SELMA, ALABAMA: Then and Now

Marching to Selma, 1965. More photos.

The Selma march precipitated the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The violence against peaceful marchers on that "Bloody Sunday", March 7, 1965 shocked the nation. It led to Martin Luther King's 25,000-person strong Selma-to-Montgomery march, 18 days later.

The Voting Rights Act was signed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson within five months.

The Act outlawed "Jim Crow" literacy tests, poll taxes, and other subjective voter tests widely used in some southern states to deprive African-Americans of the vote. The law required Federal oversight of voter registration in states and voting districts where such tests were used.

President Obama Visits Selma, 2015

The Political Climate in 1965

As an undergraduate at Oxford in 1962-64 I was trying to learn how politics worked by getting involved. I served as the General Agent of the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA), which in those days approximated the range of views of the Democratic Party in the United States. I got to know many of the people who were on the cutting edge of what became Britain's Thatcher revolution and our Reagan revolution.

I enjoyed our cerebral deliberations about the benefits of the free market. But what carried these ideas turned out to be an emotional tide, a lingering resentment by some about the intrusion of national governments in local affairs. The theoretical arguments of academics objecting to government interference would be paired with what - for lack of an adequate term - can be called a fear of change.

In the Catholic Church at that time, Vatican II had just finished its work and left traditionalist Catholics in shock at, for example, the loss of Latin in the Mass. Many Catholics were therefore open to conservative complaints. Whether from reaction to actions in the Vatican or in Washington, Catholics were ready to turn inward, which was the call of Republic poachers in the United States.

Whereas during the American Civil War it was Republican Abraham Lincoln who championed the rights of slaves, parties had become realigned by FDR, JFK and LBJ. Now the Democrats were the champions of the oppressed and the GOP was the party of those who felt that enough had been done for the poor and minorities.

During 1964-66, after finishing my two years at Oxford, I started work at the Federal Reserve Board as a financial economist in the International Finance division. I reported on what central banks were doing in the newly independent nations of Africa in those Cold War days, when the fear of infiltration of Communist agents in Africa was a major concern in Washington. Those who objected to excessive government within the United States were often at the same time demanding that the nation spend more defending the Free World against Soviet or Chinese Communist influence.

During 1965-66, Baron Patten of Barnes, who has been Oxford's Chancellor since 2003, was in a good position to observe sentiment in the southern states, where local people felt the sting of national outrage over the handling of peaceful demonstrations by law enforcement, and then the consequences in the form of federal agents. Chris Patten, as he then was, read Modern History at Oxford, going down in 1965 and visiting America on a Coolidge Traveling Fellowship.

Why Pennsylvania Plates Were Red Flags

His traveling fellowship took Patten in the summer of 1965 around some southern states in a car with Pennsylvania license plates. He told me a few years ago at an alumni reunion event that he was puzzled by the open hostility that his car quickly provoked after crossing into Alabama.

It finally dawned on him, he said, that his Pennsylvania license plates falsely flagged him as a civil rights "troublemaker". While many southerners were deeply embarrassed by the actions of white supremacists, resentment was high in the south. The Ku Klux Klan was powerful and deadly.

Pennsylvania was closely connected to two events involving volunteers from the north seeking to help Rev. Martin Luther King obtain voting rights and other civil rights in the south.

• The previous summer, three members of a Penn Law School contingent to Mississippi were killed by white supremacists in Philadelphia, Miss. (One of them was from New York.)
• On March 7, 1965 a Pennsylvania-born volunteer was killed by three KKK members.

Viola Liuzzo, 1925-1965

The volunteer was Viola Fauver Gregg, born in the town of California, Pa. on April 11, 1925. After a failed early marriage and with two children, she married Anthony Liuzzo, a Detroit Teamster union official. They had three more children, five in all. At 36 she returned to  Wayne State University and soon graduated with top honors, becoming a medical lab technician. She was also a committed Unitarian Universalist and a member of the NAACP.

On March 25, after the second march to Montgomery, Viola volunteered to drive people from downtown to Montgomery Airport. Her co-driver was Leroy Moton, a young African American. Coming back from one such trip, the volunteers were passed by a car carrying three KKK members from Birmingham plus an undercover FBI informant. Here's what ensued:

Tombstone, Viola Liuzzo, Holy
Sepulchre Cemetery, Southfield, Mich.

