THE LAST TIME I SAW SELMA

...And so the wheel of hate turns...

...Roof-gutters and outbuildings and porches were sagging, siding and fluted columns peeled, and broken windows in the rat-ridden attics unmended...

...So the love had to go, in Selma, and the Negro had to settle for justice finally...

...And I didn't see how I could change it or how I could help change it...

...We were the white minority, and we could not think of a better way of stopping integration than to keep the uppity Negroes walled up...

...Most every home had its Amanda Lark, and if the wet-nursing of white babies by mammies was gone, a good deal of the rest of the antebellum lived on...

...Everybody knows that the integration battle is won...

...No truant officer came to see if his children were in the Negro school taught by near-illiterates...

...It is an American disgrace...

...We cannot bear the spectacle of our naked condition at home or abroad, in Vietnam or in Alabama...

...The landlords and the banks double-compounded interest on the advance the Negro lived on, and the money-men took a fat mortgage on his skinny cow...

...and theirs was much lower than ours...

...The religion, art, books, and music of the antebellum rich were losing ground fast...

...the Negroes of Selma did not exist...

...or in Vietnam, where, if we only allow the Niggers to live and stop killing them and let them make a crop and eat it, they may some day have the strength to stand on their feet and register to vote...

...Was Amanda Lark happy...

...And having no part in his governance, he had no human part in his community...

...But a political philosopher would say that that was not the question...

...Amanda Lark held that home and that family together, at $2 a week...

...His articles have appeared in many publications and have won him the George Polk Memorial Award and the Benjamin Franklin Citation for Journalism...

...None of the speakers said that we Cali-fornians, by passing Proposition 14 for segregated housing, had put the club in the hands of the Selmians who attacked James Reeb...

...This demonstration," he said, "is about Selma...

...But the love of a man for a Nigra—at his mercy, like his dog—is not the love of a man for a man...

...She was the head man, at $2 a week...

...not in Selma...

...He read The New York Times, the only man in Selma I ever knew who did...

...A believer would say yes, and a non-believing psychiatrist would say yes...

...nothing...

...But social distance didn't mean that the whites did not feel a responsibility for "our own Nigras" when they were starving or dying...

...And by "we" I mean you and me and Walter Lipp-mann, who says (and the italics and the exclamation mark are both his), "Selma is not only an American tragedy...

...The last time I saw Selma it was immobile, with nothing to move it or mobilize it...

...Without love men fight for justice...

...One of the local beats carried a sign reading, "Why Are There No Negro Policemen or Firemen in Monterey...

...and that no Negro in Dallas County (or any other county down that way) ever did...

...And one of the highest officials of the Peninsula said that the sign was unfortunate...

...And when Amanda Lark said, "Y'all pick up dat stuff dis minnit," or "Outa mah way, chile," or, "Go on, now, Ah ain't got no time fo' studyin' y'all," the six children moved to it...

...Of course some of them (but not most of them) pilfered a little (like poor white folks), and some of them (but not most of them) got likkered up a little (like rich and poor white folks) on Saturday night...

...We Americans are hysterical these days, and I reckon we should be...

...and you heard, on occasion, when a servant or a janitor didn't show up, of a cuttin' on Washington Street...

...and with her four sons and her other son-in-law I carried her to her grave...

...Selma done went up a little more...

...There were stores and houses for rent a-plenty, and this was just before the Crash...

...But I don't see any Boyds or Pettuses or Owenses or Kings—or Hohenbergs or Hagedorns —mentioned anywhere...

...Rabbi Joe Gumbiner and I, two Northerners, marveled...

...and within the community was an always amused concern, but a real concern, of the whites for our own Nigras, who got all the cast-off clothing and food and shoes, and who, inside the homes where they worked, got the love that bridges social distance...

...Were any of them happy...

...If he is equal to us when he is equal, he won't be equal to much...

...Keeping cool, eating and sleeping and talking and visiting...

...But a few years after the last time I saw Selma we got into the Second World War to Make the World Safe for Democracy, and Craig Field, a flight training center, was set up outside Selma, and Selma done went up a little...

...And that, in their unutterable ignorance, they believed...

...White Selma survived on the backs of the unlimited supply of dirt-cheap Negro labor, town and country...

...The mythos was all that was necessary, the mythos of what the whites called "social distance...

...The insurance companies issued him policies consisting of nothing but loopholes...

...my little girl Amanda is named after one of them, Amanda Lark...

...Births and birthdays and weddings and funerals of our own Nigras commanded the observance, and even the attendance, of their masters and mistresses...

...Mistuh Ben, the patriarch, paid no attention to the house, and Miz Julie, the bed-ridden matriarch, never saw her own purse...

...not in Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal or Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, but in the New Jerusalem and the Great-Gettin'-Up-Day, in the one Society that admitted them and admitted them first that were last...

