MONTGOMERY, Ala. – Someone once said that practicing journalism is like capturing “history on the run.”
Sometimes when you are a fly on the wall at important events you think you are witnessing a historical moment. But it is sometimes hard to tell for sure. Like they say, only time will tell.
Did any of the reporters covering George Wallace’s inaugural address in 1963 have any idea what a seminal moment that would be in American political history?
Could anyone have anticipated that the groundswell of rage embodied in Wallace’s fiery rhetoric would lead to such a transformative movement for full-scale civil rights in the United States? Or that Wallace’s message and style would result in such a rising tide of so-called “conservatism” in American politics, a tide that has not yet fully dissipated over the country — or Wallace’s homeland of Alabama?
A Lesson in New Web Journalism and Political Activism
Editor’s Note: In December, 2002, I was on the payroll of The New York Times National Desk operating from my duplex on Plum Street, two blocks from the Carrollton Avenue street car line in New Orleans, Uptown, when the Trent Lott story broke, bringing to an end to the rise in national politics of one of the South’s most prominent, conservative Republican Senators. Much has been made of this case study in the power of the new Web Press to influence both the traditional, national news media — and the direction of politics itself. This is my original contribution to this important story in the history of Web publishing, as well as the academic field of media influence on politics and public opinion. I publish it today because it is time.
“I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years either.”
— Mississippi Senator Trent Lott, Dec. 5, 2002
“On December 20, 2002, after significant controversy following comments regarding Strom Thurmond’s presidential candidacy, Lott resigned as Senate Minority Leader. In December 2007, he resigned from the Senate and became a Washington-based lobbyist.”
– Wikipedia
by Glynn Wilson
On December 5, 2002, about the time Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was making the remarks that would bring him down at Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday party in Washington, D.C., I was in New Orleans sending an e-mail message to the brand new New York Times correspondent in Atlanta, David Halbfinger, pitching a story on the Alabama Ride to Freedom bus tour planned for January, according to my old Outlook Express e-mail archive. It goes back all the way to the 1990s, and is still on occasion a useful and reliable research tool.
Halbfinger and I never got to do that bus ride story together. But for the next few months, we would work on a number of stories. I also worked with the other more experienced Times correspondent in the South at the time, Jeffrey Gettleman, as well as Rick Bragg and a number of others. If either one of those guys had known what I knew about the history of Civil Rights struggles in the South, perhaps we could have done that bus ride story justice, especially since I was working a lot with photographer Spider Martin at the time. He was sitting on one of the most important collections of photographs from that era at his place atop the mountain in Blount County, Alabama, where I often stayed while working on stories in my home state for the Times and the Christian Science Monitor.
When the Lott story broke, it may not have caused a firestorm of publicity right away. But within only 15 days, Lott was gone and his rising political ambitions went stone cold dead.
Because of my academic research experience as well as the fact that I was one of the reporters who worked the story for the Times — in fact doing critical investigative work that was as important as anything done by the bloggers or television news in the battle — I have my own unique perspective on what went down and what it all means. But in part because I was a free-lance reporter for the Times and was never properly credited for my work on that story, along with many others, the academics in New York who used this story to make a name for themselves ignored my attempts to comment and provide some perspective for their research.
To me, it is an important lesson for bloggers trying to influence the mass media and public affairs — and for activists who are trying to change the country and the state for the better.
Rowland Scherman at Art Folk, Inc., “We Shot Rock ‘n’ Roll” (See video, links and purchasing information below)
by Glynn Wilson
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Running into Rowland Scherman at the “We Shot Rock ‘n’ Roll” show the other day made me think of a story I picked up from a professor who taught a class at the University of Alabama on the history of “Rock ‘n’ Roll,” a story packed with advice about how to live life and succeed.
Scherman was in town for a special show at a downtown gallery since none of his works were included in the Birmingham Museum of Art show going by a similar name out of Brooklyn, New York. When I saw the announcement about the Museum of Art show, I planted the idea on Facebook to get Rowland back down here, since his name was not on the list of photographers and I knew he had some of the most iconic pictures from the beginnings of Rock ‘n’ Roll.
At the time Rowland was running Joe bar on Birmingham’s Southside in the early 1980s, I was a student of journalism and photography at the University of Alabama, fully engrossed in reading authors like Hunter S. Thompson, and ordering Bass Ale, because that’s what Thompson drank at the Watergate Hotel. Joe was about the only place in Birmingham you could get it then.
The professor in question, Jim Salem in Tuscaloosa, liked to say when the bus pulls up to the station, no matter what your dream, you better have your bags packed and be ready and willing to get on that bus and go. When opportunity knocks, that is, you get on the bus.
Photographer Rowland Scherman got on that bus, in 1957, and he’s still on it, although sometimes these days, it’s a train or a plane taking him to the big picture.
Let’s just say Rowland Scherman was there, for some of the most important cultural moments of the 1960s and beyond.
Whether the news media covers them or we talk about them or not.
A Facebook friend shared this video with me this morning, and it reminded me of Spider Martin’s last words. To read the true story of Civil Rights Photographer Spider Martin’s death, and for a literary explanation of what this Website is all about, in case you missed it here’s the story:
I caught up with Manuel Cuevas at the Day of the Dead celebration on Birmingham’s Southside Tuesday night and got him to explain the purpose behind the event.
Manuel is the designer who turned Johnny Cash into the “Man in Black” and put Elvis in a jumpsuit, according to biographies on the Web, including a story from National Geographic and Wikipedia and his own Website.
Fox News’s most right-wing nut, off-the-deep-end commentator Glenn Beck criticized Civil Rights leader and Georgia Congressman John Lewis on his show for “comparing himself to civil rights activists?”
“How dare you!” Beck bellows, pointing to the scene on the TV screen with shock and awe.
Guess Beck’s not exactly up on his Civil Rights history after all. Here’s a digital reproduction of an original Spider Martin photograph hanging on my wall from Bloody Sunday on the way from Selma to Montgomery.
That’s none other than John Lewis in the foreground, marching alongside Martin Luther King Jr. That’s the day Lewis was beaten with a billy club in a cloud of tear gas, available to see in Spider Martin’s photo archives at SpiderMartin.com.
John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr., Rev. Abernathy and James Bevel, 1965
Secret Vistas: Dedicated to the Memory of Spider Martin
by Glynn Wilson
The first time I rode the rocky, rolling white water of the Locust Fork River with Spider Martin, I knew it would be more than your average adventure. In stark contrast with today’s drought in the Southeast, near record levels of rainfall in 2002 swelled the narrow banks to the top of the black rocks smoothed over by the relentless forces of time.
Then, anyone who has ever known Spider Martin knows life around him was, well, never dull.
The record rainfall would continue into 2003 and allow for other explorations of the river. But now that he is gone, they all merge in my mind into one.
When I launched this Website in early 2005, in part inspired by conversations with Spider, I also knew it would be a similar adventure even though he would not be around to share it.
To try to understand you have to picture in your head the most wide-open form of freedom possible in the imagination of a writer and a photographer in America then, sitting at the computer or careening down a fast river. In a world dominated by the professional, corporate press, and in this post 9/11, PR, police state, I know, this is hard to imagine.
But just picture Spider Martin in 2002 in the back of a green 17-foot Kevlar canoe in the lazy water by the Swann Joy Covered Bridge north of Birmingham in Blount County. I’m in the front. In the middle, there are two coolers. One is full of food. The other is stuffed with ice and beer, and not just any beer. Something golden brown.
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
