The Speech That Shocked Birmingham the Day After the Church Bombing
"A bomb went off and an all-white police force moved into action," proclaimed Charles Morgan Jr. at the Birmingham Young Men's Business Club. (Associated Press)
Appalled by the murder of four little girls, a white Alabaman spoke out against racism—and was forever shunned for it.
Andrew Cohen Sep 13 2013, 10:45 AM ET
In the next few days, you are likely to be inundated with 50th anniversary reminiscences of the Birmingham church bombing of September 15, 1963, a blast that killed four young black children and intensified the struggle for civil rights in the South. This is as it should be. The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church was the most terrible act of one of the most terribly divisive periods in American history, and it's not too much of a leap to suggest that all that came after it—including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—would not have come as quickly as it did without the martyrdom of those little girls.
What you likely will not hear about in the next few days is what happened the day after the church bombing. On Monday, September 16, 1963, a young Alabama lawyer named Charles Morgan Jr., a white man with a young family, a Southerner by heart and heritage, stood up at a lunch meeting of the Birmingham Young Men's Business Club, at the heart of the city's white Establishment, and delivered a speech about race and prejudice that bent the arc of the moral universe just a little bit more toward justice. It was a speech that changed Morgan's life—and 50 years later its power and eloquence are worth revisiting. Just hours after the church bombing, Morgan spoke these words:
Four little girls were killed in Birmingham yesterday. A mad, remorseful worried community asks, "Who did it? Who threw that bomb? Was it a Negro or a white?" The answer should be, "We all did it." Every last one of us is condemned for that crime and the bombing before it and a decade ago. We all did it.
He had written the speech that morning, he would recount years later after he and his family were forced to flee Birmingham because of the vicious reaction his words had generated from his fellow Alabamans. He had jotted down his remarks, he said, "from anger and despair, from frustration and empathy. And from years of hopes, hopes that were shattered and crumbled with the steps of that Negro Baptist Church." He had had enough of the silent acquiescence of good people who saw wrong but didn't try to right it.
A short time later, white policemen kill a Negro and wound another. A few hours later, two young men on a motorbike shoot and kill a Negro child. Fires break out, and, in Montgomery, white youths assault Negroes. And all across Alabama, an angry, guilty people cry out their mocking shouts of indignity and say they wonder, "Why?" "Who?" Everyone then "deplores" the "dastardly" act. But you know the "who" of "Who did it" is really rather simple.
There was little in Morgan's early life to suggest that he would have the courage to speak out in this fashion—but you also can see signs of the civil rights lawyer to come. He was born in Kentucky, the son of parents who moved their family to Birmingham in 1945 and were always courteous to the "black help." Like so many other local sons and daughters of the time, Morgan went to University of Alabama. By the time he got there he was interested in law and politics. He would spend his life enmeshed in both.
The "who" is every little individual who talks about the "niggers" and spreads the seeds of his hate to his neighbor and his son. The jokester, the crude oaf whose racial jokes rock the party with laughter. The "who" is every governor who ever shouted for lawlessness and became a law violator. It is every senator and every representative who in the halls of Congress stands and with mock humility tells the world that things back home aren't really like they are. It is courts that move ever so slowly, and newspapers that timorously defend the law.
He was always a Democrat, which in Alabama in 1948 meant that he was present at the creation of the chasm on race that defines American politics to this very day. Tellingly, he was drawn first to James E. Folsom [ http://www.archives.state.al.us/govs_list/g_folsom.html ]—"Big Jim"—who served two non-consecutive terms as governor from 1947 to 1959. Folsom was a populist, which wasn't uncommon, but was also an early and ardent integrationist. "As long as the Negroes are held down by deprivation and lack of opportunity the other poor people will be held down alongside them," Folsom had said, in 1949, the year after Alabama went Dixiecrat.
It is all the Christians and all their ministers who spoke too late in anguished cries against violence. It is the coward in each of us who clucks admonitions. We have 10 years of lawless preachments, 10 years of criticism of law, of courts, of our fellow man, a decade of telling school children the opposite of what the civics books say. We are a mass of intolerance and bigotry and stand indicted before our young. We are cursed by the failure of each of us to accept responsibility, by our defense of an already dead institution.
