Here's the Mobile Register's story from Sunday, April 21, 2002:
'I KNEW IT WAS A BIG STORY'
By RHODA A. PICKETT Staff Reporter
MONTGOMERY -- Patrick Harden said he thought the night of May 21, 1961, would become the second date chiseled onto his tombstone.
That night, more than 40 years ago, a mob of angry whites, numbering nearly 1,000, had surrounded the First Baptist Church in Montgomery and were threatening to burn it to the ground. Trapped inside were the church's more than 1,200 black members and two white men: Harden, then a reporter for United Press International, and a reporter for a London newspaper.
Their only protection was "a thin line of U.S. marshals that had been flown in the day before," Harden said.
"I was scared to death," he said. "I really thought we were going to burn up in a fire that night."
Harden's was one of numerous anecdotes remembered and retold Saturday during a reunion of 16 former UPI reporters, editors and photographers who worked in Alabama during 1960s covering some of the major events of the civil rights movement, including the first Selma to Montgomery march known as Bloody Sunday and the subsequent Selma to Montgomery march, the Montgomery bus boycott, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing, and a multiltude of mass meetings, marches and civil protests.
Sponsored by Troy State University Montgomery and the Gannett Foundation/Montgomery Advertiser, the one-day event was held at the Rosa Parks Museum and Library, which is part of the TSUM campus downtown.
Gov. Don Siegelman greeted the journalists Saturday morning and encouraged them to note the changes that have been made over the decades.
"I want to welcome you back to Alabama and ask you to see us through new eyes and see Alabama as we are today," Siegelman said. "I wanted to be here to welcome you to an Alabama where no one takes a seat in the back of the bus, whether in law or in spirit."
Jim Bennett, Alabama's current Secretary of State, told the symposium crowd that back in the 1960s, when he was the city hall reporter for the Birmingham Post-Herald, he was also providing stories to Newsday in New York City.
His stories were being printed on the front page in New York, he said, "and in Birmingham, those stories were appearing in the back of the paper."
The events of those years left an impression that hasn't been easy to forget, most said. They and other journalists sent to Alabama to cover the movement were sometimes beaten, threatened, their equipment spat on, camera lenses sprayed with paint.
Shortly after that night in 1961, Harden was transferred to the UPI bureau in Atlanta. He didn't return to Alabama until September 1993, when he was sent to cover the wreck of Amtrak's Sunset Limited in Bayou Canot. This reunion was his first trip back to Montgomery in more than 40 years.
Wrapping up his memories of that night in the church, Harden pointed out that he wasn't even able to get the story out.
The church's only telephone was down in the basement, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who was gaining prominence as a civil rights leader, was on that phone to then-U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, asking that more federal troops be sent to protect the church members who had gathered that afternoon for a mass meeting.
"Bobby Kennedy called (Alabama) Gov. Patterson, who sent out the National Guard," Harden said. "Kennedy federalized the Guard. There were these young kids holding bayonets, some on their own fathers, who were standing in the crowd."
Eventually, the white protestors dispersed, and the black church members were escorted back to their homes.
Covering the movement didn't always allow for complete objectivity, some reporters said. Tim Robinson, who grew up in Dora, Ala., in Walker County, recalled that his uncle, who headed the local clavern of the Ku Klux Klan, had ordered a hit on a reporter with The Birmingham News.
"There was a lot of family infighting," said Robinson, 56. "It's really surprising how you learn to deal with it. You learn who you can talk to and you can't talk to about certain issues. Some people who do bad things aren't really bad people, they just don't know what's right."
On Friday night, some of the former Unipressers -- the nickname for UPI employees -- toured the Rosa Parks Museum. Many of the exhibits looked and sounded familiar.
"Dr. King never could say 'Montgomery,'" John Hussey joked. "He would always say it like a poetic expression, 'Mont Gom-ery.'"
In those days, something happened almost every hour, and reporters sometimes found themselves in the middle of the events they tried to cover.
Bob Gordon knew the Gaston Motel. Owned by the well-known black businessman A.G. Gaston, the motel was transformed into the movement's temporary headquarters when King went to Birmingham.
One afternoon in 1963, Alabama State Troopers marched down a Birmingham street, ordering and pushing black residents inside the nearest building, whether they lived there or not.
Gordon said he found himself unable to leave the motel because a bombing had just occurred. Wyatt T. Walker, one of King's assistants, was also inside. When Wyatt's wife stepped out of a room, a State Trooper struck her in the head with the butt of his rifle. Wyatt saw his bleeding wife and attempted to rescue her but couldn't. Gordon had jumped on him.
"I just instinctively tackled him," Gordon said. "He was furious that anyone would do something like that to his wife. But I knew that if he got out there, I was convinced he would have been killed. They would have shot him."
The incident is mentioned in Diane McWhorter's book, Carry Me Home, which recently won the Pulitzer Prize, but Gordon's name is not mentioned as the reporter who held Wyatt down.
In a way, this was a homecoming for some. Friday was John Lynch's 65th birthday. He drove down a couple of days early to visit Selma and Marion prior to the reuion. He recalled his first day in Selma in 1965, when he met Wilson Baker, then the city's public safety director. The two chatted and discovered they were both North Carolina natives.
"He must has been about 6 foot 3 inches tall and weighed about 350 pounds," Lynch said. "After we spent a little time talking he said, 'Boy, you had any good barbecue since you left North Carolina?' I said 'No,' and he took me to a place owned by a black family and got a barbecue sandwich."
Lynch said he went looking for the place a few days ago and found Lannie's still standing.
"There was a lot going on, and it was a job and a job that you tried not to get too emotional about," Lynch said. "I don't think many of us thought that we were in the middle of anything historic back then. I knew it was a big story. I realize these days more than in those that we were part of a historic series of events."