the South with his Socratic style and unconventional personality. At the University one night, Gene Patterson, then editor of the Atlanta Constitution, flattered me by joining me for a nightcap after his lecture. He gave me the key to the riddle of the South’s apartness from the “other” Americans by suggesting that I read C. Vann Woodward’s books. Southern journalists of my generation are eternally grateful to “Marse” Vann for teaching us why we are different. Gene also took a chance sponsoring me for a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, a glorious year away from George Wallace’s insurgency against the “integratin’, scalawaggin’, pool-mixin’” forces of the United States.
As a self-conscious Alabama boy, I would never have had the temerity to assault the high walls of intellect at Harvard were it not for former University of North Carolina President Bill Friday who encouraged me to apply. He also did me the favor of reading my chapter on North Carolina and offering a helpful suggestion. Ferrel Guillory, a Chapel Hill authority on the region whose advice is sought by journalists and political leaders alike, also gave the North Carolina chapter a thoughtful read, as did my brilliant sister-in-law, Susan Ehringhaus, a former long-term vice chancellor at UNC. My dear friend Hodding Carter, now an endowed lecturer at UNC, has been an enabler and influence of incalculable value in my career as well as a companion, drinking, talking and arguing late into the night at various venues, and gave an early version of the manuscript a careful read.
For the Washington chapter, three men provided essential details and insights: former Deputy Attorney General Nick Katzenbach; former Justice Department spokesman Ed Guthman, since departed; and Guthman’s assistant Jack Rosenthal, later editorial page editor of the New York Times. Arthur Schlesinger, also now deceased, provided important insights about the Washington years; he was for more than twenty years a friend and colleague on the Twentieth Century Fund (now the Century Foundation).
I am greatly indebted to Kevin Stoker for invaluable research in his University of Alabama dissertation, “Harry Mel Ayers: New South Community Journalism in the Age of Reform.” Stoker’s 1998 work was both a compass and a gold mine of factual material.
If this were an academic book the bibliography from a lifetime of reading about the South would cover several pages. I have already mentioned V. O. Key’s Southern Politics and the many significant works of C. Vann Woodward. A few other books and authors who have had a lasting and profound influence on my thinking include: W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South is essential bedrock for understanding the region. Diane McWhorter’s Carry Me Home filled out for me in rich detail why Birmingham behaved as it did during the civil rights struggle and why it was so different from its post-civil war sibling, Anniston. Robert Schlesinger’s White House Ghosts, about speechwriting in the Jimmy Carter presidency, filled in the blanks and provided answers to the strange reticence of that brilliant and moral man, a disability that helped doom his administration. Finally, if one is to understand the interior of the Southern soul, he or she must read James Agee, Clarence Cason, William Faulkner, John Egerton, and the Agrarians’ I’ll Take My Stand, as well as historians and journalists too numerous to mention.
My friend and colleague as the Star’s vice president for sales and a consumer of history, Robert Jackson, carefully researched some of the chapters dealing with Anniston in the civil rights era. Local attorney Charles Doster gave flavor and substance to a crucial event, the violent integration of the Anniston library. The Star metro editor Ben Cunningham provided rich legal details about the Willie Brewster murder. Editorial Board colleague John Fleming added original reporting to the Brewster murder and its aftermath. He and Star editor Bob Davis read and gave reassuring validation to controversial portions of the “Afterword.” Joel Sanders of Montgomery read the manuscript and made many useful comments during the final editing.
All the photos in the book were carefully scanned by the Star’s graphics chief, Patrick Stokesberry. Thanks also to the skill, patience, and encouragement of my editor at NewSouth Books, Randall Williams, and for the support of his partner, Publisher Suzanne La Rosa, along with the good work of staffers Margaret Day, Brian Seidman, Sam Robards, Lisa Harrison, Noelle Matteson, and Lisa Emerson.
Until hampered by the demands of her job, Kim Usey, an excellent former editor at the Star, did yeoman’s work on the manuscript. To my surprise and delight, Kim’s task was taken up by the managing editor of Longleaf Style, Theresa Shadrix, a sharp editor herself. My wife, Longleaf Style editor Josephine Ayers, also made the long march through a manuscript most of which she had seen or heard before. I am seriously indebted to both women.
Prologue
The room clerk at Johannesburg’s five-star Saxon Hotel surprised us as we checked in: “Mrs. Suzman called and said you are expected for dinner.” That was unexpected, and in a way unwelcome; after the hassle of the flight from Cape Town, we looked forward to a shower and dinner at the famous new hotel’s dining room. I called Helen immediately who said to come right over, several of our South African friends were already there. As we approached the house—gated as most in Sandton are—the hotel driver was excited. I had promised to introduce him to South Africa’s most famous woman. Helen greeted us in the inner courtyard, shooing away the dogs as she let us through the gate. She focused the full power of her charm on the thrilled driver and then guided us to the living room, which was filled with smiling familiar faces from business, the professions, journalism and civil rights. They were into their second round of drinks so we were soon called to table.
Helen’s slight figure presided, seating me at her right, a small tribute that pleased me. During a rare lull in the conversation I offered a Helen Suzman story from a decade earlier (Helen was not then in Parliament but served on the Electoral Commission that would soon oversee the election of her friend, Nelson Mandela): “This was in 1994. We were having an after-dinner brandy in her darkened dining room. At our end of the table were only the wife of the Swedish ambassador, Helen and me when, in a sudden, impetuous moment I asked a prying question, ‘Helen, I have a theory about why people like you—and I too, in a comparatively minor way—have been so contrary to majority white opinion. My theory is that education and travel reveal the wider world, putting local loyalties and prejudices in clearer perspective. Is that why you did what you did?’ You replied emphatically, ‘No!’ Then, what was it, I pleaded. You paused, drew a long breath and answered, ‘indignation!’” Helen laughed along with the rest of the guests, enjoying being reminded of her feisty reputation.
At tea the following morning, a cool spring day in May 2005, she found a Southerner’s preference for iced tea a wholly mysterious process but not in the slightest tempting. As conversation soon revealed, she was just as impatient with her nation’s shortcomings as she had been in the thirteen years when she was the only opposition member of Parliament, calling for division which sent Afrikaner colleagues stomping on tree-limb legs across the aisle to vote “Aye” on some travesty against human rights. A slight woman, alone in a sea of green benches, she was a burning splinter in the body of South Africa’s ruling National Party. But those days were long past. She was now nearing her eighty-eighth birthday, still energetic, capable of outrage but a caged tiger. She didn’t hide her frustration. “I don’t have the access that Parliament gave me,” adding, as if it had just occurred to her, “I think access may be the most important word in the English language.”
When we first met in Cape Town in 1977, she had already used her Parliamentary privileges to mount a hectoring campaign that so nettled the Justice Minister that he relented and allowed her to visit Robben Island. It is a barren spot of land in the bay about thirty rough minutes by jet boat from Cape Town where political prisoners were kept in cells that can only be described as cement boxes. It was she who introduced her country—and the world—to Nelson Mandela. And it was she who made it possible for books and writing paper to be brought to the tall man in Cell No. 5. Visitors to that desolate place today get an informed view of the rhythms of life on that barren rock because your guide will be a former inmate. They seem strangely detached, without resentment or visible emotion when describing, for instance, the stinking latrine dug out of a lime-pit wall as the only place prisoners could speak privately, because the guards would not enter.