Jim Clark, once Selma’s sheriff and a violent enemy of the Civil Rights Movement, today — almost 40 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act — sits in a small, darkened nursing home room in South Alabama, still stewing in a racist brew of denial.ELBA, Ala. — Jim Clark is drawn back to the place most home to him, back to the big white houses with the wide porches, the softness of the neighborhoods and the quiet streets in this town built upon the lazy Pea River he once swam in as a boy.
He has retreated to the place of his childhood in his old age, as his body fails. Has gone into self-imposed exile into the familiar, the smallness, of the forever polite and welcoming, Elba. He has retreated, too, into his own Southernness, or his sense of the way the South once was and the way he insists it should always be: A society built upon the foundations of supremacy of the white race and, above all, a way of life where everyone grew up knowing their place, where the norm was not unsettled.
It still comes most forcefully to him, this unsettling, because four decades ago he sat squarely at the crossroads of one of the greatest struggles to overturn the old society.
You will know him as Sheriff Jim Clark, the man omnipresent during the Civil Rights struggle in 1960s Selma. His outbursts of violence, his mass arrests, his insistence on violating the rights of others, his strutting, his flashy military-style uniforms, his brutal tactics, his enraged face, gave Civil Rights leaders the image they were looking for, the one that brought the eyes of the nation to look sympathetically upon the cause and recognize the injustice of Selma that became the shame of Alabama and the South.
To relive those days with him, to probe the nature of race and place in society, the way of the old order and the ascent of the new, pull up a chair beside his creaky Lay-Z-Boy stuck away in a dark little room in the back end of the Elba Nursing Home and have a chat.
At only 83, Jim Clark is a physically broken down man. He has a bad heart, motors about in a wheelchair and can barely stand. He is hard of hearing.
Still, get the tough question across and witness his easy way with words, a steel-trap memory for details of 40 years ago and a way of listening intently, albeit with difficulty. He relishes a conversation and is as eager to get his point across as a sophomore at debate camp.
THE WHY OF IT
After passing through the enlightenment that ushered in our new order and from the perspective of a South that might stop licking its racial wounds in the near future, the question is: Why pay a series of visits to this man, why air the thoughts of what many would charitably call a cracker who was the very symbol of a bankrupt and hateful ideology? The answer is that Sheriff Clark himself needs to be remembered for what he brought the nation. Without him, without the brutality he helped make possible in Selma — particularly Bloody Sunday and the subsequent events surrounding the Selma to Montgomery March — President Johnson and the Civil Rights Movement might not have gained the momentum in Congress to secure the Voting Rights Act, signed into law 40 years ago this Saturday.
It is important, too, to understand the man, for to know him is to know the culture and to know ourselves, where we have come from and where we are going.
Simply put, here is a complex person, as complex as the South itself. The figure slumped in the recliner in Elba is no ignorant redneck. He is rife with the particular contradictions of a Southern white still woven to the past social and political fabric and still mourning its passing. Casual contact would lead you to the correct assumption that he is chock full of racial prejudice. But as contradictory as it may sound, you’ll have a hard time finding a cartoonish evil doer without a redeeming quality.
That’ll understandably be tough for any veteran or student of the battles of Selma to accept. After all, get a handle on how he behaved in 1965 Selma and you’ll see what I mean.
THE KING OF SELMA
Jim Clark was front and center during the violence in Selma up to and including the defining moment in March 1965, when peaceful marchers were attacked by Alabama Troopers and Clark’s men on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.He was caught on camera roughing up people standing in line at the Dallas County Courthouse waiting to be registered. He slugged C.T. Vivian, a top lieutenant to Martin Luther King Jr., when he had the audacity to speak about freedom and civil rights on the steps of the courthouse, knocking Vivian to the pavement. The blow broke the Sheriff’s finger.
He locked up old ladies and school children. He and his men stood by while innocents were beaten. He caused people great physical pain and he helped perpetuate a climate of apprehension and fear that dominated the black and white communities in Selma.
And he had an excuse for anything and everything truly evil that happened in Selma.
Take the murder of the Rev. James Reeb for example, an event that nearly anyone would find reprehensible.
Reeb was a 38-year-old Unitarian minister and father of four who had come down from Boston to lend support to the cause. In March 1965 he and two other ministers were attacked by a group of white thugs wielding two-by-fours outside a Selma restaurant. Reeb was cracked on the skull and died a few days later. His attackers were acquitted by an all-white jury.