I suppose it was inevitable that a smart young man interested in law and politics would pass the decade of the 1950s in Alabama at the center of a constant storm of racial tension. And 1954 clearly was the dividing line. Before it there were the deplorable conditions that generated the United States Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education [ http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0347_0483_ZS.html ]. After it there was the virulent opposition that the ruling generated in the South. What did Morgan say he learned during this tumultuous time? That voices of moderation must have the courage to speak up—or accept the pain of being left out.
Yesterday while Birmingham, which prides itself on the number of its churches, was attending worship services, a bomb went off and an all-white police force moved into action, a police force which has been praised by city officials and others at least once a day for a month or so. A police force which has solved no bombings. A police force which many Negroes feel is perpetrating the very evils we decry. And why would Negroes think this?
He got married. He became a lawyer. He was active in state and local politics. By 1958 he had his own firm. And through this era, of Citizens Councils [ http://www.citizenscouncils.com/ ] and Little Rock [ http://crdl.usg.edu/events/little_rock_integration/ ], he struggled to reconcile his love of the South with his aversion to its racism, his loyalty to Birmingham with his frustration at its opposition to integration. What he learned during this time in both law and politics, he would later say, was that the topic of race was a trap and that "every white man in Alabama was caught up in it."
There are no Negro policemen; there are no Negro sheriff's deputies. Few Negroes have served on juries; few have been allowed to vote; few have been allowed to accept responsibility, or granted even a simple part to play in the administration of justice. Do not misunderstand me. It it not that I think that white policemen had anything whatsoever to do with the killing of these children or previous bombings. It's just that Negroes who see an all-white police force must think in terms of its failure to prevent or solve the bombing and think perhaps Negroes would have worked a little harder. They throw rocks and bottles and bullets. And we whites don't seem to know why the Negroes are lawless. So we lecture them.
In 1960, The New York Times' correspondent Harrison Salisbury wrote a flammable piece on Birmingham titled "Fear and Hatred Grip Birmingham [ http://reportingcivilrights.loa.org/authors/selections.jsp?authorId=70 ]." In a tone Morgan would echo three years later, Salisbury wrote of the city: "Every channel of communication, every medium of mutual interest, every reasoned approach, every inch of middle ground has been fragmented by the emotional dynamite of racism, enforced by the whip, the razor, the gun, the bomb, the torch, the club, the knife, the mob, the police and many branches of the state's apparatus." Furious, Alabama officials quickly sued the Times for libel.
Birmingham is the only city in America where the police chief and the sheriff in the school crisis had to call our local ministers together to tell them to do their duty. The ministers of Birmingham who have done so little for Christianity call for prayer at high noon in a city of lawlessness, and in the same breath, speak of our city's "image." Did those ministers visit the families of the Negroes in their hour of travail? Did many of them go to the homes of their brothers and express their regrets in person or pray with the crying relatives? Do they admit Negroes into their ranks at the church?
The libel lawsuit (remember, this was before the Supreme Court issued New York Times v. Sullivan [ http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0376_0254_ZS.html ], a decision that broadened first amendment protections for journalists) immediately impacted Morgan. He was asked to represent the Rev. Robert L. Hughes, a white Methodist minister who was a director of the Alabama Council on Human Relations, a group designed to act as a liaison between the white and black communities in Birmingham. Hughes had been served a subpoena to produce the records of all those who supported the council. And he had decided to fight the request.
Who is guilty? A moderate mayor elected to change things in Birmingham and who moves so slowly and looks elsewhere for leadership? A business community which shrugs its shoulders and looks to the police or perhaps somewhere else for leadership? A newspaper which has tried so hard of late, yet finds it necessary to lecture Negroes every time a Negro home is bombed? A governor who offers a reward but mentions not his own failure to preserve either segregation or law and order? And what of those lawyers and politicians who counsel people as to what the law is not, when they know full well what the law is?