...And its gentility was fading fast away...

...Like the Hohenbergs and a dozen other Jewish families, the Hagedorns belonged to the Selma Country Club...

...We don't want to hear about what we were twenty-five years ago any more than we want to hear about what Selma is today...

...Amanda Lark, joyous, virtuous, and wise, managed the money, the house, the kitchen, and the six children at $2 a week...

...Hohenberg, President...

...Carmel, California...

...I never heard of the Klan's being in town in those fifteen years—and I'd have heard if it had been...

...The Selma Negro in my day was, as I'm sure he is for the most part still, a house servant or a janitor...

...culture" meant what the whites were, not what they had...

...Nor is the Selma of 1965 the Selma we read about in the papers...

...and if Selma was Dallas County's Fastest Growing White Community, all the others were shrinking, because Selma wasn't growing fast or slow...

...Being in, and being Jews, they had reason to keep away from "trouble," if trouble should ever appear, and to worry about Rabbi Joe Gumbiner's radicalism...

...But they would stand half the night in a cold, wet duck-blind, and walk through the fields and the swamps for partridge three days in a row...

...Five thousand dollars bought you a block of Selma with a porticoed mansion on it and a stand of live oak and magnolia, and there were no takers...

...Selma is better than a thousand other towns in the South...

...Theah she is, sittin' on th' copin' scretchin' huh haid, en Ah say, 'Aunt Mary, yo haid eetch?' En she say, 'Sho' do, Mistuh Harry.' En Ah say, 'Whyn't yo' scretch it hahduh?' En she say, 'Ah do scretch is hahduh, but it eetch.' " Under the slow, creaking ceiling fans on the verandah in Selma in the evening, that was the way it went, and the young whites who stayed in Selma grew up less literate than their elders...

...And in 1965 they came pouring out of the doors of their crumbling churches—churches the white Christians had sold them at a price that built new churches with parking lots in a better part of the new Selma...

...It will take another half century or so to mop up, and another two or three centuries to eliminate the bigotry that has its last-ditch stand in the opposition, North no less than South, to interracial marriage...

...The Last Time I Saw Selma by Milton Mayer ff^he first time I saw Selma there was a sign at the north edge of town that read, "Thirty Thousand White Farmers in Dallas County by 1930," and another at the east edge of town, on the Montgomery highway, that read, "Selma—Dallas County's Fastest Growing White Community...

...What could the whites of Selma have done...

...there was no more "white leadership" than there was Negro leadership, and the black and white pulpits (except for Rabbi Joe Gumbiner) were as mute on race as they are today on Vietnam...

...Selma, Alabama, the Selma I knew, is an historical accident as the focus of that triumph...

...En Ah say, 'Oncle, wha' kine uh boid dis heah?' En he say, 'Da's uh kildee, boss,' En Ah say, 'Ent no snipe?' En he say, 'No-suh, boss, da's uh kildee.' En Ah say, 'Dey good fuh eatin'?' En he say, Wo-suh, boss, Ah gives 'em tuh mah chillun tuh eat.' " And that's the way it was in Selma when Selma was dying and I was young...

...Nothing could, except gently down...

...For we are the minority rich, we Americans, and we cannot think of a better way of stopping Communism than to kill the uppity poor...

...The Niggers...

...What we are losing in Vietnam, and everywhere else in the world, is the war...

...If she said to Mistuh Ben, "Ah needs money, Mistuh Ben," and Mistuh Ben said, "Go get it out of my wallet," it meant that she needed money to run Mistuh Ben's house...

...Talking always about the old days, and talking about the Niggers, old times and new, in always amiable mockery...

...Keeping cool, eating and sleeping, and talking...

...Of course they sang and they laughed, and they prayed and they shouted, and they never committed suicide (or murder or rape...

...But we are not defending freedom throughout the world, least of all in Vietnam, where Walter Lippmann doubts that thirty per cent of the South Vietnamese support the government...

...Selma is just another town except for its above-average record on race...

...The house servants in the home on Broad Street got up to $2 a week and "takin's" from the kitchen...

...And hunting and fishing and swimming and bowling and poker...

...So the Selma racists hate us the more for our hypocrisy, as we hate them the more (just as we hated Hitler) for pulling the skeleton out of our closet...

...But nothing ever appeared about the cuttin' in the Selma Times-Journal, or about anything else that any Negro did or was done by...

...We thank God that nobody tells us to see the Selma racists as they see themselves or the California racists as the Selma racists see them...

...Nobody tells us about that any more than anybody tells us that a generation ago Franklin D. Roosevelt listened to Walter White's assertion that the only Negroes in the Navy were messmen and turned to his Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, and said, MILTON MAYER, author and lecturer, spent the last semester as visiting professor of English at the University of Massachusetts...

...Selma, and Dallas County, and Alabama were (as they say down that way) just too po' to tote it...

