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

Free at Last, Free at Last

61 One of the great tragedies of the 1960s, in addition to the assassinations of the Kennedys, was the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis. In this profile, Lewis Baldwin, once a teenaged follower of Dr. King, talks about a life of scholarship—and his hard­headed hope that writing and teaching can help keep the civil rights legacy alive. Free at Last, Free at Last History is a part of becoming truly free. —John Hope Franklin Lewis Baldwin remembers the day in 1965—February 15, a Monday afternoon, chilly perhaps and just a bit cloudy, though some of those specifics are beginning to fade. But there is still the mental picture of the crowd, right there in the heart of the Alabama black belt, where the civil rights movement was then in its infancy. Several hundred African Americans, including himself, had gathered on the lawn of Antioch Baptist, coming together at the little wooden church to listen to the words of Martin Luther King Jr. King was speaking that day in the village of Camden, telling the people who had turned out to hear him that they were living on the threshold of history. For many, it was a curious message even then, for they were residents of Wilcox County, just a few miles south of Selma, and this was a part of rural Alabama where the white minority had grown frightened and hard. The movement that was gaining momentum in Selma was spilling over now to the counties around it, and almost everybody understood the stakes. The issue in 1965 was the right of African Americans to vote—a revolutionary demand in a part of the South where that privilege had long been denied. Dr. King promised there would soon be a change. They were on the move, he said, and would not be defeated, for the arc of justice was on their side. Looking back on the moment after more than forty years, Baldwin understood that King and his followers were 62 With Music and Justice for All only a few months away from winning their fight. He came to see that clearly as a King biographer and professor of religion, a twentyyear member of the Vanderbilt faculty, who studied the history and theology of the movement. But at the time it was happening he was only fifteen, standing with his brother at the back of the crowd, and seeing everything through a teenager’s eyes. He noticed, oddly, that Dr. King was short, not even as tall as Baldwin’s own father, a Baptist preacher who traveled back then from one country church in Alabama to another. The elder Baldwin, also named Lewis, was a passionate believer in civil rights, willing to let his own children march, particularly the boys, and the younger Lewis was often in the ranks. Like many others, he was emboldened on the day that King came to town, seeing this man, so small and unimposing in stature, confronting the sheriff of Wilcox County. Sheriff P. L. “Lummie” Jenkins had a fearsome reputation—a small-town lawman with an overbearing style. But now here he was shaking hands with Dr. King, responding politely to King’s overtures on behalf of black citizens who were seeking to vote. From Baldwin’s position near the back of the crowd, he couldn’t hear much of what was being said, but he remembered King’s poise and attitude of calm, and many years later he knew this was a part of the triumph. The movement was confronting the old culture of fear, all those years of domination by whites, when the slightest misstep could cost a black man his life. The fear was crumbling as the people came together , and with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in the summer, 1965 became a watershed year. It was the moment when the balance of power would change, and African Americans in the segregated South would take on a greater control of their lives. As a high school sophomore, Baldwin was too young to really understand it—not reflective enough at this point in his life to look for the larger meaning of the moment. Instead, he simply scrawled in his yearbook, “I saw Dr. King.” But two years later, when he finished high school and went away to Talladega College, he began to grow serious about the history he had witnessed. Talladega itself was an inspiration to him. It was the first black...