Civil Rights: Let Me Out of Here!

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.