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Now
I often say on my radio show that politics
is a strange, almost a ridiculous profession. I don't believe
it is a profession because there are no qualifications to be
met except the ability to hustle the voters. Preaching is almost
as bad. To be a politician or preacher, all you need to do is
announce you are one. There are no educational requirements or
professional examinations. Hell, even a plumber and an electrician
must qualify for a license to practice their calling. Any nut,
however, can run for public office, and far too many do.
A disgusted young black mother
called the show in total outrage because both the black city
council president in Selma and the black superintendent of city
schools were holding back on purchasing land and constructing
a much-needed high school building for black children and primarily
because the white minority opposes it. The mother angrily said,
" We must get rid of these ignorant black people in public
positions with their personal agendas." She called them
"self promoters," and said, "we need leaders who
will help protect our babies."
I agree 100%.
A black leader, political or
otherwise, in Selma, Alabama who opposes the new school project
for whatever manufactured reasons is clearly a sellout. A few
days after the angry black mother called, a black educator called
and said we must get rid of every black leader who eagerly supports
white interests, but concocts reasons to oppose black interests.
I said to him that we must first learn how to motivate blacks
to go to the polls in such large numbers so there will be no
tokens and no "Uncle Tom" sellouts. That is the only
way to do it. 17,000 of us didn't even bother to vote in the
last county primary election.
On the other hand, I watched
a few politicians who weren't much when elected to office but
who matured in office, but most politicians do not. President
Harry S. Truman is a rare exception. President Lyndon B. Johnson
is another. Johnson was an outspoken racist until he began to
hanker to be president but he always had a deep compassion for
poor people, even poor black people. Johnson was dirt poor himself
until he was about 30 years old. In 1957, two years after the
Montgomery Bus Boycott caught the attention of the world and
pushed civil rights to center stage, Johnson, Senate Majority
Leader, began changing his image with great cunning and pushed
through the senate the first civil rights bill since Reconstruction.
Later as President, he forced through a reluctant congress both
the Public Accommodations Bill of 1964 and the Voting Rights
Bill of 1965. Johnson won his first full term as President in
1964 by a landslide.
Years before Johnson moved
to the White House, he referred to blacks as niggers. Johnson
was a complicated man--ambitious, a womanizer, ruthless, racist
and a crooked politician who stole at least one statewide election.
On the other hand, he appointed the first black person, Thurgood
Marshall, to the U.S. Supreme Court. Unlike many politicians,
Johnson actually matured in public office.
President Harry S. Truman,
a Confederate sympathizer from the border state of Missouri,
achieved the impossible in civil rights in the 1940s before Johnson
had garnered any real power in Washington. Truman closest associates
were white racist Southerners (Dixiecrats) who controlled both
houses of congress. These racists used the word "nigger"
openly in speeches on the floor of congress and while a law school
student in Washington, D.C., I used to sit in the visitor's gallery
in congress and hear my own representative refer to we blacks
as "niggers."
Initially, Truman was not elected
President and came to that office via the Vice Presidency after
President Franklin D. Roosevelt died in 1945. Truman was as beholden
to the powerful Dixiecrats in Congress as had been Franklin D.
Roosevelt, but unlike Roosevelt, Truman refused to bow and place
politics over principle. He was outraged over the lynching of
black people in the South and ordered both the Justice Department
and the FBI to open investigations and prosecute the Ku Kluxers.
Later, all white, all male Southern juries acquitted each Kluxer
and Truman's popularity in the Deep white South dipped to a new
low.
The acquittals so outraged
Truman that he signed and issued three unprecedented executive
orders that sent the white South into fits. First, he ordered
all federal agencies wherever situated in the country to racially
integrate. Second, he ordered racial integration of the armed
forces. If that were not enough, he created a new board, named
it the Fair Employment Practices Commission and appointed two
of the most radical blacks in the country to serve on the commission.
After that, hardly anyone, except Truman, thought he had any
chance of winning a full term as president in 1948. They were
all wrong.
Strom Thurmond ran a 100% racist
and outrageous Third Party campaign in 1948 against Truman and
only carried Dixie. Republican Tom Dewey, Governor of New York,
also ran but Truman won. It is interesting, at least to me, that
Thurmond (the hypocrite) could stay out of a certain black woman's
bed long enough to run for anything. Truman matured in office
and he also helped the county begin to mature on the important
issue of race. He came into office small and went out large,
but quite unpopular. It is open to question if his order to drop
two atomic bombs on people of color was a correct decision. I
believe it was a horrible mistake. Truman is rated now by most
historians as one of the great presidents.
The late and last white mayor
of Selma, Joe T. Smitherman, like Truman, was only a high school
graduate, but ruled local politics for more than three decades
by moving without mercy against anyone or any hint of opposition.
There was more fear in white Selma of Smitherman than in black
Selma. One thing, however, he would never do was to sell out
white people. Can you even imagine Smitherman "sucking-up"
to black folks by opposing a new school project for white children?
I don't know if Smitherman matured in office, but civil rights
laws and court decisions changed him from a loud mouth racist
to a practicing integrationist.
White leaders went into hiding
when Smitherman and I pushed successfully for a bond issue to
pave the muddy streets in black Selma. Little wonder white leaders
don't want a new school building for our children. White leaders
were 100% silent during segregation when black voices cried out
in great pain, in misery and for justice! Little wonder they
don't want a new school building for black children. White leaders
looked the other way when innocent people were humiliated, beaten
bloody on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965 (known as "Bloody
Sunday" in the violently aborted voting rights march to
Montgomery when the Alabama State Patrol savagely beat the marchers).
These same white leaders and their progeny oppose a new school
building for the grandchildren of the bloody victims who suffered
on the bridge.
LORD, please help us!
J.L. Chestnut, Jr. is a civil rights attorney in Selma,
Alabama. He is the founder of Chestnut, Sanders and Sanders which
is the largest black law firm in Alabama. Born in Selma and,
after graduating from Howard University Law School, he began
practicing law in Selma in 1958. He started as the only black
lawyer in the town and has been challenging the establishment
since then. His law firm now owns two radio stations in Selma
and Mr. Chestnut hosts a radio talk show three days a week touted
as the most popular radio show in south and central Alabama.
He is the author of "Black
in Selma" with Julia Cass (1989 Farrar, Straus and Giroux),
and writes a weekly column called the "Hard Cold Truth".
He can be reached at tmarshall@csspca.com.
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