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

4. Selma

I. White Supremacy Joins the Machine If Birmingham by 1963 had begun tentatively to move beyond the white supremacist past personi¤ed by “Bull” Connor, the same could most de¤nitely not be said of Connor’s birthplace, Selma. In any ranking of Alabama ’s cities in the 1950s and 1960s, Selma would very likely have emerged as its single most in®exibly and fervently segregationist. Under the circumstances , it may not be surprising that the little Alabama River town would become the next major focus of the civil rights revolution. Nevertheless , here too the careful examination of the events of municipal history can reveal much about the beliefs, personalities, and institutions that led Selma to play its particular role in the transformation of the region and the nation of which it was a part.1 Selma’s city charter had been altered in 1852 to provide for the direct election of the town’s mayor. During the subsequent three-quarters of a century, only two men—John M. Strong (1852–58) and Victor B. Atkins (1903–10)—served in the of¤ce for more than six years.2 In 1920 the mayor’s term was increased from two years to four, and T. J. Rowell, who was elected mayor in 1924 and reelected in 1928, became only the second incumbent to serve for as many as eight years. In 1932, however, after a spirited campaign, wholesale grocer and city council president Lucien P. Burns defeated Rowell handily by emphasizing the city’s political tradition that the city council president would succeed the mayor after two terms and by calling for judicious retrenchment in the face of the deepening depression.3 This election would prove a watershed in Selma’s political history; it marked the end of regular and relatively rapid turnover in the mayoralty and the beginning of machine control. Once in of¤ce, Burns proceeded to create a powerful electoral organization. The mayoral election of 1932 was to be the city’s last genuinely contested one until 1964. In 1948, without opposition, Burns was elected to his ¤fth term. The Selma 4 next year, however, he resigned in order to accept the presidency of the City National Bank. The city council president, Ralph D. Nicholson, succeeded him and served out the term. During 1950 and 1951, however, in quiet maneuvering within the Burns organization, the man who had succeeded Nicholson as council president, Councilman Chris B. Heinz, apparently emerged as the choice for mayor. Nicholson announced that he would not seek election to the mayoralty in his own right, and in 1952 Heinz ran unopposed for the of¤ce.4 Heinz was ideally suited to become Burns’s political heir. The city council had initially chosen him to membership on it in 1934, to serve out an unexpired term, and he had been a close associate of Mayor Burns’s throughout the succeeding ¤fteen years. By 1951 he was council president and chairman of the Dallas County Democratic Executive Committee. He was also a former state president of the Exchange Clubs, current state president of the Alabama Association of Insurance Agents, and a director of the Alabama League of Municipalities. Heinz was the son of a Selma furniture store owner. Both of his grandfathers had also been members of the city council. His partners in his insurance agency were Frank Hardy, one of Dallas County’s state representatives, and Mallory Privett, who succeeded him as council president. He would be reelected mayor without signi¤cant opposition in 1956 and 1960.5 The organization Heinz inherited was bound together more by friendship and general outlook than by any clearly de¤ned ideology. Selma was a small city—with about 14,400 whites and 14,000 blacks in 1960—and it was easy for most politically active whites to know each other. Indeed, they had often been friends since childhood. Such, for instance, was the relationship between Mayor Heinz and the county’s probate judge, Bernard A. “Babe” Reynolds, who presided over the county governing body, the board of revenue. Reynolds, the son of a Selma dentist and a graduate of Auburn University, had returned to Selma after college and in 1941 had entered the dry cleaning business in partnership with G. Claiborne Blanton , Dallas County’s probate judge from 1939 to his death in 1953. Governor Frank Dixon, a political ally of Blanton’s, had appointed Reynolds...