• The KKK members were outraged at seeing a white woman and black man together in the car. They decided to kill them.
• Collie Wilkins pulled alongside and fired his gun twice.  Viola was hit in the head and died instantly. Leroy was not hit; he was covered in Viola's blood and pretended to be dead. He was recently interviewed by a Connecticut newspaper. Besides Wilkins (21), KKK members William Eaton (41) and Eugene Thomas (42) were caught. The FBI man, Gary Rowe (34), testified against them. 
• Later, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, aware that the FBI's presence in the car did not look good, initiated a campaign to discredit Liuzzo. He told LBJ she was a drug addict, had sex with Moton, and was married to someone with ties to organized crime. The FBI planted these stories and several newspapers repeated them. Liuzzo daughter Penny says that the FBI propaganda campaign "took the life right out of [my father] ... he started drinking a lot."
• An autopsy in 1965 showed no traces of drugs in Viola Liuzzo's system, and no evidence of recent sexual activity,
• The FBI's role in the smear campaign was uncovered in 1978 when Liuzzo's children obtained case documents from the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act.
• Despite Rowe's testimony, the three KKK members were acquitted of murder by an all-white Alabama jury. The acquittal was widely reported in the media, outraging national officials.
• LBJ's Justice Department responded by using an 1870 federal law to charge the three men with conspiring to deprive Viola Liuzzo of her civil rights.
• All three KKK members were found guilty and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
• Rowe was placed in a witness protection program because of threats from the KKK.
• A Civil Rights Memorial was erected in Montgomery, Ala. to Viola and 39 other murdered civil rights activists, in front of the Civil Rights Memorial Center - which was formerly the office building of the Southern Poverty Law Center, founded in 1971. At least two memorial tombstones have been created in Liuzzo's memory in 1989 and 1991.

Bill Buckley's Upstart Conservative Campaign in New York City

Patten returned north to New York City to work in the campaign of John Lindsay, doing what today would be called "oppo research", tracking the television and other appearances of Lindsay's rival Bill Buckley. Young Patten arrived in New York City at a time when both NY State's Senators liberal Republicans -- Jacob Javits and Nelson Rockefeller. It was near to the high point of liberal (Ripon Society) Republicanism. Buckley never expected to win, and did not, but he developed a series of campaign strategies that could be considered a template for Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign.

Buckley, a Roman Catholic, saw something that became a crucial part of American politics for the next half century. He saw that many Catholic voters could be carved out of the Democratic base, appealing to their sense of tradition and mainstream morality, persuading them to vote Republican even though it was likely to be against their economic interest. This strategy was later described in Thomas Frank's 2004 book, What's the Matter with Kansas?

As a Catholic educated at a Benedictine school (as I was), Patten was well-positioned to pick up on Buckley's message in 1965 and how it might actually have traction. Buckley was viewed as extreme - but he was just ahead of his time. It would have been hard for someone in New York City to visualize a conservative-libertarian uprising. The Republicans were not much less progressive than the Democrats on many issues. Nixon created the country's Environmental Protection Agency. Bill Ruckelshaus, Nixon's appointee as the first head of the EPA, has said more than once in recent years that he doesn't recognize the Republican party he once served. Mayor Bloomberg was an exception, cut from the same cloth as the liberal Republicans of an earlier day.

Today

Civil rights issues are still with us. In 2013 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Voting Rights Act in 2013 as obsolete and freeing nine states, including Alabama, to change election laws without advance approval. The recent Ferguson, Mo. investigation shows continued systematic bias against minorities, and this city is in no way an isolated example. New areas of contention have arisen such as gender-related rights. The battle between tradition and change that Buckley envisioned in 1965 is still on, but as President Obama's speech in Selma stressed, much has changed for the better. 

REUNION: Europe in Madrid – Lord Patten

L to R: Lord Patten of Barnes, Oxford's Chancellor.  Steven Jones, Branch
Representative for Guernsey. Alice Tepper Marlin. Photo by JT Marlin. 

The University Dinner for the European Oxford Reunion was held on the top two floors of the Posada de la Villa Restaurant.

This three-storey building in mid-Madrid is a coach house dating back to 1642, a mere 150 years after Christopher Columbus checked in with Queen Isabella before setting off westward to find the Far East.

The restaurant, selected by the Madrid Branch representative, Andrew Moore, gets 4 to 4.5 stars on Yelp and TripAdvisor for its traditional Madrid food.

