TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/020392/0203107.000

Text File | 1992-10-19 | 5.7 KB | 118 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 24

CIVIL RIGHTS

Let Me Out of Here!


Birmingham's black mayor marches off to prison, calling his
prosecution racist -- but doesn't stay long

By MICHAEL RILEY/BIRMINGHAM


    In 1963 riveting television footage from Birmingham
helped change America's course. Images of police dogs mauling
black children and water cannons battering civil rights
demonstrators touched off a wave of moral outrage that swept
across the nation and led to the passage of the most
comprehensive laws against racial discrimination since the Civil
War.

    Last week another dramatic scene took place on
Birmingham's streets, but its impact on the nation's troubled
race relations is far from clear. With a chain draped
symbolically over his shoulders and his wrists bound by steel
handcuffs, Mayor Richard Arrington marched with hundreds of
supporters from the 16th Street Baptist Church, where four girls
were killed by a racially inspired bombing in 1963. Their
destination: the federal courthouse three blocks away, where
Arrington surrendered and was taken to the minimum-security
prison camp at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery to begin
serving a prison term for contempt of court.

    Under the sentence handed down by U.S. District Judge
Edwin Nelson, Arrington was supposed to go to the prison camp
every Thursday and stay until Monday morning until he turned
over appointment logs and other records that a grand jury
subpoenaed in a probe of alleged corruption at city hall.
Arrington, a Democrat who in 1979 was elected the city's first
black mayor, refused to cooperate with the investigation on the
grounds that he was being harassed by federal prosecutors solely
because of his race. He explained his decision to go to prison
as a principled stand against racist law enforcement and vowed
not to give up the documents to U.S. Attorney Frank Donaldson,
who retires a few months from now. "We have a history of taking
adversity and turning it into advantage," Arrington told
supporters before he marched off. "That's what we want to do
here."

    And then, after only one night in jail, Arrington caved
in, cutting short his protest by relinquishing his records.
"It's not been great fun," he said. His abrupt abandonment of
principle left some citizens shaking their heads and wondering
whether the protest was orchestrated as a clever media ploy.
Only the mayor can answer that question. What is certain is that
the controversy exposed the city's raw nerves of race and that
it will take a substantial effort to calm them.

    All along, U.S. Attorney Donaldson, a white Republican,
vehemently dismissed the charge of bias. Says he: "We're
colorblind, and we simply follow the evidence where it leads."
Last fall that evidence led to Atlanta architect Tarlee Brown,
a former business partner of Arrington's, who pleaded guilty to
charges of defrauding the city. Brown says he paid the mayor
$5,000 in kickbacks for city architectural work, a charge
Arrington denies. While the mayor contended that his records
will exonerate him, he also claimed that turning the documents
over to the prosecutors may allow them to concoct a case against
him. So why did he go to jail at all? "He wants to see if he can
defuse the [case] by wrapping himself in the mantle of the
civil rights movement," speculates political scientist Steven
Daniels of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

    The contretemps has divided Birmingham along racial lines.
Many whites suspect that the mayor might be hiding something.
Many blacks, however, share the mayor's claim that black
elected officials are being unfairly targeted. As evidence, they
cite the example of former Washington Mayor Marion Barry, who
was videotaped inhaling from a crack pipe by federal agents
after being lured to a hotel by an ex-girl friend. Now, says the
Rev. Abraham Woods, one of the civil rights veterans who has
championed Arrington's cause, "they're out to destroy this fine
mayor. They have a Klan mentality. They think they can treat
blacks the way they want to. They belong to the old school."

    One of the more visible results of the controversy is that
it rekindled the passions that had been damped for decades. At
the 16th Street Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr.
organized demonstrations during the 1960s, throngs of
demonstrators waving placards that read RACISM WILL NOT PREVAIL,
WE SHALL OVERCOME and RACISM IS CORRUPTION were led in old
movement anthems by grizzled civil rights veterans like Woods
and the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth. They hoped they were writing
a new chapter in an old book. "We put it together once," roared
Shuttlesworth to stamping applause, "and we can put it together
again." Blacks are outraged that the man they elected, with the
ballot they fought so hard to win, is under attack. To many
people, the case against Arrington is a present-day version of
trumped-up charges brought against King in 1963.

    But equating the mayor with King is as bogus as comparing
Donaldson to Bull Connor. The straightforward moral choices that
Birmingham faced in King's day are not a reliable guide to
sorting out the ambiguities posed by the Arrington affair. Back
then, racist bombing attacks were so common that the city's best
black neighborhood was nicknamed "Dynamite Hill." Parks, schools
and buses were segregated, and most blacks were denied the vote.
Today every legal vestige of Jim Crow has disappeared from the
city, and Arrington sits in the mayor's office. The racial
battleground is no longer black or white, but a murky gray, and
Arrington's bizarre performance only adds to the confusion and
frustration.