Representing Rev. Hughes immediately made Morgan the target of the Klan. Its members accosted him in a courthouse at a hearing. There were anonymous nighttime phone calls. "How come you'd represent that nigger-lover Hughes?" he would be asked. "You better watch out, tough guy. Some night we'll get you alone." The experience made Morgan realize that he and Hughes, that all moderates seeking to foster equal rights in the South at that time, were "in the same boat." Whether he had wanted to or not, he had chosen a side.
Those four little Negro girls were human beings. They had lived their fourteen years in a leaderless city: a city where no one accepts responsibility, where everybody wants to blame somebody else. A city with a reward fund which grew like Topsy as a sort of sacrificial offering, a balm for the conscience of the "good people," whose ready answer is for those "right wing extremists" to shut up. People who absolve themselves of guilt. The liberal lawyer who told me this morning, "Me? I'm not guilty!" he then proceeding to discuss the guilt of the other lawyers, the one who told the people that the Supreme Court did not properly interpret the law. And that's the way it is with the Southern liberals. They condemn those with whom they disagree for speaking while they sit in fearful silence.
He became radicalized—but only to a point and always within the structure of the law. He represented a black murder defendant named Boaz Sanders, a case that further opened his eyes to the state's unequal justice under law. Then he sued the University of Alabama, his beloved alma mater, after it refused to admit two black men around the same time it was stalling the admission of Hood and Malone. These were formal acts of subversion against a culture he could neither abide nor quit. It was tough love. It was the tiny ripple of hope that Robert Kennedy, years later [ http://www.rfksafilm.org/html/speeches/unicape.php ], would talk about in South Africa.
Birmingham is a city in which the major industry, operated from Pittsburgh, never tried to solve the problem. It is a city where four little Negro girls can be born into a second-class school system, live a segregated life, ghettoed into their own little neighborhoods, restricted to Negro churches, destined to ride in Negro ambulances, to Negro wards of hospitals or to a Negro cemetery. Local papers, on their front and editorial pages, call for order and then exclude their names from obituary columns.
The Alabama of the early 1960s was the Alabama of George Wallace and the Freedom Riders [ http://amhistory.si.edu/onthemove/collection/object_546.html ]. It was the Alabama of Vivian Malone and James Hood [ http://partners.nytimes.com/library/national/race/061263race-ra.html ] and Eugene "Bull" Connor. It was the Alabama from which came many blacks and whites who believed in integration and in civil rights and who participated in the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. And then, just 18 days later, it was the Alabama that detonated a bomb inside a church on a Sunday. "My God," a woman on the scene screamed, "you're not even safe in a church."
And who is really guilty? Each of us. Each citizen who has not consciously attempted to bring about peaceful compliance with the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, every citizen who has ever said "they ought to kill that nigger," every citizen who votes for the candidate with the bloody flag, every citizen and every school board member and schoolteacher and principal and businessman and judge and lawyer who has corrupted the minds of our youth; every person in this community who has in any way contributed during the past several years to the popularity of hatred, is at least as guilty, or more so, than the demented fool who threw that bomb.
What's it like living in Birmingham? No one ever really has known and no one will until this city becomes part of the United States. Birmingham is not a dying city; it is dead.
And with those words—"It is dead"—Morgan sat down. In his powerful book, "A Time to Speak [ http://www.amazon.com/A-time-speak-Charles-Morgan/dp/0030139562 ]," from which the speech has been transcribed, Morgan wrote: "There was applause, and then one member rose. He suggested that we admit a Negro into the club. There was silence. The motion died. Soon the Young Men's Business Club of Birmingham, Alabama, adjourned its meeting of September 16, 1963. It was one o'clock. Downstairs, the troopers still laughed and talked, and blocks away the carillon again played 'Dixie.'"
Postscript
Following the speech, the threats began almost immediately. The very next morning, at 5 a.m., Morgan received a call. "Is the mortician there yet?" a voice asked. "I don't know any morticians," Morgan responded. "Well, you will," the voice answered, "when the bodies are all over your front yard." Later, Morgan recounted, a client of his drove an hour to tell him to flee Birmingham. "They'll shoot you down like a dog," the client told Morgan. Little wonder that Morgan quickly closed down his law practice and moved himself and his family to safety.
