A Writer's Life (24 page)

The trial was well publicized within the state. I had read about it in the Alabama newspapers during the end of my senior year in college, and the trial was mentioned in some of the phone conversations I had with Alabama friends after I had graduated and moved to New York in the summer of 1953. But I was then not overly interested in William Earl Fikes. I was preoccupied with my work as a news assistant at the
Times
and was also anxiously awaiting notification of when and where I would begin my two-year military obligation as a second lieutenant in the tank corps. I was twenty-one, had rented an L-shaped room month to month in a Greenwich Village brownstone, and was living a narrowly defined existence on a day-to-day basis, wondering more about where I was going than where I was, or where I had been. Several years would pass before I would be reminded of the name William Earl Fikes and learn that his trial in 1953 had been a prelude to the national civil rights movement begun in Alabama by Martin Luther King, Jr.

I would be made aware of this through my subsequent interviews with, and from the published writings of, J. L. Chestnut, Jr., a black attorney who was a native of Selma and whose law practice there, beginning in 1958, would in time become heavily engaged in freeing from jail and defending in court a large number of black civil rights activists.

I first met Chestnut after I had been sent to Selma by the
Times
in 1965 to help cover the King-led demonstrations. Although I did not then know it, this would be my final year in journalism, and the Selma story my last major assignment as a
Times
man. I had been a reporter for ten years, having been elevated from news assistant to the writing staff in 1955 shortly after I had returned from Germany upon completing my military tour. A month before arriving in Selma, I had turned thirty-three. I had been married for six years to Nan, then an associate editor at Random House, who was about to publish her first best-seller,
Papa Hemingway
, and my wife and I were residing in a rent-controlled apartment within a dilapidated East Side brownstone in Manhattan that we would one day buy, sharing space at the time with two Siamese cats, a one-year-old daughter, and her buxom young red-haired governess from Bavaria, whose charms were not lost on the neighborhood's delivery boys and doormen.

While I had loved working at the
Times
, after ten years I was no longer adapting well to the daily space limitations, to the deadline pressures, and to feelings that whatever I had finished writing was not really finished—there was so much more to be learned and written about than what I had researched and published in the
Times
. This fact frustrated me throughout the weeks of my prolonged assignment in Selma, perhaps because here I was in a familiar part of my past that was no longer so familiar, and I was very curious about why and how it was changing; and here I also realized—and my acquaintanceship with J. L. Chestnut, Jr., heightened this realization—how incomplete had been my education at the University of Alabama and how little aware I had long been of the common struggles and adversities known to Chestnut and the rest of the black people of my generation who had been born in Alabama and been thwarted by the traditions that had dominated southern social life well into the middle of the twentieth century.

I referred previously to the “lingering sense of separateness” endemic to my southern Italian forebears and the families of my southern classmates at the University of Alabama, but what I did not take into account was the separateness in the extreme that had been historically inherent in the lives of black southerners in such places as Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma, and my old college town of Tuscaloosa. If J. L. Chestnut, Jr., and I had been born a generation later, we might have been classmates at the University of Alabama. After meeting him in 1965, and continuing to correspond with him and visit him after I had left the
Times
, it was apparent to me that he and I had much in common, had many shared aspirations and standards, and had we been classmates and friends, my
education at the University of Alabama would have been less deprived and I would have no doubt been a wiser reporter and writer than I was when I arrived to cover the Selma story in the spring of 1965.

Chestnut was then nearly thirty-five, the only black attorney in Selma—a short, stockily constructed, somewhat remote, and always formal man invariably dressed in a manner appropriate to the court, meaning mainly white shirts with dark suits and ties and well-shined black shoes. He gave the impression that he was taller than his five-foot-eight-inch frame because of his broad chest, his commanding demeanor, and his booming baritone voice. His close-cropped kinky head of shiny black hair was receding to the crown of his head in a way that resembled a skull cap; however, his penetrating bright-eyed expression, ever inquiring yet withholding judgment, was his most salient characteristic. Though he was less than two years older than myself, I privately deferred to him as if he were much older and more mature, a situation that had nothing to do with our respective ages and everything to do with who he was, and what he had been forced to overcome in order to become who he was. He was well known only in Selma, where the black people admired and depended upon him and the white people saw him as a notoriously irrepressible force in their legal system. He was nevertheless the only black man in Selma who thought highly enough of himself to write about himself, and his memoir—
Black in Selma
, coauthored with Julia Cass—takes the reader inside the head of a native son who was influenced by Selma's traditions but whose perceptions were altered by the circumstances of the Fikes trial, and who finally lived out his life in Selma long after the city had ceased to attract national headlines and had been abandoned by the last procession of out-of-state demonstrators singing “We Shall Overcome.”

When the case of the attempted rape of the mayor's daughter was brought to trial in 1953, J. L. Chestnut, Jr., was a twenty-two-year-old law student attending classes at Howard University, a black college in Washington, D.C.; but he returned home to witness the performance of Fikes's defense counselor from Birmingham, Peter Hall, a black attorney whose impressive prior efforts with NAACP-sponsored cases were known to Chestnut and to his fellow students and the faculty at Howard. Chestnut stayed at his parents' home in Selma. His father formerly owned a grocery store in the black quarter. His mother performed many chores for white people, and knew how to maneuver herself socially and productively without ever seeming to be crossing the color line. She had scrupulously set aside her savings for the college education of her son and only child, J.L., who had inherited his only-initials name from his father, J. L. Chestnut, Sr., who had been so named by
his
mother because she had once
been acquainted with a prominent white banker in Selma who had these initials.

