The racist south has gone with the wind
Sarah Baxter returns to her US childhood home to find out how much racial attitudes have changed
When Martin Luther King delivered his “I have a dream” speech, he was not thinking about me, but he might have been.
“I have a dream,” he said, “that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists . . . one day, right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”
By an accident of history, Barack Obama is set to delivery his victory nomination speech at the Democratic National Convention on August 28, the 45th anniversary of the civil rights leader’s prophecy. If the timing has a special resonance for me, it was because I lived in Alabama as a young girl for three years in the late 1960s, the period when King was assassinated.
My father was an RAF officer stationed at Maxwell air force base in Montgomery, Alabama, the crucible of the civil rights movement. I lived the life of a privileged little white girl and attended an all-white school. A classmate was a cousin of Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, the story of a white lawyer’s fight for a black man seen through the eyes of a girl.
I was six to nine years old, too young to be fully aware of the swirling currents of history and yet I felt their pull. My father used to speak contemptuously about George Wallace, the Alabama governor, and his links to the Ku Klux Klan, the hooded white supremacists, while my mother, an American from Ohio, said you could not trust the sweet smiles and sugary accent of southerners: underneath, they were mean.
These were golden years for me of perpetual summer, a childhood lived outdoors and at the swimming pool, and also the last time that my family lived together under one roof. We scattered in 1969. My mother returned to Ohio as a graduate student, like the narrator of the femi-nist classic The Women’s Room. I went to live for a year with my paternal grandmother in France, a formidable war widow with a scary glass eye, and my brother and sister went to boarding school in England. My father travelled around the world with the RAF; the military did not know where to place a senior officer whose marriage had collapsed.
Alabama was a paradise lost, but one where I knew the serpent of rac-ism lurked. Years later in my teens and early twenties, I reflected that Britain may be grey and damp, its cars small and its streets narrow, but it had not been scarred by slavery and segregation. It was a consoling thought.
Over time, I stopped being self-in-dulgently antiAmerican and came to admire the country’s capacity for reform and renewal. When I was a girl I heard a man of 104 speak on the radio about being born a slave. Who would have predicted then that the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya would be knocking on the door of the White House?
When I moved to Washington for The Sunday Times in 2001, I was struck by the words of Thomas Jefferson, one of America’s founding fathers and a slave owner, on the marble wall of his memorial. “Institutions must advance to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilised society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.”
Has America changed enough to elect its first African-American president? Last month I returned to the Alabama of my childhood to find out.
Today Montgomery is a small, sleepy town on the banks of the lazy Alabama River, with a large Hyundai car plant to provide employment. Most of the cotton fields have gone. I looked out for the tiny wooden cabins where the descendants of slaves and sharecroppers had lived and which had shocked me as a child, but I saw only one or two tumbledown remains.
The licence plates bearing the defiant “Heart of Dixie” have been replaced by “Stars Fell on Alabama”, a bland tribute to the song made famous by jazz singers Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. Some cars now bear the campaign bumper sticker “Al-O-bama”, although it remains a largely conservative state. Before his fame exploded, Obama used to joke that people garbled his name. “What are you called?” he would laugh. “Yo Mama? Alabama?”
Alabama has hit on an inspired way to market its troubled past as the state with the “rebellious streak”. Montgomery was the first capital of the confederacy during the civil war, while a century later Governor Wallace declared “segregation forever” and stood at the schoolhouse door in Tusca-loosa refusing entry to blacks. But Alabama is also where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person on a Montgomery bus, King preached about human dignity in a small church outside the statehouse and the Selma marchers stood their ground after being beaten by police with bull whips, clubs and tear gas on Bloody Sunday in 1965.
One of the first people I called before setting off on my journey was Kathleen Magnan, who was in my second grade class at the elite private school, Montgomery Academy, a year after the Selma marches. Her family had been part of the country club set. She was ecstatic about Obama’s victory in the Democratic primary campaign.
“I’m so wild about Barack and I think Michelle [his wife] is just fabulous,” she told me. “I was so thrilled when he won the Alabama primary. I thought: finally!”
