The Grace of Silence (18 page)

Mom’s imagined advice suffused me with warmth, the comfort I’d feel in grade school when I’d find a note from her in my lunch box, telling me to use my nickel to buy regular instead of chocolate milk. The memory put me at ease as I stepped up to ring the doorbell. Aubrey Justice must have had his eyes on me, for he was at the front door in a flash. When he opened the screen door I sensed that he, too, assumed unwanted spectators. He looked past me toward the street, furtively glancing this way and that to see if a neighbor had spotted the stranger at his house. He waved to a fellow mowing his lawn down the street and chuckled to himself before ushering me in.

I liked him immediately.

We chatted in his living room, where he sat in what appeared to be his favorite chair, an overstuffed brown lounger. It was one of a pair separated by a table with a crystal lamp. At the base of each lounger was a half-moon rug. There was something sweet about these his-and-hers recliners, where Aubrey and Wadean Justice spend their evenings watching a huge flat-screen TV—a recent upgrade so large that it crowds the carefully arranged vintage children’s photos displayed on a shared wall.

Aubrey Justice is handsome in a Spencer Tracy sort of way: White hair. Sparkling blue eyes. Deep tan. A few dark patches on his arms betray how much time he’s spent in the sun. He limps ever so slightly, one foot turning inward when he walks. Yet his skin is taut and his movements sharp. He’s an avid golfer and a good one. He had just celebrated his birthday on the links, where he’d shot a 69.

Justice was originally from a rural area in Shelby County. After the war, he moved to Birmingham, where he worked as a laborer for American Bridge before enrolling in the police academy. He was a beat cop and spent much of his time patrolling the seedier fringes of Birmingham’s black business district, an area called the “scratch-ankle district.” The name derives from either a dance style or the aggressive red ants that might scamper up your leg in barrooms and brothels with dirt floors.

Justice joined the force in 1949, after returning from service in the war as an army paratrooper. To lighten the mood, I asked if his name had led him to a career in law enforcement. “Naw,” he replied. “I just decided that I wanted to. Went down and took the civil service test and they hired me. Simple as that.”

Since police officers didn’t make much money, he usually worked two jobs, moonlighting at nightclubs until he’d had enough of the nightly coal miners’ fistfights. “I finally got tired of that,” he told me. “I said, I’m tired of this blood money, so I got me a job working at a driving range, giving golf lessons and everything.” He carefully managed his dual responsibilities: to remain in good stead as a police officer, he avoided rocking the boat even when he questioned the way Connor ran the department. “We all didn’t think like Bull Connor though, but we had to do a certain amount of orders because [it was] either that or get fired, but we said we had families and we couldn’t do anything but do what we had to do.”

I asked Justice how difficult it was to work for Bull Connor if you didn’t share Connor’s belief in strict segregation, and he
explained that officers had to be shrewd. “Well, you had ways to get around things,” he said. “I mean, you had to … certain things you had to do, some things you might not like. But you had to do it ’cause it’s either that or get fired.” As to what the “certain things you had to do” were, he refused to say. To hear him tell it, relations between police officers and blacks in the city were “fine.” “We didn’t have no problems at all,” he insisted. “Everybody knew their place.”

Justice is a guarded storyteller. He was careful not to reveal too much about his time in a police department that’s been judged through the harsh lens of history. He was more willing to talk about the subjects he encountered during street patrols than the officers he worked with. I noticed that he had a certain fondness for the ne’er-do-wells he described, the men who ran the juke joints or sold moonshine on the sly to policemen. You’d think he was talking about an old chum when he described a police informant who drank paint thinner when he couldn’t afford liquor. They were all black and described by Justice as decent fellows who lacked the wherewithal to make an honest living. Nowhere in Aubrey’s stories were any black men I recognized. Working men. Family men. Churchgoing, mortgage-paying, lawn-mowing, upright-till-the-day-they-die kind of men. Perhaps the strict color line prevented contact between the white Birmingham police and ordinary black men, or perhaps ordinary black men went to pains to steer clear of the police.