"Chuck told me that he received a stream of threats both by telephone and letter for weeks after his speech," recalls Steve Suitts [ http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2005/05-259.html ], the renowned author, scholar, and civil libertarian who was one of Morgan's longtime friends. "Once we discussed the anonymous threats that Alabama-born Justice Hugo Black received from white Southerners after the Brown decision, and a note I had found in Black's papers saying 'Nigger-lovers don't live long in Alabama.' Chuck smiled and said he got the very same language in a note after his speech in 1963.
"But, the threats that worried Chuck the most were those made against his wife, Camille, and his little boy, Charles," Suitts told me this week via email. "He once told me that he had received a note that he did not share with Camille or anyone else. It listed all the places that Camille and Charles had been on a recent Saturday and said something like, 'Wife and kid of a troublemaker ain't always getting home. Next time?' That one worried him the most, because it meant someone had actually followed his family all day."
What did he do when he left Alabama? A great deal. He led an extraordinarily vital life on behalf of the poor and the dispossessed and the accused. Here's how the Times, in its 2009 obituary of him [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/10/us/10morgan.html?pagewanted=all ], described the impact of Morgan's work upon the lay of the law:
Among his many cases as a civil rights lawyer, Mr. Morgan sued to desegregate his alma mater, the University of Alabama; forced a new election in Greene County, Ala., that led to the election of six black candidates for local offices in 1969; and successfully challenged racially segregated juries and prisons. After the civil rights movement began to subside, Mr. Morgan, as a leader of the American Civil Liberties Union, fought three celebrated court cases involving protests against the Vietnam War.
He represented Muhammad Ali in his successful court fight to avoid being drafted. He represented the civil rights activist Julian Bond in the early stages of an ultimately successful lawsuit after Mr. Bond had been denied a seat in the Georgia legislature because of his antiwar views. And he defended an officer when he was court-martialed for refusing to help instruct Green Berets headed for Vietnam.
But it is Suitts, who in many ways carries on the tradition of the Southern moderate, who deserves the last word as we approach the golden anniversary of this remarkable act of personal courage. Of Morgan, Suitts told me:
In many ways, Chuck took one of the key points in Dr. King's "Letter from the Birmingham Jail," written five months earlier, and extended it into the horrendous facts of the bombing. (Dr. King wrote: "I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice... who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait.")
Chuck's speech carried this theme one step further by suggesting the white moderate was responsible for the worst of "disorder" as well as gross injustice ... by asking" Who is guilty?" of the bombing of innocent little girls and answering "Each of us!" - not the Klan, not the extremist whites but every white person in Birmingham...
There is no monument or commemoration of Chuck's "Time to Speak" in Birmingham. Last time I was in the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum, I did not see any reference to Chuck's speech. Birmingham's Young Men's Business Club still remembers Chuck's speech occasionally, but it is not remembered all that often there or elsewhere in Birmingham.
There is probably more than one reason for this fact. The bombing - not Chuck's speech - was the event that rocked Birmingham and the nation. It is also very hard for anyone today, in Birmingham and elsewhere, to genuinely understand how often and how many good white people kept silent in the face of rank injustice and racial violence in the South during the era of Jim Crow.
In fact, in one of the last conversation Chuck and I had, we laughed about how difficult it is nowadays to find a Southern white family that does not claim having done at least one heroic act on their part to end racial injustice during the civil rights movement.
A speech by Birmingham, Ala. civil rights lawyer Charles Morgan after the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church which killed four black girls on Sept. 15, 1963.
He looks like an Alabama sheriff--all 300 pounds of him--as he reclines on the divan of the Leverett House Guest Suite, his wrinkled shirt unbuttoned, his huge belly rippling under his undershirt.
But aside from his accent and the numerous homey aphorisms scattered through his speech ("You got to get people together so they don't spit at each other on the sidewalk"), Charles Morgan Jr. doesn't sound like a Southern sheriff. First, he doesn't know the meaning of the word "drawl"--he talks non-stop, the words tumbling out of his mouth.