However, Kathleen now lives in the far more liberal state of New Jersey: “My big fear is that people talk about how wonderful he is, but when the [voting booth] curtain closes they will say, ‘I just can’t bring myself to vote for a black man’.”
On my first day in Montgomery I went to see my old school. It was twice the size it used to be, but its graceful open-air porticos and walkways looked familiar enough for the memories to come flooding back.
There had been girls so pampered and wealthy that they never wore the same dress twice, whereas my wardrobe barely lasted the week. I later learnt from a delightfully gossipy friend that the richest girl, whom I remembered having seven televisions in her house including one in the bathroom, had joined a biker set and become a grungy country and western DJ.
The boy I liked, who teased me for my British accent, went on to become a top California heart surgeon and was voted one of the 10 most eligible bachelors in Los Angeles. Another good-looking boy, who was cocky and carefree, was killed at 11 by his older brother in a gun accident at home. It was a shock. For me, they had all been frozen in time aged nine in the glossy school yearbook I hauled back to Britain.
Archie Douglas, the current head-master, welcomed me back to the school. He said he had two sons, 16 and 18: “These kids don’t see colour. This is the generation that is going to change things and Obama is riding the crest of that wave.”
Douglas, a northerner, joined the school in 2001. “I wasn’t going to come down here unless I could make a difference,” he said.
“I have only once or twice run into an outright racist statement. Everybody understands that, even if you might feel it, you just can’t say it any more.”
Douglas has increased financial aid, introduced uniforms to level the disparities of wealth, and raised the proportion of ethnic minority children from 5% to 12%, but that includes Koreans from the Hyundai plant, Hindus and Muslims as well as African-Americans.
Kathleen recalled that the first black pupil to arrive in the 1970s was in her younger sister’s class. “She was as light-skinned as you could be and not be white,” she said. It is no surprise, perhaps, that the first African-American candidate with a serious chance of becoming president is half-white.
Another African-American student at the school was Alabama congressman Artur Davis, 40. He went on to study law at Harvard with Obama and is one of the Democratic candidate’s most prominent supporters. I went to see him in his office in Birmingham, the industrial city where police chief Eugene “Bull” Connor shocked America by turning dogs and fire hoses on peaceful black demonstrators.
Davis hopes to become the first black governor of the state in 2010. “There has been incalculable change in my lifetime,” he said. “When I was born, the Voting Rights Act was in its infancy. The idea of African-Americans voting in large numbers would have been a signal event.”
Just before Davis’s 10th birthday there was a spate of rapes in a nearby white community. A curfew was imposed on all black boys under 18 to get off the streets at dusk. He had wanted to buy a comic book but his mother would not let him out. “It was the first time I had been told I couldn’t do anything because of my race,” he said. “The order was blatantly unconstitutional.”
Davis believes Obama’s victory in the Democratic primary has lifted people’s spirits, regardless of their race. “It is a sign that the country is capable of great change in a relatively short space of time. Race has certainly reared its head in this campaign – anybody who doubts it should get on the internet and read around – but the genius of the American political character is that we are capable of healing in rapid order.”
Has the country really healed? If Obama succeeds in becoming president, Davis believes it will be in no small measure because of the example provided by two Republican secretaries of state, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice: “They have shown that black Americans can hold high office without the cosmos crashing.”
Yet in Alabama rumours are rife that Obama is a secret Muslim, a substitute form of prejudice. One perfectly sensible retired colonel told me that when Obama slipped up and referred to the “57 states” of America, he was thinking of the “57 Islamic states”, one of the web’s most ridiculous and persistent rumours. Davis has had similar exasperating experiences.
“I’m astounded the falsehood has gained so much traction,” he said. A woman lawyer solemnly told him that Obama must be a Muslim because he had changed his name from Barry to Barack as an adult. “It never occurred to her that Barry was short for Barack!”
Davis attended Montgomery Academy for only a couple of years as a teenager. He thinks that being a “supernerd” made him more uncomfortable there than being black. He went on to Clover-dale high school, a mile or two from my first home on Clover-dale Road.
It was an all-white neighbourhood then, full of modest bungalows and starter homes.
Today it is a predominantly black area. But when I went to my old home, an elderly white woman who had been living there since 1972 opened the door.
