What even fraternity boys could not avoid noticing for a few days in February 1956 at the University of Alabama was Autherine Lucy, the first Negro admitted to an all-white Southern university, and Leonard Wilson, an intense young man who led student protests against her enrollment. As student protesters’ ranks swelled with the addition of some of the state’s most diabolical racists, striking rubber workers, Ku Klux Klansmen and their allies from out of state, the crowds became more and more vehement and violent. On the morning of February 6 in New Orleans, where a fraternity brother and I had taken dates for the weekend, we awoke to radio news about the commotion on campus. We decided Tuscaloosa was more interesting than New Orleans and drove back. That night, the trustees met and decided to “exclude Autherine Lucy until further notice,” for the safety of the students. She had been a student for five days. The mob had won. Lucy later married and moved to Texas. Leonard Wilson was expelled from the university for his role in the riots, but became a celebrity racist as executive director of the Alabama White Citizens Council until it expired, along with the civilization that spawned it, in 1969.
At the time, I wasn’t stabbed by sympathy for Lucy or burning with moral indignation against the mob. I just wondered what all the fuss was about. She was just another student, a momentary celebrity whom I never saw but would have liked to have met. An amusing irony from that time, told to me by a girl from Anniston, was the real story behind the two-page photo spread in Life magazine of what appeared to be a racist thug stomping the roof of a Cadillac. As it turned out, the boy trampolining atop the car had been partying all weekend and was so drunk he didn’t know—or care—who was in the car: frightened black tourists, unaware of what had been unfolding on campus. Historian Culpepper Clark in his indispensable account of the times, The Schoolhouse Door, confirmed the true story. Historical accounts of those few days now, when African American students are so ubiquitous as to be invisible, have the texture of a distant reality like Dickens’s London or Hugo’s Paris—events from a past century, a past civilization, which in fact they were.
The White Citizens’ Council is a blur in my memory—the Klan in a business suit, with a college degree. If it had many members in Anniston, Dad was certainly not one of them. I recall his criticism of the white resistance movement, and by the time I returned to Alabama, such middle-class bigotry had been marginalized by real-man racists such as our famous fellow townsman, Asa “Ace” Carter, one of the authors of George Wallace’s 1963 “Segregation Forever!” speech. But I’m getting ahead of my story. It is 1956, and the place is Montgomery.
These were serious times, but my awareness of them remained dim as I engaged in fraternity house frivolity. Novels and trendy nonfiction such as Phillip Wylie’s sardonic Generation of Vipers fed my intellectual appetite rather than textbooks. My grades were passable, but class attendance wasn’t, and those were the days of in loco parentis—university administrators who treated us as their children. The university “family” reached an instant consensus about my value to the academy, and the next thing I knew, I was at the U.S. Naval Training Center in Bainbridge, Maryland, in a boot-camp company under the tender care of a man named Tarango, said to be the all-service heavyweight boxing champion.
After two years in the peacetime Navy, I returned to the University, a more serious student. The seeds of social conscience sown by family and the Wooster School were nourished and began to take root in discussions with Dr. Donald Strong. He was a political science professor who had been one of the two main researchers for Harvard professor V. O. Key’s classic, Southern Politics. Dr. Strong’s graduate course of the same title began to shape my intellectual and ideological foundation. A foundation stone was set when I asked a dumb question after class one day, “Wouldn’t society be more stable if the vote were restricted to the educated and propertied classes?” Dr. Strong answered with a question, put something like this: “Do you think a person without a high school degree should be able to make a political statement about his life?” I could not think of a good reason why he shouldn’t have that right. Which, of course, meant that my west-side classmates in junior high—even the black sailors I avoided in boot-camp—had the same political rights I had. It was so basic that it should not have been such a memorable insight. Donald Strong’s graduate seminar in a tower of the library was a high place where I could look down on my life and inbred assumptions, putting them in perspective.
Key’s text and the supplemental readings began to reinforce in my consciousness something else—the knowledge that to be Southern was to be somehow different. Of course, that distinction had been noticeable when I was the only Southerner in my prep school class, where I had organized a Confederate underground and actually raised the Stars and Bars on Wooster’s flagpole. Clues to a more complete architecture of Southern uniqueness came my way one evening in the spring of 1959. The celebrated journalist Eugene Patterson, then editor of the Atlanta Constitution, spoke to our journalism fraternity and flattered me by accepting an invitation for a nightcap in the bar of the Stafford Hotel. He advised me to read everything C. Vann Woodward had written. Eventually, I made my way through most of Woodward’s seminal series of books and got to know slightly the man we called “Marse Vann.” In particular, his slim volume, The Burden of Southern History, shaped my generation’s sense of the singularity of being Southern.
Gene Patterson’s reading list would be completed in time, but immediately on graduation from the University, I first had to announce the happy news of my availability to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Miami Herald. A humbling wave of apathy greeted my applications to those great journals. Forced to live at home, under the roof of the publisher of the Anniston Star as the greenest of cub reporters at the paper inspired in me a powerful desire to . . . get the hell out of there.
Before I could escape, two reportorial diversions developed into lifelong anecdotes: the story of the ax murderess and the African prince. Every reporter remembers his first murder story, and mine was a doozie. The mystery began in the summer of 1959 with the grisly discovery in nearby Gadsden of a legless, armless, faceless torso. A day later, a couple picking berries pulled back a branch and uncovered a horrifying sight—a second legless, armless, faceless torso. Associated Press labeled the mysterious slayings the “X” and “Y” murders. We speculated that they were “gangland” murders, possibly the result of an underworld civil war between the Alabama hill-based white-whiskey ring and the Tennessee red-whiskey ring. The speculation ended when employees at the Anniston Army Depot noticed that the Harper brothers, Emmet and Lee, had not been at work for several days.
They had been living in a trailer on a farm in Rabbittown where Viola Virginia Hyatt lived with her father. All Viola said about motive was: “They done me wrong.” In fact, she was alleged to have been in the midst of a dual sexual encounter with the brothers. Her business with one concluded, something was said, and the other brother covered himself with a handkerchief in a manner she found insulting. The punishment she exacted was hardly commensurate with the offense. She stole into their trailer at night with her daddy’s shotgun, emptied a chamber into each brother’s face, and dragged the bodies outside. There, in order to fit the disposal task to the dimensions of a wooden wheelbarrow, she cut off their arms and legs with her daddy’s double-bit ax. Making several trips, she deposited the parts on a tarpaulin in the back seat of the family car. She drove through the night on a journey that touched several northeast Alabama counties, throwing an arm out here, a leg out there, rolling out the two torsos. After her arrest she took sheriff’s deputies on a ghastly treasure hunt to relocate the pieces, and deputies stated as fact that she kept more private “treasure” in the freezer. Lorena Bobbitt never attained such rank as a folk villain.
I met Viola in the basement of the old county jail when she returned from her sanity hearing at Bryce Hospital, the state mental health facility in Tuscaloosa, where she was declared sane and competent. A big woman wearing a simple, camellia-red dress and red shoes appeared in the door, dwarfing little Sheriff Roy Snead