Joe Gotta Go!: A Victory in Selma, Alabama

The last time I was in Selma, Alabama was in 1972, traveling across the South with a group of activists making a movie. (It never came out, which was just as well.) Our group was received with traditional Southern hospitality everywhere throughout the South, except in Selma. We sat down in a café right next to the famous Edmund Pettus Bridge, where voting rights marchers had been gassed and beaten on Bloody Sunday, seven years before. The atmosphere was so thick I had to go stand outside to collect myself. On the street I met an elderly black man in overalls who had worked all his life in Chicago ' 'second worst place in the world' ' before retiring back home to Selma ' 'the worst.' Twenty-eight years later I returned to find the town finally climbing out of that bottom spot.

In Selma, Alabama, there is actually an intersection of Jefferson Davis and Martin Luther King streets. As a spot for a polling place, it asks an obvious question about which way Selma wants to go in the 21st century. The answer, by 57% in a runoff election with a 75% turnout, is Selma's first African American mayor, James Perkins, Jr.

On March 7, 1965, 600 black voting rights activists began a march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge leading out of Selma, they were met by sheriff's deputies and state troopers who dispersed them brutally with tear gas and nightsticks. 'Bloody Sunday' became the catalyst for the federal Voting Rights Act. The mayor of Selma that Sunday was Joseph T. Smitherman, a young man who continued to hold that post for 36 years. His reign came to a turbulent finish Tuesday, September 12, the Voting Rights Act having finally become reality.

The phenomenal voter turnout, concentrated in the black community, which now comprises 65 percent of the registered voters, was the work of the 'Joe Gotta Go' campaign, a community effort featuring noisy car caravans winding through black neighborhoods and national assistance with voter turnout from the NAACP, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and college students from across the South. The Smitherman campaign called the presence of the outsiders an unnecessary interference. But black activists countered with allegations of persistent electoral fraud and voter intimidation and bribery. In 1992 there were many sworn affidavits of forged ballot signatures and vote-buying, but the government failed to investigate. Accusations of irregularities - including the relocation of polling stations - re-surfaced in the regular election this August.

The participation of youth was decisive. Groups like the 21st Century Youth Leadership Movement, a national organization founded in Selma in 1985, energized the black community with rhythmic street chants like 'Everybody, everybody get your vote on!', 'I say Tuesday, you say Vote!', and the ubiquitous community motto, 'Joe gotta go!' A surge of excitement and hyperactivity swept the community. Mass meetings in parks and churches featured gospel music with brand new civil rights lyrics, continuing a tradition that characterized the struggles of the 1960s. Standing in the midst of a spontaneous street party that begin immediately after the polls closed, youth organizer Felicia Pettaway enthused, 'It's a great way to start off the 21st century. It is so great to feel hope again.'

In fact, many locals commented that the sixties were being born again, that they were seeing people they hadn't seen since for decades and feeling a spirit that had long been missing. Rev. Fredrick Reese, who first asked Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to come to Selma in 1965, stood stately and beaming next to the new Mayor. Lillie Brown, 70, of Birmingham, had been here too. She had nearly gotten in the car with Viola Liuzzo, the 'Detroit housewife' civil rights volunteer; an hour later three Klansmen shot Liuzzo dead. Thirty-five years later 'Mama Lillie' was in the street, embracing friends old and new and shouting 'Joe Gone!' Legendary Birmingham activist Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth came; so did former Black Panther Geronimo ji jaga, Kathleen Cleaver's daughter Joju, and actor Sean Penn ' all ignored by the press.

During Smitherman's tenure, Selma has had the highest unemployment in the state, disproportionately affecting the black community. Whites deserted the public schools, leaving them 99% African American. Smitherman has practiced a sometimes subtle and suave method of keeping the old boy network in control while posing for pictures with national black leaders and claiming to be the champion of all Selmians. Some years ago a number of blacks were elected to the city council. The last act of the old white-dominated council was to give the Mayor veto power; there is already talk of rescinding that veto power now that the new Mayor may use it to help the dispossessed.