J. L. Chestnut, Jr., did not intend to resettle in Selma after getting his law degree, assuming that to open a practice in his hometown would lead only to frustration and starvation. Other black professionals in Selma—physicians, dentists, educators—could make a living catering to the needs of their own kind, but blacks in trouble with the law were better off having a white attorney, inasmuch as they would be appearing in front of a white jury and judge. So Chestnut thought he would hang up his shingle in Harlem or Washington, D.C., or somewhere else far from Alabama, and he would return to Selma primarily for family visits—or, as in this instance, to see how William Earl Fikes's lead lawyer, Peter Hall, would fare in a courthouse where people were accustomed to seeing black men working only as janitors.

On the eve of the trial, at a social club for black people in Selma, Hall sat on a bar stool, slowly sipping whiskey and explaining to the well-wishers who surrounded him (in the crowd was young Chestnut) how he intended to attack Selma's rigged legal system and its policy of blocking black residents from serving on juries. Hall was a handsome, slim, light-skinned, mustachioed man in his late thirties. He wore a well-cut suit, which Chestnut admired up close, wondering what it had cost. “I don't know if Fikes is guilty,” Hall was saying, speaking in a clear and authoritative voice without a trace of a southern accent, although he had been raised in Birmingham, “but it is damn certain that the system is guilty. And I intend to try the system while the circuit solicitor is trying Fikes.”

These were very bold words coming out of a black man's mouth in Selma in 1953, and it occurred to Chestnut that Hall was maybe emboldened by what he was drinking and might turn into a shrinking violet when facing the white judge and jury. But on the following morning, it was the same Peter Hall—stouthearted, articulate, and clearly confident—who entered the courtroom a few minutes late, and then at his own pace headed toward the elevated desk of the judge to introduce several pretrial motions that advocated, among other things, the dismissal of the jury due to their prejudicial selection and the freedom of Fikes, since his confession had been extracted via “Gestapo-like tactics.”

Perhaps because the judge was so bedazzled by the presence of a pertinacious black attorney, he neither censured nor interrupted him, and as J. L. Chestnut, Jr., would recount many years later in his book:

But Peter Hall did succeed in saving Fikes's life. After the three-day trial had resulted in Fikes's conviction and the death sentence, Hall got the conviction overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court on the grounds that his client, a man of deficient mental and verbal capabilities, had been wrongly queried by the police and had also been improperly sequestered. While Fikes would remain in jail for the next twenty years, the trial itself, as Chestnut wrote, “rallied the black community as it had never been rallied before.” Black parents had brought their children into the courtroom to get a look at the valorous attorney, Hall, who was not “Uncle Tom-ing” in front of the white legal establishment. This valor was also in evidence two years later, in 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, bringing Martin Luther King, Jr., to her aid. What Dr. King and Peter Hall were doing in the South convinced J. L. Chestnut, Jr., that he should return home after getting his law degree in Washington in 1958. He would become Selma's first full-time black attorney. He would join the courtroom battle against a legal system that fostered racial injustice. He knew he was needed and the timing was right.

“Rumblings of change were coming from the South,” he wrote. “Alabama was where the action was.”

S
ELMA
, A
LABAMA
—
MARCH 7, 1965
.

I
T WAS A SUNNY BUT CHILLY
S
UNDAY MORNING AS MORE THAN FIVE
hundred civil rights demonstrators made their way through the main business district of the city, ignoring the stares of the white people and defying the court order of a local judge as they headed in the direction of the bridge and the highway, marching two abreast and carrying satchels filled with extra clothing and shoes for the fifty-mile journey to the governor's office in Montgomery.

I stood with other reporters along the grassy edge of the highway, beyond the bridge, watching the oncoming procession and also the helmeted white men from the state police and the sheriff's posse who had set up a roadblock two hundred yards in the distance. Except for the sounds of the clacking hoofs and the baying of the posse's horses, the prolonged silence hovering around us was interrupted now and then by catcalls coming from behind me just as the first pair of marchers had descended from the bridge.

“Here come the niggers” was what I heard, and, turning, I saw about thirty white male spectators gathered in front of a small drive-in restaurant, most of them wearing dungarees with plaid shirts and peaked caps, and one of them, a scrawny teenage boy who was the heckler, waved a long pole on which was attached a faded Confederate flag.

On the other side of the road, paying no attention to the flag-bearer, was J. L. Chestnut, Jr. He was wearing a black suit, white shirt, and blue tie. He stood on a flatbed truck that was parked near a ditch, and he was stretching up on his toes to get a better view of the marchers. A few other black people, whom I did not recognize, watched from behind him. I had introduced myself to him earlier in the morning in the black part of town, where the marchers had lined up in front of Brown Chapel, a redbrick church that since the early 1960s had been the gathering place for civil
rights organizing and protesting. When Chestnut had returned home with a law degree in 1958, he lived in a housing project across the street from Brown Chapel, and in time he became the legal adviser to the preacher and others who had the will and energy to challenge the existing order.

Although I had not yet intruded myself into Chestnut's busy schedule for an interview, I already had collected information about him from journalists who specialized in civil rights coverage, and I was impressed with his unique status as the only black officer in a white man's court. When he had started his practice in Selma seven years before, earning a meager livelihood dealing mainly with black people's wills, divorces, bar fights, and petty crimes like shoplifting, he had been socially ostracized by nearly all of Selma's white attorneys and had been welcomed to the courthouse with stern words from the probate judge.