Cussing Dixie, Loving Dixie: Fifty Years of Commentary by H. Brandt Ayers

CUSSING DIXIE, LOVING DIXIE

CUSSING DIXIE, LOVING DIXIE

50 Years of Commentary by H. Brandt Ayers

H. Brandt Ayers & Carol Nunnelley

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2015 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

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ISBN: 978-0-8173-1896-3

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Contents

Acknowledgments

The Loving Critic: H. Brandt Ayers Speaks to the Heart of Dixie

CAROL NUNNELLEY

PART I - The 1960s: An Editorial Voice Forged by Crisis

Commentary

On Race and Civil Rights

The March on Washington, August 28, 1963

The Problems of Anniston, September 15, 1964

The Streets of Alabama, March 14, 1965

Moral Issue: Another View, March 20, 1965

A First Step Is Made, March 28, 1965

We Make Our Choice Now, July 16, 1965

A Call for Responsibility, July 18, 1965

In a Man’s Dying, July 19, 1965

Twelve Men and a Decision, December 3, 1965

On Alabama

Thought Control for Alabama?, September 3, 1964

Goldwater Fell on Alabama, September 18, 1964

Johnson, the Nation, Alabama, November 1, 1964

You Can’t Eat Magnolias, November 3, 1964

End of an Era, November 4, 1964

Capitol Mood Changes, March 31, 1969

Sacrificial Lamb, September 7, 1969

On Anniston

The Hours Run Out, October 8, 1964

City Hall: Injured Party?, October 20, 1968

Looking Backwards from Another Year, November 2, 1969

On the Nation and the World

Famous ‘Freedom’ Clichés, November 28, 1965

On the South

Southerners Are Americans, January 12, 1969

Who Thinks . . . ?, June 22, 1969

New Group’s Goal: Progressive South, November 30, 1969

PART II - The 1970s: Celebrating a New South

Commentary

On Race and Civil Rights

Is Soul-Power Leaking from the Movement?, August 7, 1977

Sorrows of a Moderate South African, June 11, 1978

On Alabama

Politics of Hate versus Politics of Hope, May 31, 1970

Wallace: He Has Squandered Great Talent for Political Leadership in the Swamp of Racial Politics and Let His Followers Pay the Price, June 7, 1970

Inauguration, Changing Times: Alabama, Eight Years Later, Still Faces Major Problems, January 17, 1971

Alabama Needs Governing Man, May 5, 1974

Reflections on a Green Room: The State Has Killed Swiftly and Slowly, for Great and Trivial Crimes, yet Crime Will Not Go Away, June 1, 1975

On Anniston

Define, Solve Wellborn’s Problem, October 28, 1971

Somebody’s Listening: A Voice for the People, January 9, 1972

On the Nation and the World

Hugo L. Black: He Enlarged Our Liberties, September 26, 1971

Can Nation Resolve the Busing Dilemma?, September 21, 1975

Miles Still to Go, but . . . : After Iowa, Carter More of a Contender, January 25, 1976

