| Photo by S. Beth Atkin |
Thelton Henderson Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
| Photo by S. Beth Atkin |
Page 3 of 8
Tell us a little about what that then involved -- traveling to these states, getting witness testimony, building a case?
That's right. It involved traveling to the particular voting precinct -- in Louisiana it was parishes; in the other states, it was counties -- and finding a "pattern in practice," those were the operative words under the legislation, of discrimination. And what that usually involved; you'd look at voting records or you'd get the FBI to photograph all the voting records, and you'd usually have a long list of whites who were registered and a very short list of whites who weren't registered. You'd have very short or nonexistent list of registered blacks and a very long list of unregistered. And you'd analyze those to try to find out why those statistics existed. And generally what you would find after a lot of study -- they all did it differently but the most prevalent pattern was that they'd have very difficult questions and then helped the whites answer the questions but didn't help the blacks. And so you could see answers from the whites in different handwritings that you knew were not their handwriting. You'd find that pattern in practice and then you'd go into court and get an injunction against that practice and get them registered.
Several questions come to mind. First, this was dangerous business for a young black attorney.
It was.
Were there any physical threats on your life? Or any actual physical violence on your person?
There were physical threats. I was anxious all the time, and there were threats and some violence. I still have a scar on my hand from an arrest, where a sheriff smashed my hand with a billy club because he wanted to see my driver's license and I took it out and held it in the covering that they have on it. And he smashed my hand and said, "Take it out of that thing." And it was that kind of thing. But that was the only actual physical violence.
Did you get death threats?
I did get death threats and, fortunately, when I was in the South in 1962, there weren't any places for me to stay in these towns except in Birmingham. There was a black motel, the A.G. Gaston Motel. In the other places there was no place to stay, so I stayed on military bases in the evening. And it felt secure there. I was actually pleased that I could stay on a military base rather than a hotel. And I wasn't allowed to stay in black homes because that would have identified me with the Civil Rights Movement. I was supposed to be neutral as a government employee.
And we'll talk about that in a moment. It sounds like a time so long ago but it really isn't so long ago. What about relations with the FBI, because they presumably were an arm of the Justice Department. How did that play out in your work?
Well the FBI, and we can say it with much more assurance now, they weren't a big partner of the Civil Rights Division. We didn't feel that they were interested in what we were doing. And so they did the technical work, they would photograph the voting records, and we had no problem with that. But we never felt comfortable that they were really investigating civil rights violations.
One story that I can tell that I think personifies that ... I mentioned earlier to you, before we came here, about a day in Selma. It was a big voting rights registration day in which four young blacks were going to defy the local authorities by taking food and drink to black voters waiting in line [to register to vote] and they were told by the sheriff they couldn't. And I was orchestrating this [the gathering of evidence]. I knew they were going to go over and they were going to get beat. And I ordered pictures of this. And so when we saw the pictures which were taken by the FBI, they showed the blacks walking across with the food and then they approached a phalanx of whites and you saw arms raised with billy clubs. And then the camera sort of wanders off and you never get the beating. Well that was the way the FBI did many things in those days. So they weren't diligent pursuers of justice and civil rights, I thought.
The other constraint must have been the judges you were arguing before.
A serious constraint.
Tell us about that.
Well they were probably less hospitable than the FBI. They were actively hostile to our cause, to our cases, to the people we represented. And they would use racial slurs even in court. Generally I've made the statement that some of my judicial heroes are not these judges in the district court, and it's ironic that I sit on a district court now, but the appellate court judges. There were some very brave judges in the fifth circuit. John Minor Wisdom, and others that come to mind, were the judges who enforced the law [in the appellate courts]. So you had to get to the trial court and get [the district court judges] to rule against you, and then justice would be done when you would appeal it up to the fifth circuit.
And many of these justices at the higher level received death threats.
They got death threats and were ostracized in their community. One of the more poignant -- there's a book that I still often read called Unlikely Heroes -- which is about five of these judges. In there is a segment about John Minor Wisdom, whose family was a leading family in his community. After his rulings -- upholding the law is simply all he did -- he would go to church. His family had been founders of the church, and no one would sit with them; they'd get up and move. So his family suffered a lot for doing the right thing.
So for how many years did you do this work?
Two years. I did this for two years.
Your career, in this regard, ended rather abruptly because of a particular incident. Tell us about that incident, what happened to you.
Okay, and that's why it was only two years. I would have worked longer. I was working on a voting rights case one day, and on this particular day it involved going out into the rural areas and interviewing people. "When did you apply to vote?" "What did you do?" And after a long day of that I was coming back to the A.G. Gaston Motel, this was in Birmingham, and Martin Luther King was also staying there. And just as I was driving into the motel; King was driving out. And we stopped and chatted for a few minutes and he said that he was on the way to Selma. A minister was driving him to Selma because this was right after the incident I described, where the four blacks were beat. And the process that King [was engaged in] -- it took six months to a year to get a community ready to really demonstrate and rise up against the patterns. And he was going out there on one of those rallies. He told me that the car he was being driven in had a bad tire and sort of casually asked, "Can we use your car?" So I said, of course. I was finished for the day. So we drove back into the motel, I got out and gave the minister who was driving my keys, and they left. I went in and ate and went to bed. Well, we didn't know that we were being followed every place; he certainly was. I often was. And I know now from my Freedom of Information Act papers that I was being followed by George Wallace's minions. So whoever was watching outside assumed that I was driving King instead of giving him the car. So the newspaper the next day had a headline, "High Ranking Government Official" -- I was just out of law school but for Southern purposes I became a high ranking government official -- who was doing the Kennedys' bidding by chauffeuring Martin Luther King around. A huge scandal followed and that was the end of my career with the Civil Rights Division.
You became a political football.
Exactly. Exactly.
Tell us what stands out in your mind in terms of the courage of the people you witnessed acting politically and being in the Civil Rights Movement.
It was unbelievable courage. I mean, I saw young kids who would come to a march or a demonstration knowing they were going to get arrested. Indeed, many of them would bring their toothbrush and a face towel expecting to be arrested. And beyond beaten. And I thought that was tremendous courage, and courage that I'm not sure that I would have had. One of the untold stories: The New York Times and what we saw on the front pages -- of King coming in, the national press looking at this and everyone applauding the bravery! But when they [the press] pulled out of town, the untold story was the misery when these [local] people were left alone. The press was gone -- they [the local civil rights activists] lost their jobs; they were beaten. They were threatened; houses were blown up. And they knew this, because I've heard them talk about it prior to the demonstrations. And I thought that was tremendous courage.
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