By the 1960s, Aubrey Justice, like most of Birmingham, found himself amid the convulsion of civil rights protests, when residential bombings becoming so frequent that Birmingham was called “Bombingham.” It was hard for Justice not to be front and center at some seminal events in Birmingham’s civil rights history. While administering a sobriety test to a suspected drunk driver in the city jail one day, he heard peals of laughter down the hall. He turned to see a group of officers—
some in uniform, some in street clothes—bringing Martin Luther King to jail. “As far as I could see, they did not mistreat him. They were just joking and cutting up and carrying on,” he related. Was King, too, laughing and joking? “I don’t think he had any ill feelings toward them, you know,” Aubrey said. Police in Birmingham knew all too well that King’s and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s nonviolent tactics were intended to provoke arrests for greater publicity.

Aubrey Justice also saw his share of violence. He was one of the police officers assigned to guard the home of civil rights attorney Arthur Shores, after it had been firebombed twice within one month. He was also summoned to guard the home of activist Fred Shuttlesworth, after someone put sticks of dynamite under his bedroom window. Shuttlesworth has maintained that a police officer invoked the Ku Klux Klan shortly after the bombing and warned him to “get out of town.” In these times the Birmingham Police Department was racked by tension and, in some cases, conflicting loyalties. Some officers didn’t hide their Klan sympathies. For his part, Justice said, he “wasn’t in favor of committing crimes against anybody … I think there were some bad ones there. But I also know there was a lot of dedicated good, good people there. You go to church and you find all kinds of different people. Good ones. Bad ones. Go to the police department, find good ones. Bad ones. That’s just the way life was.”

On Sunday September 15, 1963, Justice was assigned to traffic duty in the East Lake district. The day was overcast and unseasonably cold. At about half past ten that morning, his patrol radio crackled with orders to get downtown to Sixteenth Street as fast as possible. Justice was one of the first officers to arrive on the scene after nineteen sticks of dynamite had ripped through the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, a rallying site for the civil rights movement. The dynamite, which all but destroyed the church, had been placed near the basement,
where children had gathered to change into their church robes after Sunday school. The sermon that day was supposed to be “The Love That Forgives.” The church clock is still frozen at 10:22 a.m.

As Aubrey Justice tells it, while he didn’t hear the blast, he did hear the shrill wail of sirens as he got closer to the bombed sanctuary. The streets were crowded. There were cries and shouts. Dazed churchgoers mired by concrete dust shared the street with young onlookers roused from bed by the explosion, now demanding retribution. There was no doubt that there would be casualties, but in those first moments, Justice said, no one yet knew that four little girls had perished, or that twenty had been badly injured. “It was so crowded and so bad that we had to make them all get in a house,” Justice said. As to how exactly this was achieved, he only allowed, “Let’s just say we made them get into a house.”

Justice busied himself directing traffic, trying, along with other officers, to disperse the crowd as much as possible and prevent anyone from heading toward the scene of devastation. As it happened, some of the people turned away were parents of the slain little girls; they’d dropped their daughters off for Sunday school and had returned for Sunday service. That day Aubrey got home bedraggled and discomfited: he and his wife, Wadean, knew that race relations in Birmingham would never be the same.

After spending a few hours with Aubrey Justice, I was touched by something I didn’t fully understand at the time. Only later, upon reflection on his life and our conversation, did it occur to me that I’d been sitting knee to knee with an older white man who was in odd ways a mirror image of the black man who’d raised me. At first I pushed the thought away. For myriad reasons, I didn’t want to go there. Segregation was informed by, and sought to keep alive, the illusion that white and black people are fundamentally different, one superior to
the other. But the illusion could sometimes work both ways, for many blacks have refused to see anything of themselves in their oppressors, the race responsible for their denigration.

Maybe it was all that talk about golf and Justice’s well-tended garden. Or maybe it was the big brown recliner, where Aubrey said he often fell asleep. Similarities between Aubrey Justice and Belvin Norris kept creeping up on me. The two men were born one year apart. Dad graduated from high school in 1943, Justice in ’44. Both had gone off to war; both had been headed to Japan when the war came to a close, after bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To be sure, in the armed services Justice had had opportunities that were denied my father; unlike Belvin, he had not been demeaned because of the color of his skin. As a paratrooper, he had benefited from a higher pay grade. It also turned out that, for all their obvious differences, Aubrey and Belvin held similar views about the tactics used by civil rights advocates in the 1950s and ’60s.