The Smitherman campaign was clearly aimed at galvanizing the white vote, with the Mayor alleging that "Blacks don't have the concept of working within budgets." He repeatedly warned that business would leave town under a black Mayor. This from the man who claimed he had had a change of heart since referring to 'Martin Luther Coon' in 1965. Even after the vote, Smitherman's nephew Jack kept up the drumbeat, saying "It's going to be a monkey-town." Dirty tricks abounded; a radio commercial featured a black man saying that when black people get into office, the city dies. The man whose voice graced the ad now says he was tricked into this, and he wants to make a counter-commercial.

James Perkins, Jr. received only 200 white votes. The possibility that local whites would face retribution for violating the white wall of silence was one reason black activists called for white support from the outside ' to give people hope, a sense of the possibility of cross-racial friendship and solidarity.

What will it take to break the solidity of the white bloc ' to help white folks become Selmians instead of white Selmians? Selma native Gwendolyn Smith Shaw told me, 'It's gonna take a while for white Selma to realize that it's not a bad thing for a black person to be mayor. Because it's about justice for all people, which it has been all along.' Perhaps if Selma prospers, if the jobs fail to flee, if new and more varied businesses ' with the encouragement of national black leadership - come to town, people will see what they've seen in other cities that elect black mayors. Racial animosity is not increased when black officials are elected. It is increased when communities are suppressed. As Rev. Randel Osburn of the SCLC said, 'When you fight for black people, you fight for all people.' Based on the experience of Selma, it seems more whites must enlist in this struggle if there is to be any hope of reconciliation.

The overall feeling was, as I said in the other article, one of a revival ' a sixties revival, to be sure, but also a church revival. Really it was a mix of the spiritual and the political. The old saw about the centrality of the black church to the black community's survival was never more in evidence. Indoor mass meetings, nightly events in the week before the election, were held in churches, and the business of the evening was the invocation of the Holy Spirit at the service of the people. Prayers were offered for the candidate, James Perkins, Jr., and his family: 'Reach out your arms to this family!' Arms outstretched, many hundreds voiced their personal prayers in quiet tones, creating a peaceful cacophony of individual and yet collective prayers. The declarations of community members and leaders at the podium amounted to a resurrection of the militant and loving spirit of the civil rights movement.

Daytime rallies were held in the parks, with devotional and civil rights songs, testimony, barbecue, and visiting dignitaries like Martin Luther King III and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth. These rallies were enlivened by the presence of groups of students from African American colleges around the South, bused in for Get Out the Vote campaigns. Similarly, large groups of NAACP volunteers of all ages came and deployed themselves through the wards, setting up rallies at strategic intersections and chanting for hours, exhorting motorists to honk if Joe Gotta Go, and flushing out recalcitrant voters. 'When you don't vote, you make a mockery of the sacrifices of Martin, Cheney, Goodman, Schwerner, Viola Liuzzo.' The slogan: 'We ain't goin' back.' The t-shirt: 'Lift every voice and vote,' after the 'Negro National Anthem.' They went to the high school football game and were permitted to rally the citizenry in between more important doings. Car caravans threaded through the neighborhoods led by a pickup truck festooned with signs, bullhorns blaring.

After about a day in town, I decided I would concentrate on media work, while staying on call to help put out fires or start them, as needed. Some of my work involved connecting local activists to radio programs at KPFA in Berkeley and WBAI in New York. For this purpose I had switched to a national cell phone, which occasionally worked. One night we had a live three-way hookup with the station, me at a church rally, and a very tired activist back at her house. Another of my functions, on election day, was to bring bigger media to polling stations when there were dustups. like disagreements over sign placement, distance of partisan workers from poll entrance, etc.

Naturally, there were memorable meetings with individuals. I worked with a small team of outside folks who were basically running the office, sending out teams of students, fielding media calls and so on. The NAACP people were fun and interesting. All these folks added to the freedom summer atmosphere.

