14

Alabama

I HAD A DREAM

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

—WILLIAM FAULKNER, Requiem for a Nun

Approaching Montgomery, I was jolted from my interstate trance by two anomalous sights. The first was a long line of men in white uniforms, shackled at the ankle, swinging hoes and hauling brush as shotgun-toting guards kept watch. Alabama had recently brought back chain gangs and positioned them by major highways for maximum publicity.

The second sight was a huge Chamber of Commerce billboard welcoming visitors to Montgomery:

WE’RE HISTORY!

VISIT THE CIVIL RIGHTS MEMORIAL,

THE FIRST CONFEDERATE CAPITOL.

The irony of the first line, which consigned Montgomery to Trotsky’s dustbin, was matched by the startling juxtaposition that followed. Civil Rights and Civil War—joint billing as Montgomery’s premier tourist attractions.

At first glance, driving into Montgomery at dusk, I wondered if the “We’re History” sign was meant to be read literally. The downtown office blocks had emptied for the day, leaving Montgomery a virtual ghost town. Birds twittering in the trees made more racket than passing traffic. Checking into a hotel by the grand but forsaken railroad station, I asked the receptionist where I might find something to eat. She directed me to a franchise-clogged highway several miles from downtown.

She also explained why the city seemed so dead. The interstate cleaved Montgomery in half in the 1960s. White flight and suburban strip malls had since sucked the life out of the old commercial district. Not that Montgomery had ever been renowned as a happening town. “I have rarely seen a more dull, lifeless place,” the London Times correspondent, William Howard Russell, acidly observed in 1861, soon after the rebels set up government in Montgomery. “It looks like a small Russian town in the interior.”

But touring the city on foot, I discovered one advantage that Montgomery had over other Southern capitals I’d visited. Unlike Columbia or Jackson or Atlanta, Montgomery’s antebellum core hadn’t been cauterized by Sherman or razed by developers. Topography also conspired to elevate the past. The city’s historic center perched on high ground known in more rural days as “Goat Hill.” Depending on your perspective, Goat Hill represented one of the most hallowed or haunted places in the entire South.

Crowning the knoll was Alabama’s domed capitol, where Jeff Davis took the oath of office in 1861 (a few months later, the Confederate capital moved to Richmond). A brass star marked the marble on which Davis stood. A century later, George Wallace pointedly occupied the exact same spot to deliver his inaugural address as governor. “It is very appropriate that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom,” he declared. “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

Stepping into the foyer, I found myself surrounded by a school group about to start a tour through the capitol. “I’m Sandy,” said the statehouse guide, a young black woman in a white headband and African-print dress. “And this is Lurleen Wallace.” Sandy pointed at a bust of George Wallace’s wife, adding, “She served sixteen months as governor before dying of cancer.”

We moved down marble hallways lined with portraits of Alabama’s governors, a 175-year procession of stern-looking white men, plus Lurleen. Sandy pointed out a portrait of George Wallace and also of the current governor, “Fob” James, who was painted clutching a tree. “That’s to show his closeness to the roots of Alabama,” Sandy explained. Fob’s full name—Forrest Hood James—incorporated the surnames of two famous Confederate generals.

We climbed a spiral staircase to the capitol rotunda, adorned with vast murals of Alabama history. One, titled “Wealth and Leisure Produce the Golden Period: Antebellum Life in Alabama,” showed an elegant couple on horseback in front of a grand plantation. A black mammy held a white child on the mansion’s porch. “That was twenty years before the Civil War when cotton was king,” Sandy said.

We moved down the hall to the former Senate chamber. “Boys and girls,” Sandy said, “this is the very room where Jeff Davis was elected president of the Confederate States, restored to look the way it did in 1861.”

“What are those?” a pony-tailed girl asked, pointing at what looked like flower pots near the back of the chamber.

“Spittoons,” Sandy said. “For the juice from chewing tobacco.”

“Oooh, yuk!”

As Sandy explained how the chamber’s original carpeting was pulled up and sent to rebel soldiers for use as blankets, I realized that the entire tour had become a replay of Golden Southern Oldies: secession and segregation, from Jeff Davis to George Wallace. I also noticed something odd about the school group. The kids were all white, they ranged widely in age, and accompanying them was a crowd of teachers, about one for every two students. A number of the children wore T-shirts saying, “Jesus’s Kids Totally His.”

Chatting with a woman named Roxie, I learned that the group was composed of home-schoolers from south Alabama on a field trip to the capital. “Right now the fourth graders are studying the Civil War,” Roxie said. “From a Christian perspective, of course.”

I asked what she meant. “We start with a canned curriculum we get from a Christian-based outfit in Florida,” she said. “Then we supplement it with things out of the library. And my brother’s a Civil War buff. That helps.”

“How do you handle slavery?”

“Well, the kids always ask, ‘Why did people do it?’ We explain that not that many people owned slaves. I had three great-great-grandfathers in the War. They weren’t wealthy. They fought for the South because it was their way of life.” She paused. “Of course, we’re Christians. Slavery wasn’t right. But we teach that slavery wasn’t that big a deal in terms of causing the War.”

Roxie’s husband, Doug, wore wire-rim glasses and a knapsack labeled “Jesus Loves You.” He worked as an engineer and taught the kids science. I asked why he and his wife had chosen to home-school their children. “Because if you want some choice in your kids” curriculum, they call you homophobic or racist or something,” Doug said.

“What do you mean?”

“Like slavery. That was a period of history, that’s all. You can’t gloss it over. But teach the truth. Public schools won’t do that.”

Doug and Roxie paused politely as Sandy told the kids about the marble stairs, which were crafted by freed slaves. “Our kids are sort of secluded,” Roxie whispered. “So this is nice, having a tour guide who’s, you know, different.”

