published by the university of alabama, the …

NUMBER 113, S U M M E R 2014S I X D OLL A R S

PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA, THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA AT BIRMINGHAM, AND THE ALABAMA DEPARTMENT OF ARCHIVES AND HISTOR Y

This article was reprinted by permission of Alabama Heritage magazine.

A L A B A M A H E R I T A G E : S U M M E R 2 0 1 4 1

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Editorial and Advisory Board

Edwin C. Bridges, Emeritus, Alabama State Department of Archives and History; Wilton S. Dillon, Senior Scholar Emeritus, Smithsonian Institution; J. Wayne Flynt, Professor Emeritus, Department of History, Auburn University; Robert Gamble, Retired Senior Architectural Historian, Alabama Historical Commission; Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton, Professor Emerita, Department of History, University of Alabama at Birmingham; William J. Koopman, Chairman Emeritus, Department of Medicine, University of Alabama at Birmingham; Tennant S. McWilliams, Professor Emeritus, History Department, University of Alabama at Birmingham; Robert O. Mellown, Department of Art, University of Alabama; George C. Rable, Summersell Chair in Southern History, University of Alabama;

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Published by the University of Alabama, the University of Alabama at Birmingham

and the Alabama Department of Archives and History

The University of Alabama

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The University of Alabama at Birmingham

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Shirley Salloway Kahn, Vice President, Development, Alumni and External Relations

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A L A B A M A H E R I T A G E : S U M M E R 2 0 1 4 3w w w . A l a b a m a H e r i t a g e . c o m

DEFEAT AT FORT BOWYER: THE FAILED BRITISH CAMPAIGN FOR THE

GULF COAST DURING THE WAR OF 1812

BY GENE ALLEN SMITH

During a September 1814 attack on Fort Bowyer,

American soldiers defeated the British ship Hermes,

representing the only time during the War of 1812

that American shore defenses sank a British frigate.

PIGSKINS TO STETHOSCOPES: FOOTBALL PLAYERS WHO PRACTICED MEDICINE IN ALABAMA

BY TIM L. PENNYCUFF

Th e proliferation of football players-turned-physicians

in Alabama suggests a correlation between the

discipline, time management skills, and work ethic

required from the sport and the profession.

FROM ROOSEVELT TO ROSA PARKS: THE SUBVERSIVE WORLD OF VIRGINIA AND CLIFFORD DURR, 1940 TO 1955

BY THOMAS E. REIDY

A Montgomery couple overcame all obstacles to emerge

as icons in the civil rights movement.

FEATURES

Table of Contents

Cover: Admiral Farragut

had himself lashed to the rig-

ging at the Battle of Mobile

Bay. See article page 43.

(Library of Congress)

DEPARTMENTS4

Southern Architecture & Preservation

Present at the Beginning

42Becoming Alabama Quarter by QuarterCalendar of Events

50Alabama Women

Th e Life and Career of Ruby Pickens Tartt

54Revealing Hidden

CollectionsRev. Richard Charles Boone

58Portraits & Landscapes

Th e Legend of Savannah Jack

60Alabama Treasures

Th e Tale of Two Quilts

62Nature Journal

Th e Small World of Northfork Creek

66Reading the

Southern PastPopulists and Progressives,

Democrats and Republicans

8

34

TRUMAN CAPOTE, MONROEVILLE’S OTHER MUSE

BY WAYNE FLYNT

Even as he traveled among some of the nation’s

most elite social circles, Truman Capote continued to

wrestle with his southern origin.

26

18


54 A L A B A M A H E R I T A G E : S U M M E R 2 0 1 4 w w w . A l a b a m a H e r i t a g e . c o m

B Y H O W A R D O. R O B I N S O N

he archives at Alabama State University (ASU) emphasize

African American history and culture, with a focus

related to the modern civil rights movement in Ala-

bama. Th e ASU Boone Collection, an archive of items relat-

ing to Rev. Richard Charles Boone, sheds an important light

on how a fi eld director in the Southern Christian Leadership

Conference (SCLC), the civil rights organization established

by Martin Luther King Jr. and other activist minsters in 1957,

worked to challenge racial discrimination in mid-twentieth-

century America. SCLC fi eld directors worked to implement

SCLC programs in targeted communities identifi ed by the

organization’s leadership. Th e bulk of the collection is made

up of materials related to Boone’s civil rights work with the

SCLC throughout the South and with various civil rights

initiatives in Montgomery. Th e collection consists of a large

format photo album, several recordings and transcripts, and

two cubic feet of papers. Boone, who was part of a cadre of

freedom fi ghters introduced to activism while a student at

Alabama State College (now ASU), worked on civil rights

campaigns in various places throughout the United States

and Alabama, including in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia,

Selma, Montgomery, Tuscaloosa, and Birmingham.