Her husband had been a navy pilot and, like us, they had rented the house (they later bought it). She courteously invited me in. “The old South still lives,” she smiled. The area was “not as safe as it used to be”, she said, but she was guardedly polite about her neighbours.
She was a Republican who did not like talking about politics. I got the impression that, like many white southerners, she thought it best to stay off the subject but I took the plunge anyway: “Is America ready for an African-American president?”
“I don’t know,” she replied. “I’d just like an honest one.” (President, that is.)
The following evening I was invited to dinner by Mark Harris, a genial classmate who is now a prosperous Montgomery stockbroker. I got the impression that he was not going to vote for Obama either, although he did not spell it out. His doubts were based on Obama’s inexperience, not colour. “My first choice for the first black president would probably be Colin Powell – he’s been tested in so many areas of his life,” he said.
Mark told me that when he was five, his father’s handyman, a tall, gentle African-American – “the finest, kindest person” – was thrown off a bridge by the Ku Klux Klan and left to drown: “He couldn’t swim but he managed to land in the marsh. He lived, but he would never talk about it. He knew who did it but he would never say.”
Mark’s parents first told him about the murder attempt in 1968, the year of King’s assassination. “It was then that ‘things’ really become recognised,” he said. The shock of King’s death revealed just how ugly the Deep South, which prided itself on its civility, had become. Under pressure from federal laws, it began to reform.
On my last day in Alabama I went to Maxwell air force base, home to the Air War College where my father taught military strategy. We lived there for two years.
I half-expected my old house would not be as lovely as I remembered, but if anything it was more beautiful – a gracious, five-bedroom, light-yellow colonial. It is still known today as the “Brit house” because so many group captains lived there over the years. My heart ached as I stepped through the door. My life there had not always been idyllic. I could remember the rows that led us to feel some relief when our parents separated, but it was our last proper home.
The memory of my childhood there had led me to want to live in America with my own husband and children. My daughter Billie, 10, and son Max, 8, are now much the same age as I was. Sitting on my father’s knee on the sofa, reciting the capitals of the world and listening to him talk about current affairs, gave me a lifelong love of history and politics.
I was taken to meet Jerome Ennels, the African-American former historian of the base. Military jets roared overhead. “We call it the sound of freedom,” the colonel accompanying us said.
In 1948 President Harry Truman desegregated the military, putting service-men in the peculiar position of having to obey segregation laws outside but not inside the base. “Occasionally white and black soldiers would defy the laws on the buses,” Ennels said. “They would sit together, but as soon as they got outside the gate, the bus driver would give them their money back and tell them to get off.”
Parks is believed to have worked at Maxwell as a domestic when she found it difficult to obtain work after her act of defiance. Legend has it that officers’ wives helped to drive black people to work during the bus boycotts that followed. My mother once got stopped for driving our maid home in the front seat of our car. The police officer asked rudely if she was “all right”.
By the early 1970s the Jim Crow laws had been shelved, but a popular restaurant still refused to serve Ennels and his wife. The waitress was busy, it was not her shift, they were at the wrong table – countless excuses were given. Eventually, their drinks arrived: “They looked like they had spit or dishwater in them.” He sued and received a $10,000 settlement out of court. “We got a car out of it,” he said.
In the 1980s the town’s reputation was still so awful that there was a sign on the highway saying, “Welcome to Montgomery. It’s better than you think”.
Today, Ennels said, “It’s great as far as I am concerned. I’m sure some prejudice and discrimination still exist, but I don’t see it. I’d put Montgomery in one of the top cities in America when it comes to race relations. It’s a fine place.”
The talk of the town is that Montgomery is poised to elect its first black mayor. Davis believes that in the years to come, the election of more African-American politicians will be “one of the gifts that Barack Obama will contribute to the political process”.
“It doesn’t mean that race will disappear as a factor, but it means that black candidates will have a chance to be judged on their assets and their liabilities,” Davis said.
“Go back to Alabama . . .” King had said. “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character.”
I went back and I think that day is coming. I don’t know if Obama will win the election but, if he does, it is because he will have passed King’s character test for president.