The tour wound outside to a towering shaft ringed by the flags of the Confederacy, and by statues representing each branch of the military. “This is to honor the soldiers they sent the carpet to,” Sandy said. I studied the inscription beneath a Cavalier with a plumed hat and extravagant mustache.

THE KNIGHTLIEST OF THE KNIGHTLY RACE

WHO SINCE THE DAYS OF OLD

HAVE KEPT THE LAMP OF CHIVALRY

ALIGHT IN HEARTS OF GOLD.

We ended our tour at the brass star marking the site of Jeff Davis’s inaugural. The kids, wide-eyed, took turns jumping up and down on the spot.

As the group wandered off, I lingered to chat with Sandy and asked how she felt about guiding groups through this Old South shrine. “I never thought in my life I’d be doing this,” she said. “And some of the people who visit here obviously feel the same. You know, diehard rebels. They look at you as if to say, ‘How did your black face get here?’” She laughed. “But I have all the answers to their questions, so they go away happy. If anything, it’s the black groups from up North that are unsettled. They want to know why this is on their tour in the first place, and what in the world I’m doing here.”

“What do you tell them?”

“I say, ‘Look here, honey, history’s changed and I wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t. Folks here wouldn’t have me, and I wouldn’t have them. I see black faces going through these halls every day—black officials, understand, not janitors and maids. We don’t have any black faces hanging on these walls yet, but it’s just a matter of time.’”

In her own small way, Sandy felt she was hastening the change. “I like to think these dead white guys are looking back at me and rolling in their graves.” She locked eyes with a wigged antebellum governor. “I’m here, honey. This is the 1990s. Understand?” With that, she smiled and hurried toward the door as another group of tourists wandered in.

TOURING THE REST of Goat Hill, I kept encountering the same, startling juxtapositions. A plaque beside the capitol identified the statehouse as both the home of the first Confederate Congress and the end point of the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march in 1965. Just a few paces away stood the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. served as pastor in the 1950s and helped lead the Montgomery bus boycott. On the street outside stood two plaques. One noted that Dexter Avenue was the site of Jeff Davis’s inaugural parade: “‘Dixie’ was played as a band arrangement for the first time on this occasion.” The other plaque told of the Dexter Church and the bus boycott.

A block behind the church, on the same street as the First White House of the Confederacy, stood the Civil Rights Memorial I’d seen advertised on the billboard outside town. Designed by Maya Lin and closely resembling her Vietnam memorial in Washington, the monument’s black granite slab was etched with the names of forty people who died in the civil rights struggle. A few doors away, in the corridors of the state archives, busts of Confederate generals nuzzled busts of Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. Portraits of Nat “King” Cole and bluesman W. C. Handy shared wall space with the “Alabama Troubador,” Hank Williams. In a section devoted to religious leaders, a painting of Martin Luther King hung beside one of Bob Jones, founder of Bob Jones University in South Carolina, a bastion of the Christian Right that banned interracial dating.

At times, this proximity of black and white icons became a bit strange. In the faded downtown business district, I found a derelict building that had once housed the Empire movie theater. A plaque told how Rosa Parks, at a bus stop here in 1955, refused to give up her seat to a white man, sparking the Montgomery boycott. On the plaque’s reverse side, I read that Hank Williams won a song contest at the Empire in 1938 before going on to write classics such as “Your Cheatin’ Heart.”

Montgomery’s forthright treatment of its past was a refreshing contrast to the other Southern cities I’d visited. Genteel Charleston would have wrapped the same history in gauze, or discreetly averted its eyes; I couldn’t imagine a painting of the black insurrectionist Denmark Vesey beside portraits of other “rebels,” such as the Citadel cadets or P. G. T. Beauregard. Atlanta would have bulldozed Goat Hill, or rewritten the inscription on the Confederate monument and bounced holograph cartoons off the mustachioed visage of the Knightliest of the Knightly Race.

Alabama had even finessed controversy over the rebel battle flag, which flew for several decades above the capitol dome. While South Carolina and Georgia kept debating whether to keep the symbol aloft, Alabama had lowered its flag in 1993 and placed the banner beside the capitol’s Confederate monument. A few agitators on both extremes objected to this compromise, but the fight over the flag had gradually faded from public consciousness.

Montgomery’s equipoise about its past seemed almost too good to be true, and in one sense it was. On my third day in town, I awoke to a story in the local paper headlined: “Union General’s Marker Stolen.” The marker commemorated James Wilson, a cavalry commander whose troops sacked the nearby city of Selma in 1865 before peacefully capturing Montgomery three days after Appomattox. The marker, recently erected beside the capitol, had mysteriously vanished in the night. An anonymous caller told the newspaper, “The persons responsible for erecting the marker should be ‘tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail.’”

The main person responsible for erecting the marker was Will Hill Tankersley, an investment banker and former chairman of the Chamber of Commerce. I found him studying a Quotron on the seventh floor of a downtown bank building. A fair-haired man of about seventy, with a red bow tie and carefully groomed beard, Tankersley was baffled by the Wilson marker’s theft. “This is an aberration,” he said. “I’d say 99.9 percent of Alabamans care more about who’s going to win the Alabama-Auburn football game than they do about the Civil War.”

Tankersley belonged to the 1 percent who cared passionately. “I’m a West Point grad, a sixth-generation Alabaman, and I’m proud as punch that one of my ancestors was a seventeen-year-old from Pineapple, Alabama, who fought until the day Lee surrendered,” he said. “But history’s history. We lost. And the only action here in Montgomery was Wilson’s raid. So why not remember it the same way we remember all the rest of our history?”

Tankersley paused to take a phone call. “It’s at fifteen and a quarter, down an eighth.” Hanging up, he brushed aside a copy of Standard & Poor’s and unearthed Co. Aytch, the famous memoir of Tennessee private Sam Watkins I’d read at Shiloh. “What comes through from these memoirs is how brave these boys were,” Tankersley said. “I reckon the boys from up North were just as dedicated. We shouldn’t demonize one side and deify the other.”