The call for outside aid had partly to do with the feeling of isolation; the deflating effect that outsiders could have on white power was considered important. But so too was the boost African Americans could theoretically get from having any white folks at all support them, and so there was a special emphasis put on white folks coming in, in addition to the black students and NAACP. Whether this worked is rather subjective; the good old boys immediately labeled all outsiders the source of all problems, while black folks thanked us repeatedly and effusively for being there. The last time I was in Selma, Alabama was in 1972, traveling across the South with a group of activists making a movie. (It never came out, which was just as well.) Our group was received with traditional Southern hospitality everywhere throughout the South, except in Selma. We sat down in a café right next to the famous Edmund Pettus Bridge, where voting rights marchers had been gassed and beaten on Bloody Sunday, seven years before. The atmosphere was so thick I had to go stand outside to collect myself. On the street I met an elderly black man in overalls who had worked all his life in Chicago ' 'second worst place in the world' ' before retiring back home to Selma ' 'the worst.' Twenty-eight years later I returned to find the town finally climbing out of that bottom spot.

In Selma, Alabama, there is actually an intersection of Jefferson Davis and Martin Luther King streets. As a spot for a polling place, it asks an obvious question about which way Selma wants to go in the 21st century. The answer, by 57% in a runoff election with a 75% turnout, is Selma's first African American mayor, James Perkins, Jr.

On March 7, 1965, 600 black voting rights activists began a march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge leading out of Selma, they were met by sheriff's deputies and state troopers who dispersed them brutally with tear gas and nightsticks. 'Bloody Sunday' became the catalyst for the federal Voting Rights Act. The mayor of Selma that Sunday was Joseph T. Smitherman, a young man who continued to hold that post for 36 years. His reign came to a turbulent finish Tuesday, September 12, the Voting Rights Act having finally become reality.

The phenomenal voter turnout, concentrated in the black community, which now comprises 65 percent of the registered voters, was the work of the 'Joe Gotta Go' campaign, a community effort featuring noisy car caravans winding through black neighborhoods and national assistance with voter turnout from the NAACP, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and college students from across the South. The Smitherman campaign called the presence of the outsiders an unnecessary interference. But black activists countered with allegations of persistent electoral fraud and voter intimidation and bribery. In 1992 there were many sworn affidavits of forged ballot signatures and vote-buying, but the government failed to investigate. Accusations of irregularities - including the relocation of polling stations - re-surfaced in the regular election this August.

The participation of youth was decisive. Groups like the 21st Century Youth Leadership Movement, a national organization founded in Selma in 1985, energized the black community with rhythmic street chants like 'Everybody, everybody get your vote on!', 'I say Tuesday, you say Vote!', and the ubiquitous community motto, 'Joe gotta go!' A surge of excitement and hyperactivity swept the community. Mass meetings in parks and churches featured gospel music with brand new civil rights lyrics, continuing a tradition that characterized the struggles of the 1960s. Standing in the midst of a spontaneous street party that begin immediately after the polls closed, youth organizer Felicia Pettaway enthused, 'It's a great way to start off the 21st century. It is so great to feel hope again.'

In fact, many locals commented that the sixties were being born again, that they were seeing people they hadn't seen since for decades and feeling a spirit that had long been missing. Rev. Fredrick Reese, who first asked Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to come to Selma in 1965, stood stately and beaming next to the new Mayor. Lillie Brown, 70, of Birmingham, had been here too. She had nearly gotten in the car with Viola Liuzzo, the 'Detroit housewife' civil rights volunteer; an hour later three Klansmen shot Liuzzo dead. Thirty-five years later 'Mama Lillie' was in the street, embracing friends old and new and shouting 'Joe Gone!' Legendary Birmingham activist Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth came; so did former Black Panther Geronimo ji jaga, Kathleen Cleaver's daughter Joju, and actor Sean Penn ' all ignored by the press.

