A Writer's Life (37 page)

White students represented barely 25 percent of the total enrollment of about six thousand youths attending public schools in 1987. On school days, these 1,500 whites intermingled with 4,500 black students in the corridors, cafeterias, gymnasiums, and classrooms of the eleven buildings that constituted Selma's public school real estate. The largest building was occupied by the fourteen hundred students attending Selma High School. There were also two middle-school buildings, one on the east side of town, the other on the west side, which had a combined enrollment of thirteen hundred students who were taught in the sixth-, seventh-, or eighth-grade classes. Finally there was a scattering of eight elementary school buildings that accommodated the more than three thousand younger students who attended classes ranging from kindergarten to the fifth grade.

Isolated from the public school system were two private schools in Selma that catered only to white children, at an annual cost to their parents or guardians of about two thousand dollars, and the combined number
of students attending these two institutions was slightly more than eight hundred. Roussell wanted to prevent this figure from increasing, as it surely would if heightened racial tensions in his schools prompted white parents to transfer their children into one of the private schools. And there were also other places that might attract them. There were public schools in the county that had a higher percentage of white pupils and there were a few private schools (whites only) in the outer boroughs that were less expensive than the two in Selma and were at a convenient driving distance from the city. But where these schools existed was unimportant to him—he saw them all as sites of “white flight,” and this term and its possible consequences both disheartened and perturbed him.

He had not come to Selma to oversee buildings in which the student body had once been exclusively white, and had then been integrated, and had then become exclusively black. His position would be reduced to that of a ghetto administrator, and it would also be a setback for the civil rights movement, which he had benefitted from and identified with. The movement had finally succeeded during the mid-1950s in enrolling black students in white classrooms, providing young blacks and whites with an equal opportunity for a broader education, and also a chance as classmates to learn more about one another and ideally promote greater understanding and tolerance. What a pity it would be if the victory over school segregation in the 1950s were followed at century's end by school segregation of another type. He would strive mightly against this happening, wanting neither to see his white students defecting from his schools nor their families relocating their homes to other places, depriving Selma of taxpayers, consumers, and white parents with a vested interest in his school system.

Having said this did not mean he would allow himself to be subverted by his white supporters, who might raise the issue of white flight as a threat to justify reining him in, to exert pressure on him to behave in accord with the will of white parents in the hope of retaining their children. He knew he could not become the white folks' hostage. He must maintain his independence from the town's white leaders as well as the black ones. He was an educator, not a mediator in race relations. He had been summoned to Selma to deal with the city's troubled schools, which had a 36 percent dropout rate prior to his arrival. He had been assured by the white people who hired him that they believed in integrated public schools as much as he did, letting him know that they could well afford to place their children in private schools but that they nonetheless saw public schools as essential pillars in the pluralistic community they preferred and wished to cultivate. He had been provided with an annual operating
budget of $18 million, larger than any agency in the city; and so with this substantial sum of money, and with the biracial backing of many city boosters, Dr. Roussell was confident in the fall of 1987 that he could succeed in upgrading Selma's schools academically and could create within them a desirable environment that would reduce truancy and encourage a higher degree of prideful participation from the parents and students of both races.

A year later, his efforts had earned him a praiseworthy report from the school board and congratulatory comments throughout the community. Parents were pleased that he had quickly introduced their children to the new technology, installing computer labs in the schools, thanks to a $1.2 million federal grant he had requested and received not long after he had assumed his duties. He also brought professional counselors into the schools to meet and assist the needs of pupils whose low or failing grades and habitual truancy were thought to be linked to their crises at home, or their drug use, or their dyslexia or other physical disorders and personal problems. In a move intending to improve the efficiency of the members of his faculty, he often granted them free time so they could attend workshops and lectures that were held outside the city and featured prominent educators. While he kept abreast of the latest teaching methods being advocated elsewhere, Dr. Roussell kept a vigilant watch over what was going on within his jurisdiction, and the people of the town became accustomed to seeing him driving around in his maroon Cadillac, visiting one school after another. After greeting his principals he would make the rounds, observing his teachers at work in their classrooms, and he noted how the students were responding.