We were served mostly tapas-bar style, with plates of fried octopus and onion rings, peppers, salad, scrambled eggs and mushrooms, potato croquettes, and lamb, followed by various Spanish pastries. The small "black pudding" cakes were a topic of conversation because the uninitiated are startled to be told what they ate. Everyone likes the decor and most people love the food, though a few dissidents don't like so much being fried. Nobody doesn't like the lamb.

Christine Fairchild, Director of Alumni Relations for Oxford (and previously Executive Director of External Relations for the Harvard B School), spots Alice and me as we come in to the restaurant looking for someone we know. She takes us to the third floor, where we are seated behind place cards at the "Chancellor's Table". Apparently we had been notified but the email never reached us.

Sure enough, on my left and Alice's right is Chris Patten, the Chancellor of Oxford since 2003 and Chairman of the BBC Trust since 2011. He was made a life peer in 2005, with the title Baron Patten of Barnes. We are both delighted at this unexpected honor and treat. 

Lord Patten was born Christopher Francis Patten in Cleaveleys, Lancashire in May 1944. He is proud of the fact that he is the son of a jazz drummer and was the first person in his family to attend university. He attended St. Benedict's School at Ealing Abbey in western London, from which he won an exhibition to Balliol College, Oxford. I can vouch for the high academic standards of the Benedictine schools of that era, having been dunked into three rigorous years of Latin and Greek at Ampleforth College in Yorkshire in the 1950s - followed by three more years at Portsmouth Abbey School in Rhode Island. Lord Patten read Modern History at Oxford. Patten was a near contemporary, matriculating a year after I did. (Unusually for an American at Oxford, I served as editor of Oxford Tory for a term and was General Agent of OUCA when Balliol's James Douglas-Hamilton, now Lord Selkirk of Douglas, was President.)

After taking his degree, Patten traveled around the United States on a Coolidge Traveling Fellowship - kind of a U.S. equivalent for Brits of what the European Tour was for American college students. His visit to the United States followed in the peripatetic footsteps in 1964 of Oxford Union standouts Michael Beloff (predecessor of Sir Ivor Roberts as President of Trinity) and Jonathan Aitken. 

At one point in mid-1965 Patten was touring the southern states, in a car with Pennsylvania plates. As he made his way into  Alabama, he was puzzled by the open hostility that his car provoked. It dawned on him that his northern license plates tagged him as a likely civil rights troublemaker. Pennsylvania was  the source the previous summer of a Penn Law School contingent, three of whom (one of them a New Yorker) were killed by white supremacists in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Viola Liuzzo, 1925-1965

VIOLA FAUVER LIUZZO was born in Pennsylvania on April 11, 1925. After a failed first marriage, Viola married Anthony J. Liuzzo, a Teamster union official from Detroit. She raised five children, and at 36 resumed her education at Wayne State University, graduating with top honors and becoming a medical lab technician.  She joined Martin Luther King's 25,000-person strong Selma-to-Montgomery March on March 25, 1965. King brought a petition to Alabama Governor George Wallace demanding voting rights for African Americans. After the demonstration, Viola was a volunteer driver, ferrying marchers back to Montgomery Airport. Her co-driver was Leroy Moton, a young African American. Coming back from one of these trips, the two volunteers were passed by a car carrying three KKK members from Birmingham and an undercover FBI informant. Seeing a white woman and black man together in the car, the three KKK members decided to kill them. Collie Wilkins put his arm out of the window and fired his gun, hitting Viola in the head twice and killing her instantly. Leroy survived. Besides Wilkins (aged 21), the KKK members were William Eaton (41) and Eugene Thomas (42). All three were swiftly apprehended.  Gary Rowe (34), the FBI agent, testified against the others. Between arrest and the trial, rumors circulated in the media that Viola was a Communist who abandoned her five children to seek sexual relationships with African Americans. The stories were later found to have been planted by the FBI. Despite Rowe's testimony, the three KKK members were acquitted of murder by an all-white Alabama jury. President Johnson's Justice Department charged the men using an 1870 federal law with conspiring to deprive Viola Liuzzo of her civil rights. Wilkins, Eaton and Thomas were found guilty and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

On August 6, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed by President Johnson, ending "Jim Crow" literacy tests, poll tax, and other subjective voter tests that were widely used in some southern states to deprive African-Americans of the vote. The law required Federal oversight of voter registration in states and voting districts where such tests were used.

Patten then went to New York to work in the campaign of John Lindsay, doing what today would be called "oppo research", tracking the television and other appearances of Lindsay's rival Bill Buckley.  Buckley never expected to win, and did not, but he developed a series of campaign strategies that could be considered a template for Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign.