During Smitherman's tenure, Selma has had the highest unemployment in the state, disproportionately affecting the black community. Whites deserted the public schools, leaving them 99% African American. Smitherman has practiced a sometimes subtle and suave method of keeping the old boy network in control while posing for pictures with national black leaders and claiming to be the champion of all Selmians. Some years ago a number of blacks were elected to the city council. The last act of the old white-dominated council was to give the Mayor veto power; there is already talk of rescinding that veto power now that the new Mayor may use it to help the dispossessed.

The Smitherman campaign was clearly aimed at galvanizing the white vote, with the Mayor alleging that 'Blacks don't have the concept of working within budgets.' He repeatedly warned that business would leave town under a black Mayor. This from the man who claimed he had had a change of heart since referring to 'Martin Luther Coon' in 1965. Even after the vote, Smitherman's nephew Jack kept up the drumbeat, saying 'It's going to be a monkey-town.' Dirty tricks abounded; a radio commercial featured a black man saying that when black people get into office, the city dies. The man whose voice graced the ad now says he was tricked into this, and he wants to make a counter-commercial.

James Perkins, Jr. received only 200 white votes. The possibility that local whites would face retribution for violating the white wall of silence was one reason black activists called for white support from the outside ' to give people hope, a sense of the possibility of cross-racial friendship and solidarity.

What will it take to break the solidity of the white bloc ' to help white folks become Selmians instead of white Selmians' Selma native Gwendolyn Smith Shaw told me, 'It's gonna take a while for white Selma to realize that it's not a bad thing for a black person to be mayor. Because it's about justice for all people, which it has been all along.' Perhaps if Selma prospers, if the jobs fail to flee, if new and more varied businesses ' with the encouragement of national black leadership - come to town, people will see what they've seen in other cities that elect black mayors. Racial animosity is not increased when black officials are elected. It is increased when communities are suppressed. As Rev. Randel Osburn of the SCLC said, 'When you fight for black people, you fight for all people.' Based on the experience of Selma, it seems more whites must enlist in this struggle if there is to be any hope of reconciliation.

One of our hosts, who was certainly party to this strategy, has had a real hard time with white people and doesn't really like them all that much. One night, three of us Yanks were sitting around with her till all hours, and the discussion drifted to the relationship between class and race. I was surprised to find myself isolated in arguing the inextricable relation between the two, and ending up being told that I was just not going to get it, because I'm white. This is something I often think about others, though I try never to say it,. Well, it was certainly a humbling charge, and there is truth in it, since I can never have and wouldn't hope to have the experience they've had in that town, that South, that country. What I learned mostly, though, was that I hadn't established who I was about race relations before jumping into other analyses. Anyway, in the end she does like me, and it's always nice to be one o' them liked white persons.

On the afternoon of election day, we began to steel ourselves for possible defeat, having been so cautioned by a couple of key activists. However, as the polls closed at 6:00, we immediately heard horns and yelling on the main street, and rushed out to find our pessimism dashed. 'Is Joe Gone'', I asked two young women who were exulting and cavorting. 'He's been gone for days!', they shouted. The sidewalks began to fill with revelers, as motorists drove back and forth honking and yelling until after midnight. The only white peeople I saw turned out to be personal friends of the new mayor, a man and his 10 year-old daughter visiting from Birmingham, both of them happy, comfortable and optimistic in the midst of the communal ecstasy.

The feeling was that of victory, but also that of peace. The benevolence of a new dawn was in the air. I ran up and down snapping pictures and recording exuberances. Occasionally I stopped, dropping my role and merging with the moment, and tears came. So rarely is there any kind of victory ' a political prisoner is released or an old order in some measure toppled ' and even more rarely is any one of us on the spot for the moment. It is an experience to savor and hoard until the next one. And for me, it was also like going back to somewhere I had never quite been, but heard about and sort of felt. I wish you all could have been there. Let's do it again soon.