At the completion of the first year, some teachers were transferred from the high school to one of the middle schools, or from the middle schools up to the high school, although it was not always made clear to them why they were being moved. These teachers began to complain among themselves. There was also some grumbling being expressed around town by the proprietors of those businesses that had long done work for the schools—as printers, as maintenance contractors, and as providers of other services—and now learned of other firms taking over these contracts. Roussell was making changes, decisively but arbitrarily, it seemed to some people. Their criticisms were muted, however, until his popularity began to wane, which it did during the middle of his second year, when certain unfortunate happenings within the schools began to call into question the autonomy that he had assumed was his due.

Among these incidents were a number of publicized interracial quarrels involving students, one of which began after a group of white youths
took exception to those black classmates who appeared in school wearing African medallions, and a fistfight erupted after a white was overheard to say, “Hey, nigger, go back to Africa.” There were also allegations of unfairness in the amount of punishment that a white faculty member had meted out against the black boys on the track team who were accused of boisterous “partying” as compared to what the whites on the debate team had received for a similar offense. After a white member of the school board had become displeased by Dr. Roussell's tardiness in replying to an inquiry relating to the curriculum, which the latter believed was beyond the former's right to review, the board member began to circulate a memo indicating that Dr. Roussell was showing signs of “arrogance” and “excessive independence”—and this opinion soon drew concurring nods in the black community as well as the white. Members of the town's leading black businessmen's club had already been unpersuaded by his explanation that he was too busy to attend one of their social functions and deliver a speech. And the white couple who had held a cocktail party in his honor at their home had been offended when he arrived one hour late.

His difficulties in Selma came to the forefront, however, when he decided to discontinue the schools' trilevel scholastic rating system, which Rose Sanders had been complaining about. It was not that Dr. Roussell had chosen to ally himself with the Chestnut-Sanders anti-Smitherman faction, but, rather, that after the eleven-member school board had decided not to renew his contract (six white members had voted to replace him; five black members voted to retain him) the Chestnut group saw Roussell's plight as a racial issue that might arouse black passion and promote unity in the ghetto. Roussell himself was not pleased to find himself in this situation, being caught in the middle of a polarized community, and yet it made him more receptive to those who might possibly help him hold on to his job.

J. L. Chestnut, Jr., was clearly
the
ascending black power broker at this time, one who was starting to pull the political strings in the ghetto so effectively that he had all but delegitimized the black leaders who were accepting patronage from Mayor Smitherman; and Chestnut had already demonstrated that he had the influence to help black candidates overcome white incumbents at the polls. This had happened in the recent countywide election, which saw his choices garnering enough votes to gain control of the county government, setting the stage for his own triumphant entrance into the courthouse on January 16, 1989—Martin Luther King, Jr. Day—to congratulate those commissioners whose campaigns his law firm had helped to manage. One of the newly elected commissioners
was, in fact, the office manager of Chestnut's law firm—Perry Varner, who earned his law degree at Boston College and was a brother-in-law of Rose Sanders. What was additionally gratifying to Chestnut on this day was the festive and spruced-up presence of those many black men who had brought their wives and children to observe the swearing-in ceremony. It reminded Chestnut of the crowds of black families he had seen in this same courtroom back in 1953 when they had assembled to watch the performance of Peter Hall, the first black attorney ever to try a case in Selma. That was the rape case involving William Earl Fikes—the one that had influenced J. L. Chestnut, Jr., to return to Selma in 1958 after getting his law degree. The Fikes case had convinced Chestnut that “Alabama was where the action was,” and this action would engage him for the rest of his working life, bringing him in 1989 into open conflict with Mayor Smitherman and the school board that was trying to oust his new friend, Norward Roussell.

