Martin Luther King, Jr. said the goal of the civil rights movement should be to turn an enemy into a friend. It can be done, he said, because people aren’t simply good or evil. “There is something within human nature that can respond to goodness,” King said. “So that a Jesus of Nazareth or a Mohandas Gandhi, can appeal to human beings and appeal to that element of goodness within them, and a Hitler can appeal to the element of evil within them.”
Three years after writing that, in one of the darkest moments of the civil rights movement, King eulogized four girls who were killed in church on a Sunday morning in Birmingham, Alabama. Earlier that year, Eugene “Bull” Connor had attacked King’s non-violent troops with fire hoses and police dogs. Alabama’s governor, George Wallace, had proclaimed “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” And Wallace had suggested, “What this country needs is a few first-class funerals.” Piling hurt upon hurt, the white citizens of Birmingham mostly boycotted the funeral.
That eulogy might have been a moment for King to lay off from his “in every heart, there is some good” and “we must have faith in white people” messages. But at the funeral, this is what King said: “We must not lose faith in our white brothers. Somehow we must believe that the most misguided among them can learn to respect the dignity and worth of all human personality.”
So what happened to those misguided white brothers from 1963? What happened to Wallace and Connor? For that matter, what happened to Sheriff Jim Clark, whose troopers attacked John Lewis and other peaceful marchers with billy clubs, tear gas, and trampling horses on the Edmund Pettus bridge? Did they learn to respect the dignity and worth of all human personality?
Well, Connor died ten years later, apparently unrepentant. Clark lived a long life. He ran a series of fraudulent businesses, did time for marijuana trafficking, and died in 2007, shortly before Obama became president. Late in life he said he would do it all over again if given the chance.
Wallace lost his wife to cancer and ran for president as a segregationist alternative to the major parties. In 1968, he won five states. Then he got shot (and became partially paralyzed), found Jesus, renounced racism, crowned the first black homecoming queen at the University of Alabama, got himself elected for a fourth term as governor (with 90% support among black voters), and appointed more black people to government positions than had ever been done in Alabama.
This is roughly equivalent to an epilogue in which Matt Gaetz becomes a modestly-effective Governor of Florida and, while there, he depoliticizes the department of justice, narrows the gender wage gap, and prepares his state for the impact of climate change.
Even then, Wallace never led Alabama through the basics of remedial justice. Under his leadership, Alabama never prosecuted the four terrorists who bombed 16th St. Baptist Church. It never compensated victims like Sarah Collins who, though blinded in one eye, survived the bombing that killed her sister and three friends. She spent the next several decades bearing responsibility for her own medical bills, and she still lives in Birmingham.
Wallace, Connor, Clark. These three men are a tiny sample. Taken alone, they are not a great record for King’s gold-standard aspiration to make a brother of his enemy.
But there is a second, “bronze standard” accomplishment that gets lost in that assessment. King so altered the system in Alabama – and in America – that it denied those men the rewards of evil. It no longer promoted its worst people to the top. After the civil rights movement, Connor and Clark languished in obscurity while Wallace re-invented himself for a society that had been restructured to promote a different kind of man.
The reform was incomplete. But it was successful enough to suggest both that misguided people can respond to good, like Wallace did, and that a perverse system can be altered to promote a better kind of person to the top.
The law cannot make a man love me, King says. But “it can restrain him from lynching me. And I think that’s pretty important too.”
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