A Writer's Life by Gay Talese

Author:Gay Talese [Talese, Gay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-26476-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

19

AS I DROVE THROUGH DOWNTOWN SELMA ONTO HIGHWAY 80 toward the Holiday Inn, which was where I and most of the out-of-town media who were here for the silver anniversary conclave were staying—along with Jesse Jackson and the other honored guests and speakers—I continued to think about the wedding and how coincidental it was that Betty Ramsey and Randall Miller would be formalizing their union at a time when civil rights proponents would be memorializing the disaffection that had led to Bloody Sunday.

Most of what I read about race relations in the Selma paper that week focused upon the tension and differences of opinion that made the chances of cooperation between the town’s blacks and whites seem highly unlikely in the near future. There was a police report that a bomb might be planted at the base of the bridge over which the twenty-fifth anniversary participants were scheduled to march. There was an interview with Jesse Jackson in which he described the bridge as symbolizing “Calvary” for black people, explaining, “We carried the cross of oppression and suffered the crucifixion so that all would have a new hope.” But this hope, according to a white councilman named Carl Morgan, was being undermined by the contrariness of such black leaders as Rose Sanders. Her well-publicized accusations that a racist grading system prevailed within the classrooms of Selma’s public schools was a manufactured controversy, Morgan suggested, one that kept Rose Sanders in the headlines and provided her and her anti-Smitherman friends with a lively issue to rally around. It was noted elsewhere that Sanders was currently raising funds for the establishment of a voting-rights museum near the bridge; it would display artifacts and memorabilia associated with the 1960s era of Dr. King, the Freedom Riders, and the rampaging posse of Sheriff Jim Clark. There was also a guest column on the editorial page of the Selma paper by J. L. Chestnut, Jr., in which he asserted that he and his parents had been receiving many threatening phone calls at night from white people who were part of a “planned conspiracy to assault and harass.”

With these and other articles concentrating on the grievances and ill-feelings that were said to characterize the city, it seemed to me all the more important that I emphasize in my story for the Times what was apparently not deemed to be newsworthy here in Alabama—the fact that, despite all the local reports of contentiousness, it was nonetheless possible in today’s Selma for a black man to walk arm in arm with a white woman along the sidewalks without being physically impeded. Did this not say something about changing attitudes in Selma? Was it not a step forward along the path of what Dr. King called the “highway up from darkness”? Did this not exemplify a black man’s right to choose? In this state still associated with the notoriety of the Scottsboro trials, and in this city still marked by its own prejudicial prosecution of William Earl Fikes, was

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