THE MAYOR-NEXT-DOOR TYPE
This is an open letter to the City of Birmingham, Mayor Randall Woodfin, and to everyone living here that gives a damn.
We lived in a small East Lake house until I was five, and when I say small, I mean it. Two bedrooms, narrow as a shotgun, one bathroom and a hotel room kitchen. We had a tire swing off the back stairs and there was an alley that ran long ways against the backyard. My sister and I slept in bunkbeds and our Dad worked like a maniac to buy us somewhere better… 24-hour shifts of firefighting only to clock out, drive across town, and load tires onto trucks at Goodrich. George Cowgill Jr could be a folksong hero in the next Jason Isbell song, not joking. Too bad I can’t play guitar… or sing, or I’d do it myself.
And a few years went by… years of back-breaking and money-saving, and of two ingrate children asking where Dad is all the time, or why he’s so tired. Hard work paying off he found us a house, a nicer house, one that was on the other side of the trees, no longer in East Lake, but in an upscale area nearby called Roebuck. It was 1979.
Our new home was light years better than the house in East Lake. My sister April and I each got our own room, hers with a bathroom, and the backyard looked like a field. Our next door neighbors, a pleasant couple in their sixties, lived only a few feet away and their house seemed to mirror ours. Matching driveways and awnings, matching floorplans, and each with a downstairs den area. Each with backyards that looked like fields… at least they looked that way to a five-year old East Lake relocate.
My neighbor Art and his wife could not have been nicer to me and my baby sister. Art was the same age as my grandfather, with a similar slow walk and demeanor. And my parents told me how, when they were little kids, Art was a really well-known man in the city. For a few years he was even the Mayor.
The Mayor of Birmingham.
My third grade teacher once assigned us homework to interview someone who had lived through the Great Depression. She gave us the questions to ask so all we had to do, such young journalists were we, was write down their answers. Easy. I asked Art if I could interview him, and he readily agreed. We sat down in his den, oh so similar to the one in my house, but instead of Star Wars toys (Mine!) and a waterbed (April’s!), he had a desk and a recliner with tons of pictures on the walls… most in black and white, and other trophy items encased in glass. I remember being so stuck on the similarity of his den to my den that I didn’t truly acknowledge the triangular white hood in the shadow box, or the white robe. I was eight years old, not quite the idiot kid I would grow up to be, but still clueless. And it was only 1981… the world didn’t care about racism then, or recognize it, or understand it, I sure as hell didn’t.
Art loved baseball as much as I did, and back then I was obsessed with the sport. I collected baseball cards and played in the summer leagues, constantly whining for my Dad to play catch… hitting groundballs in our backyard over and over so I could field them until my knees bled. I was actually not awful at the sport either.
In ’82 My grandfather took me to Rickwood Field to meet Mickey Mantle, a childhood hero to me and millions and millions of other American boys… a true baseball legend. Remembering Art loved the sport like I did, I got “The Mick” to sign two balls that day, and I took one back to Art, who proudly displayed it on his desk.
In his den.
Under the white hood and robe that I never asked about.
I grew up in that Roebuck house all the way into college and my Dad retiring from the Fire Department. Art and his wife were right next door for a good decade, the quiet yet helpful neighbors. Ironically, when I moved out on my own for the first time, I ended up in Sharpsburg Manor, a sprawling apartment complex on the Irondale/Mountain Brook line. Art, too old to take care of a yard and a house, sold himself away from Roebuck and moved him and his wife to Sharpsburg as well. We seemed destined to be forever neighbors.
Art died in the late nineties while I was busy playing punk rock singer, touring all over the U.S. in a van with my idiot friends.
Not knowing my history very well…
And certainly culpable.
Three decades evaporate… leaving me with scars and memories, a beautiful daughter who doesn’t call me enough and a couple of pit bulls. And cursed with flashbacks of the varying eras of my life… memories of me growing up, and memories of me trying hard to not grow up at all.
Just because you don’t know your history doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Growing up next door I never knew the story of how Art, refusing a federal order to integrate, decided to close down the city parks and city pools and dismiss every employee, all in the name of white supremacy. In a town hall meeting that followed Art declared, “I don’t think any of you want a nigger mayor, or a nigger police chief, but I tell you that’s what’ll happen if we play dead on this park integration.”
Or how Art, a seasoned trial lawyer, born and raised in Birmingham, graduating from Woodlawn High, then on to Birmingham-Southern, with a final stop in Tuscaloosa to get his law degree, constantly found himself on the wrong side of the biggest civil rights trials this nation has ever endured.
Does the name James Earl Ray mean anything? It should because, whether he did it or not (conspiracy theorists unite!) he is still credited with assassinating a southern preacher named Martin Luther King Jr in 1968. When Ray was finally apprehended in England his first phone call was to Art, who would go on to be his first of many lawyers.
