The Southern Courier - A paper for the people

[typewriter sounds] [PRINCELLA W. H. DIXON:] Today at the 40-year reunion of the Southern Courier, Montgomery-based newspaper, blaring to you the news of the up and rising African-American community, who do we have here? All of the people who participated in that next emancipation – not after slavery, but after the vote. These are white people who committed themselves from the heart to come into an indigenous community. Oh, yeah, this is not just an international term. It was a community where white people did not have any kind of contact with us. And you made a decision to put aside the prejudice – perhaps of your mother, daddy, sisters, and brothers – and get on the freedom train, and come and make a difference. [GEOFF COWAN:] The idea for the Courier really came from Ellen Lake and Peter Cummings, who were two students who were at Harvard on the Harvard Crimson, and who had been in Mississippi in the summer of 1964. [ELLEN LAKE:] We thought about combining our journalism experience and training at the Crimson with the passion and the commitment that we had developed that summer before, the summer of 64. And the idea of the Courier was born. [STEVE COTTON:] It’s been said that journalism is the first draft of history, and that history belongs to those who write it. Without the Courier, there was a stream of human events going on in that period of the South that simply would not constitute history. It’s true in journalism and in life, what you focus on is what it’s all about. And the Courier’s focus for that 175 occasions really defined, created, and perhaps on 175 occasions, minutely changed history. [MIKE LOTTMAN:] And I remember I came down here, during the primary season in 1966, which was the fist election that measurable numbers of black people could vote. And I just said, “this is it”. This was the best job I ever had, it was the most fun I ever had, and it really changed my life. [[MARY ELLEN GALE:]] I came because I wanted to be part of what seemed to me to the most extraordinary social movement of my time. And I also came for the lesser reasons, that I thought it would be -- and it was – the most extraordinary reporting job I think possible. In a sense, one of the reasons I didn’t go back to journalism, I sometimes think it’s because I thought nothing could ever be better than this experience, the opportunity to share the lives of people who were really doing something to change the world. [GEOFF COWAN:] I think that I had gone into it believing in journalism, and that journalism could make a difference. At a moment in time, it was something that was important to me to believe in it: that you could maintain the highest standards of journalism – the fairness, the balance, the accuracy – at the same time that you felt actually personally passionate about the movement, about the people and the episodes you were covering, but you could still do it with the kind of standards that would make us all proud as journalists. [BOB SMITH:] To me, it was all encapsulated by a little encounter I had with a young kid, couldn’t have been 6 or 7, over in Selma when I went to the projects to work on a story. And this kid ran up to me and said, “Are you a demonstrator?” And I thought for a minute – what I wanted to say was, “No, I’m a professional journalist, and I’m trying to compile an objective newspaper that’s going to reach both sides of the Civil Rights Movement, and it’s going to get the reporters in the South reporting on the stories that they’re missing. But I just looked back at him, I said, “Uh, yeah, I’m a demonstrator.” [laughter] [JOHN DIAMANTE:] The aspect I take away from the Courier is how simple it is to make a newspaper. And I think of a lot of places in this country, how badly a newspaper is needed. And it’s such a simple thing to do, just to go in and put together a crew who talk to both sides, get both sides’ stories, write a straight piece, have it well-edited, and put it in circulation, and put it in people’s hands is an incredible thing. [ARLAM CARR:] I can remember growing up, as a kid, in the Montgomery Advertiser, they had what was called the *** page, or the *** column. The column would be about this size, of this column right here, on one page, of all the *** news in Montgomery. [STEVE COTTON:] The gentleman referred, I think sort of charitably, to the “*** Page”. That’s not what they called it on the mainstream newspapers that had that page. They used another “N” word to describe it. And the way we know that is that one typesetter inadvertently left the slug line in one day, and the paper printed with “The N Page” at the top of that page, spawning a bit of a demonstration, but also revealing just what the attitude was on the mainstream press. [ARLAM CARR:] And so when I had the chance to see a paper that was not just devoted to just Montgomery, but for black people, it really made me feel good. [typewriter sounds] [ARLAM CARR:] I sort of came full circle with the Southern Courier. I started out as a carrier. I saw the Southern Courier as sort of a way that black people had a voice in the community and got some of the news out. So it made me feel good to be a part of the Southern Courier, to be able to get the newspaper out into the community. And then, again, when I said I came full circle, I think it was