Reading Russia with Soul-a-Vision, December 19, 1976

China: Door Opened to My Childhood, December 24, 1978

On the South

Putting an End to the Old Game, February 15, 1970

South’s Real Face Emerging, January 31, 1971

Symbols: Soul in ‘Dixie,’ ‘We Shall Overcome’, March 14, 1971

The South Looks Ahead, April 28, 1974

Father Greeley: A Fear of Sheets, October 3, 1976

The Election: Dead and Dying Myths, November 7, 1976

New South Party Is Over, October 29, 1977

PART III - The 1980s: A Conversation with the World

Commentary

On Race and Civil Rights

There Will Be Heroes after Jesse, May 6, 1984

Go Ahead, Get Good and Mad!, February 1, 1987

On Alabama

What’s the Matter with Alabama?, October 7, 1984

Silence about Abortion Is Golden, July 16, 1989

On Anniston

Diplomacy Cannot Cool Boiling Blood, June 22, 1980

Rockers, Meet the Moral Majority, July 21, 1985

On the Nation and the World

Dear Mr. President: We Need a Vision, September 14, 1980

Be Tender with Male Ego, Ms. Ferraro, August 5, 1984

Success Is a Permissive Teacher, November 11, 1984

A China Journey to Meet Grandfather, January 13, 1985

The NRA Isn’t Fun Anymore, April 9, 1989

Our Right to Be Damn Fools, July 9, 1989

On the South

When ‘Sisyphus Lost His Job’ Down South, January 21, 1980

GOP Gaining: Who Is Losing?, September 1, 1985

What Does God’s Word Have to Fear?, June 26, 1988

PART IV - The 1990s: Full Tilt, at Home and Afar

Commentary

On Race and Civil Rights

The Bus Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, July 21, 1991

Talk to Duke Voters, the Right Way, November 24, 1991

Do Gays Merit Life, Liberty, Happiness?, January 31, 1994

Helen Suzman: A Certain Trumpet, March 20, 1994

On Alabama

Paul Hubbert: A New South Governor for Alabama, at Last!, October 21, 1990

Aim Low, Alabama, April 20, 1997

Fob: You Better Believe, June 8, 1997

George Wallace: The Forgiven?, September 20, 1998

We Join The South—Finally?, November 1, 1998

On Anniston

A Death in the Family, January 29, 1995

Mean Politics, Good People, June 30, 1996

A Stranger in His Home, September 21, 1997

Honda: Long Time Coming, May 16, 1999

On the Nation and the World

Jimmy Carter: A Loser as Winner, April 8, 1990

Open Letter: Dear Bill—Run! August 8, 1991

Clinton Sins Like a . . . Roosevelt!?, March 22, 1992

You’ll Be Okay, Mr. President, September 12, 1993

Impeachment: Final Word, February 14, 1999

On the South

Driving the Devils from Miss Dixie, April 29, 1990

Will Dixie Be Like the Balkans?, March 7, 1993

The South Knows South Africa, May 8, 1994

Measure of a Statesman, April 26, 1998

PART V - Beyond 2000: Reflection but No Retirement

Commentary

On Race and Civil Rights

Can We Laugh Now?, May 20, 2001

SCLC: Beached Whale, August 26, 2001

On Alabama

Thank God for Alabama, November 3, 2002

A House for Sale, August 15, 2004

Birthday for Two Alabamas, December 19, 2004

A Punch in the Nose, October 14, 2007

We Need Mark Twain, July 20, 2008

On Anniston

"Why Not Sell the Star?," July 27, 2003

News from Main Street, February 19, 2006

Keep Failing Poor Kids, July 8, 2007

In Our Lifetime, December 14, 2008

On the Nation and the World

Why They Hate Us, September 30, 2001

Second Greatest Generation, December 1, 2002

How We Love War, April 6, 2003

Katrina: Intelligent Design?, August 28, 2005

Collapse of Conservatism, June 1, 2008

And So It Ends, June 8, 2008

On the South

John Rocker, Culture Captive, June 11, 2000

Be a Man, ’Fess Up! July 16, 2000

Confederacy Forever! June 27, 2004

Affirmative Southern Strategy, November 12, 2008

A Final Word

H. BRANDT AYERS

Index

Acknowledgments

THIS BOOK HAS BEEN IN THE making for more than fifty years. Collecting, organizing and giving perspective to a lifetime’s work in daily journalism is a rewarding and demanding assignment. We did not do this alone, and we owe thanks to those who helped.

Dr. Jennifer Greer, then professor and journalism department chair and now associate provost at the University of Alabama, brought us together in 2010 to work on the project. We thank her for her eye for a good collaboration.

The collections and librarians of the Alabama Room of the Public Library of Anniston-Calhoun County were essential to our task. The files of Anniston Star newspapers from 1900 to the present are a treasure to those who care about the history of Alabama and their part in it. The librarians were unfailingly expert and helpful.

Kim Kirk of the Anniston Star was troubleshooter extraordinaire throughout the research and production of the manuscript. She transcribed the oldest columns, beyond the reach of electronic recall. She found missing columns and researched words and facts, sometimes in yellowing clips. She knew the person at the Star and elsewhere who could answer a question or help overcome production challenges.

Carol Nunnelley especially thanks Brandt Ayers for the pleasure of reading his lively, insightful, provocative writing. I laughed aloud while getting a refresher course in the history of my state and time. I especially appreciated his newspaper toughness in enduring my choices of columns, among thousands, to include in this book. I also thank the real historians in my family—my spouse William Nunnelley and daughter Margaret Nell Nunnelley Olsen—for guidance on all fronts: research, writing and editing.

Brandt Ayers also thanks those named here and others who made important contributions to the book. I thank my editor, my wife, my best friend. And I want to acknowledge my partner, who did the selections and other heavy lifting to make this book possible.