In May 1963, Justice had not been among the police officers in Kelly Ingram Park who unleashed dogs on peaceful demonstrators while firemen turned hoses on schoolchildren, but he does have a clear memory and sharp opinions about what happened that day.

“I thought the whole thing was nothing but a show. Nothing happened till they’d all gathered down there and they’d be standing and wouldn’t do nothing. And the minute the police got there, they’d start and they’d egg them dogs on, and this and that and the other, and it was just a mess. They knew it was going to happen.” According to Justice, the protesters were intent on getting arrested to incur sympathy, to persuade others of the rightness of their cause.

I’d heard all that before. My father had great respect for Martin Luther King. He wept an ocean when King died and kept his image in his locker at the post office. Even so, he was uncomfortable when civil rights leaders who had not been born
and raised in Birmingham became leaders in Birmingham’s civil rights struggles. He referred to them as “that Atlanta crowd.” And when newsmen would describe Birmingham as “the most segregated city in America,” he’d grouse at the TV: “What? Did they hold a contest?” While Birmingham may have broken his heart, it still had a strong hold on him, despite his need to flee the city. The actuality and portrayal of his hometown as a racial Armageddon pained him, perhaps because of a mixture of pride and guilt. After all, his aging parents still had to walk the streets where blood had been shed. And he must have worried that residents and businesses would abandon the city to escape chaos or stigma, resulting in its demise.

Justice, too, worried about the city’s image, as well as the police department’s reputation, after shocking pictures documenting the confrontations at Kelly Ingram Park were beamed around the world. “Seemed to me,” he said, “like what they should have done [is] just let them go ahead and protest as long as they didn’t damage anything or tear up anything or do anything. Of course, I wasn’t involved.”

At the time, Justice thought that what happened in that park would amplify black hatred of the police, casting a grim shadow over all of Birmingham. He was right. Bull Connor was forced from office in May 1963, and ever since the police department and politicians have worked hard to repair Birmingham’s badly damaged image. Yet, regarding the scandal of Kelly Ingram Park, John F. Kennedy remarked, “The civil rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He’s helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln.”

Aubrey Justice and my father had one more thing in common: both were assaulted across the color line. By the mid-seventies, Justice increasingly found himself working at police headquarters. One Thanksgiving weekend, he was fulfilling his duties as desk sergeant when a young black man approached
him about some stolen property. The man gave Justice a description and an address. Justice turned his back to consult the docket; when he turned around to face the complainant, a different young black man was standing there, pointing a gun through an opening in the glass partition.

The young man pulled the trigger. Justice remembers the click. The gun was either jammed or not loaded. His eyes were tightly shut until he realized he was still alive and uninjured. He saw the youth scramble down the stairs and out the front door, yelling, “Kill the pigs!” Justice flew into the radio room to tell all officers in the vicinity to be on the lookout for the culprit. But there was a problem: he couldn’t remember what the young man looked like. Only the nickel-plated pistol. He couldn’t recall if the assailant was short or tall, thin or fat, light- or dark-skinned. Nothing.

Though Justice had been sharing robust tales with me for hours, his voice got reedy when discussing the attempt on his life. “I just couldn’t identify him,” he sighed. His fellow police officers showed Justice mug shots and collared possible suspects, to no avail. I asked Justice if he was under pressure to identify someone. “I wanted to identify someone,” he said. But he felt he had to be sure of the thug’s identity. For Justice wondered, “What would happen if they caught him? And what if it was the wrong kid?” Indeed.

Justice said he tried hard to set the incident aside, to reject the instinct to demonize all black people as a result of one man’s criminality. He fully embraces integration in the workplace and in his neighborhood; he is empathetic with regard to his adult children’s friendship with blacks. But still he harbors a certain nostalgia for bygone days.