Many Alabamans evidently disagreed. When the Wilson marker first went up, Tankersley received a torrent of angry letters and phone calls. “One guy called and said, ‘As soon as they put up a Nathan Bedford Forrest monument in Cleveland, you can put one up to Wilson here.’” He chuckled. “I told him Forrest didn’t make it to Cleveland.” Another caller likened the Wilson marker to a monument honoring Benedict Arnold. A neo-Confederate publication even created a prize called “The Will Hill Tankersley Scalawag of the Year Award,” awarded to Southerners who betrayed Confederate heritage.

This ire took Tankersley by surprise. As Chamber of Commerce chairman, he had also helped engineer the exhaustive marking of Montgomery’s civil rights history, an effort that caused little controversy. “It’s funny, isn’t it,” he said, “that people get more bent out of shape about a war they lost a hundred thirty years ago than about a struggle that occurred in their own lifetimes.”

Tankersley’s balanced approach to Montgomery’s history wasn’t just philosophical. It also made business sense. “There were two great cataclysms that started here—the Civil War and the civil rights movement,” he said. “Tourists want to see that.” Memorializing both events was also a way to burnish Alabama’s battered reputation. “This state is overflowing with resources,” he said. “It’s got a heck of a work ethic. I want to bring jobs here. But we’ve still got an image problem. When you’re sitting in a boardroom in New York and hear about Fruit Loops waving rebel flags down here, it’s bad for business.”

Tankersley glanced at his Quotron. The market had stopped trading for the day on an upward spike, as it had so often during the long bull market. “You’d think stocks never went down,” he said, shaking his head. “When it comes to some things, people have very short memories.”

FOLLOWING WILSON’S PATH in reverse, I headed for Selma, an hour’s drive west. Selma lay near the buckle of Alabama’s Black Belt, the band of dark, fecund soil that once undergirded the richest cotton land in Dixie. In 1860, Dallas County (of which Selma was now seat) ranked first in Alabama in cotton production, slaveholding, and per capita wealth. Selma also became a key Confederate arsenal and manufacturing center. In the War’s waning days, Nathan Bedford Forrest fought a doomed battle to save the town. Wilson’s cavalry captured most of Forrest’s men and torched Selma’s arsenal before riding on to Montgomery.

Almost a century to the day after Forrest’s last battle, Selma became famous for another rearguard stand. Alabama troopers in gas masks and helmets, backed by a mounted posse of hastily deputized locals, blocked civil rights protestors from crossing Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge for a march to Montgomery. Then the lawmen assaulted the peaceful demonstrators with billy clubs, bullwhips, cattle prods and tear gas. Television footage of the melee stunned the nation. A week after the clash, President Johnson pressed Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act, which ended literacy tests and other devices used for so long to deny blacks the vote. Before the law’s passage, only 250 of Dallas County’s 15,000 voting-age blacks had succeeded in registering. A year later, the number was 9,000. Thirty years after the Selma bridge incident, the Black Belt of Alabama and Mississippi had more black elected officials than any other part of the nation.

The Pettus Bridge clash—known as “Bloody Sunday”—made Selma synonymous in the national mind with bigotry and brutality. But, like Montgomery, Selma had recently turned its troubled history to tourist advantage. “From Civil War to Civil Rights,” declared a billboard rising from the farmland bordering town. At Selma’s small visitors’ center, an elderly white man took out a street map and carefully marked a half-dozen historic sites: antebellum mansions, remnants of the 1865 battle, the Pettus Bridge, the Martin Luther King Historic Walking Tour, and the Voting Rights Museum. “We’ve always lived in the past in Selma, and we still do,” he said. “But the past has changed on us. It includes a lot of stories it didn’t used to.”

As we chatted, the man said he’d served on Selma’s segregationist city council during the civil rights violence of the 1960s. “I was born in 1921 and was raised up with segregation and separate water fountains,” he said. “It was stupid now that I think of it. All these signs saying ‘white’ and ‘colored’ when most people couldn’t even read.”

I asked how he felt about the changes since. “You get older and you mellow, I guess,” he said. “The marchers corrected an injustice.” He felt the same about the Civil War. “I was raised when Confederates were gods and all Yankees were devils. But the Civil War had to be fought, just like the civil rights thing.” So here he was, an elderly man, directing tourists to the ground where both he and his forebears had fought and lost in defense of the Southern “way of life.”

As I toured Selma, though, it became obvious that the changes only went so far. While the Black Belt’s political and touristic landscape had been transformed, the social and economic picture remained much the same. Across the railroad tracks, in predominantly black east Selma, sprawled a shantytown of tumbledown shacks propped precariously on cement blocks. Just outside town, I drove through an all-black housing project, wedged between a forlorn ball-field and a Budweiser plant. A sign at the entrance said “Nathan B. Forrest Homes”—an odd choice, given Forrest’s notoriety as a slave trader and Imperial Wizard of the KKK. Drab housing projects also ringed the Brown Chapel, which served as the headquarters for the civil rights movement in Selma. In front of the chapel stood a bust of King, inscribed with the words: I HAD A DREAM.

The west side of Selma was mostly white and far more affluent. But the sprinkling of old mansions seemed only to underscore Selma’s fall from antebellum bounty. A cemetery at the center of west Selma added to the doleful atmosphere. Live oaks dripped Spanish moss, shadowing a tall shaft marking the mass grave of 150 unknown rebels. “There is Grandeur in Graves, There is Glory in Gloom,” the inscription read.

I ended my melancholy tour at the Voting Rights Museum, beside the Pettus Bridge. The walls were lined with photographs of white troopers chasing black marchers through clouds of tear gas. There was one other visitor, a graying black man in a kente-cloth robe and cap. “That’s me, right there,” he said, pointing at a photograph showing a young man in coat and tie, arms linked with other marchers. “We were so young then.”