H. BRANDT AYERS

CAROL NUNNELLEY

The Loving Critic

H. Brandt Ayers Speaks to the Heart of Dixie

CAROL NUNNELLEY

FOR NEARLY HALF A CENTURY, publisher and editor H. Brandt Ayers, writing for his family’s newspaper in Anniston, Alabama, has challenged the historical prejudices, political preferences, and conventional thinking of his hometown in the deepest of Deep South states.

His hometown readers smile when they confide that the Anniston Star is known as the Red Star around here. Heavy hitters in Alabama political campaigns use the label as a bludgeon. Ayers considers it a badge of honor, earned by his early appeals for racial justice and his decades of advocacy for progressive causes and national Democratic Party candidates.

Ayers found welcome from afar. His dispatches from the South—engaging, literate, sometimes tart, frequently funny, and very different from the snarling faces of provincial demagogues—appeared in the New York Times and on National Public Radio. The Star made national best lists, representing journalism’s dream of an independent, crusading local newspaper worldly wise enough to write about Russia and South Africa, Shakespeare, and Live Aid concerts.

The terrain at home is tougher.

Wayne Flynt, an Alabama historian and a fellow combatant in battles for the state’s mind and heart, knows the territory. Community to Alabamians means don’t have any foreign ideas, he says. In contrast, Brandt Ayers and his father before him always believed that what Anniston needed was a voice from outside, and they proudly presented a picture of an alternate reality, Flynt explains. "The amazing thing about the Anniston Star is that it has survived," he says.

So how do we explain that Brandt Ayers and the Star survived, even thrived, while failing more than prevailing in contests for local public opinion? Two admirers of Ayers, though far apart in their professional paths, converge on an explanation.

Hodding Carter III, like Ayers, was a privileged heir to a family newspaper, the Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville, Mississippi. He later became a national figure in politics, on television, and as the president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. As young men, both Ayers and Carter ventured away from their small-town Southern roots, but they had returned home when their newspapers’ defining question arose: What should the owners and editors say to their communities about the civil rights movement and the fair treatment of black citizens?

Ayers, like Carter and his father and unlike many other Southern newspaper patriarchs, rejected merely following the local majority opinion. Instead Ayers told his community that change must come. He said Anniston’s white people, the ones who thought of themselves as good people, must take responsibility for the worst that was done in the name of segregation. He counseled against the violent resistance advocated by politicians and often executed by a thuggish underground. Resistance came to define Alabama during the 1960s. But in Anniston, Ayers called for peaceful negotiation in print, organized citizens’ groups in person, and steered his city onto a different path.

What made Brandy distinct was not that he chose to speak at all, but that he chose to speak to call to account, Carter notes, and he did that as a loving critic.

From the outside, Carter continues, "the message was ‘You’re hopeless.’ But from Ayers and the Anniston Star the message was ‘You’re better than this.’" That didn’t stop the name-calling or the shots through the newspaper office windows during the toughest times, but the voice of a loving critic endured in hundreds of editorials and columns over the decades.

George Smith, now the seventy-eight-year-old community columnist for the Anniston Star, grew up in the newsroom as a young sports writer when Ayers was a cub reporter, albeit a publisher-in-waiting. Ayers refers to Smith as his ambassador to the recreation rooms and church halls. Smith jokes, I’m his token redneck.

Smith, who writes about such things as the memories of a ninety-one-year-old and the accomplishments of a National Merit Scholar, is a welcome figure around Anniston. He is sometimes called on to explain his friend Ayers, a visitor to the White House and a globe-trotting advocate of the candidates most people in Anniston vote against. Smith can think of a range of explanations for the relationship between Ayers and his town. I think they love to cuss him, he muses. Ayers can be tough, no pushover in a confrontation. But he has always remained accessible; his phone number is listed. He makes contributions to worthy causes, and his newspaper’s reporting helps keep the courthouse honest and the sports fans happy.

In the end Smith returns to the same quality that Carter sees as the heart of journalism practiced by a native son in the town where he grew up. He loves this town, Smith says, and the town tolerates him.

Ayers gets his hair cut and his ideas vetted at an Anniston barbershop where football, religion, and politics have always held the floor in a mostly peaceable fashion. In his columns, Ayers calls the shop a university of common wisdom. Here the definition of tolerance takes on a warm tone. Proprietor Jim Turner, who describes himself as a conservative Republican, says, Mr. Ayers stands on a point because he believes it. I can respect that. Ayers’s personal barber, Cindy Stephens, who has been with the shop for thirty-six years, says she can’t recall when Ayers has ever changed her opinion on an issue. But he’s made me aware of a lot of things, she acknowledges.

