Behind the Magic Curtain

Thorne T. K.

Description

Behind the Magic Curtain: Secrets, Spies, and Unsung White Allies of Birminghams Civil Rights Days is a remarkable look at a historic city enmeshed in racial tensions, revealing untold or forgotten stories of secret deals, law enforcement intrigue, and courage alongside pivotal events that would sweep change across the nation.Birmingham, Alabama gave birth to momentous events that spawned the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and affected world history. But that is not why it is known as The Magic City. It earned that nickname with its meteoric rise from a cornfield valley to an industrial boomtown in the late 1800s. Images of snarling dogs and fire hoses of the 1960s define popular perception of the city, obscuring the complexity of race relations in a tumultuous time and the contributions of white citizens who quietly or boldly influenced social change. Behind the Magic Curtain peels back historys veil to reveal little-known or never-told stories of an intriguing cast of characters that include not only progressive members of the Jewish, Christian, and educational communities, but also a racist businessman and a Ku Klux Klan member, who, in an ironic twist, helped bring about justice and forward racial equality and civil rights. Woven throughout the book are the firsthand recollections of a reporter with the states major newspaper of the time. Embedded with law enforcement, he reveals the fascinating details of their secret wiretapping and intelligence operations. With a deft hand, Thorne offers the insight that can be gained from understanding little-known but important perspectives, painting a multihued portrait of a city that has figured so prominently in history, but which so few really know.

Sujets

• Histoire
• USA
• Media studies
• History of the Americas
• États-Unis
• Media

Informations

• Publié par: University of Georgia Press
• Date de parution: 30 juin 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781588384430
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

BEHIND THE MAGIC CURTAIN
A LSO BY T. K. T HORNE
FICTION
Noah s Wife
Angels at the Gate
House of Rose: A Magic City Story
NONFICTION
Last Chance for Justice: How Relentless Investigators Uncovered New Evidence Convicting the Birmingham Church Bombers

NewSouth Books
105 S. Court Street
Montgomery, AL 36104
Copyright 2021 by T. K. Thorne
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, Montgomery, Alabama.
Publisher s Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Thorne, T. K., author.
Title: Behind the magic curtain: Secrets, spies, and unsung white allies of Birmingham s civil rights days / T. K. Thorne.
Description: Montgomery : NewSouth Books [2021]. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021930748 | ISBN 9781588384409 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781588384430 (ebook).
Subjects: Journalists and editors-Civil rights movement-Biography. | Law enforcement-Civil rights movement-Biography. | Civil rights movement-History-United States. | 20th century-History-United States. | South-History-United States. | Alabama-History-United States. I. Title.
Design by Randall Williams
Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan

