Beware of Limbo Dancers: A Correspondent’s Adventures with the New York Times

13. Resisting the Resisters

CHAPTER 13 Resisting the Resisters The thugs and demagogues got most of the attention, but there were quieter men and women in the South who had the courage to oppose this last wrongheaded lost cause. We reporters seemed to gravitate toward those folks everywhere we went.I think of Mike and Patt Derian in Jackson,leading citizens,he a physician and she a former nurse,seemingly ordinary parents and concerned citizens.Patt jumped into the fight against segregation,and Mike spoke out fervently against it.Patt’s friend Winifred Green,a daughter of a powerful,well-connected lawyer,joined the fight about the same time.Winifred parted company with her father on the race issue and never looked back. She spent the next fifty years fighting for justice and equality.Her friend Constance Curry,a colleague in the American Friends Service Committee, traversed the South endlessly and fearlessly, hard at work against the established order. These were all white people of the substantial middle class. Right across the South there were newspaper editors and reporters who understood the stakes and reported honestly. There were also courageous clergy, educators , and civic leaders. In Birmingham there was Cecil Roberts, an English-born woman whose husband,David,a coal-mine owner,had the conscience and the wealth to support his wife’s liberal habit.Mrs.Roberts was not satisfied just to run the city behind the scenes, as she apparently did. She knew every officeholder at the state and local level, starting with Governor Wallace. I think he was afraid of her, but he understood who she was and made sure to stay on friendly terms with her. Cecil and David invited me to stay at their house when I visited Birmingham on stories,many of which had been more or less assigned  to me by Cecil. The New York Times was her favorite newspaper. She saw herself as its ex-officio representative in darkest Alabama. She loved boosting her adopted hometown while improving it with tough love. She was a big force behind the arts. Theater and music were her main interests, and no one knows how much of her family’s money she invested in them. She saw to it that the city had a first-class professional theater. When Martin Luther King came to town in  and wrote his “Letter From the Birmingham Jail,”everything changed in Cecil’s life. The civil rights movement had already come,and she was an early supporter , but it seemed not to have affected most of the people in her social circle.She changed that in one bold stroke.She integrated a symphony concert. She walked into the auditorium one night on the arm of a prominent black man and in a matter of minutes managed to offend Birmingham sensibilities on two or three different levels.I don’t remember whether David was with her. He probably was not. Cecil was a public relations genius. She might well have persuaded him to stay home so as to raise the dramatic effect of her entrance with not just a black man, but a man who was not her husband. Cecil was an irresistible force. Harry Ashmore phoned her once from Little Rock and asked whether she might be able to keep the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, a famous civil rights activist and firebrand , from coming to Little Rock to further inflame the city during the powder-keg months after the Central High School crisis. She replied that she could ask her friend Bull Connor to put him in jail long enough to keep him away. Ashmore, not quite sure that she was joking, declined the offer. For a white person of liberal tendencies, even for such a towering personality as Cecil Roberts, Birmingham was quite a horrible place during those years. Here’s the way Charles Morgan Jr., the civil rights lawyer, described his hometown as it was when he began his practice: Birmingham closed its parks, de-seated its park benches, drained its swimming pools, poured concrete in the holes of its public golf courses, witnessed the beatings of countless blacks and the castration of one, suffered scores of unsolved bombings, and voted its habit for Police Commissioner Bull Connor and his designees. Birmingham had seen preacher Fred L. Shuttlesworth  RESISTING THE RESISTERS and singer Nat (“King”) Cole slugged, the latter onstage. It had sued The New York Times for libel, denied all...