you, Michael, who came to me one day and said, “Do you want to be a reporter, a reporter for the newspaper?” I thought, sure! My senior year in high school. And I had one true experience with this, and I think I told Michael about it. But that experience gave me a chance to see some of the things that were happening not only just in the civil rights in Montgomery, but also experiencing it for myself, to see what people went through to cover news. [GLORIA B. BRADLEY:] I am Gloria Bradford Bradley, formerly the photography lab technician for the Southern Courier, under the direction of Mr. James ‘Jim’ Peppler. I joined the Southern Courier about a month before graduating from high school in 1966. I had had a photography course at George Washington Carver High School on Fairview Avenue. And that afforded me the opportunity to have a job with Southern Courier, about a month before graduating from high school. And I’m grateful for having been employed with the Southern Courier until it closed. I was functioning in the lab, and I knew the Southern Courier newspaper was getting the word out to the people, whereas the regular newspapers, the standard newspapers, may not have been. I noticed how much news we did give out, and what an impact it would have had, getting the word out to the masses where the other newspapers may not have been doing that. [BARBARA HOWARD:] When they first came south, I was actually in the 12th grade, and had had typing skills and training, worked in the office, private lessons. And they needed a typist coming from Atlanta for the newspaper. And I was working for the NAACP in the position that Rosa Parks had served, as secretary. And then the Courier came along, so in September of 1965 I started working for the Courier, and worked for the Courier until we became defunct, December of 1968, and what an experience. [MIKE LOTTMAN:] Viola Bradford, she was just amazing, one of the local people who came to work for us when she was still in high school. She was the best writer, the most naturally gifted writer I have ever known. She could cover anything and make it make sense, and everybody related to the things she wrote. We did find a printer in Montgomery. It was a guy named Paul Wooley, who was a wonderful guy, and it was still pretty much an all-white operation at the print shop. And those guys used to stand around, reading the paper, reading Viola’s stuff, the stuff she wrote, and talking about it. Mertis Rubin was one of my favorite Courier people. She was very young, too, I think probably 19 or so. She lived in Mendenhall, Mississippi, which is a very small town in Mississippi. I don’t know how she found her way to the Courier, but she used to cover a lot of Mississippi politics, and no-one knew more about Mississippi politics than Mertis Rubin. I mean, she had the inside poop on everything. [JIM WILLSE:] I was in Tuscaloosa, in west Alabama, from the fall of ‘65 into the spring of ‘66. And in Greene County, as in a lot of the other black belt counties, that was a seismic time for voter registration. And the two local Movement leaders were a guy named Thomas E. Gilmore, and a Rev. Branch, William Branch. And I found Gilmore, and I called him this week. He’s now a pastor, a full-time pastor in a church near Birmingham, and I introduced myself, I said, “There’s no reason why you should remember me, Rev. Gilmore, but my name is Jim Willse, and 40 years ago I was with the Southern Courier, and I wrote about you.” And he said, “The Southern Courier. Our newspaper.” [MIKE LOTTMAN:] And it kind of all came together in a guy named John Hulett from Lowndes County. He was one of the first people we met in Lowndes County. Mr. Hulett sold the paper for us for a long time, we used to send it to him, even when he started forming the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, and even when he started working with SNCC and the Black Panther Party. I know his picture was in the Courier a number of times, we wrote stories about him a number of times. And I guess you could call it black power, but his goal was to register voters in probably the toughest, scariest county in Alabama, and he did it very well. After we left he ended up as the High Sheriff of Lowndes County for a long time, and really the man to see in Lowndes County if you wanted to get anything done. And so it all kind of came together in somebody like that. I mean, that was about integration, that was about black power, it was about telling truth to power. He was an amazing man, and he did a lot of remarkable things. [BOB SMITH:] A turning point for me, in the Courier’s life, was in January of ‘66, when Stokely Carmichael called us from Selma, and he was then challenging SCLC and Dr. King with regard to his – he had a shout of “Black Power” that was just beginning just about that time. SCLC was regarded as the integrationist wing of the movement, and SNCC was regarded as the more assertive, black-empowerment part of the movement. And he summoned us over there. And he said, “Look, you’re running all these stories about black people getting their heads bashed in trying to integrate into the white world. Every Courier article is about blacks trying to get into the white world.” And I learned a lot about racism from what he said then, and the tone of the Courier changed for me that day, when he said, “The