Reverend Richard Boone was only twenty when he helped direct the Selma Project, as that phase of the civil rights movement was known. “We used to wear yarmulkes with our overalls,” he said. “We considered ourselves Baptist rabbis.” Later, Boone was arrested while trying to integrate Montgomery’s Empire Theater, where Rosa Parks began her bus protest. “The good old days,” he said. “Everything was clear, black and white, like these pictures.”

These days, Boone found himself embroiled in much murkier protests. He’d spent the past three months picketing a black radio station in Montgomery that had dropped several controversial programs, including a weekly address by the Nation of Islam leader, Reverend Louis Farrakhan. Ironically, the station’s office stood directly across from the Empire Theater. “You’ve got black faces now doing the white massah’s bidding,” Boone said. “It’s like slave days, with house niggers lording it over field niggers.”

Some of his former white allies were also now in the enemy camp. Boone had recently gone to the Million Man March in Washington and resented charges of anti-Semitism leveled at its organizer, Reverend Farrakhan. “It’s true what he says about the Jews,” Boone said. “They used to be on our side. But now a lot of them are bloodsuckers.”

I let this go. We drifted through the rest of the museum, past plaster casts of marchers’ feet and a chapel-like “memorial room” honoring martyrs of the struggle. The museum also hosted frequent civil rights observances, including one that afternoon to honor a veteran Selma activist named Irma Jean Jackson. So I returned a few hours later and joined Boone and about fifty others, almost all of them elderly and late-middle-aged black women.

“This museum is a place where we honor the foot soldiers,” the master of ceremonies began. “We were once children in the struggle and we must never forget the deeds of Irma Jean and other young fighters.” Then Irma Jackson spoke, recalling her political awakening as a student in college. “The time had come to take a stand for our rights,” she said, before telling the familiar story of the Selma struggle. “We got to the foot of the bridge, they charged and started beating people and throwing tear-gas bombs. The sun eclipsed, there was that much smoke. You could hear skulls cracking as the men opened up heads with their billy clubs. People screamed and splashed in puddles to get water in their stinging eyes.”

As Jackson went on, a few people in the audience began softly weeping. Then she urged the audience to remember the martyrs and “the cause for which they fought.” I realized I’d heard all this before. Honor the young foot soldiers. Take a stand for our rights. The litany of heroic deeds and fallen martyrs. It was the same mournful refrain that ran through dozens of Confederate observances I’d attended.

Almost every sentence began to carry familiar echoes. Irma Jackson told of “marching all day and sleeping in the fields” between Selma and Montgomery—just as rebel soldiers had done in Virginia. She recalled other hallowed fields of battle—Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, Little Rock—which resonated with her audience as powerfully as Sharpsburg and Shiloh did for many white Southerners. While working in small towns across the South, Jackson said, “We all suffered from nervous stomachs and sometimes went two days without eating because the restaurants weren’t integrated”—recalling, for me, the tales of lean Confederates foraging for green corn and green apples on their hungry march through Maryland.

Jackson’s speech ended with the invocation of the sainted leader, in this case Martin Luther King. “All are soldiers but only some are warriors,” she said. “He was a warrior, a warrior for his people, who sacrificed all that they might live free.” The same lines might have been spoken at a Sons of Confederate Veterans meeting about Stonewall Jackson or Robert E. Lee.

When she finished, Reverend Boone gave a short address that echoed the Civil War even more explicitly. “To quote our greatest president, ‘We are met on a great battlefield. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract.’” Boone lit candles to honor the civil rights dead and the audience began singing “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.” It was a rousing tune, but I sensed a mournful cloud hanging over the room. The civil rights celebrants seemed caught in the same ghost dance as so many whites I’d met, conjuring spirits from an exalted past of heroic sacrifice, halo-crowned martyrs, and unfulfilled dreams.

After the ceremony, I chatted with the museum’s director, Rose Mary Sanders, a striking woman with short-cropped hair who wore brilliant African robes and silver bands that ran halfway up each arm. I asked her if I was wrong in sensing a plaintive nostalgia among others in the audience.

“You’re right. It’s depressing because so little has really changed,” she said. “We still have the same mayor we had on Bloody Sunday. We don’t worry about being shot by the Klan, but we worry about being shot by one another. We integrated the schools, so now all the whites go to their own. Whites here still make three times as much as blacks. What’s to feel good about?”

Rose Sanders didn’t look or talk like a Selma native, nor was she one. She and her husband, Hank, were Harvard-educated lawyers who worked in Africa before coming to Alabama in the 1970s. They’d since become Selma’s leading—and most controversial—activists. Hank, elected Alabama’s first black state senator since Reconstruction, had once been arrested while trying to take the battle flag down from the state capitol. Rose had spearheaded a black school boycott to protest the “tracking” of black students into slow classes. The 1990 protest ultimately led to racial brawls, the closure of Selma schools and the summoning of the National Guard—to protect white students. When schools reopened, the remaining whites fled en masse to private schools.

Sanders’s latest cause was a petition to change the name of the Nathan Bedford Forrest housing project I’d passed outside town. “Can you imagine Jews living in some subdivision named for Himmler?” she asked. But so far, her efforts had met with indifference from blacks. “Most folks don’t know their history enough to be insulted. They’ve never heard of Forrest, unless it’s Forrest Gump. So they just take it. The whites make heroes of killers like Forrest and because of our own ignorance or internalized oppression, we let it happen.”

Another of Sanders’s causes was faring better. She’d begun an alternative school for black teenagers who had dropped out or been held back because of discipline or learning problems. The students were currently studying African empires, Sanders said, and would soon move on to modern black history in America. When I told her about my own research, Sanders’s eyes lit up. “Why don’t you come back tomorrow and tell my students about it?”

I agreed, on the condition I could quiz her students about their attitudes toward the Civil War. Sanders laughed. “You won’t have to ask,” she said. “They’ll let you know, loud and clear.”