The Black Belt, defined by its dark, rich soil, stretches across central Alabama. It was the heart of the cotton belt. It was and is a place of great beauty, of extreme wealth and grinding poverty, of pain and joy. Here we take our stand, listening to the past, looking to the future .
To my family, who provided the air of civil and human rights I breathed in my youth, and to those who loved and love Birmingham with all her scars, tragedies, and triumphs.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall catch hell from all sides .
S IGN IN THE OFFICE OF B URKE M ARSHALL, HEAD OF R OBERT K ENNEDY S C IVIL R IGHTS D IVISION
Its reputation as a bastion of hard-line segregation notwithstanding, Birmingham s social and political atmosphere was complex .
S OL K IMERLING , B IRMINGHAM HISTORIAN
There were a lot of white people who were with us. Everybody white is not bad and everybody black is not good .
N IMS D ADDY G AY , CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT LEADER
Events in Birmingham changed the world .
B ILL B AXLEY, FORMER A LABAMA ATTORNEY GENERAL AND LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Prologue
Part One
1 Close Encounter with the Klan
2 Power Connections
3 Police Beat
4 A Black Hand
5 Birmingham s Bloody Mother s Day, 1961
6 A Midnight Roundup More Blood in Montgomery
7 The Damned Spot and the Quilt
8 The Webs We Weave . . .
9 The Jewish Connection
10 Unsung Heroes Cement Golf Holes
11 A Failed Assassination
12 Secret Meetings
13 The Spark that Lit the Birmingham Movement Fire
14 Prelaunch Clash
15 Fireman s Hall, Hat on the Table
Part Two
16 Year of Infamy
17 Scratch Ankle, the New Sheriff, and Spies Lies
18 Sin in the City
19 A Vote for Birmingham s Future
20 The Perfect Storm
21 A Bad Good Friday
22 Two Mayors, a King, and a Crisis
23 Children, Dogs Hoses, Meetings
24 Miracle Sunday and a City on its Knees
25 The Invasion of the Rabbis
26 It Takes a Village -Behind the Curtain
27 Bombings and Riots
28 Bugging and Long Hot Summer
29 Change in the Magic City
30 Countdown to Calamity
31 The Unthinkable
Part Three
32 Bullets and Beatles
33 The Color of Money and Trouble Down the Road
34 Selma Repercussions in Birmingham
35 Selma Post-Op
36 Chases Cracked Ceilings
37 Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
38 Justice, Finally
39 The Way Forward
Postscript
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Eight pages of photos
Preface
This book has been the better part of a decade in the making. I was asked to write it by four men who loved Birmingham and wanted to pull aside the Magic City s curtain to tell the untold or forgotten stories of those who worked for peace and racial progress under extraordinary circumstances in extraordinary times. The four were Bill Thomason, Karl Friedman, Doug Carpenter, and Tom Lankford. I was hesitant, but after reading some of Tom Lankford s memoir notes about his whirlwind newspaper career in the heart of historic happenings in the city, I agreed. Lankford and Friedman, in particular, were generous with their time and sharing their experiences and memories. Without their input, this book would not have been possible. I have preserved many of their turns of phrase.
It is a great sadness to me that Friedman, Thomason, and Lankford passed away before seeing the published book. I hope I have done some justice to their vision.
Although this work is based on interviews, personal memos, video recordings, and historical documentation, a dominant narrative voice follows the perspective of Lankford. As a young reporter for the Birmingham News embedded with law enforcement by assignment and his own initiative, Lankford was on the scene and behind the scenes on almost all major civil rights happenings in Alabama during the era. Driven by a desire to get the scoop and provide information needed in an extraordinary time, he had his hand in some capers of questionable ethics. He didn t question them at the time and is disclosing them now in the name of telling truths about what happened. His unique perspective and stories reveal an untold layer to historical events. That I have relied extensively on his memories and notes does not mean that I endorse all his methods or actions.
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
A sincere thank-you to those who have read the manuscript, multiple times for some, and offered invaluable assistance over the years-Earl Tilford, author and historian; Stephen Edmondson, lore-keeper extraordinaire; Sol Kimerling, local historian, writer, and early mentor; Dan Waterman at the University of Alabama Press, also a mentor and champion of this story; the Reverend Doug Carpenter, son of Bishop C. C. J. Carpenter; Anthony Grooms, author and professor of creative writing at Kennesaw State University; Captains Juanita Eaton and Jennifer Kilburn; Donna Dukes, for tireless efforts to connect me with civil rights icons; and Dana Thomas and Jennifer Buettner at the Birmingham Bar Association. Thanks also to readers who shared their thoughts and support-Odessa Woolfolk, educator and community activist; Jack Drake, civil rights attorney and advocate; Dr. Terry Barr, author and director of creative writing at Presbyterian College; Debra Goldstein, author and retired federal judge; Richard Friedman, community leader; and community volunteer and leader Fran Godchaux.
Also, my sincere appreciation to all who helped on my hunt for photographs and those who gave me their time for personal interviews. The latter are too numerous to mention here but appear in the bibliography. A special thanks, as well, to Pam Powell, for access to raw footage of her video interviews for a film series on this subject; Mark Kelley for his video interview footage on Karl Friedman and Betty Loeb; Jeanne Weaver, for access to her manuscript, now a book, on the history of the Unitarian Church in Birmingham; Janet Griffin, Virginia Volker, Elaine Hobson Miller, Sol Kimerling, Shannon Webster, Sam Rumore, Harriet Schaffer, Chervis Isom, and Robert Vance Jr. for sharing their priceless papers; Alice Westerly for digging up old documents on the Community Affairs Committee; Wayne Coleman, archives director, and Laura Anderson, former archives director at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute; James L. Baggett and Don Veasey and Catherine Oseas of the Birmingham Public Library; Monika Singletary of Temple Emanu-El; my wonderful agent, Kimberley Cameron, who kept believing in this story; Joe Taylor of Livingston Press at the University of West Alabama who took the book under his wing; and, of course, the amazing shepherds at NewSouth Books, Suzanne La Rosa and Randall Williams.
Most of all, I thank my husband, friend, and first-editor Roger Thorne for his love and support and putting up with the time and attention required for such a project.
Introduction
Much of the truth of Birmingham in the civil rights era is ugly, plain and simple. This book is not an attempt to revise that truth. The darkness, however, is always what allows the light. And in Birmingham s darkness, individual lights grew-some from shades of gray that bloomed into sparks, some lanterns of courage. Painfully and slowly, in tandem with economic forces, judicial justice, labor law reform, and street demonstrations, they led the way out. These stories about the darkness and the shades of light in a city that literally brought change to the world are needed, perhaps now more than ever.
Birmingham s meteoric rise from a cornfield valley after the Civil War to a boomtown in the late 1800s and early 1900s earned it the nickname of the Magic City. An industrial mining town built on the backs of convict labor, Birmingham was controlled in large part by outsiders. In a unique happenstance of nature, all the ingredients for making steel-coal, iron ore, and limestone-lay under and near the city, ripe for the plucking. And it hadn t taken long for corporate interests from the North to set up shop and pluck it. Those interests supported and encouraged the status quo of racial divide formed with slavery and afterwards encoded into law as a backlash against Reconstruction.
Birmingham would become a major canvas for the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 60s, and the world s memory has painted the city in indelible ink with the images of firehoses and snarling police dogs. Reality was far more multihued. For Whites in Birmingham, positions on race and segregation existed on a continuum that stretched from strident white supremacists who wielded bombs and murder to those who risked social and financial ostracism, even their lives, to meet in secret with Black friends and activists and take unpopular public stands. In between were varying degrees of