Correspondence included in the collection between

Boone and the SCLC leadership illustrates how this student

activist moved through the ranks in the direct-action wing

of the movement. Teresa Baxley, in her 2009 ASU master’s

thesis, Richard Charles Boone: Montgomery Civil Rights Ac-

tivist and Proponent of Nonviolence, 1960–1973, describes

how Boone worked for civil rights attorney Charles Conley

as a student. It was through attorney Conley that Boone

became familiar with the SCLC. In 1960 Boone joined the

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), but

like many college students introduced to the movement, he

eventually migrated into Martin Luther King Jr.’s SCLC. In

the SCLC, Boone worked as a fi eld secretary on campaigns

in Tuscaloosa and Birmingham. He eventually headed up

his own campaigns as a fi eld director in Selma and Etowah

County. Th e Boone Collection also highlights the SCLC

campaigns in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Chicago, Illinois;

and Rochester, New York.

Early in the modern civil rights movement, activists be-

gan to organize around participatory democracy and sought

ways that black people could realize an equitable voice in the

political life of their communities. In March 1963 Boone be-

gan working in Selma for the SCLC to overcome obstacles to

black voting rights. In the much-celebrated Selma to Mont-

gomery march, Boone also spoke at churches and other

Revealing Hidden Collections


A L A B A M A H E R I T A G E : S U M M E R 2 0 1 4 55w w w . A l a b a m a H e r i t a g e . c o m

venues to generate support for the marchers as they neared

the capital city. At ASU he organized over one thousand

students who agreed to leave campus en masse and join the

marchers entering town from Selma.

After the passage of the Voting Rights Act, Boone was

among a group of African Americans in Alabama who

worked to pursue political infl uence outside the Demo-

cratic Party, the party of George Wallace and Eugene “Bull”

Connor. For most of the twentieth century, the Democratic

Party of Alabama operated under the symbol of a rooster

and used the motto “White Supremacy for Right.” In 1968

Huntsville dentist John Cashion founded the National

Democratic Party of Alabama (NDPA) as a wing of the

Democratic Party. Th e political organization was created

to off er minorities an opportunity to hold offi ce and fully

participate in the political process. Th e collection at ASU

also features materials from Boone’s 1968 failed run for

Congress, when he ran on the NDPA ticket in Alabama.

Additionally, the Boone Collection details developments

in the late 1960s, during the waning days of the modern

civil rights movement. In 1965 Boone objected to being

reassigned to Chicago by the SCLC. He opted to stay in

Montgomery and attack vestiges of racial discrimination in

the capital city. He also worked through the Montgomery

Improvement Association (MIA) on a number of projects.

Th e collection refl ects the MIA involvement in desegregat-

ing schools, the public library, and public parks. In keep-

ing with the tradition of SCLC activists, Boone became an

ordained Baptist preacher in 1967, and he was re-affi rmed

in the early 1970s by the Christian Methodist Episcopalian

Church. Boone’s civil rights work continued aside from the

SCLC in the late 1960s.

Many in the MIA did not believe in street demonstrations

and discouraged Boone’s brand of protest. He reacted by

establishing the Alabama Action Committee (AAC) in 1967.

Letters, newspaper articles, and fl yers in the Boone Collec-

tion illuminate the interworking of the AAC. Th e collection

also reveals the AAC’s attempts to compel stores on Dexter

Avenue to hire blacks, allow black employees to handle

money and manage white employees, and to treat their black

customers courteously. Th e papers in the Boone Collection

relating to the AAC chronicle the 1969 “Blackout,” a boycott

of downtown Montgomery stores. Th e AAC’s publication,

Voice of Action, shows how the AAC targeted police brutal-

ity, particularly in the 1969 police arrest and beating of Liege

Richardson, a black disc jockey at WPAX radio.

venues to generate support for the marchers as they neared

the capital city At ASU he organized over one thousand

Opposite page: Richard Boone was an advocate of street protests.