The columns in this collection deal with milestones during the second half of the twentieth century through the beginning of the twenty-first: the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the civil rights crisis nationally and at home, the emergence and passing of a New South movement, the Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton presidencies, the transformation from a solid Democratic South to a solid Republican South, the decline of Anniston’s image from model city to toxic city, and the nation’s election of a black president in 2008.

The columns reflect Ayers’s roles as participant, chronicler, and critic—an insider and an outsider—in conversations and events at home and around the nation and the world. In part he remained an Anniston émigré, finding respite in journalism fellowships, in travel abroad, at gatherings devoted to national issues, and in the occasional company of presidents. But Ayers was also the inheritor of an Anniston history built on the noblesse oblige of its Yankee founders, and he became a part of the Anniston civic establishment. Ayers remained confident in a rightful role for traditional city leaders while he relayed the claims to justice by black reformers and the claims to pride and prosperity by George Wallace’s people, poor and working-class whites.

A signature of his work, an unapologetic emphasis on world affairs, is a family legacy. Brandt Ayers’s grandfather was a medical missionary in China. His father, Colonel Harry Mell Ayers, who preceded him as owner and publisher of the Star, countered the criticism of international commentary in 1949. It still is true that ‘he who will not take heed of events far away will soon find trouble near at hand,’ he wrote. Brandt Ayers too has pushed against a journalistic tide away from international coverage; he has made connections between Main Street and the world in his own writing and has encouraged it in the coverage by the Star newsroom.

Ayers demonstrates a mastery of information and ideas when he writes about national and international topics, and there are periods in which he wrote more about these matters than about his hometown. His friend Hodding Carter says he was an assiduous student and reporter, as well as an enthusiastic late-night companion, on trips dismissed as junkets by newsroom critics back home. But it is the softer side of Ayers’s Southern sensibility—his admiration for manners, reticence and neighborliness, pleasure in storytelling, and tolerance of eccentricity—that may seem especially distinct. Who else would look for, much less find, a kindred spirit between his counselors at the Anniston barbershop and the rock performers and fans at 1985’s Live Aid concerts around the world? And who but Ayers, always seeking reconciliation between the South and the nation, would urge the new president, Barack Obama, who had been rejected by voters throughout the Deep South, to visit and sit and talk with the men on the bench outside the Country Corner store in Shinbone Valley?

Another part of Ayers’s legacy, glimpsed in his columns that applaud the new books and other triumphs of Anniston Star graduates, is building a haven that nurtures other writers, journalists, and contrarian thinkers. The Star stretched horizons for the historian Wayne Flynt. I felt I grew up in a place more like New York, he recalls. Famously, Ayers brought young reporters from northeastern colleges to Anniston. They arrived with newcomers’ eyes, a zeal for practicing their craft on the locals, and, according to the locals, a laughable lack of back-road driving skills. He also took in the talented strivers from nearby who were less schooled and less knowing of the world outside Anniston but who had uncommon determination.

One of those was Rick Bragg, who won a Pulitzer Prize when he worked for the New York Times and has written a series of books about his family and others who lived in an Alabama of closing mills, one good dress, food stamps, and broken cars. Ayers celebrates, in person and in print, the triumph of a boy from Possum Trot with talent. Bragg calls Ayers one of the few rich people I’ve ever liked.

For Bragg, the Ayers family decision to establish a newspaper in the Alabama highlands and make it a good one created a cultural slingshot that propelled him to a different future. Wanting to be a writer and finding a place right there that would let you do that—it wasn’t just a paycheck, it was survival, he recalls. Ayers and the Star gave him a view beyond Alabama’s old bad legacies and introduced him to better ideas. Besides, he says, you can’t be mad at somebody when he’s asking how your mama is.

In the twenty-first century, Ayers continues to write and contend in his eighth decade. He has no intention of abandoning that mission, even after, in his words, we do the practical thing—drop dead.

In 2003 Ayers wrote to his readers explaining why he and his family decided to turn down a sizable offer to sell the Star and would instead will the newspaper to a foundation. The foundation’s mission would be to keep the newspaper strong and independent and locally controlled—to preserve it as a community newspaper. It was, he said, a gift of caring and commitment to a hometown, one that his fellow citizens can choose to enjoy and to cuss.