THE NEXT DAY, before heading to Sanders’s class, I stopped in to see Selma’s long-time mayor. Joe Smitherman’s career was a minor classic of Southern politics. A former appliance-store owner, Smitherman had risen through the political ranks as an avowed segregationist, served as mayor during the civil rights turmoil, and deftly tacked with the changing winds ever since. He was now in his eighth term as mayor in a city that was 60 percent black and had a black majority on its city council and school board.

“When running against other whites, I’ve gotten ninety percent of the black vote,” he said. This seemed a curious boast from a man who had once opposed voting rights demonstrators, and who had also once stumbled at a press conference, referring to “Martin Luther Coon.”

Now a graying man of sixty-four, Smitherman wore a Snoopy tie and sat chain-smoking amidst mementos that mirrored the curious twists during his three decades in office: a Confederate flag, a tommy gun, framed photographs of George Wallace, Lester Maddox, Jesse Jackson, and the black assistant police chief of Selma. He reached into his filing cabinet for a news clip about a recent visit by John Lewis, a civil rights leader who was hospitalized with a severe concussion after Bloody Sunday. “Lewis said the change in Selma is ‘almost unbelievable,’” Smitherman said. “And he had his skull busted open here.”

But Smitherman didn’t want to dwell on his city’s civil rights turmoil. “People say, ‘Oh Selma, that’s where they set the dogs on people.’” He groaned. “We didn’t even have dogs here. The dogs were in Birmingham.”

Smitherman, though, was more than happy to talk about Selma’s recent decision to market its civil rights history. “The idea was, what happened at that bridge, we’ve been stigmatized because of it for so long, why don’t we sell it, too?” It was only recently, too, that Selma had become broad-minded about its Civil War history. “You have to remember the Yankees won the battle here and burned the town. Older folks in Selma naturally don’t like making a big deal out of that.”

I asked Smitherman about his own attitude toward the Confederacy. He responded by telling me about his childhood in the Depression, as the son of sharecroppers. “We were dirt poor,” he said. “My father died when I was a few months old and my mother raised the six of us on welfare. For us, the Civil War was pride. It was all we had to hold onto. The rich whites, they had ancestors who were colonel this or general that. But we didn’t know anything about that. It was just pride in having once been something.”

These days, the city helped sponsor an annual reenactment of the Yankee victory at Selma, and also supported an annual commemoration of Bloody Sunday. Smitherman had even joined returning marchers on the bridge and awarded a key to the city to Reverend Joseph Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with King.

Even so, fresh clashes over race kept cropping up, including Rose Sanders’s recent demand that the name of Nathan Bedford Forrest Homes be changed. “Everyone just calls it N.B.F. for short,” Smitherman said of the housing project. “If you live at 118 N.B.F., do you really want to change to 118 Magnolia Gardens? We’ve got a Lee Street, a Jeff Davis Avenue, a Martin Luther King Street. We should be beyond that sort of thing.”

As Smitherman walked me to the door, I told him I’d send a copy of whatever I wrote about Selma. He chuckled. “I don’t give a damn what you do. Y’all always do the same, come in here smiling and then go home and write a dig at us.” He clapped me on the back, straightened his Snoopy tie, and headed back into his office.

Several months later, I received two newspaper clips in the mail from a friend in Alabama. One told of a vote by Selma officials, including the mayor, to rename the Nathan Bedford Forrest Homes after a local civil rights leader. The other story reported that Joe Smitherman had outpolled a black candidate by just 52 votes to win his ninth term in office as Selma’s mayor.

ROSE SANDERS’S CLASSROOM, adjoining the Voting Rights Museum, was decorated with pictures of Rosa Parks, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, and a Klansman hunched over a bleeding black man. A large poster declared: “I Need Respect, I Want Respect, I Will Give Respect.” Fifteen kids, most of them sixteen and seventeen, straddled chairs or sprawled across desks. I’d just begun telling them about my travels when a student named Jamal raised his hand. “You got a name for your book?”

“Not yet.”

He went to the blackboard and wrote in large block letters, REDNECKS OF THE SOUTH. The others laughed and started shouting their own suggestions. “Crackers of the South!” “Bigots!” “Peckerwoods!”

I smiled and ran the eraser across the blackboard. “What’s the Civil War mean to you?” I asked.

“Nothing,” several students sang out in unison.

“It’s his-tory,” a teenager named Percy said. “As in his story, the white man’s, not mine.”

I pointed out this wasn’t really so. “Blacks fought in the War and slavery ended because of it.”

“No it didn’t!” a girl named Ni’key declared. “We just don’t call it slavery anymore.”

I changed tacks. “When I say the words ‘Abraham Lincoln,’ what’s the first thing that comes into your head?”

“Benevolent racist.”

“Just racist.”

“He had slaves.”

“That’s not true,” I said.

“He was probably paying blacks so little that they might as well have been slaves!” Ni’key shouted. Several other students came over and gave her high fives.

“What about the Emancipation Proclamation?” I asked.

“What about it?” Jamal said. “These Southern crackers were farm boys and slave hunters, so of course they were whipping those nerds from up North. Lincoln had to free the slaves so he could use them as soldiers.”

We went back and forth for half an hour. In essence, the students were saying that the Civil War had nothing to do with race or slavery—much the same argument made by neo-Confederates who saw the War through the prism of states’ rights.

I asked if any of the students attended Selma’s annual Civil War reenactment. Percy laughed. “We got some crazy rednecks here. They could use all that shooting as an excuse to shoot us and say it was an accident.”

“Hypothetical question,” I said. “My great-grandaddy was in the Civil War, fighting for the South. How should I remember him?”

“Forget him. He’s all bad.”

“Those crackers did wrong. Why honor them?”

“Rednecks!”

“Peckerwoods!”