“Reeb walked a long way after he got hit,” says Clark from his Elba recliner. “There is no way he could have walked that far given the head wound he had. Those men in Selma didn’t kill him. Someone else killed him later. Someone from the Civil Rights Movement killed him.”
Clark’s thinking is that the Movement needed a martyr, so it made one up.
That kind of contorted reasoning helped sway the jury in 1965. You wouldn’t think it would fly in 2005.
Then there’s John Lewis, today a Georgia congressman, who led marchers across the Pettus bridge on Bloody Sunday, a noble and courageous man in anyone’s book, except, of course, Jim Clark’s.
Clark says that Lewis’ wounds, captured on television cameras the morning of Bloody Sunday, were in fact inflicted earlier by the boyfriend of a girl he was seeing in Selma.
“When he left (the girl’s house) the boyfriend hit him in the head,” he said. “He was not hit in the head on the bridge.”
Jim Clark has nothing but disparaging remarks about Viola Liuzzo, the white Detroit housewife who came South to volunteer during the Selma march and who was slaughtered on Highway 80 outside Selma while shuttling marchers back from Montgomery.
She was sleeping with black men, including the one riding with her the night she was murdered. She was a drinker. She had an arrest record in Detroit. She frequently left her children at home. Her husband was a $400-a-week union man, etc., etc.
Martin Luther King was a communist, and the communists were funneling him money. He had a girlfriend in Selma, he was a failed preacher.
Lyndon Johnson? Well, he was a communist dupe.
And since I work for a paper that is sometimes called The Red Star, I took the opportunity to ask him about my publisher, Brandy Ayers. Sure enough, he too is and was a communist.
The list goes on. Others people’s heroes are his losers.
The common denominator of all these people is that they were “outside agitators.” Even in the parlance of the current South you can understand what he means when he’s talking about Reeb and Liuzzo. But, Lewis? He was from Pike County, Ala., just down the road. He tilled the same black dirt as Clark.
In his book “Walking With The Wind,” John Lewis says Clark stormed up to him at one point, red with rage, calling him an outside agitator.
“I might have called him that,” says Clark with a chuckle. “It didn’t make any difference to me that he was from Pike County. He wasn’t from Dallas County. You know (key Civil Rights leader) Ralph Abernathy was from
Linden, Alabama. Well, he was an outside agitator too, because he was from the next county.”
HUMANITY AFTER ALL
So there sits Jim Clark in his Laz-Z-Boy and there sits his way of things. His thinking went and still goes something like: If the outsiders would have just left us alone we would have been fine, because people in Dallas County understood each other, understood their place, everyone was happy. As long as no one got out of the box, as long as no one unsettled the norm, all was fine. These are disgusting, frustratingly stubborn notions he clings to, designed perhaps to maintain some elaborate fantasy world he has constructed for himself in order to live with himself.
It is also stereotypical and predictable, but snoop around, dig a little and you come across a hint of humanity.
It comes in the form of anecdote, compliments of his wife, Louise, still a resident of Selma.
Sitting on the front porch of her cluttered frame house outside of town, she takes a breath after recalling stories of the tumultuous mid-1960s.
She tells of one that happened before the troubles started in Selma, of a young black preacher who had a new church miles away from his home, but no way to get to it on Sunday morning.
“Well this preacher,” she told me, “he used to go up and ‘borrow’ this white fellow’s car on Sunday mornings and bring it back right after services were finished. Well for a long time no one ever knew what he was doing. The white man had some factory job where he was off working on Sundays. Well months later, the white man figured it out and came to Jimmy all outraged, wanted that preacher arrested, hauled off to jail.”
The sheriff, Louise Clark says, nodded to the man and promised to get right on it, then put all the paperwork in the bottom drawer of his desk and quietly let the matter die.
“Jimmy had a way of solving those kinds of problems,” she said. “The preacher got to his church every Sunday and brought the car right back. Where was the harm? It just isn’t fair to judge someone’s entire life based on one year of his life, or just March 1965. There’s good to him.”
Kathryn Tucker Windham, Alabama’s premier storyteller, is a Selma resident and former reporter for the Selma Times Journal during the Civil Rights Movement. She knew Clark well, and saw him at his worst. Yet, she insists, he’s not that much different from so many others in the South, except that perhaps his temper is a little closer to the surface.
