Alabama Getaway: The Political Imaginary and the Heart of Dixie

CHAPTER SIX: Black Alabamas

183 chapter six Black Alabamas Black Alabama is not a third-rate reproduction of white Alabama. It’s a different culture. It almost has a different language. It has a different appetite, a different menu. —j. l. chestnut, quoted in “J. L. Chestnut, Lawyer and Author” Across the years, strategies and strengths shifting with the possibilities for protest and change, the Black Alabama invoked by Selma’s first African American lawyer, J. L. Chestnut (1930–2008), has challenged state and local white regimes. For the Chestnut-minded, Black Alabama represents an activist polity attempting to perpetrate democracy in a historical locus of racist violence, foreclosure of possibility, repression, and economic inequity. Occupying moral high ground (but not without occasional feet of clay), black Alabamians have shaped a political imaginary in sharp contrast with that of the Heart of Dixie, emphasizing economic justice and an end to poverty, democratic inclusiveness, affirmative action, education equity, prison reform, and claiming rights to health care, child care, and housing. In his weekly newspaper column, “The Hard, Cold Truth,” Chestnut called to account white as well as African American political figures when he judged their actions at odds with the best interests of Black Alabama. An incisive commentator, Chestnut extrapolated the range of racial feeling in Selma to make widely applicable judgments. At one end of a continuum of white attitudes , he pointed to the writers of unsigned letters to the editor who “hold such extreme, foolish and racist views they are even careful about stating those views in intelligent white company much less to blacks.” He went on, 184 • chapter six In the opposite direction, whites have sometimes privately expressed to me very positive views about racial integration that they could never afford to utter publicly . Then, there are some whites who put up false fronts to hustle potential black customers or black voters. Such fronts are relatively safe even in the South: however, any white person who steps beyond that front and establishes a genuine interracial relationship runs some risk of community censure, of being branded “nigger-lover” or a leftwing radical.1 Sought after as a public speaker for his candor and humor, especially after the publication of his co-authored autobiography, Black in Selma, Chestnut traveled widely, soaked up opinions and conversations, and never withheld his opinion. He expressed revulsion for Republicans such as Georgia native Clarence Thomas and Birmingham-born Condoleezza Rice, both of whom he felt had betrayed African Americans. Thomas, nominated to the high court by George H. W. Bush in 1991, had not paid his “civil rights dues,” had opposed affirmative action when he directed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission during the Reagan administration, and reminded Chestnut of those among “our slave ancestors who achieved emancipation, but not liberation .” Thomas’s appointment was also opposed by other voices of Black Alabama, including Chestnut’s longtime law partner, state senator Hank Sanders, and state representative Alvin Holmes. “Unless Clarence Thomas has made a great change, as Saul did on the road to Damascus,” insisted Holmes, “he is not the person to be on the Supreme Court. If he’s against affirmative action —that’s the reason he’s where he is today, he’s against everything to benefit blacks.”2 Approaching the Black Belt The heartland of Black Alabama remains the Black Belt, a largely rural region of African American insurgence that has effectively taken over the meaning of the term from older senses and other geographies. For disenfranchised and oppressed black citizens of this multicounty swath of west central Alabama, Supreme Court decisions and congressional actions during the 1950s and 1960s accompanied a regionally based movement for political and civil rights. Places such as Tuskegee, Marion, Selma, Montgomery, Hayneville, and Eutaw became pivotal sites in the U.S. freedom struggle. At lunch counters, in city Black Alabamas • 185 parks and courthouse squares, in registrars’ and sheriffs’ offices, and on the highways and streets, Black Belt Alabamians challenged the spaces and climate of segregation. In the 1820s and ’30s, the Black Belt identified a strip of rich, dark, cotton-­ growing dirt that drew immigrants from Georgia and the Carolinas in an epidemic of “Alabama Fever.” Following the forced removal of Native Americans, the Black Belt emerged as the core of a rapidly expanding plantation area. Geologically, the region lies within the Gulf South’s Coastal Plain in a crescent some twenty to twenty-five miles wide...