...What could the white Selmians have done if they had cared...

...They came pouring out of the doors of their churches, clothed finer than their finest this time: clothed in the whole empty-handed armor of the Lord...

...Clean and dressed in their finest—though the children in their finest might be shoeless—they went to Church...

...there are a few lawyers, I suppose, and a banker or a doctor or two, who maintain the old family practices...

...Books cost money, and the library was too far to go in the heat...

...Neither had the white Selmians in the Thirties...

...Here was a borderline economy, the city's, the county's, and the state's...

...When Rabbi Joe Gumbiner squawked on behalf of the synagogue's janitor, the insurance agent, one of the new men moving in, said, "What do you want to mix up with the Niggers for...

...and when Rabbi Joe Gumbiner of Berkeley went back to Selma (and to jail) a few weeks ago, the old Jews of Selma, like the old gentiles, were far to find...

...We have no intention of letting justice or Godliness touch the American Standard of Living...

...Its religion has even moved the white church...

...the county Negro a fantastically miserable cropper whose crop was "advanced" before he ever made it...

...The Kingdom...

...It didn't go back much before the 1850's, and almost as far back as it went there were Jews there, and a Jewish synagogue...

...So you see how it was in Selma, and how it is outside Selma...

...Nothing moved...

...And when men fight—whatever they fight for— there is always less love...

...And that was the last thing that had ever happened in Selma, or ever would...

...These were prosperous Jews of the "right," i.e., German, kind, whose cultural level was higher than that of most of the antebellum gentiles...

...No-suh, boss...

...Their complete squalor was completely isolated...

...and neither did you, and neither did Franklin D. Roosevelt, and neither did Theodore Roosevelt, and he had Booker T. Washington to the White House for lunch...

...Mixing up with the Niggers was really beyond comprehension in Selma (as where wasn't it...

...Selma is not a tragedy...

...But the "we" who have achieved that triumph are not you and I and Walter Lippmann, but the poorest and worst oppressed and most inarticulate and most religious minority in our gung-ho secular society...

...A generation before Northerners got into their cars to go around the corner, Southerners did...

...The stores sold the Negroes bright-striped shoddy...

...The Negro didn't understand the white man's cal'atin' and would have had ho alternative if he had...

...The Niggers were happy, weren't they...

...To relieve the squalor of the Negroes—not to say hiring them at white men's wages—would have wrecked that borderline economy in ninety days...

...If Selma was better than most towns like it—and it was—it may have been because it was newer...

...The sons and daughters of the big old families in the big old houses were going away to school and they weren't coming back...

...There was a lot more love in Selma then than now, and, I trow, a lot more in slave times than in my day...

...Nobody said that two of the Peninsula's five towns, Car-mel and Pebble Beach, are Jim Crow towns...

...A big old home, across from the Hotel Albert on Broad Street, where Miz Julie ruled a large family (or let it rule itself) from a sickbed...

...And without love there is no durable justice in peace...

...Selma is a looking-glass—and a triumph...

...and maybe lose himself something in the process, and maybe lose us something too...

...They belonged to everything, and they hadn't to stoop to get in...

...They weren't pushed around, or made to get off the sidewalk, or clubbed or lynched...

...If man is a political animal, he is not a man unless he participates in his governance...

...And so it was in my day in Selma long ago...

...at the behest of their white patients the white physicians took care of Negroes as a matter of course...

...I talked with the librarian, the editor, and two of the teachers occasionally...

...If we Americans were to substitute justice for the scandalous pretense of aid, in a world two-thirds of whose people are hungry, we'd sink the American Standard of Living in ninety days...

...Must be a son or grandson of Old Judge Pitts...

...Selma, too, was done going down, without even having been a mighty place...

...nothing is, I guess...

...and eight a.m...

...For the Negroes, there were no health measures or police protection, no sanitation or sewage system, no water, no paving or pavements...

...Maybe mostly one kind, country people and boomtown people and people possessed of neither antebellum nor postbellum gentility...

...and so did his cousin, Mayor Leon Schwartz of Mobile...

...His most recent book is "What Can a Man Do...

...A melancholy circle...

...And just survived...

...I hope that somebody some day takes the trouble to find out who they are...

...Between five p.m...

...The mighty Alabama— and it was and is mighty to see—had been killed long ago by the railroads...

...It is a triumph of faith in a faithless age and among a faithless people, South and North, who tell the Sheriff Clarks to go sic 'em in Vietnam and don't go sic 'em in Selma...

...The Selma of 1965 is not the Selma of 1929...

...But out of that squalor, on Sunday morning, came the whole resplendent Negro world into the Resplendid Presence...

...Within the absolutely formal isolation there were nevertheless the vestiges of a community, half ex-slave and half free...

...What can the whites (and blacks) of America do in all the world's Vietnams, besides stop killing the Vietnamese...

