History versus the Historian

On a rainy Friday night a few weeks ago, a popular author visited Selma and all hell broke loose. This man came to town to talk about his new book, which begins with the Selma voting rights campaign and even includes stories from Lowndes County, the place between Selma and Montgomery that often gets ignored in books and films about the Movement. Everyone I talked to seemed happy to have him in town. So, I was more than a little shocked when the popular writer's lecture almost became the scene of an Alabama beat down.

O.k., maybe I'm exaggerating a little about the beat down, but the author later said that he was a bit concerned about his physical safety when a former student activist got in his face during his talk and refused to back down.

Anyone who's ever seen this writer - a distinguished-looking white guy - might be surprised to know that he was the center of chaos that teetered on the brink of violence. He looks exactly like the type of guy who'd be a talking head on a History Channel documentary: white-haired, soft-spoken, and wearing a tweed jacket. None of this mattered, though, to the two men who came to the talk with a bone to pick.

In a nutshell, these guys (both white, middle-aged men with the slightly unhinged look of a 60s radical gone bad) felt that the writer's new book had denied them a legacy. Before the event even started, one man was called out because he wouldn't stop ranting about how his organization hadn't been mentioned in the book. An event organizer brought him down to a medium boil, though, and he was more of a nuisance than a menace for the rest of the talk. The other guy was much more of a problem. He basically "showed his ass," as my grandmother would say, by loudly interrupting the writer's speech and completely dominating the Q&A. He became so disruptive that another event organizer politely told him he was no longer welcome at the talk. That's when the real trouble started. On his way to the door, he stopped within striking distance of the writer, who was seated at the front of the room, and physically threatened him, as well as the man who eventually had to escort him out of the building. I guess he's abandoned his commitment to nonviolence.

Watching the way these two men behaved, in comparison to the room full of black activists who also weren't mentioned in the book, I wondered how much race factors into their response. I think that because white men are generally the center of most interpretations of American history, they're not accustomed to being left out of the story. Obviously, issues like class also affect whose stories get told, but I think that the African Americans who didn't make it into the top-down version of history offered by the author never even expected to be included. So, why would they get worked up?

On the other hand, I can understand the men's frustration, even if I disagree with their tactics. Selma is a place where everyone has a story, so it must be exasperating for them to read books that focus on big leaders like King and not the grassroots organizers who were the backbone of the movement. That's pretty much why the NVRMI exists in the first place.

Leaving the event that night, I ran into the president of the museum and we hatched a plan right there in the parking lot. Using the museum's oral history collection, we would create a book filled with first-hand accounts of the movement in the Black Belt. It will be called "The Stories That Were Never Told." Here, the "foot soldiers" can tell it like it was. Renewed after a night full of frustration and anger, I climbed into the car with Jerome and went home.

I love Selma!