black movement is gonna be different, at least this part of it is going to be different, and we’re gonna stress self-empowerment and the fact that black people can achieve on their own without being part of the white world.” Some members were offended by it, but it made an effect on me, taught me a lot about racism, and I think the paper, at least while I was around, changed quite a bit because of that. [MIKE LOTTMAN:] And really, I thought it was a good paper right to the end. And it kind of evolved a little bit. It wasn’t so much the heroes from the north, it was a lot more local involvement, and a lot of really good people working for the paper, and kind of what we had in mind when we started. It was a paper, you know, of the people, for the people, and it was getting to be a paper by the people. [typewriter sounds] [GEOFF COWAN:] So we tried to get into these communities, to meet people, and try to make them, encourage them to take over this paper, become an important part of that paper. But one of the things we found was that there was a danger level. Not that we had fear – I think probably none of us felt personal physical fear – but we were aware, prudently, of what could happen. [MARTHA HONEY:] When the first issue came out, we all celebrated by gathering together and going to a Ku Klux *** rally. Up on the stage, this guy in a robe pulls out from under his robe this issue of the Courier, and starts saying, “This has just come out, and we’ve got to hunt out these people, find out who’s doing this.” [JOHN DIAMANTE:] But I loved the back roads of southern Alabama, and to drive them. Once on a story, after talking to a sheriff or a policeman or something, there were some good old boys and they came around me. They said, “You were over here yesterday in such and such.” And they cited, chapter and verse, where I’d been yesterday and the day before, and almost where I was going. And that’s how I became aware of the white citizens’ network of CB radios and intelligence that tracked a lot of the civil rights workers, and a lot of us – but there’s really no time to be scared. I mean, who could be scared when people were dying, who really were putting their lives on the line? [JACK KRAMER:] I was scared all the time, with no good reason. If somebody in a pickup truck was following me closely, maybe he was just angry that I was driving too slow, but I was sure he was after me. And I’ve covered six wars since I left the Courier, and I’ve never been as scared then as I was here. Part of the reason, I think, is I didn’t come here looking like a civil rights worker. So, I was able to listen to the good old boys, and get really scared. [KENNETH LUMPKIN:] I know the question has been asked, were you scared. And, of course I was. Quite scared. I got connected with SNCC, and I was on the fringe of being a little radical, and so my sense when I got involved with the Courier, it was more paranoia. You know, these white guys and ladies that have come from the north, Ken, do you really trust em? [GEOFF COWAN:] A group of rich Harvard kids coming to the South, all white – which is true of the group of us who came down from the Crimson – who somehow think that they are going to, in this patronizing way, make a difference in the South, leave— and by the way, why aren’t they changing the white community? What are they doing, going into the black community? [BARBARA HOWARD:] That was one thing that bothered me the most, you all, is I could see visible signs of love and caring, and whites wanting to seek out freedom and equality and justice, and to be color-blind. But here I am, living in Montgomery, with people who are killing and shooting and, you know, calling you ***. [KENNETH LUMPKIN:] I remember going to Lowndes County with Jim, and bless him, he made me feel at ease, because I was scared to death. And, you know, here I am, in Lowndes County, and you have to live in that era to understand what was going on. You could be killed. [JIM PEPPLER:] This was my night of darkness, and it occurred in Lowndes County, the night of the day that the Black Panther Party had been on the ballot. We were all gathered at a little church, I think it was, Stokely and the SNCC people, and John Hulett, and all the movement people were there. And somebody came in, and a message had come in that a man had been shot dead in Fort Deposit. [SCOTT B. SMITH:] Stokely and I, and all of us, began to carry guns. The Battle of Fort Deposit was based on the very fact that we were hoping the *** would attack. We had planned for a shootout. We wanted the *** to attack, and go in after us, because we were going to take them out. [JIM PEPPLER:] Within moments, every man in the room had a shotgun. Stokely went wild and got a gun. And a pickup truck was just filled with men with guns that, I don’t know where the guns came from. But obviously, people who live in Lowndes County didn’t get too far from their guns. And they rolled off down the road. Something made me feel I could die that night. And there was something empowering about making the decision that I’m going to do this because I feel that my place is to be there. And if I die or live, I have made the choice and I have accepted it. And I drove on in. [typewriter sounds] [BOB SMITH:] When it occurred to me that it was the 10th anniversary of the bus boycott, I just