Rose Sanders finally stepped in. “The Vietnam War was evil,” she said, “but we don’t feel everyone who fought in it was evil.”

The students went silent for a moment. “You got a point,” one student said. “My uncle fought over there.”

Then Sanders banged a desk. “But no monuments! We’re trying to change criminal behavior among our young people. You can’t do that and at the same time honor Confederate criminals.”

“Right on!”

“The Civil War is still going on,” Sanders said. “The only difference is that the Union army has betrayed us, too. So we’re fighting a confederacy up North and down South.”

“Tell it!”

“And why should we go watch some reenactment that honors the Southern way of life?” Sanders said. “The money I pay for that just goes into a pot that continues to oppress us. Only a few whites come to our bridge reenactment. They’re signaling that our history isn’t important. So why should we join in theirs?”

I listened silently. Sanders’s message was the same refrain I’d heard across the South. My history and his-story. You Wear Your X, I’ll Wear Mine. Both races sealing themselves off from each other. I was relieved when the class finally ended.

“You can see for yourself now,” Sanders said, leading me back to the museum, “that there’s a lot of fear and anger in these kids about that whole Civil War crowd.”

I suggested this might not be so if they had more contact with the “Civil War crowd,” some of whom, like Will Hill Tankersley in Montgomery, regarded themselves as progressives when it came to race.

Sanders frowned. “I prefer to deal with someone who admits their racism than with white liberals who hide it.” Then she launched into a tirade against white civil rights workers, black “sellouts” like Julian Bond, and “Jews who knock down men like Farrakhan.”

“Jews don’t like Farrakhan because he calls them bloodsuckers,” I replied. “If you’re fighting racism, you shouldn’t have a leader who says racist things.”

“Don’t tell us who our leaders should be,” Sanders snapped. “If you give up on a leader because of a few things he says, you can’t follow anyone.”

“A few things?” I snapped back. “He says Hitler’s a great man. As a Jew, I’ve got a problem with that.”

“Oh, here we go again. Jewish suffering. What about our suffering? Our holocaust? What about the holocaust of Indians?”

We argued for half an hour before shouting ourselves out. I glanced around. We were surrounded by photographs of Bloody Sunday and the Selma to Montgomery March. Looking at these same photos the day before, I’d wished myself there on the Pettus Bridge, or marching behind Martin Luther King. “The good old days,” Reverend Boone had called them. In a way he was right.

Sanders’s thoughts seemed to travel along a similar plane. She walked me to a window and looked out through the rain as traffic crawled over the Pettus Bridge. “I guess I wanted to have this museum to add some clarity to history, or at least to remember a time when there was some clarity,” she said. “It’s gotten so complicated ever since.”

I DROVE OUT OF SELMA through the late-afternoon gloom, past King’s “I Had a Dream” bust, feeling lower than at any time during my long Southern ramble. If the Civil War infused my boyhood imagination, it was the racial dramas of the 1960s that had molded my political consciousness. I was five when King made his Dream speech a few miles from my home. The March on Washington was my first political memory—mainly, I suspect, because my parents fought over whether my mother should go. My father, a liberal but cautious man, feared trouble. In the end my mother stayed home.

Five years later, I sat on a friend’s rooftop and watched Washington burn during the rioting sparked by King’s murder. It was about this time that I began drifting away from the Civil War. Thinking back, I couldn’t remember why. But perhaps it was my growing awareness of the race-charged city around me; at some point, cool-looking Confederates didn’t seem so cool anymore. And Union soldiers, to me, had always seemed like a bore.

Or maybe my focus just shifted. In college I studied black history, tutored inner-city kids, wrote a turgid senior thesis on Southern black workers. It was my thesis advisor, a civil rights scholar from a black college in Mississippi, who urged me to go South after graduation to work as a union organizer. While in Mississippi, I wrote my first newspaper article, on a maimed black logger, and found I liked writing better than agitating. In a way, my childhood fixation on the Confederacy had mutated into an adult preoccupation with the South and with race—and led, in a roundabout fashion, to my choice of careers.

The past year’s journey had given me ample chance to revisit all this. But the South had changed on me, or I’d changed on it. My passion for Civil War history and the kinship I felt for Southerners who shared it kept bumping into racism and right-wing politics. And here I was in Selma, after holding my temper with countless white supremacists, losing it with a black woman whose passion I’d initially admired. Months before, in Mississippi, I’d learned that the union I’d worked for, once militantly integrationist, was now all-black. It had little use anymore for white sympathizers from up North. Nor, evidently, did black activists like Rose Sanders and Richard Boone. To some degree, this was inevitable and healthy. People had to fight their own battles; outsiders tended to get in the way, particularly in the South. Still, it saddened me that I sometimes felt like an enemy on the premises, among both whites and blacks.

DRIVING OUT OF SELMA, I pondered something else. Rose Sanders’s students had offered me a glimpse of what angry young blacks in Alabama learned about the Civil War. I’d also seen a bit of what conservative whites—namely, the home-schoolers I’d met at the state capitol—taught their kids about slavery and secession. I was curious to know what lay between these extremes.

Through the friend of a friend, I contacted a history teacher in Greenville, a town of 8,000 an hour’s drive south of Montgomery. Billie Faulk was about to teach the Civil War to her high school students, and said I could listen in. But the offer came with a curious caveat: the Civil War wasn’t part of the prescribed high school curriculum.

“Alabama’s course of study is pitiful,” Faulk said, sweeping the blackboard clean between classes. A slim, attractive woman in her early forties, Faulk had the frazzled intensity of a twenty-year classroom veteran. In elementary school, she said, students made a high-speed pass at slavery and secession during survey courses covering all of Alabama and U.S. history. They returned to the War in eighth grade, at the tail end of a class covering U.S. history to 1877. “But most teachers fall behind during the year and end up rushing through the War,” Faulk said.