“He and I never agreed on much, but he could be such a nice, disarming person,” she said from her den in Selma.
She saw a lot of bloodletting, a lot of disturbing images and many of them of Clark’s making. One of the most serious was prior to the Selma march when a group of whites, mostly from Birmingham, came to Selma to demonstrate in support of the movement.
Windham said the event bordered on a catastrophe, as angry local whites surged toward the demonstrators.
“I have never seen such a thing,” she said. “The white women were screaming, ‘kill ’em, kill ’em communists.’ It was awful. Southerners, you see, can get all crazy, mixed up in their thinking. They are laid back, yet right under the surface is this streak of violence.”
The worst part of the whole episode, however, is that Jim Clark and his men stood by and did nothing as this was taking place, and it wasn’t the first time. It was only when the Chief of Police Wilson Baker, a man credited with establishing what little order there was in Selma, moved in with his men.
THE GOOD OLD 1901 CONSTITUTION
A lawman Jim Clark was. A strict interpreter of the law, or so it would seem, he was not.Yet within that there are even more complexities, even more contradictions. Under the old order, when he was king of the county and before Selma was “under siege,” Jim Clark didn’t follow the letter of the law and thus allowed an obviously good man to go free, a level-headed thing to do.
Ask him, though, if the jailing of school children, the use of violence against people who were only trying to exercise their civil rights is in any way defensible and he’ll fall back on the law.
The 1901 Constitution of the state of Alabama, that is.
“I was doing my doggonest to enforce the law of Alabama in Selma in 1965,” he says. Quoting the document at length, he sums up by saying, “It doesn’t say anything about the U.S. Constitution, only Alabama. It is not written anywhere that a county sheriff must enforce the U.S. Constitution.”
He’ll also tell you he has no remorse for anything he did in Selma.
“Those people were breaking the law all along,” he says.
That argument is the height of hypocrisy when you learn that he was arrested for marijuana smuggling in the 1970s and sent to prison for nine months.
In response to the “why” of that, he asks simply, “Have you ever been hungry? You get pretty desperate when you get hungry, don’t you?”
As desperate, one might add, as the disenfranchised of middle Alabama in 1965.
JUDGE HARE
A clue to how deep Sheriff Clark’s rabbit hole goes can be found in his relationship with a judge named Hare who seems to have helped dig it.Judge James Hare was Circuit Judge of Dallas County during the 1960s. He was also a neighbor of Clark’s on a farm outside of Selma. By all accounts the men were friends, and by Louise’s account Clark idolized Hare.
Judge Hare is the man who issued a court order banning the public assembly of three or more people, a blatantly unconstitutional order, still one that Clark enforced with glee and used with great effectiveness, saying that, “unlawful assembly of three or more people was good law, then.”
From the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, the judge believed the South to be under attack by the federal government at all levels and was a staunch segregationist.
He was also a firm believer in eugenics.
“Judge Hare did a lot of research on the races and on Africa,” he said. “He talked a lot about the Berber tribes of North Africa. They didn’t have the facial features of the inland tribes. He studied these tribes too, they were short and stocky, lips poked out. You see examples of these everywhere.”
IN EXILE
In his exile, he is as comfortable as he can be for an ill man. Out the window lies the landscape of his childhood. And inside there are people who tend to him. A black nurse happily shows the way to his room. Another black nurse drops by more than a few times to dote on him. They speak sweetly, even fondly of him, and he of them. “They are very good to me,” he says.So then after witnessing this tenderness, you want to go to the very essence of it, to the question of equality and the rightness of the Civil Rights Movement, to whether the man wishes at least a partial cleansing.
“Martin Luther King said we would all hold hands someday, but all we get these days is hate,” he continued, “Every year Selma has become nothing but a hate convention.”
On the last of my three visits with Clark, I noticed a book on a table by his bed, “The Dark Side of Civil Rights,” by C.M. Rhodes, a preacher at a Church of Christ in Selma during the 1960s and a friend of Clark’s. It amounts to an indictment of the Civil Rights Movement and insists that it was communist inspired and funded.
“You really ought to read this book. You could learn a lot from it,” said the Sheriff as I was leaving.