This photograph was taken at a demonstration at Luverne, Alabama,

in 1965. (Alabama Department of Archives and History) Above:

Boone wrote his “toilet-paper manifesto” during a year spent in

solitary confi nement while in prison. (Reverend Richard Boone

Collection, University Archives, Alabama State University)


56 A L A B A M A H E R I T A G E : S U M M E R 2 0 1 4 w w w . A l a b a m a H e r i t a g e . c o m

For the entire decade of the

1960s, ASU students or former

students were involved in civil

rights demonstrations. Th e

decade ended with Boone at

the center of a demonstra-

tion on the ASU campus.

Th is episode involved

the fi ring of Alvin

Homes, an instructor

and records and

registration employee.

Boone, who was in and out

of school during the entire

decade, led a student dem-

onstration and a weeklong

takeover of the student

union. In the aftermath,

school president Levi Watkins closed the college and dis-

missed seven students, including Boone.

In 1970 Boone was arrested and convicted of conspiracy

to commit arson. Th is episode began with him arranging

for several young men from New York City to picket the

WRMA radio station. Montgomery police accused the

young people of attempting to set the Dexter Avenue station

on fi re. As they were approached, the men fl ed and refused

to stop when ordered to do so. After giving chase, the offi cers

fi red and killed two of the picketers. Th e Boone Collection

provides documentation of this episode, Boone’s subsequent

arrest, and his seven-year sentence. During a year in solitary

confi nement, Boone penned his “toilet paper manifesto.”

He served two years of his sentence before the case against

him was dropped for insuffi cient evidence. After his release,

Boone asked to be reinstated as an ASU student, and he

received his degree in political science on June 4, 1972.

While the modern civil rights movement defi ned Rev.

Boone’s life, the end of the 1960s did not bring an end to

Boone’s engagement. Some civil rights activists adopted

nonviolence as a practical strategy to address racial discrimi-

nation during the modern civil rights movement. Rev. Boone

embraced nonviolence and social justice as his life’s mission.

He continued his crusade for justice, picketing Morris Dees

and the Montgomery based Southern Poverty Law Center in

1992, after Dees supported death penalty proponent Edward

E. Carnes for Federal appeals court judge. Boone protested

at Montgomery City Hall during a 2000 police brutality case,

and he protested in opposition to

the United States’s decision to

go to war in Iraq. Rev. Boone

embodied the principals of

fairness, universal love, and

justice, speaking out against

the mass-incarceration

of black men and the

persistent poverty

that stifl es so many

lives. Th e movement

gave his existence

meaning and his contribu-

tions, as chronicled in his

collection, gave the city of

Montgomery, the state of

Alabama, and the United

States itself an opportunity

to embrace claims of justice, liberty, and equality more fully,

as articulated in the nation’s founding documents.

During the last decade of his life, Boone worked closely

with the National Center for the Study of Civil Rights

and African American Culture, located at his alma mater.

Th rough the center, Boone shared movement stories with

local groups and with visitors from all over the world. Th e

ASU archives maintains a videotaped oral history of Rev-

erend Boone, and holds several recordings of his presenta-

tions, allowing people to listen in as Boone talked to college

students and church groups, as he sang movement songs,

and as he recounted the heroics of those little-mentioned

personalities he encountered in the movement. Before the

seventy-six-year-old Boone passed away in 2013, he played

a key role in the National Park Service decision to locate

the Selma to Montgomery March Interpretive Center on

the campus of ASU. Th e center is slated to break ground on

March 7, 2015.

Howard Robinson teaches American history at Alabama

State University (ASU) and has served as the university

archivist for ten years. He is a native of New York City, a

graduate of ASU, and received his PhD in American history

from the University of Akron. Louis A. Pitschmann, standing

editor of the “Revealing Hidden Collections” department of

Alabama Heritage, is Dean of the University Libraries at the

University of Alabama and director of the Alabama Center

for the Book, which co-sponsor this department.

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The ASU collection includes scrapbooks of newspaper articles about

Boone. Above is a front page of Voice of Action, the newspaper of

the AAC, calling for Boone’s release from prison. (Reverend Richard

Boone Collection, University Archives, Alabama State University)


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published by the university of alabama, the …

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