Red Faces in Alabama

...This move was accomplished in spite of a special trip to Birmingham by the "little leader," who saw that he could not stop the desecration of his pet rooster (still the party emblem) and returned to Montgomery without speaking a word...

...A railroad station at the time of the Civil War, the city was given its present name only in 1871...

...The failure of that effort has left Flowers supporters and sympathizers (many cast their ballots for Carl Elliott, in the belief that he would stand a better chance against Wallace) with a devil's choice in November: Wallace or Congressman James Martin...

...Third-partyism has been discussed with varying degrees of seriousness by Flowers supporters and by others, including such leaders of the Negro community as Dr...

...Bull" Connor, a former baseball announcer, was first elected to public office in the 1930s...

...For the present, it is essential that the anti-Wallace forces band together and once more "get out the vote" in the May 31 runoff elections...

...In terms of efficacy, a "national" party would stand to gain from a Wallace-Republican dogfight in November...

...Richmond Flowers' effort to capture the Democratic party's nomination was at least in part based on the postulate that the new and potentially powerful bloc of Negro voters should be fully integrated into the party's structure...

...Many middle- and upper-class whites in the state (apart from the small nucleus of long-standing liberals) have realized the sad state of affairs to which the Wallaces, Clarks and Lingos have driven them...

...In 1950 Birmingham and Atlanta were nearly equal in population...

...Neither old nor particularly respectable by traditional Southern standards, Birmingham had to develop its own "aristocracy" around a few fortunes made from the steel industry and land speculation...

...An all-Negro one, however, would be self-defeating, since it would alienate many of the moderate whites, and quite possibly would also be abortive, because of the numerous divisions within the Negro community itself...

...A Right-wing Republican with extreme views and great wealth, Martin has embarrassed by his crude demagoguery even the leading Goldwater supporters in the state, who nonetheless depend on him for funds...

...The atmosphere of Alabama politics, however, is undergoing a significant change...

...The most feasible "third force" idea is that of a coalition between Elliott, Flowers, Gilchrist and allNegro groups...

...The change may best be symbolized by the state Democratic Committee's decision early this year to strike the phrase "white supremacy" from the party motto and replace it with the single word "democracy...

...The Birmingham aristocrats were in turn regarded as parvenus by the crustier Southern aristocracies...

...Whether or not it could eventually achieve recognition as the official Washington party is at best a moot point...

...And yet, I think a certain amount of optimism is warranted...

...During the last Presidential campaign I had the misfortune of spending 10 weeks in Montgomery and Birmingham when the Goldwater fever was at its peak...

...The majority of white citizens here continue to regard Negroes as biologically inferior creatures, look on Washington as a fearful Hobbesian Leviathan teeming with outright Reds and fellowtravellers, and in general practice what Professor Fritz Stern has called "the politics of cultural despair...

...Political power and the future of Birmingham were in effect handed over by default to the city's toiling and very bigoted masses...

...Rabid pseudo-Republicans were loudly professing their new-found faith at the drop of a hat and any reasonable discussion of facts, events or issues was precluded...

...Nixon, and many a power struggle is raging now among the sometimes rival, sometimes overlapping, sometimes near-defunct Negro organizations...

...Speaking in Birmingham before the primary, Martin Luther King Jr...

...he and Flowers are, further, on good terms...

...On the contrary, much of the battle is yet to be fought...

...NATIONAL REPORTS Red Faces in Alabama By Frank Fletcher Montgomery By returning a hermaphroditic Wallace rooster to the head of the Democratic party without even the necessity of a runoff, Alabamians have once again shown the nation that their collective neck is still a rosy (if not quite a bloody) shade of red...

...Cries of "Uncle Tomism" have already been levelled at Dr...

...This is not to suggest that the trial is over for the Alabama Negro or that within the decade Washington will be able to embrace the repentent prodigal, withdraw all Justice Department observers and pour healing balm into the state's coffers...

...A third party could take a number of forms...

...Depletion of highgrade resources coupled with a failure to invest heavily in modern production facilities led inevitably to a decline in the critical steel industry...

