(Here's a column written by Pat Harden about the April 20-21, 2002, UPI civil rights coverage reunion in Montgomery, Ala. It was for the Edmonton Sun, one of Harden's post-UPI stops. The column ran on May 5, 2002.)
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BY PAT HARDEN
MONTGOMERY, Ala: When I fled this southern town in November 1961, I promised myself I 'd never return. For an interminable year, as a United Press International reporter, I 'd been stuck in this backwater where the ferment of civil rights colored every story.
In the early '60s, Alabama was the front line for racial confrontation. The governor was John Patterson, a man so steeped in white supremacy that the rival he defeated in the election, George Wallace, complained he had been "out-niggered." George subsequently ran a successful campaign on a platform of "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." Montgomery was the town that, five years before I arrived, saw a weary Rosa Parks spark a year-long bus boycott by refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. It was here that a silver-tongued black preacher named Martin Luther King invoked Gandhi's passive resistance principles while Imperial Grand Dragon Bobby Shelton paraded the streets in his KKK regalia and encouraged his white-sheeted thugs to "punish" anyone, black or white, who challenged racial mores.
I had reported on the riot sparked by the May 20 arrival of the Freedom Riders, an inter-racial group that challenged the back-of-the-bus tradition of inter-state travel in the South, and I was in Ralph Abernathy's First Baptist Church the next day, along with the Riders and a 1,200-strong congregation, when an angry mob of 1,000 tried to burn the place down. We were rescued only when MLK persuaded then-Attorney General Bobby Kennedy to federalize the Alabama National Guard.
By November, having endured a year, I got the heck out.
But a couple of weeks ago, after 41 years of determined absence, I returned -- lured by a symposium at Troy State University Montgomery that looked at how UPI reporters covered the civil rights era in the state, from the Freedom Riders of '61 through Wallace's "Stand in the schoolhouse door" and the Birmingham church bombing that killed four black girls, both in '63, to the "Bloody Sunday" in Selma of 1965 when state troopers attacked unarmed marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
The point was to record reminiscences from reporters who were there. From now on, civil rights scholars can probe TSUM's library for eyewitness accounts of the sights, sounds and smells of bloodshed that led to America's racial revolution.
There were lots of war stories, fascinating and nostalgic.
But there were marked differences between the Alabama I knew and today's racially progressive state, which claims more black officials than any other.
On the site where Rosa Parks was dragged from the bus stands an interactive, multimedia museum that walks the visitor through the black seamstress's daring act of civil disobedience. Visit and you'll understand why she did it.
MLK's church on Dexter Avenue is now a shrine and the red brick First Baptist Church on North Ripley Street, where I feared for my life, sports an Alabama Historical Commission sign detailing its role in the civil rights movement.
When we "graying, balding men," as one reporter wrote, rode the 90 km from Montgomery to Selma, we were escorted by a black sheriff's deputy and then greeted by the mayor of Selma, also black. Outside the voting rights museum, a shop-front building that overlooks the Pettus Bridge, a white cop offered a friendly welcome while a black cop directed traffic around our bus. Said an ex-Unipresser who'd witnessed the '65 bloodshed, "Who'd have believed it?"
On the surface, Montgomery hasn't changed. The dazzling white government buildings are impressive, but there's not much else downtown and three blocks from the centre, there's the usual urban blight.
But there's a different, progressive spirit here. And I'm glad I came back to feel it.