So what, right? This is America and everyone, EVERYONE, deserves a legal defense… regardless of the atrocities they committed. I believe it and, even when I hate it, I still believe it.
But at some point, you have to look past such an easy answer.
Because Art would then go on to serve as legal counsel for a man named Robert Chambliss, or as the press called him “Dynamite Bob.” Dynamite Bob’s name may not find its way into your grimace as quickly as James Earl Ray’s does, but I assure you his crimes will. Something about a bomb, and the 16th Street Baptist Church and four little girls dying. In his trial defense Art argued that the death certificates of the four little girls were biased against his client because the cause of injuries were listed as “dynamite blast.” The judge agreed, took out his pocketknife and cut out the word’s “bomb” and “dynamite” from all four documents before allowing the jury to see.
God forbid bias.
I cannot imagine anything more biased than ten sticks of dynamite killing four young girls over the color of their skin. Too bad that judge didn’t have his pocketknife handy to cut the red wire, that goddamned day in September 1963.
But this is America. Everyone deserves a defense.
Like the four Ku Klux Klan members who gunned down a civil rights activist named Viola Liuzzo, a young woman from Detroit, who was in the process of shuttling other activists from Selma to Montgomery. Art, yet again, served as legal defense for the four, and actually argued them into getting an acquittal… at least in Alabama’s court system.
Time and time again Art injected himself on the wrong side of history… even going out of his way to do so.
His years as Mayor were no different. His 1961 election campaign relied heavily on painting his opponent, Tom King, as a race traitor in favor of integration. The decisive blow was Art’s people distributing a photo of Tom King shaking hands with a black man. “If my opponent is elected tomorrow this will be hailed as the fall of the South’s greatest segregation stronghold,” Art said on the eve of the election.
Soon after winning the Mayor’s office he closed the city’s parks. 67 parks, 38 playgrounds, eight swimming pools and four golf courses to be exact, all in the name of disallowing integration.
And I drive down Montclair Road daily, passing the street named after him and it stings. It stings how I haven’t written this until now. It stings that I sat there in his office in 1982, a dumb eight-year-old into baseball, and didn’t question the “trophies” that Art had on display.
When I started jotting down notes to write this essay, I called my friend Wasserman up in Detroit. Good or bad, he knows me as well as anyone can, and I told him that I would overcome the feeling, but I was reluctant because of how nice Art was to me growing up. And Wasserman, smarter than me and light years more practical, said “This is bigger than you. Being nice to you is not enough.”
Last thing…
Under Art’s leadership Martin Luther King Jr was jailed in Birmingham for demonstrating without a permit. Three days later Art was removed from office as his replacement, Albert Boutwell, was sworn in. The very next day King sent out a letter addressed to Boutwell, the brand new Mayor, and it was a letter that picked up quite a bit of notoriety and has since been dubbed “The Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
Maybe you know that bit of history?
And Art, my neighbor, was only hours removed from being named in one of the most influential literary pieces in civil rights history.
Named, once again, on the wrong side.
It stings writing this, it does. Holed up in my back office, I’m surrounded by my “trophies.” House signs from fires that I was lucky to walk away from. Tons of punk albums autographed and addressed to my daughter. A framed polaroid my grandfather took of a third-grade nothing in a Yankees jersey standing next to Mickey Mantle. In my top drawer I have an iron sign from Selma, 1931 that reads “Public Swimming Pool, White Only.” I’ve kept it tucked away and out of sight for years, with plans of someday donating it to the Civil Rights Institute. I probably should’ve already done that by now, but I get distracted so easily. Anyway… maybe when I do, they could put it next to a couple of other new pieces that belong there.
The street signs for Art Hanes Blvd perhaps? And Art Hanes Circle? Because if it stings me, a child of Birmingham, that Art was actually nice to, then I can only imagine how it feels to the people of this city that suffered under his racist doctrine. “Anyway you look at it the white race is superior to the black race,” Art said in his last year as Mayor. And me knowing this, this whole time, but only now letting it come to terms in my head, stings.
But just because we didn’t know our history doesn’t mean we can’t fix things now.
Fix things for four little girls. Addie May Collins, Carol Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Rosamond Robertson.
And for Viola Liuzzo.
And for a southern preacher named Martin Luther King Jr.
And for everyone in this city, a city that lives in infamy as a battleground for racial equality, that gives a damn.
I was culpable and it stings, damn it stings. But I choose now to write this, and to share with you what I know.
Wasserman said it… being nice to me is not enough.
Therefore, I choose to be on the right side of history.
Xoxo
George Cowgill III, Birmingham’s Idiot Son
“My Daddy told me, and I believe he told me true, that the right thing is always the hardest thing to do.” — Jason Isbell