Second, and more important, his words aren't those of a Sheriff Rainey--or of any other segregationist. For Chuck Morgan is a member of that close-knit band of rebels called Southern liberals who periodically speak their minds--and shatter the peace and quiet of the Southern way of life.
Morgan was practicing law in 1963 in Birmingham when his time to speak came. That spring, Martin Luther King led a series of demonstrations in the city's streets. In September the Birmingham schools were desegregated. Two weeks later a bomb shattered a Negro church, killing four little girls. The next day, Charles Morgan Jr. rose to address the Young Men's Business Club of Birmingham.
"I was mad as hell," Morgan recalls. "I made a speech I'd written that morning. When I got through, everyone applauded, and someone moved to admit a Negro to membership in the club. Like everything else in Birmingham, it died for want of a second.
"After that I knew it was all over. I didn't wait to be ridden out of town, but I knew the rail was coming. Within four or five days, I packed my bags, closed down my office and moved."
Morgan became director of the Southern regional office of the American Civil Liberties Union in Atlanta. He still holds that post--an exile from Birmingham, but not from the South.
How did Morgan become a liberal? "I just grew up in a world where you didn't hear so much cussing out of Negroes every day. My father came from east Kentucky and I never saw him exhibit any prejudice. He shook hands with Negroes and called them Mr. and Mrs. Robert E. Lee was my hero, until I found out he fought on the side of slavery."
"As I grew up, I didn't change. Lots of people around me began to change--and the climate changed--but not me." Morgan pauses briefly. "There are tens of thousands of Southerners who grew up like me. A lot of them moved out and went north. A lot are still there, living relatively happy lives. Most of them are rarely ever confronted with the decision about what to do."
Morgan does not feel that these moderates can be expected to be a powerful force for change in the South. "The fiction of the Northern liberal that the Southern moderate is going to rise up and speak out is silly," he says. "Ivan Allen (the liberal mayor of Athens) couldn't survive if 40 per cent of his votes weren't Negro. This base of support doesn't exist for most Southerners.
"A Northern liberal lawyer in the cool 4:30 comfort of his Madison Avenue bar says, 'Why don't you stay there and fight?' Then that same lawyer will send his Southern business to a firm all of whose partners are racists, and, rationalize it by saying: 'We want a firm that will win.'"
Morgan leans back in his chair, gulps a drink of his third glass of wine and takes a big breath. "When the federal government starts sending in registrars and enforcing the laws already on the books, when the North accepts the social responsibility that goes with the ownership of all the corporate wealth in the South, when Harvard and all the Harvards take the stewardship of their Southern investments as a social concern that is equal to their concern for the education of young men--that's when someone in the South who's a normal human being wedded to his hometown will be able to take the stances that are necessary to achieve change."
But Morgan hesitates to put the burden of overthrowing the southern way of life on the back of the Negro. "You can hardly expect a man to exercise his 'freedom of choice' to send his kids to an all-white school if he thinks they will be blown up in a church," he says.
Instead he looks to Washington for the solution of the South's racial problems, especially in the crucial areas of voting and the administration of justice.
In the field of voting he feels that Attorney General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach should blanket the South with federal registrars, whose presence would encourage the Negro registrants.
To improve the judicial system, Morgan advocates a two-prong attack. First, U.S. attorneys should use their statutory power to challenge the racial makeup of federal grand juries. Second, he feels that the Justice Department should employ the 1964 Civil Rights Act to integrate legal facilities (from paddy wagons to court drinking fountains) and jobs (from clerk to state trooper). "Right now the only facility which Negroes and whites share is the electric chair," Morgan says.
Although Morgan is deadly serious about his objectives, he loves to spoof his listeners along the way. After his speech in Leverett House last week, a member of the audience made his way to the platform and told Morgan he was too partial to Negroes. "My father is in the Georgia legislature, and he almost lost his last race because his opponent gave a barbecue for Negroes the night before the election," the young man declared.
"Was that the only reason?" Morgan inquired.
"Well, it was the big one," came the answer.
Morgan paused and grinned. "Looks like your father should give a bigger barbecue next year," he said.
