by Tony Horwitz
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 De
xter 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.