Officially, that was all they got. Alabama had recently changed its curriculum so that high-schoolers studied U.S. history only from 1877 onward. I later called a state official, who explained, “We wanted to adjust the frame to include time closer to the present that’s more relevant to students.” Texas and several other Southern states had done the same.

Faulk bent the rules as best she could, supplementing the textbooks with material of her own and including a review of slavery and the War. But it was Band-Aid work at best. “Most kids simply don’t have a grasp of the basic facts,” she said, “so it’s hard to really probe the issues.”

Her students filtered in. Five blacks sat in a clump by the door. Six white students camped by the window. I sat alone in a row that formed a sort of no-man’s land between the two groups.

“Let’s talk about Southern society,” Faulk began. “What does it mean to be Southern?”

“Country accent,” one boy said. “Country ways.”

“Backwoods, like.”

“We farm more than people up north.”

“We talk different and eat funny foods. Like we have a rattlesnake rodeo and a watermelon jubilee.”

This seemed a rather narrow and self-deprecatory notion of Southern identity. Still, it was refreshingly free of rebel flags. Unfortunately, as Faulk had warned, it was also almost free of facts.

“How long did slavery last?” she asked.

“Until the 1900s?” one boy ventured.

“1940,” another said, with certainty.

Faulk frowned. “Is that what the rest of you think?” The others looked at her blankly. “Well, the answer is 1865.” She paused, then asked, “When did the Civil War start?”

“1812!”

“1840!”

“1816!”

“1861,” Faulk corrected. “How do we know about slavery? What are our sources?”

“Books, like, and movies,” one boy called out. “The Autobiography of Scottie Pippen.”

“Miss Jane Pittman, you dummy!” a friend yelled, thumping him on the back. “Scottie Pippen plays for the Bulls.” The class erupted in laughter.

Faulk asked the students what came to mind when she said the words “Old South.”

“Big Houses.”

“Big dresses, too.”

“Big parties, like in Gone With the Wind and North and South.”

“Hard work, cotton, slaves,” a black student said. He was the only black to speak up during the class.

Faulk explained that the Old South wasn’t very old or very grand in most of Alabama. Less than 1 percent of whites owned 100 or more slaves, and some of Alabama’s finest plantations grew from log cabins built just forty years before the Civil War.

“You mean the one Lincoln grew up in?”

“When they freed the slaves did they all go and kill their old masters?” another boy asked.

“There’s something I don’t get,” a third boy said. “If slaves were so cruelly treated, why do they always have pretty teeth in the movies?”

Faulk lectured for the remaining twenty minutes until the bell rang. “As you can see,” she said, smiling wearily, “I’m competing with Hollywood. It’s almost a let-down when they learn that the antebellum South wasn’t all Scarlett O’Hara and Ashley Wilkes.”

The same mythic gauze overlaid their notions about the Civil War. “They think it’s all glory,” she said. Faulk tried to dispel this romance by talking about the horrors of the War. Her own forebears had fought for the South; one went to war at fourteen, another in his sixties. “They were poor men fighting a rich man’s war,” she said. “I don’t think there was much glory in that.”

We headed for the cafeteria and piled our trays with fried steak nuggets, turnip greens, pickled beets and cornbread. Again, the kids separated loosely along racial lines. The same was true of the break period that followed, during which students milled outside in neighboring clumps of white and black.

Faulk’s next class was world history, so I went to the school library to look at the textbooks she’d given me. “Like most people in the South, Alabamans held a strong belief in states’ rights. Alabama joined the secession movement and fought against the Union in the Civil War.” Those two lines were all the ninth-grade primer had to say on the subject.

Still, this was better than the apologias of old, which I’d read at a Montgomery library. “It was only a question of time when the slaveholders would have freed their slaves,” claimed a ninth-grade textbook from the 1940s. A 1961 textbook showed kindly mammies and obedient field hands flashing “bright rows of white teeth.” The pages were also filled with wicked Yankees, vicious scalawags, and venal carpetbaggers.

I poked my head in another classroom and found Ruby Shambray, a heavyset black woman who had taught history in Greenville for thirty-five years. “When I started here, the Civil War was my favorite subject,” she said. “You just taught what happened and kids were interested.”

Back then, her students were all black. Then, when schools integrated in 1969, many middle-class white parents began sending their kids to new, all-white private schools—known colloquially across the South as “seg academies.” This drained energy and resources from Greenville High, which was now mostly black and working-class, like many other public schools in the region. Shambray said the school’s library was poorly stocked, its computers few, its labs antiquated. Alabama spent less on public education than any other state in the nation.

Integration had also turned the Civil War into a minefield. “Suddenly, whatever I said was wrong,” Shambray said. Blacks accused her of soft-pedaling slavery while whites thought she was vilifying their ancestors. Shambray found herself dreading the subject. “For a few years, I would take a running jump from about 1855 to Reconstruction,” she said.

Then, from about the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, the atmosphere improved and Shambray learned to ease her students into the Civil War. “I’d preface the whole issue by saying that none of us here today were responsible for what happened. It’s history, and we need to discuss things in an open, intelligent fashion.”

But like others I’d spoken to across the South, Shambray sensed a hardening of attitudes from about the mid-1980s onward. Both blacks and whites became contentious and less interested in facts. “I’ve taught two generations now, and this one is different,” she said. “They’re much thinner-skinned than kids used to be, but at the same time more insensitive to others.”

Each year, she asked for a special report on an historical subject. “There’s always a white student now who wants to report on the Klan. I’ve had a few claim they’re members.” Blacks, meanwhile, seemed intent on tuning out the nineteenth century. “They feel like it’s someone else’s war, history that belongs to someone else,” she said, echoing what I’d heard in Selma.

The split extended to school trips to Montgomery. Black kids perked up at the civil rights sites, whites at the capitol and White House of the Confederacy. They also kept their distance in the classroom. “I don’t seat students. The classes just segregate themselves. They’ve all just got used to it this way.”