In those days, it would have been hard for someone in New York City to visualize a conservative comeback. The Republicans were not much less progressive change than the Democrats on many issues. Nixon created the country's Environmental Protection Agency. 

Both the Conservative Republican victories and the election of Barack Obama might have been surprising in 1965. As Patten said during the dinner:

Who would have thought that during our lifetimes the United States would have a black president? But are we seeing now a backlash? When I was in New York City in 1965, the Senators were Jacob Javits and Nelson Rockefeller. Could either of them be nominated by the Republican Party today?

Bill Ruckelshaus, Nixon's appointee as the first head of the EPA, has said more than once that he doesn't recognize the Republican party he once served. Mayor Bloomberg is an exception, cut from the same cloth as the liberal Republicans of that day. But the fact that Bloomberg can have liberal views on key issues, only proves that New York City is different, and Bloomberg's personal campaign war chest makes him also different. 

When Patten returned to the UK, Patten he became a desk officer and then, within ten years of going down from Oxford, director of research for the Conservative Party. He stood for Parliament in 1979 and won (MP for Bath), eventually rising to a cabinet minister post and party chairman, serving in turn as UK Secretary of State for the Environment, UK Minister for Overseas Development and  Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. He led the Conservative Party's unexpected fourth consecutive electoral victory (under John Major) in 1992, the year that President Clinton was elected to his first term. 

However, that year Patten lost his own seat in the House of Commons. He was therefore freed up for the post of Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Hong Kong, and was a figure of dignity in July 1997 as the television cameras famously recorded the Union Jack being hauled down, as Britain handed back Hong Kong - in accordance with the terms of its lease - to the People's Republic of China. Patten's term was marked by both a steady rise in the Hong Kong economy and an expansion of Hong Kong's social welfare system that would have made Nelson Rockefeller proud.

The dinner table conversation of course turned to China and Lord Patten wondered how the clash between rising wages and expectations on the part of the population and a government that does not have the same institutional capacity for flexible adaptation that are built into democracies like the United States and the UK. Will China become more democratic? An open question.

From 1999 to 2004 he served as one of the United Kingdom's two members of the European Commission. In his first speech after his appointment to the EC, addressing the Confederation of British Industry, Patten said:

There are strong moral arguments for the EU as a factor of peace and stability in Europe. And the single market has had a huge multiplier effect in terms of economic integration, shared wealth and mutual understanding.

This long-standing past support of the European Union made it a talk of the Oxford European Reunion when he expressed doubts about the EU's future. Who knows? Maybe reports of his comments contributed to a weekend walk-back by the EU of its austerity dictates to Spain and other debt-burdened EU members.

Lord Patten asked me whether President Obama can get much more done given the stalemate in the Congress. I said it was certainly a bad sign that the Senate failed to pass even modest background checks for gun-buyers, when 90 percent of the public is reportedly in favor of such checks. But all is not lost: 

• Democratic supporters are learning how to make better use of the independent groups that up to now have been noted primarily for supporting far-out anti-tax and socially conservative agendas and candidates. Gun control is a major test case, with Mayor Bloomberg investing heavily in pursuing the topic, with his mayoral group out front on the issue. Gun-control supporters are gearing up to punish gun-pushers  of both parties in 2014 (some Democratic Senators joined with the Republicans to defeat the bill).
• There is much that the President can do without need for Congressional support. George W. Bush missed a huge opportunity after 9-11 to impose a carbon tax or higher fuel standards, and he went out of his way to permit more mountain-top coal mining and continued use of coal-fired power plants. But in his second term he made major contributions to the environment by executive order. He did finally raise fuel standards for cars, he implemented a phaseout of HCFCs, and perhaps most important, he added 125 million acres of land and sea areas to the marine and land preserves.     

Patten admires many American politicians, and he is especially in touch with those that have Oxford ties. Senator Dick Lugar (defeated in the Republican primary in Indiana; the GOP nominee lost to Democrat) was first off his lips, along with Senators Sarbanes and Bradley. He stays in touch with Justice Breyer, and NY Times columnists Nick Kristof and Tom Friedman.

 Photo by JT Marlin.

It is rare to have such a pleasant and interesting evening and it more than made up for the miserably cold and cloudy weather in Madrid. 

On the way out of the restaurant, each of us was given a key that includes the phone number for future reservations. What a clever idea!