picked up the phone and called Martin Luther King in Atlanta, and said would you write a piece for us on the 10th anniversary, and he said yes. But the week went by, and our deadline was approaching, and I think whatever it was, was it Tuesday night we put it together? And Tuesday morning arrived a Western Union telegram, which was then the equivalent of email, and it was from Martin Luther King, Jr., with a wonderful, beautiful article on what the bus boycott not only meant to Montgomery, but to American history. He quoted Thucydides in the very first paragraph, which most editors probably would edit out, but he could translate all of that into lay terms, and reach the common person, and it was just a wonderful article. I called Rosa Parks at about the same time during that fall. She truly did not think anything she did was extraordinary, or a part of history. She couldn’t understand why I was asking, and she didn’t want to do it. And I kept asking, and really had to persuade her that people in Montgomery cared about her memory after ten years. And I said, could I write it up from what I know, and I would ghost-write it, and get your approval? And that’s the arrangement we had, and in the end I read it to her over the telephone, and she said, that’s fine, and you can put my byline on it. It was an extraordinary time for me. [MARTHA HONEY:] The big issue in Tuskegee that summer was the integration of the churches. And it was just, I mean I actually was in a way scared, but I was mostly scared, partly personally, because every Sunday we all got attacked, and we had cameras broken. And it was just, really, it was raw violence in a way that, I had seen some Mississippi in the summer of ‘64, but this was just relentless. And the students were so incredibly persistent and courageous, and, at a certain level I thought, foolhardy to take on the white churches with the sort of tenacity that they did every Sunday. And Sammy Younge was the leader of it, and the final story I did, as I recall, was on this movement to integrate the churches. And shortly after I left, he was assassinated. I just had a question all summer long of, did they really have to— did this movement in Tuskegee really have to take on sort of the most difficult part of the struggle, which was the churches, and yet, in a way, the most logical part. But the violence that we experienced every Sunday was just really quite shocking. [MARY ELLEN GALE:] I also covered a very big trial in which the person who killed Sammy Younge in January of 1966— this was a student who was there or who had just graduated, and who had been leading demonstrations, among them to white churches. And he was killed. He was killed by a gas station operator. And there were demonstrations all over Tuskegee, they painted a yellow stripe down the back of the Confederate statue, and there were guns, mostly kept out of sight, on the side of the demonstrators as well as on the police, but no-one else got shot. [SCOTT B. SMITH, JR.:] We took that campus over. I helped paint the statue black, trying to provoke the *** for a fight. We wanted a fight. [MARY ELLEN GALE:] When the man who had shot Sammy Younge was tried, I covered that trial. There was no formal transcript taken, so that my notes became the basis for any further writings about that trial, my notes and my coverage in the paper. [JOAN TORNOW:] Not many white people had crossed the threshold into this black funeral home in Birmingham. Not in 1967. But here we were, investigating what we believed to be a ***. The proprietor knew why we were here. We needed to ascertain the location of the bullet that killed James Small, son of a black political activist. The day before, I had read a one-inch report buried in the back pages of the Birmingham News. A black man had been spotted running near a school where, in the past, break-ins had been reported. The police yelled stop, and then fired a warning shot into the air. Later they found his body. That was how the Birmingham News reported it. The proprietor pulled down the sheet so we could see that the bullet had not entered his chest. He tipped James over on his side and we could see that the bullet had entered his back. The warning shot. The one that had allegedly been fired into the air. I had seen a corpse for the first time, and it was the corpse of a young person whose death made no sense. A few evenings later, I went to a meeting of the Alabama Christian Movement at a black Baptist church. Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, head of the city chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, was there. He said, "Every time you turn around, some ***'s being killed by some trigger-happy policeman in Birmingham.” [ROBIN REISIG:] But there are a lot of other murders we reported on. Some were just trigger-happy cops, scared or dumb or careless with black people’s lives. But others were pre-meditated ***. A police officer from Prattville shot a black man in the back, after – according to the man’s dying statement – telling him he was free to go. And the policeman said, “Oh, he was trying to escape.” Now, the reason the police officer would have had a good motive for pre-meditated ***, is the black man had just shot and killed a prominent white landowner, because that landowner was shooting into his house. And what ensued, just