Segregation at All Costs: Bull Connor and the Civil Rights Movement
Uploaded on May 7, 2009
National History Day documentary on Bull Connor, Birmingham's Commissioner of Public Safety, whose use of police dogs and fire hoses on civil rights demonstrators dramatically backfired and called national attention to the Civil Rights Movement.
Created by Eamon Ronan. If anyone is interested in seeing the bibliography/if anyone has any questions, feel free to contact me at eamon.ronan@yale.edu. Thank you for watching.
Charles Morgan Jr. forced Birmingham to confront its racial demons
By Joey Kennedy on January 11, 2009 at 2:00 AM, updated January 11, 2009 at 2:14 AM
Chuck Morgan held up a mirror to Birmingham during the city's darkest days, and many people saw something they didn't want to see.
The day after a bomb ripped through the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and killed four black girls on Sept. 15, 1963, Morgan at the Young Men's Business Club called out those he believed were guilty -- not just the perpetrators, unknown to the public at the time, who planted the bomb. Everyone wanted to know "Who did it?" the young lawyer said to his audience. "The answer should be, 'We all did it.'"
As recounted in "The Politics of Rage," Morgan said it was the man who spread "the seeds of his hate to his neighbor and his son;" it was "every governor who ever shouted for lawlessness and became a law violator;" it was white preachers who "call for prayer at high noon in a city of lawlessness and, in the same breath, speak of our city's image" instead of standing up for what is right; it was politicians, business leaders and, yes, newspaper editors, who had abdicated moral leadership.
The reflection in Morgan's mirror was an ugly one, and many people didn't take kindly to his condemnation of their city. "After that I knew it was all over," Morgan told The Harvard Crimson two years later. "I didn't wait to be ridden out of town, but I knew the rail was coming. Within four or five days, I packed my bags, closed down my office and moved."
Morgan's speech was one of many seminal events in Birmingham -- multiple bombings on what became known as "Dynamite Hill," the beating of Freedom Riders, firehoses and police dogs sicced on peaceful protesters, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "letter from Birmingham Jail" and, of course, the deadly church bombing itself -- that forced a community, and a nation, to confront and change its collective conscience.
Morgan, 78, died Friday of complications from Alzheimer's disease at his home in Destin, Fla., family members said.
Outside Birmingham, Morgan wasn't through fighting for what he believed in. Morgan in 1964 argued and won before the U.S. Supreme Court the "one man, one vote" principle that reshaped political maps across the country. In Reynolds vs. Sims, an Alabama reapportionment case, the court required voting districts to be equal in population, reshaping the State House that had been dominated by rural lawmakers.
Morgan also represented boxer Muhammad Ali in a successful effort to throw out Ali's conviction for evading the Vietnam-era draft, and he helped a young Julian Bond win his seat in the Georgia General Assembly after it had been denied to him because of his opposition to the Vietnam conflict.
Morgan lived a life touched by history, but one that also made history. Birmingham should be thankful Morgan, and others, forced this city to face its racial demons and begin to move beyond them, a journey that continues to this day.
Our thoughts and prayers go to his family and friends.
Why Don't You Ever See TV Interviews With Inmates?
Thierry Ehrmann/Flickr
A Supreme Court decision 40 years ago this summer allowed states to block access to specific prisoners. What does that mean for freedom of the press and our justice system?
Adrian Shirk Jul 15 2014, 10:03 AM ET
In 1972, Angela Davis was interviewed on film for television from the basement of the San Rafael County Prison. She was being held under charges of conspiracy, kidnapping, and first-degree murder—for a crime she was neither complicit in nor present for. Davis had been in prison since 1970, three months after 17-year-old Jonathan Jackson [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_P._Jackson ] held a courtroom hostage, kidnapping the judge and three jurors with firearms licensed in Davis’s name. The incident left Jackson, the judge, and two inmates dead, and at the time, California state law held “anyone who aid[ed] a major crime as guilty as the direct participants.” Davis went on the lam but was captured and jailed three months later.