...For Alabama has been changing, slowly but perceptibly, and many Alabamians are now embarrassed by its official racism...

...But several factors would, on the surface, tend to favor recognition: Elliott-a 16year veteran of Congress who lost his seat after the last census largely through the dollar diplomacy of H. L. Hunt, the Texas millionaireBirchite-was the Johnson Administration's platonically favored primary candidate...

...the state's Democratic Committee is evenly enough divided along loyalist-Wallace lines to enable a movement of Committee members to the "national" camp that would add an element of legitimacy...

...Though hard-hit by the Depression, Birmingham experienced a rapid wartime recovery before falling into its present pattern of relative stagnation...

...The shift is illuminated by a brief historical glance at Birmingham, with a population of some 680,000 by far the state's largest metropolitan area, containing much of Alabama's upper middle class...

...The sizeable if disappointing votes cast for the three more-or-less moderate candidates (Richmond Flowers, Carl Elliott, Bob Gilchrist) demonstrate that (1) a moderate opposition does exist within the state, and (2) that the Negro vote, which may be near 400,000 by November, will have to be taken into account by Alabama politicians in the future...

...and finally, the Democratic National Committee, having virtually given up on the state since 1960, would have little to lose...

...This will mean registering as many Negro voters as are willing and/or able to register, creating official or unofficial organs and channels for dissent, and beginning to organize on the precinct, district and county levels (something which the state Democratic party has never effectively accomplished...

...If this, for whatever reason, is not done, the state will face eight-to-12 more years of rule by the Wallaces and the Klavern Cyclopses, a city may truly die, and, for Alabama, the moderates may indeed be too late...

...quipped that Wallace and Jim Clark had contributed just as much as he to the Negroes' struggle in Alabama, and the statement contains a large degree of truth...

...At the very least, such a party-or, in diluted form, a nominally non-partisan "Action Committee" or pressure group-could serve as a focal point and guiding light for the hopefully growing "loyal" opposition in years to come...

...Regrettably, it took the violence and chaos of 1963-66 to make responsible Birminghamians aware of the deep crisis to which their torpidity had brought them-though in view of the fact that the Wallaces carried Mountain Brook, even the turmoil to date may not have been enough...

...Whither the newly-enfranchised Negro...

...John Nixon, president of the state NAACP...

...Such a rassemblement could bill itself as the true representative of the national Democratic party, adopt the donkey instead of the rooster as its emblem, and so on...

...10 years later Atlanta had tripled in size while Birmingham had grown by only 33 per cent...

...Unfortunately, the answers are not readily forthcoming...

...Eighteen months later I found some of the same people not only laughing bitterly at themselves and their compatriots but also voting and actively campaigning for the moderate-to-liberal candidates...

...These, then, are some of the alternatives...

...Frank Fletcher, a new contributor, was a member of Richmond Flowers' staff in this May's primary...

...An equally important if less evident fact, however, is that Lurleen Wallace's landslide victory in the primary has also left a large and growing number of red faces...

...Despite the comments of many observers, Race still was the issue in this month's primary and probably will remain the issue in Alabama politics for a long time to come...

...But if a political renaissance is to occur in Birmingham and in Alabama as a whole, then a leadership, a following and some form of organization-quite possibly apart from the Democratic party-will have to emerge, that is clear, from the primary race, with its potpourri of civil rights groups, political committees and silent-partner moderates (one Harris poll found 15-20 per cent of the whites in support of Flowers...

...After that-and here is the nub of the problem-the opposition will have to find some cohesive force and bend every effort toward holding together as well as becoming as strong and as outspoken as possible...

...Despite what appears to be a Justice Department whitewash, there is ample evidence that voting frauds and "irregularities' occurred in the primary-enough, perhaps, to have raised the Wallace total by 10-15 per cent and/or lowered that of his opponents by a comparable figure...

...With industrial growth and a desire for status soon causing a largescale exodus to the greener pastures "over the mountain" on the outskirts of the city, Mountain Brook, America's eighth richest community, grew up...

...Whither, then, the moderate...