for the sake of you who don’t know, were lots of demonstrations. The white people in town would demonstrate in Ku Klux *** robes, and then walk into the little town hall to disrobe, because they were the establishment. The black people had many other kinds of demonstrations, that culminated in a really horrific night, where they were in a house which had been shot into a few times, allegedly by the brother of the policeman who killed the man. Someone in a white car had been shooting in, so the next time a white car came back, the civil rights workers in the house shot back and managed to shoot a policeman, injuring him only slightly. So all hell broke loose, and there was a standoff, and eventually the police went into the house and beat the crap out of a lot of people I knew, nearly blinding the head of the local civil rights movement. [STEVE COTTON:] My first story for the Courier when I came down from Boston, of course through Atlanta, Mike asked me to go out to the little town of Crawfordville, Georgia, which was then getting some attention in the national news because they had been under a court order to de-segregate the schools. And during the summer when the school system was supposed to be preparing for desegregation, what they in fact did was quietly enroll all the white kids in schools outside of Taliaferro County. And they would provide buses every day to the white kids with police lined up, because what would happen in the form of a demonstration was that t he black kids would make a run for the bus, and be tackled by the white policemen so that they could not get on the bus to go to what then would have been integrated schools. And on the day that I came into town, there was a rally that was being held that night in the black church, and Dr. King was actually going to come in from Atlanta to address the rally, and he did so, on a very, very dark night in very tense circumstances, and gave a very moving speech to a crowd that was both angry and afraid of what was going on. And there was a large crowd of whites outside, gathering menacingly, but because King was in town, and to protect him there was a state trooper presence there, and under the moonlight a phalanx of state troopers kept the white toughs, a couple hundred of them across the street, from getting to the church. And at the end of his speech, King was really hustled out of the church through a side door. They got him into a car, leaving behind Rev. Andy Young, who stayed with the parishioners. And partly to kind of quiet both sides, as the parishioners walked out of the church, Andy had a prayer session. And at one point, he said something like, “Father teach us to be nonviolent in the face of violence, and pray for our white brothers and sisters, because we cannot be free unless we are all free.” And from the white crowd came a yell, “You’ll never be free, ***.” [BOB SMITH:] I once wrote an obituary about a tree. I think it was Greeneville, Alabama. It was a chinaberry tree. And the young people used to meet under the chinaberry tree – that was the code for a civil rights get-together. That’s the only way they could do it: “We’re going to meet under the chinaberry tree.” It not only provided shade in a very god-forsaken place, but this was their code, and they would meet there regularly, to plan their demonstrations and what they were going to do. And one time, in the full view of the police, somebody chopped down the damn tree and carted it away. And this had a devastating effect on the young people in the community. And we ran a picture of the stump, and that’s the obituary of the tree that explains to me how nasty racism can be. The only intent of that was to discourage people, to dehumanize them, to put them in disarray, and also to send the message who is in charge in that community. [JIM PEPPLER:] I went down in May of 65, and I left in May of 68 because I had, I covered the funeral of Martin Luther King. And I just didn’t feel like I wanted to keep on doing -- I couldn’t feel like I could carry my weight with the Courier without knowing that he was alive. [typewriter sounds] [JIM WILLSE:] When you look at the papers, I was pleased to see one of the things I thought I remembered about the Southern Courier – it was not just the big stories that we covered, the demonstrations and the trials, and the sort of big earthquake events, but the little things. And I think that was one of the goals that we brought into the adventure, was to try and write about the sort of stuff-of-life stories that would not make their way into the mainstream white press. You think back about the big events that, the ones that had a lot of thunder and lightning to them, but that was, I felt at the time, and looking back I guess I still feel, kind of an important thing to do. [GEOFF COWAN:] One of the conversations I remember us having as we thought about the newspaper was about formatting. One of the decisions that we made was that this should have lots of pictures. That pictures could tell a story in a way that words couldn’t. And Jim Peppler, who is here, and Ken Lumpkin are among those who became photographers and who brought to life so much that’s enduring about the paper, a decision that was made at that time about what the paper should be like. [JIM PEPPLER:] I have to say that the golden uplifting underpinning