stomach, pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter and served a six month sentence in 2010 and 2011.
Two summers after Selma I returned to Montgomery, Alabama to join the staff of the Southern Courier, a student-run civil rights newspaper. Week after week our staff reported more stories about the continuing civil rights battles across the South. During that tour of duty I visited and interviewed Governor Wallace who gave me his autographed picture. In June I returned to Michigan in plenty of time to spend a week covering the Detroit race riots for the Wall Street Journal.
Half a century later, little Selma remains a big tour stop on the southern civil rights trail. Today, of course, there are still reporters in other countries finding safety in church basements and perhaps hitchhiking part of the way home from human rights stories the way I did. The Daily's coverage of those events was part of a long tradition that confirmed our paper's commitment to eyewitness reporting.
The suppression of voter rights, not just those of blacks but all Americans, remains on the national agenda. Part of this discussion was triggered by the Supreme Court's decision to gut portions of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. The disenfranchisement of some voters, inside and outside the South, remains a widely covered story. The Michigan Daily remains a good place to continue following this national story that impacts all of us.
Roger Rapoport was a Michigan Daily news reporter from 1964 to 1967 and editor from 1967 to 1968. He has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Harper's, and the Atlantic. His books include Citizen Moore, Hillsdale, and Pilot Error, which is the basis of his feature film released in 2015. The lead character in Pilot Error is investigative reporter Nicola Wilson, who began her career at the Michigan Daily. He is also the producer of the feature film Waterwalk. Rapoport lives in Muskegon, Michigan, with his wife Marty Ferriby, director of the Hackley Public Library since 1994.
CHAPTER 2
f8 and Be There
Andy Sacks
October 15, 1965
I thought I would be a good sport about it. Take the photo assignment that was handed to me, the freshman photographer, and do what I could with it. The big event of that day, October 15, 1965, was supposed to be the University of Michigan homecoming parade and a concert that evening. Those assignments went to more experienced Daily photographers. They knew the ropes, and, as I understood it, the parade and the homecoming hoopla were not going to be their first rodeos.
On the other hand, I had been at college for only six weeks. Born in December, I was almost eighteen years old by mid-October 1965. So as the new kid on the staff, I headed down Liberty Street toward Main, on foot, to see what a sit-in at the Selective Service office was all about.
In today's parlance, I was the low value asset deployed for this low priority event. The paper needed to have some photo coverage of the demonstration, but why send the top guys to staff it? After all, what is the action at a sit-in? The people all sit down. So I thought.
I owned one secondhand Asahi Pentax camera, bought toward the end of my service on the Berkley High School Spectator staff, and two extra preset Spiratone lenses. Together, the lenses, a 135mm telephoto and a 28mm wide angle, cost less than $80. I carried all of it in an army green canvas shoulder bag that I thought helped me look rough and ready. I was 6 feet tall and weighed almost 150 pounds with camera gear. Maybe ready, but not rough. (The irony of carrying a faux army issue shoulder bag to a draft board sit-in did not occur to me until I sat down to write this piece.)
So I got to the sit-in and found everyone sitting down. It was just like it sounds — you go in somewhere, and you sit. The only shot I saw for the first couple of hours was to juxtapose the profile of an elderly secretary sitting straight and rigid at her desk intently typing, with the protesters sitting against file cabinets behind her.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from In the Name of Editorial Freedom by Stephanie Steinberg. Copyright © 2015 University of Michigan. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