Not only did Chestnut file a lawsuit against the board, claiming that its six white members should not continue to function while its five black members were absenting themselves in support of Dr. Roussell, but Chestnut's law office proceeded to become the nerve center of many demonstrations and confrontations that would disrupt the city for nearly six months. During this period—from September 1989 into March 1990—there was a high school sit-in, a boycott against the business interests of the white board members, several pro-Roussell rallies in the streets, and a brawling invasion of the office of Mayor Smitherman. This last incident, which occurred on February 5, 1990, had been the handiwork of Rose Sanders.

Chestnut had not been with her at the time, but she was accompanied by two other individuals from his firm. One was his office manager, Perry Varner, and the other was Carlos Williams, one of the five partners at Chestnut, Sanders, Sanders, Turner, Williams & Pettaway. After Mrs. Sanders, along with Varner and Williams and a half-dozen younger followers, had entered City Hall and settled themselves in the hallway near the mayor's office, Joe Smitherman himself came out to explain that he was too busy at this time to invite them in, but he said that he would try to see them later. After offering them soft drinks, which he laid on the receptionist's desk in his outer office, which on this day was guarded by a police officer, Smitherman returned to his inner office, where a second policeman was on duty, and closed the door.

Sanders and her group waited in the hallway for the next hour, sitting or standing in or near the outer office's door while singing civil rights songs or chatting among themselves, and occasionally bantering with
some of the city employees who strolled through the corridors. When Rose Sanders saw the city attorney, Henry Pitts, walking in her direction and then quickly turning and heading unhesitatingly through the outer office to within a few feet of the mayor's door, she yelled out, “I've had it”—and immediately she and her people ran forward and fell in line behind Mr. Pitts, doing so with such force that they knocked him headfirst over the outer office's reception desk. While a police guard bent down to assist him, Rose Sanders and the others slipped past them and proceeded to open Smitherman's door, pressing it against the buttocks of the three-hundred-pound police officer who was posted inside, and who now turned around, with his elbows raised high, blocking and shoving aside Sanders and her fellow intruders.

As they pushed forward into the office, bodies tumbled to the floor, furniture began to splinter, and the alarm system signaled for the arrival of more security. Joe Smitherman rose angrily from behind his desk and, pointing a finger at Rose Sanders, declared, “You're going to be charged with obstructing governmental operations and anything else we can come up with.…” She regarded him contemptuously but did not respond. She continued to glare at him in silence as more police officers entered Mayor Smitherman's office and began to handcuff her colleagues, including Carlos Williams and Perry Varner. Refusing to leave on foot, both men were carried away by the lawmen, with Varner exiting headfirst, and facing the ground, as he was hauled through the corridor of City Hall and then raised into a patrol wagon that was parked at the curb and was headed for the prison.

Rose Sanders also refused to leave voluntarily, kicking and screaming as the lawmen picked her up and shoved her into the backseat of a police vehicle. She would claim that she sustained injuries as a result of her arrest and that the white male officer who had accompanied her in the car to prison had “brutalized” her, committing such offenses as placing his club between her legs. Her condition required immediate medical attention, she insisted; days later, at a news conference that she held in her room at the Vaughan Regional Hospital, she appeared before the press wearing a rose-colored gown and a neck brace. She sat in a wheelchair guided by her husband. Her left arm was in a sling and hooked up to tubes attached to an intravenous trolley. A black physician, her gynecologist, told the press that while she had not broken any bones, she was unable to use her left hand and also suffered from chest, neck, and arm pain. She herself added that the mental anguish and the sexual violation she'd experienced had been equally damaging to her well-being, and she took the opportunity to insist on the dismissal of the white policeman and to
emphasize that Mayor Smitherman was the sort of man who “doesn't give a damn about a black woman” and had handled her “the way slaves were treated by their masters two hundred years ago.”