Shambray had taken a step back as well, feeling queasy again about teaching the Civil War. The new curriculum let her off the hook, since she wasn’t required to teach events before 1877. “I have to talk about slavery and the War—it’s too important,” she said. “But I don’t dwell on it.”

The bell rang and I returned to Faulk’s classroom for her eleventh-grade advanced placement history class. These students, at least, had a basic grasp of the facts and the discussion quickly turned to the War’s causes and legacy.

“The Civil War’s relevant because the effects are still obvious,” one student said. “A lot of people are still poor and prejudiced in the South, and that basically goes back to the War.”

“I think the racism is worse now than then,” another girl said. “Back then, blacks and whites both farmed and often worked close by, even if they weren’t equal. Today, we’re so much more separate.”

Another student stroked his peach fuzz and said, “The North deserves some blame. They talked a lot about emancipation but didn’t do much for blacks after the War. And when blacks started moving North, whites weren’t much better than here in the South.”

A black student blamed parents for the persistence of prejudice. “The racism, it’s generational. It gets passed down,” she said. “It’s like church. You don’t choose which one you go to. You just do what your parents did.”

The conversation had become free-flowing and I raised my hand. Why, I asked from my lonely perch in the middle aisle, were all the whites sitting on one side of the room and blacks on the other?

“It’s just always been that way,” one of the whites said. A black student nodded. “When we were younger we were all friends,” she said. “You didn’t think about black and white. But you get older, you hear things on the news. You look around. You hear the little things people say. Things change. We’re still friends but it’s different.”

There was no animosity to this observation. It was just the way things were. At least the students were occupying the same classroom and talking to each other, unlike Rose Sanders’s students or the home-schoolers I’d met in Montgomery. Or, for that matter, most students in the North. Washington, D.C., where I’d been educated, now had a public school system that was 97 percent black.

After the day’s last class, I asked Faulk about the school’s informal apartheid and the fact that white students seemed far more outspoken and self-assured than blacks. “We had an exchange student from Macedonia,” she said. “He told me, ‘You know, blacks are in the majority here but they’re afraid of you.’ He was right. Blacks have grown up with whites being dominant and they seem to tolerate it.”

Like Ruby Shambray, Faulk was also bewildered by what she called “a blip of good ol’ boyism” in recent years. “Before, kids really wanted to get along and understand each other. Then the urge just withered.” She paused. “I graduated from a segregated high school here. I knew black kids got educated somewhere, but I didn’t really think about it or stand up for change. Somehow, I’d hoped these kids would think more about these things, but I’m not sure they do.”

I SPENT TWO MORE DAYS at Greenville High and left with mixed emotions about what I’d seen and heard. Clearly, the Lost Cause was close to being truly lost in the minds of young Alabamans. Only the advanced students grasped even the dimmest outline of the War’s history. Nor were these teenagers unusual. I later read a survey about Southerners’ knowledge of the War; only half of those aged eighteen to twenty-four could name a single battle, and only one in eight knew if they had a Confederate ancestor.

This was a long way from the experience of earlier generations, smothered from birth in the thick gravy of Confederate culture and schooled on textbooks that were little more than Old South propaganda. In this sense, ignorance might prove a blessing. Knowing less about the past, kids seemed less attached to it. Maybe the South would finally exorcise its demons by simply forgetting the history that created them.

But Alabamans seemed to have also let go of the more recent and hopeful history embodied in Martin Luther King’s famous speech. “I have a dream,” he said, of an Alabama where “black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.” Alabama, like Mississippi, appeared to have made much greater strides than places less seared by the civil rights struggle, such as southern Kentucky. Even so, the past-tense rendering of King’s quote in Selma seemed a sadly apt commentary on most of the 1990s South I’d visited.

On my last evening in Greenville, I went to see a retired teacher named Bobbie Gamble who taught for many years both at the public high school and at one of Greenville’s private academies. “We really believed that if you started kids together from first grade, the whole racial attitude would change,” she said. Gamble recalled staging a production of Hello Dolly! in the early 1970s. She cast black kids in many of the white roles, and parents of both races mingled comfortably in the audience. “Given what it was like here before, that was a small revolution,” she said.

But viewed with twenty-five years’ hindsight, the revolution appeared limited, and seemed to have turned reactionary. “No one really talks about true integration now,” Gamble said. “Now, the goal seems to be separatism with everything equal. Not just in terms of facilities, but in terms of how we present society. Black history and white history. Black culture and white culture. We should be teaching all this as our culture, our history. But no one’s trying to do that anymore. It’s Plessy vs. Ferguson extended to everything.”

Nor was separate really equal when it came to education. At first, Gamble said, white parents who sent their kids to private academies “were people with money who didn’t want their kids sitting next to blacks.” But as public schools deteriorated, the academies began to attract middle-class families who simply wanted their kids to have a better chance. The academies cost $150 a month, straining budgets and deepening resentment of blacks, whom many whites blamed for the decline of public schools. “It’s a vicious cycle and the whole South is caught in it, the whole nation, really,” she said.

On my way out of town, I stopped at Fort Dale South Butler Academy, whose sign proclaimed, “established 1969”—the year Greenville’s schools integrated. The trim brick building was ringed with trailers to accommodate the school’s rapid growth. There wasn’t a black face among the hundred or so kids I saw running to buses as school let out. I wandered past an outdoor play area and saw a large Confederate battle flag painted on the pavement. Like the rebels of old, the seg academies had effectively seceded from the changing society that surrounded them.

Leaving Greenville, shadowed by the same melancholic cloud that hung over my visit to Selma, I kept replaying Bobbie Gamble’s parting comment. “Remember, Bloody Sunday was only thirty years ago and school integration’s even younger than that. Maybe we’re just asking too much. Revolutions don’t happen overnight.”

Winding out of Greenville behind a long line of school buses, I hoped she was right.