PART I

The 1960s

An Editorial Voice Forged by Crisis

Commentary

CAROL NUNNELLEY

IN LATE 1963 H. BRANDT AYERS left Camelot, the life he loved as a correspondent in John F. Kennedy’s Washington, and came home to Anniston, Alabama. He was summoned to help his ailing father, the owner and publisher of the Anniston Star, and to take a place in the leadership of the newspaper and the city.

Brandt Ayers returned with a rare turn of mind for a white Alabamian, even at his father’s famously progressive Star and in a town founded as an experiment in civic good. He believed that the civil rights revolution would prevail. He admired the Kennedys. He respected North Carolina leaders who calmed racial tensions and built economic and educational momentum. He disdained a South that, as he put it, was armed to resist.

We came home as strangers, Ayers recalls of the reception he and his wife, Josephine, got from others who had been born to Anniston’s aristocracy but had never left their hometown. Events came tumbling down, and the shadow of Alabama’s segregationist governor, George Wallace, reached everywhere.

In Anniston and throughout Alabama in the 1960s, the Vietnam War, women’s rights, gay rights, and space travel were news. The civil rights revolution was local and personal for virtually everyone. The policies of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were framed in the nation’s capital, granting black citizens the rights to vote, to work for equal pay, and to use public places, but they were played out in schools, businesses, and government in Anniston.

For much of Alabama, the 1960s were years of resistance. Governor Wallace, in his 1962 inaugural address, called for segregation forever. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. challenged segregation in Birmingham, and young marchers were met with snarling dogs and fire hoses. King pushed for voting rights in Selma, and state troopers wielded clubs against the demonstrators. Klansmen bombed a black church in Birmingham and killed four young girls.

But early in the decade, Anniston began a rare journey for a Deep South city. Its leaders were committed to communication between the races and to peaceful change. Ayers was part of that quest, and it forged his editorial voice. The beginning for him was his response to the killing of black Anniston foundry worker Willie Brewster, shot on his way home from work by white night riders. The end for him was his role in founding an organization of young Southerners intent on a second New South.

In 1960 Anniston’s roots as a post–Civil War model city experiment—in which factory owners provided good wages and schools in pursuit of an orderly, pleasant industrial city—were weakening. Nevertheless, a heritage remained. Most people who ran factories, banks, and stores weren’t managers from afar but people who had built lives in Anniston. They believed they could and should guide the city away from danger.

That year Ayers moved to North Carolina to cover state government for the Raleigh Times and saw what he considered a normal, progressive approach to race relations and economic growth for the South—a normality that proved rare.

In 1961 Anniston thugs, led by local Ku Klux Klan leader Kenneth Adams, attacked two buses of Freedom Riders. The photograph of a burning bus carried Anniston’s name and Adams’s message around the world.

Little changed at first, according to Reverend J. Phillips Noble, the minister of Anniston’s white First Presbyterian Church, who wrote about the time in his book Beyond the Burning Bus: The Civil Rights Revolution in a Southern Town. Noble would be central to the changes that were coming. In 1962 two black ministers, Reverends Nimrod Q. Reynolds and William B. McClain, asked Noble to help them change life for blacks in Anniston. He agreed, and a journey of small steps began. Eventually, ministerial associations were integrated and moderates controlled the city commission. But in May 1963 white men shot into a black church and the homes of two black families. The same week, the commission created the biracial Human Relations Council of the City of Anniston and appointed Noble chairman. President Kennedy praised Anniston, and Governor Wallace complained.

WHITE and COLORED signs disappeared on drinking fountains, and a few lunch counters were integrated. But on a September Sunday a white mob attacked Reynolds and McClain as they arrived to enter the previously whites-only downtown library. Fellow Human Relations Council members and city officials agreed that violence must not prevail. On Monday an integrated group walked together into the library.

This was the hometown described by Noble to which Brandt Ayers returned in 1963. By late 1964, he was managing editor of the Star. He bravely, if foolishly, ran on a slate of Democratic Party electors pledged to Lyndon Johnson, which was doomed to be crushed by a Wallace slate. After the race he delivered a speech, You Can’t Eat Magnolias, around the state calling for sensible economic development rather than defiance. Passage of Johnson’s sweeping Civil Rights Act led to a Republican tide for Barry Goldwater that turned the state from a solid (white) Democratic Alabama to a solid (white) Republican Alabama. In Anniston the carefully crafted peace was in danger of unraveling.

