Assignment America: Selma

[Algernon Moncrieff]

Full story at link, below

Assignment America: Selma

Fifty years after the police viciously attacked hundreds of marchers in a pivotal moment of the civil rights movement, Selma, Ala., defies neat story lines.

By GAY TALESE MARCH 6, 2015

Without doubt, civil rights history — American history — was made here. But I grew up in Ocean City, N.J., a politically and socially conservative island resort founded during the 1800s by Methodist ministers. Although black students attended school with whites in my hometown, it was otherwise a largely segregated community. At the boardwalk’s Village Theater, black students and blacks of all ages sat by themselves in the balcony while whites gathered below in the orchestra. I recall seeing groups of white-sheeted Klansmen holding meetings occasionally on our campgrounds, within a few blocks of the business district, where my Italian-born Catholic father owned and operated a tailor shop. When I first became part of the University of Alabama’s all-white campus in 1949, I saw nothing so different from what I had observed during my New Jersey boyhood.

In June of 1963, as a reporter at The Times, I had an interview in New York with Alabama’s Gov. George C. Wallace, who had flown in to appear on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He stayed in a large suite at the Pierre hotel on Fifth Avenue, where our talk took place.

The interview had been going well for the first 10 minutes, but then Governor Wallace suddenly rose from his chair, took me by the arm, and led me to one of the windows overlooking Central Park and the row of expensive buildings that line Fifth Avenue.

“Here we have the citadel of hypocrisy in America,” he said, pointing down to the street and declaring that hardly any black people, even those who could afford it, could hope to share living space with whites in this area, or in surrounding areas, because of the longstanding, if unacknowledged, practices of real estate segregation in New York and other Northern cities. [div]

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