Alabama Afternoons: Profiles and Conversations

Neil Davis: Tough, Sweet Voice of Reason

Neil Davis TOUGH, SWEET VOICE OF REASON A few years before he passed away in 2000, I spent a memorable two days with Neil Davis, exploring the home region he loved and believed in passionately, despite all. Auburn L ate one night in the early 1950s, the telephone jangled in the home of Neil Davis, owner and editor of the Lee County Bulletin. “Davis?” “Speaking.” “Is it true you’re a pinko, nigger-lover?” Last time, Davis had hung up the phone. Now, he answered: “Yeah.” The receiver on the other end clicked down, but Davis had recognized the voice. Next morning, with the steeliness and civility he maintains still at age 82, Davis went to pay a visit. “He was in business downtown,” Davis recalls. “I told the man, ‘I feel sorry for you and the way you let your family down. I knew some of your antecedents . Good, decent, upstanding people. They would have been so embarrassed if they’d heard what you said last night.’” Davis shakes his head, chuckling. “Boy, did it get away with him!” Bald, bespectacled, injured from a recent fall, Neil Davis, publisher of the Lee County Bulletin (later the Auburn Bulletin) from 1937 to 1975, looks back 126 WITNESSES TO THE MOVEMENT on countless enemies. With courtly manner, and brutal pen that reached far beyond Alabama, he often got their goat. “Back in the thirties and forties, if you were liberal that wasn’t the currency of the day. It was ‘pinko.’ And now they mean pretty much the same thing when they say liberal. It didn’t take much to be a liberal in those days. If you just believed in a modicum of civil rights, justice, and equality of opportunity, then, in today’s jargon, you were a liberal.” Neil Davis in March 1997. Photo by William T. Martin. NEIL DAVIS 127 A 1935 Auburn graduate, he went to Harvard University in 1941 on a Nieman fellowship, a prestigious grant that allows working journalists to further their studies for a year. It was rare for the editor of a weekly to receive this honor. Rather than continue on to the glamour of a big-city paper, Davis decided to deepen his commitment at home. In his Nieman class was Harry Ashmore, who returned to the South, too, to edit the Arkansas Gazette during the Little Rock school crisis of 1958. As a white liberal, Davis daily confronted the fact that old ways die hard. With gentlemanly grit he worked to change these ways. George Wallace’s administration , Davis says, “had a black-list of their opponents. I was told my name was on it, and the name of the then Lee County Bulletin.” But Davis’ editorial opinions in the small-circulation Bulletin, reprinted for legions in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, joined the often-isolated voices of other liberal southerners and coursed through a turbulent nation. $ Governor Patterson might as well stop pretending to be shocked. So had some of our newspapers. They piously have talked of preserving the law while simultaneously they have assumed a most provocative position. When public officials and papers use inflammatory language, urge last-ditch stands and fighting every inch of the way, what do they expect? Neil Davis, 1961, commenting in the — Lee County Bulletin on racial violence in Montgomery, reprinted by the Washington Post German shepherds, fire hoses, billy sticks, the images of civil rights confrontations in Alabama, violent and graphic, are burned into America’s consciousness . But there are other images, of hard-working men and women bearing not guns, but ballpoint pens; of editors churning out papers deeply engaged in local issues. These issues took on epic dimensions when the subject was voting rights, or Klan activity, or Governor George Wallace, or the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. But weekly papers like Davis’ were far more than broadsides. As he sits 128 WITNESSES TO THE MOVEMENT with a visitor and leafs through yellowing pages of fifty-year-old Bulletins, a chronicle unfolds: church suppers, school pageants, Little League baseball games. Writing community news was Henrietta Worsley Davis, Neil’s wife. Neil and Henrietta had met as college journalists at the Auburn Plainsman, the university’s student newspaper. They went to work together at a Georgia weekly until the publisher directed Neil to endorse the U.S. Senate candidacy of Eugene Talmadge...