With Music and Justice for All: Some Southerners and Their Passions

The Sheriff Without a Gun

45 Resistance to the civil rights movement always seemed to be at its meanest in places like the Alabama Black Belt, a swatch of rural flatlands in the center of the state, where blacks, most often, outnumbered whites, and oppression tended to be at its crudest. African Americans who lived in these places understood that it would make a day­to­day difference in their lives if they could demand and acquire the right to vote and thus elect officials, most importantly, the sheriff, who would govern with justice rather than brutality. The following story, adapted from my book Cradle of Freedom, recounts the saga of Thomas Gilmore, the first black sheriff in Greene County, Alabama, who faced his own self­imposed dilemma. After battling for the right to run for the office, he had to decide what to do about his personal oath—a com­ mitment made in the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—to embrace nonviolence as the central tenet of his life. The Sheriff Without a Gun It was February 1965 when Thomas Gilmore came back home. He had gotten tired of Alabama for a while, the meanness of it, the rigid segregation, and in 1963 he had moved his family out to California. But he discovered early on that he couldn’t run away, and in any case, the city of Los Angeles was not a happy destination for his flight. “The bigness of it and the wildness of it” were a little too much for a country boy from Greene County, and he decided he missed those swampy bottomlands, where he had fished and hunted and learned to be a man. The civil rights movement was gaining momentum at the time of his return, even making its way to those Black Belt counties where it sometimes seemed as though nothing ever changed. Gilmore hadn’t really thought much about it, not in terms of his own participation, for it was a distant reality from his life in California—and certainly it had never even crossed his mind that he would one day become a symbol of liberation. He was simply homesick, lonesome for the sight of Forkland, Alabama, where he had grown up poor on a patch of land that had been in his family for five generations. 46 With Music and Justice for All He began his life in a rough wooden cabin, which was later replaced by a white frame house, down in the southern end of the county. The Warrior River was just a stone’s throw away, and he and the others who lived in the area were known as “swamp people.” They were an independent lot, especially the Gilmores, who traced their ancestry back to Joe Winn, a slave who managed to buy enough land, in the days just after emancipation, to give his six children eighty acres each. Clara Gilmore, Thomas’s grandmother, was still a farmer on one of those plots, raising a little bit of everything—pigs, chickens, milk cows, and vegetables. Overlaid against the strength of his family and the legacy of independence going back a hundred years was the specter of racism. Like virtually every other black southerner his age, Gilmore carried a picture in his mind of the horrible, misshapen face of Emmett Till, and there were lesser cruelties in Alabama as well. As a child on shopping trips to Demopolis, the nearest town with a store, he was troubled by the segregated drinking fountains, for what difference did it make where a child got his water? Later, as a teenager, he could see the purpose of the segregated order, how it was not a simple matter of separation, polite and benign, as many whites insisted, but a tool for keeping black people in their place. Once in a field not far from his house, two young men, one black and one white, got into a good-natured wrestling match that abruptly turned dark and almost deadly when the black youth threw the white boy to the ground. Sometime later, this young black man was paddling across the Warrior River in his skiff, when the same white boy and several of his friends rowed out to meet him. Somewhere out near the middle of the river, they flipped his boat and threw him in the water, and the black youth had to swim for his life. Gilmore absorbed these lessons of the times, and as a young man early in the 1960s...