...Selma was dying, a dying town on a dead river...

...Nobody had ever heard of Selma then, or ever would...

...It could have been anywhere in America, and maybe, except for the spectacular splendor of it in Selma, it should have been somewhere else altogether: in California...

...Out on a washboard turn off from the Marion Junction road was Old Cahaba, the first capital of the state, a tangle of Spanish moss and Cherokee roses, tumbled with fallen and worn-away tombstones and, among the still-standing chimneys that mark the burned shanties all over the South, a few great chimneys of the great houses of Old Cahaba...

...And they stood on the white man's pavement in Selma and waited (so the Niggers say) on the Lord...

...So we thank God that we are not as other men are—in Selma...

...And neither did Booker T. Washington...

...I suspect that they are the rootless rednecks, rooted out of the canebrake by the war and the collapse of cotton and the promise of industrial jobs—in which last the Negro might have his only opportunity to move up and compete with them for work...

...And it symbolizes the only triumph "we" have achieved in a long time...

...The last battle of the War had been fought there—but it was a week before Appomattox and it wasn't anything like the big battle we're now told it was...

...And nobody outside of Selma had ever heard of that battle...

...We had a big Selma demonstration on the Monterey Peninsula in California a few weeks ago...

...Selma was poor, and Selma was seedy, living on its antebellum gentility...

...Old Cahaba was drowned out—the Alabama at flood backs up into the Cahaba there—and the capital was moved to Montgomery...

...Selma is happening in a country which is engaged in defending freedom throughout the world...

...enough to bring in all kinds of new people...

...But they were a majority of the people of Selma and the county...

...No redneck rabble posse was needed...

...The bottom was out of Alabama cotton (which couldn't compete with Texas), and the train in and out of Selma had one dirty old day coach which was running nearly empty...

...there was less reading in white Selma, per capita, than there had been fifty years before...

...The white schools looked better, but they weren't much better taught...

...But nobody tells us about that...

...I wasn't a Selmian, or a Southerner, but I spent many a long...

...The Niggers were the conversational staple...

...And we thank God that nobody tells us what we don't want to know...

...The while Selmians didn't know or care...

...I used to go out to Cahaba to commune with death and decay, in company with Rabbi Joe Gumbiner of Selma and Sampson Lightning, Caha-ba's only centenarian and only citizen...

...But the Hohen-bergs and the Hagedorns, like the Pet-tus' and the Kings and the Owens and the Boyds, sent their children away to college...

...But the battle is won...

...Happy, oh, happy, those Amanda Larks who, in Egypt, had jobs in the homes of those who would never quite forget their own Egypt...

...Wartime or peacetime, it gave a disproportionate number of its sons to the Army—any army...

...Mis-tuh Ben's partner in Tepper Brothers, "Where a Child Can Buy," was Max Hagedorn, Miz Julie's brother, and Max Hagedorn was just about the weightiest man in town...

...It be a mighty place den," said Sampson, "but it done gone down...

...But the Negroes thought that God could change it and would show them how, because he had said to Isaiah, "You shall walk in my path, and I will show you my way...

...But being Jews, and having once been in Egypt, they supported Negro charities (including Tuskegee) far heavier than the gentiles did...

...He thought that things would change in the South, not, of course, in his time or mine, but some time, and in some unimaginable way...

...But I mean to write about Selma here, and not about me...

...As I read the papers nowadays and see the names of Selmians like Clark, Smitherman, Wilson, and even Connors, I can't find a name that I recognize...

...Nor is Selma either a tragedy or a disgrace...

...How did they do it, without water, soap, or money...

...Yes, one: Sheriff Clark's lawyer, W. McLean Pitts...

...Frank, maybe we could have some Negro bandsmen in the Navy...

...They weren't complaining, were they...

...And in the news pictures of Selma these days I see the names of low-wage and non-union manufacturing plants that weren't there at all in my day or in the day of M. Hohen-berg, President of the Chamber of Commerce...

...Were they happy...

...Some of the big old houses had one elderly widow or spinster in them and old Negro servants who came by the day...

...They existed, all right...

...this, mind you, in the Thirties...

...It was crowding 1930 then, and it didn't look as if Dallas County would make it...

...The papers don't bother to tell us that the Hotel Albert is long since desegregated, and the restaurants and the movies, and all without demonstrations or violence...

...What we have won in Selma is the battle...

...A physical world, slipping further and further back into the physical...

...languid week and month in Selma over a period of fifteen years...

...Both signs were signed, "Chamber of Commerce—H...

...What we want to hear about is the black-hearted wickedness of white Selma, so that we may be whiter-hearted free of charge...

...Meanwhile the hatred and the fear and the frustration that create racism go on mounting as "we" go it alone in attacking North Vietnam with our conventional weapons of napalm and phosphorus and gas...