Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma

2. Montgomery

I. The City before the Boycott At the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, Montgomery’s municipal politics was in the midst of a fundamental transformation—a transformation that, as we shall see, played an essential role in shaping the course of race relations in the city.1 For essentially the preceding half century , Montgomery had been ruled by the Gunter machine, headed for most of that time by William A. Gunter, Jr., the city’s mayor from 1910 to 1915 and from 1919 to his death in 1940. Mayor Gunter had come to power after more than a dozen years of bitter factional warfare between a group of wealthy families headed by the Gunters, who had been leaders in the area since the antebellum period, and the Hill family, whose local prominence dated only from the postbellum years. The abolition of the city council form of government in 1911 and its replacement by the city commission was a central incident in this struggle. After Gunter returned to the mayoralty in 1919, he managed to turn back all challenges to his rule. He could always rely upon the unwavering support of the city’s morning newspaper, the Montgomery Advertiser, whose editor, Grover C. Hall, Sr., was one of his closest advisers. He had the allegiance of the majority of Montgomery’s older families. And in the ¤nal two decades of his life, he also commanded the unanimous support of city employees, whom—as a result of an act which he pushed through the state legislature during a term as state senator—he could in effect hire and ¤re at will.2 If there were no successful challenges to the machine after 1919, however , the unsuccessful challenges were many. The Hills continued as Gunter ’s uncompromising opponents, allying themselves in the various elections with whatever other elements were dissatis¤ed with the machine’s rule. Though they never won city of¤ce, the Hills were frequently more fortunate at the county level. Gunter’s repeated expressions of disapproval for the prohibition experiment placed the Anti-Saloon League in the ranks Montgomery 2 of his enemies, and religious fundamentalists—led by Robert R. Jones, the Montgomery Baptist minister who would later found Bob Jones University —condemned Gunter for his generally lax enforcement of public morality. On the other hand, these encounters acquired for the machine the quite considerable ¤nancial support of the city’s bootleggers and gambling club operators. In the 1920s, Gunter’s energetic and courageous condemnations of the Ku Klux Klan, both for its religious bigotry and for its advocacy of prohibition, made him a special object of Klan hatred. In 1927 a Montgomery druggist and Klan leader J. Johnston Moore made a strong effort to defeat Gunter at the polls. Grover Hall’s editorial attacks on the Klan during this period, in large part an outgrowth of his effort to defend the machine on the local level, gained him national admiration and a Pulitzer Prize in 1928. During the Depression, Gunter turned the city government into something of a relief operation, earning the bitter hostility of ¤scal conservatives for the substantial city debt that his efforts soon created. By the time of his death in 1940, he was admired by much of Montgomery’s upper class and idolized by large numbers of the city’s poor and unemployed, but he was also detested by many owners of small businesses, lower-middle-class and conservative citizens, strict Baptists and Methodists, and others to whom his values—rooted in the easygoing tolerance and aristocratic paternalism of his planter and Episcopalian background—were anathema.3 After Gunter’s death, the machine spent the next decade searching for a leader. The mayor was immediately succeeded by Cyrus B. Brown, who had long been one of Gunter’s most powerful lieutenants and was at the time the president of the governing body of Montgomery County, the board of revenue. But Brown, an elderly man, followed Gunter in death in 1944. David Dunn, who had earlier been a political protégé of former governor Bibb Graves, obtained machine endorsement to succeed Brown, but he resigned in 1946 to go into private business. The mayoralty then passed to City Attorney John L. Goodwyn, a cousin of Gunter’s wife whom Gunter had appointed city attorney in 1930. Goodwyn resigned in 1951 to accept a position in the state government which soon led...