“Behind the Magic Curtain: Secrets, Spies, and Unsung White Allies of Birmingham’s Civil Rights Days”
Author: T.K. Thorne
Publisher: NewSouth Books
Pages: 354
Price: $28.95 (Hardcover)
New Research Reveals Lesser-Known Allies in 1960s Birmingham
After a groundbreaking career with the Birmingham police force, retiring as a precinct captain, T. K. Thorne has become an important Alabama writer in several genres.
She has two biblical/historical novels, “Angels at the Gate,” set in the last days of Sodom and Gomorrah, and “Noah’s Wife,” and an odd but successful mystery/fantasy novel, “House of Rose,” set at the foot of Vulcan.
Thorne in 2013 published “Last Chance for Justice,” a study of the successful if belated trial of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombers.
This work, “Behind the Magic Curtain,” is a further exploration into those days. In its portrayal of 1960s Birmingham, described by Harrison Salisbury of the “New York Times” as “fragmented by the emotional dynamite of racism, reinforced by the whip, the razor, the gun, the bomb, the torch, the club, the knife, the mob, the police, and many branches of the state’s apparatus,” it could also be seen as a sequel to “Angels at the Gate.”
Either way, Thorne has a sound premise. We all know a great deal about the main events of the civil rights era and are familiar with the major players–Bull Connor and the KKK on the one side and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and Martin Luther king, Jr. on the other.
Thorne is out to throw some light on the many, many others who were involved. Diane McWhorter undertook a similar project in her brilliant study “Carry Me Home,” but that book was infused with the fear that friends and family members of McWhorter might have been associated in some ways with the Klan or other unsavory elements.
Thorne’s investigation here is much more positive. Many white people helped in small ways to promote racial justice, and their names remain unknown.
Perhaps at the time they were fearful of retribution or some were just modest and shy, avoiding the spotlight.
In “Magic Curtain” there is a familiar historical through line: the attacks on Freedom Riders, the work to obtain fair treatment at the downtown stores, the many bombings to intimidate black leaders, King’s marches, and then the children’s marches, King in the Birmingham jail, the dogs and hoses, the bombing of the 16th St Baptist church.
Throughout, there were people meeting constantly, usually in secret, to find the best way forward. Many were brave and good-hearted people with nothing to gain and much to lose, lawyer Chuck Morgan foremost among this crowd.
Businessmen, frustrated by the city’s inability to grow and prosper as Atlanta and other places had, saw integration as inevitable although some were themselves segregationists at heart. Sidney Smyer, a real estate mogul, best represented this position.
Heroes among the Jewish community included Abe Berkowitz, who saw integration not as a pragmatic issue but as a moral imperative. Several in the Unitarian community are worthy of special praise.
Vincent Townsend, editor of the “Birmingham News,” understood the steps to justice that needed to be taken but couldn’t bear to give negative news about his beloved Birmingham the prominence it deserved. Roberts and Klibanoff in “The Race Beat” make this sadly clear.
The story of Tom Lankford, “News” reporter, figures large here and is ambiguous. Utterly loyal to Townsend, at a time when tapping phones and hiding microphones was mostly legal he gathered information on the Klan, Bull Connor and the police, but also on civil rights leaders.
His ethics, as Lankford himself admits, were murky.
As Thorne honestly and painfully makes clear, this was not a picture in black and white but in 20 shades of gray.
Don Noble’s newest book is Alabama Noir, a collection of original stories by Winston Groom, Ace Atkins, Carolyn Haines, Brad Watson, and eleven other Alabama authors.