excitement and joy of my life with the Courier was the music. I got to experience, in live performance, music in places like Tom’s Place, and the Laicos Club, and I couldn’t get enough of it. It was, because the music, like photography, it talks to and comes from places that are deeper than just words. It gets right into you. And if you put pictures and music and words together, you’ve got a package that can come close to communicating truth. [KENNETH LUMPKIN:] They would love the paper with the pictures, and I’m glad that came up, because it gave me the opportunity to put people in the paper that normally everyday folks wouldn’t see. And I think that’s what made the Courier, here in Montgomery at the time, so important. It was people, ordinary people, people that didn’t have the opportunity to fame and glory. They got the opportunity to be seen, and it made them feel good. It made me feel tremendously good to be a part of. [SCOTT B. SMITH:] People in their homes have old papers that you have over there, and look upon those papers as almost their family Bible, pleased with the very fact that you have written about them. And I’m very happy to be old enough and alive enough to tell you “thank you.” [applause] [typewriter sounds] [MIKE LOTTMAN:] We were only here like three and a half years. And it was a big time out of our lives, and a big time in our lives, that most of us, all of us, will never forget. But, you know, things got tough, we ran out of money. I and the people who were still around couldn’t think of any way to keep it going. [MARY ELLEN GALE:] The Southern Courier was something that I could feel proud of in my life, that I had had the will and the energy to do it, and that it opened up a world to me. I always was incredibly grateful for the way in which so many of the people I met in the South would share their lives, the intimate details of their lives, without being afraid that they were going to be disrespected. They came to trust the Courier. [KENNETH LUMPKIN:] I have had some things that happened, real bad, in my life. But I have always been able to reach back and bring the memories of the Courier, and make it work for me. I was homeless, and had a drug problem. But the Courier was there, the thought of it, and it gave me a sense of determination. [BARBARA HOWARD:] I thought that Tuskegee, Alabama was all of that and then some, because black folks lived there, and because of the work of the citizens there, they were able to make strides when Lucius Amerson was elected the first black Sheriff in the United States since reconstruction. We covered that article. And imagine me moving to Tuskegee in 1975, and I could go up to the Sheriff and say, ‘I know you!’ I’d never met him, but because of the articles in the Courier, I knew all about him. It set the tone, coming from Montgomery, having worked in the newspaper and actually typing the articles, seeing the pictures, we were civil rights movement people. Because of my work on the Southern Courier, it connected me to the civil and human rights movement, really, not just in the South, but I met all of these folks who have worked so through the years. [JIM WILLSE:] and I look back, and I’ve said this to people, and I mean it: the time I spent at the Southern Courier was the best job I ever had. It was all real. You were there. There was no, there was nothing filtering it. And that summer ratified a feeling that I had, or thought I had, which was that journalism could be a great adventure, and it could be, in its way, a way to change, to fix something that needed fixing. [typewriter sounds] [JOHN DIAMANTE:] But don’t you feel in this country since the civil rights movement, there is just this suppression of idealism in America. This great, generous nation that does such good work at home and overseas, there has been no channel for this idealism. I just feel that the country is so bottled up. It’s so ready to heal itself, and do a lot for the world. I don’t know how that’s going to break loose, but this paper is really, it’s kind of a beacon in that respect. [KENNETH LUMPKIN:] We have to bring value back to the way we feel about people. I think we have lost that. Then, we really cared about making a difference for people. I just don’t think people have that passion, that love for one another. And the media have to be the institution to make the difference. The word and the message have to get out here, and we need a new breed of journalist like we had back then. [applause] And, until we have that, we're gonna see a new destruction of a whole generation of people. [STEVE COTTON:] The commitment, the courage, the skill, the integrity that they brought to the craft of journalism was a model then for what journalism should be, and stands as a model, I think, today. And if you really read some of these back issues, you will see that there were some great reporters who, as very young people, really did an excellent job of reporting on a rich tapestry of events that no-one else was committing to writing. [KENNETH LUMPKIN:] I look back and I look at the Southern Courier as being raw journalism. I think all of us, to some degree, we didn’t know it all, and we learned. But I think the results is great, that this is a part of history that will go on long after we are gone. And I’m just glad I’ve been a part of it. [end of program]