Her interview [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuBqyBE1Ppw (below, as embedded)(same excerpt also included in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2BIZy0HScM )] took place in a powder blue cement-block cell. In the video, she’s pale, her lips cracked and gummy, but she’s angled fiercely forward. Cigarette smoke curls between her and the interlocutor, Swedish journalist Bo Holmstrum. Mentioning her participation in the Black Panther Party, Holmstrum asks Davis whether she thinks violence is the right way to achieve justice for black Americans.
She smiles. “Oh, is that the question you were asking?” And then she laughs.
See, that’s the other thing. When most people think of revolution, they think of violence, without realizing that the real content of any kind of revolutionary thrust lies in the principals and goals you’re striving for, not how you reach them. On the other hand, because of the way this society is organized, because of the violence that exists on the surface everywhere, you have to expect that there are going to be such explosions .… I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama .… I remember the sound of bombs exploding across the street, I remember my house shaking. I remember my father having to have guns at his disposal at all times because of the fact that at any moment we might expect to be attacked .… So when someone asks me about violence, I just find it incredible, because what it means is that the person who's asking that question has absolutely no idea what black people have gone through, what black people have experienced in this country...
This summer marks the 40th anniversary of Pell v. Procunier [ http://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/417/817/ ], in which four prisoners and three journalists challenged the constitutionality of what was a recently revised section of the California Department of Corrections Manual which states that “[p]ress and other media interviews with specific inmates will not be permitted.”
The plaintiffs lost. On June 24, 1974, the Supreme Court held that the regulation did not violate the freedom of the press guaranteed by the First or 14th Amendments. The primary argument was that because there are other means of direct communication (for instance, by mail or through inmates’ attorneys and loved ones) the rights of neither prisoners nor the press were impeded.
In many ways, the ruling was a product of the social turbulence of the 1970s. In less than a decade, there had been five major prison riots, multiple organized liberation efforts for political prisoners, and media exposure of prison abuses, including revelations of lethal medical experimentation on inmates that had gone on for decades. The failings of the correctional system were visible to even the most politically apathetic American and the negative publicity threatened to discredit state correctional boards.
But, of course, the system’s defense didn’t put it that way. While, in 1974, the California State Department of Corrections was defending the manual revision in court, they argued that giving notoriety to certain inmates was causing, in part, violence within facilities and other “undue grievances,” and that such public interface with the press might disrupt the “rehabilitative procedures,” and thwart the state’s attempts to “deter crime, [ ] protect society by quarantining criminal offenders ... and to maintain the internal security of penal institutions.” In essence, the “security interests” of the state were pitted against the public’s constitutional right to information.
Since Pell v. Procunier, access to inmates has diminished steadily from coast to coast. In 2013, media-access scholar Jessica Pupovac noted in The Crime Report [ http://www.thecrimereport.org/news/inside-criminal-justice/2013-01-the-battle-to-open-prisons-to-journalists ] that today, “at least five states (Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Michigan) make any access the exception to the rule” and that Kansas and Michigan flat out refuse to arrange interviews with specific inmates. In Florida, Kansas, Michigan, New York, and New Hampshire, inmates must “put reporters on their visitation or phone call list if they wish to speak to them, thus forfeiting a visit or call with family or friends.” In Wyoming, officials can screen all questions ahead of time, and if an interview veers from the approved list, a minder can end it. Even state correctional departments that don’t explicitly deny media access to specific inmates still have sanction under Pell to make ad-hoc restrictions and deny access on a case-by-case basis. Meanwhile, the California State Correctional Manual remains unchanged.
Where would we be without that filmed interview with Angela Davis? There’s no direct link between the footage and Davis’s eventual release; hers was already a major press story, and she a public figure. But without the media attention she received—filmed and otherwise—would her legacy of activism for black Americans’ civil liberties and against the American prison system, have been quashed? In Ronald Reagan’s California, Davis’s charges carried the possibility of the death penalty. (She was tried and found not guilty.)
It was 1972. Had it happened just two years later, the interview wouldn’t exist. The video’s freshness serves as a reminder of what the public might know, or hear, or feel, were the press allowed back into the jailhouse. It reminds us of all that we’re likely missing now.
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