Red Termites and Rebel Yells: The Civil War Centennial in Strife-Torn Alabama, 1961-1965

Abstract

Red Termites and Rebel Yells: The Civil War Centennial in Strife-Torn Alabama, 1961–1965 Falling rain failed to dampen the spirits of the crowd gathered at Montgomery’s Union Station to greet the leader of the Confederate States of America as he entered the capital of his new slaveholding republic. Hundreds of local people, some of them carrying flaming torches, watched expectantly as Jefferson Davis’s train pulled into the terminal and the nation’s chief executive clambered out onto the platform. They then escorted him proudly to the Exchange Building where a judge introduced the austere Mississippi lawyer to a larger assemblage on Court Square. Davis made a brief address to his admirers and then retired to bed. The next morning thousands of loyal Alabamians braved the wet weather to witness a spectacular parade along Dexter Avenue to the site of the inauguration. Confederate military units, minstrel bands, and carriages carrying dignitaries including the governors of Alabama, Virginia, and Mississippi wound their way up the street to the capitol. At the statehouse President Davis took the oath of allegiance and spoke compellingly of “the American idea that governments rest on the consent of the governed.” A glittering inauguration ball attended by excited women wearing hoop skirts and bearded men clad in Rebel gray concluded the festivities.1 While these events resonated with the secession fever of the Old South, they took place in February 1961, not 1861. White Alabamians clearly had much to cheer in modern times but, like their Confederate forebears, their gaiety was tinged with worry induced by the brooding menace of the federal government. As Jeff Davis—in reality a local Robert J. Cook Robert Cook is professor of American history at the University of Sussex, UK. His latest book, Civil War Senator: William Pitt Fessenden and the Fight to Save the American Republic, was published by Louisiana State University Press in January. 1 Montgomery Advertiser, February 18, 1961. the alabama review 144 lawyer playing the part of the Confederate president—gave a repeat performance of his inaugural address, United States Circuit Court Judge Richard T. Rives ruled unconstitutional the Jim Crow practices at Birmingham’s railroad terminal. If their racial order were to survive intact, the sons and daughters of Dixie had another stiff fight on their hands.2 The reenactment of Jefferson Davis’s inauguration was the����� centerpiece of a week-long series of events intended to kick-start four years of commemorative exercises marking the one-hundredth anniversary of the American Civil War. Conceived by elites as a practical contribution to the country’s struggle against Communism, the Civil War centennial opened with a grand drum roll in Montgomery and other southern cities and ended in April 1965 amidst deafening silence. Scholars have charted the reasons for the pageant’s demise, tracing its downfall to the planners’ failure to deal effectively with racial issues and to their trivialization of Civil War events through excessive commercialization. The centennial’s uneven progress in Alabama mirrored national developments in many respects. As the Montgomery public’s enthusiastic participation in the secession celebrations demonstrated, many local whites welcomed the chance to display their allegiance to a constructed Confederate memory. Indeed, large numbers of them were still involved in grassroots centennial events in the troubled second half of the commemoration after national interest in the bloated pageant had fallen away precipitously . Alabama’s place at the storm-center of civil rights activism, however, soon rendered the state’s centennial observance an increasingly problematic exercise. For staunch segregationists like Governor George C. Wallace, the centennial and the Confederate heritage that underpinned it constituted a handy weapon in their fight to combat federally sponsored integration. For more liberal whites, such nakedly political manipulation of historical memory at a time when the Civil Rights movement was transforming Americans’ perception of segregation epitomized everything that was wrong with their state and the wider region in the early 1960s.3 2 Ibid., February 19, 1961. 3 On the history of the Civil War centennial see Michael G. Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory : The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1991), 590–610; John April 2011 145 Reconciliation between northern and...