In September 1964 the advocates of faster progress for Anniston’s black citizens placed a full-page ad in the Star headlined Anniston Manifesto. The message disdained the emphasis on order and peace and called for equal representation in jobs and accommodations immediately. Nine days afterward, a bomb exploded outside the store owned by Miller Sproull, who had run for commissioner as an advocate of the Human Relations Council. In October Klan leader Adams began holding white man’s rallies.

Pressure for civil rights changes continued. Black complainants sued Anniston businesses, including Adams’s gas station, for refusing them service. In January 1965 the school boards agreed to sign a nondiscrimination pledge in order to keep federal funds.

Beginning in February, Adams and his associates marched for weeks in front of Kitchin’s Department Store, which was owned by a Human Relations Council member. In March a tear gas canister exploded in the store.

There could hardly have been a more demanding time to come of age as a journalist and as a community leader. I tended to think that the generation ahead was a little timid, Ayers recalls. In March 1965 five hundred members of Anniston’s establishment, including Ayers, signed a full-page Where We Stand statement in the Star urging citizens to act in a responsible, realistic, and thoughtful manner.

But the violence continued. In May a bomb exploded at the Pine Ridge Christian Methodist Episcopal church in Friendship, near Anniston. In July Adams and the National States Rights Party kicked off more white man’s rallies. After the first one, an employee of the Adams Oil Company attacked a black student outside Anniston High School. After the second rally, Damon Strange and two friends drove around looking for a black victim, shot into a car carrying four foundry workers, and hit Willie Brewster.

In an editorial titled We Make Our Choice Now, Ayers called for Anniston’s people to confront the ugly racial violence. Brandt and Josephine joined the small group that was organized the evening after the shooting by physician T. C. Donald. Within hours, pledges raised twenty thousand dollars as a reward for information about the shooting. On Sunday a story in the Star announced the reward, and an ad signed by three hundred people, including Brandt and Josephine, denounced violence.

Willie Brewster died that Sunday.

The reward money lured a witness, and Strange, an employee of Adams, stood trial. Anniston faced becoming a new civil rights battleground if the expected not-guilty verdict came from an all-white jury. Instead, in December 1965 the jury found Strange guilty of murder, a verdict Ayers welcomed as a momentous entry in the annals of Southern justice.

For the most part, the later years of the 1960s were a time of restored hope. Early after his return to Anniston, Ayers recalls, his feeling was sometimes I just hate my beloved South. A 1967–1968 Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University gave Ayers a respite, and he came to understand the sense of dislocation that many Southerners felt in the North.

In Alabama in 1968, Albert Brewer, a man who cared about governing, became governor. Ayers expected to return and campaign for Robert F. Kennedy in his run for president, but the man he knew in Washington was slain on the night he won the California primary. From Kennedy’s funeral train, Ayers saw a solitary working man, who might have voted for Wallace, saluting Bobby with a bouquet of jonquils. With that connection of seeming opposites in mind, he returned home more reconciled to his South.

Ayers was invited to join a group of young Southerners who met at the Quail Roost Farm in Rougemont, North Carolina, and created a group to champion a new, more prosperous, and just South. Ayers was to become a leading voice in this group, named the L. Q. C. Lamar Society after a Mississippi secessionist who became a spokesman for reconciliation after the Civil War. Ayers’s view, shared with his Anniston readers, was that there was reason to be skeptical that the new group could accomplish its ambitions. Nonetheless, he admitted, he dreamed of a diverse group of Southerners united by devotion to their native region.

On Race and Civil Rights

The March on Washington

AUGUST 28, 1963

NEW YORK TIMES EDITOR SCOTTY RESTON and I decided to cover the event together. We had a tip that American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell would stage an early-morning counter-demonstration and agreed to meet on the mall before daylight. Memories of that long, long day are so vivid that I see them in present tense, just as I wrote it:

They came as if to a picnic, with their songs, their hard-boiled eggs and fried chicken—and their demands for freedom and jobs. Then, almost magically, they were gone. The vast body of the 210,000 marchers—hot, dirty, bone-tired—were gone by 9 P.M.

They left this: discarded leaflets blowing in an autumnal wind Thursday morning, papers missed by the sanitation crews plastered to concrete in the flat, straight, drenching rain that dropped when the wind stopped.

And they also left this: vast respect for District of Columbia authorities and the Negro leaders who moved this unbelievable, living mass in and out of the nation’s capital without incident.

Finally, they left: the unshakable conviction that the revolution started in Birmingham this spring did not end Wednesday. Negroes will march