Karl Fleming - An Uncivil Memoir

Son of the Rough South, an Uncivil Memoir, by Karl Fleming.   Published by Public Affairs, New York.  $26.95 in hardback.

Reviewed by Chris Braithwaite

I don’t think I have ever mentioned the name Karl Fleming, while talking shop with other reporters over a beer or two, without adding that he is the best reporter I ever worked with.

Now I can prove it by inviting them to read his “uncivil memoir,”Son of the Rough South.

The book lives up to its subtitle.  It is full of the shockingly incorrect language of another place at another time (language that will necessarily, I think, be quoted in this review). 

It is full of accounts of savage attacks on the powerless by the powerful; calculated, cold-blooded attempts to preserve a racist social and political order.

It is a tale of uncommon frankness told by a man who is no model of decorum and self-restraint.  Here’s how he recalls himself in 1965 as he arrived in Los Angeles to take over Newsweek’s bureau there:

“Outwardly, I was still the same crew-cut, 210-pound, cigar-smoking, Jack Daniels-gulping, profane, cynical, take-no-shit-from-nobody, gruff, tough-guy reporter I had learned to be over the years.”

Son of the Rough South is, in short, exactly the sort of story Karl Fleming loves to tell, and it is a happy coincidence that he turns out to be the source of some of the best material he has had to work with in a long and distinguished career.

Objectively, it is an important book about an important era of history, the civil rights struggle of the 1960s in the American South.

More specifically, it speaks to the history of American journalism.  There was nothing new in the white violence that greeted black efforts to end segregation and gain the right to vote in states like Mississippi and Alabama. What was new, and a key element of the black leadership’s strategy, was that this violence would be documented in newspapers like the New York Times, national magazines like Newsweek and, finally, on the nation’s television screens. 

The level of violence and, sadly, the fact that some of its victims were earnest young college students from the north whose skin was white, generated enough public revulsion to get important civil rights protections through Congress.

But it was by no means obvious at the outset that the press would play this role of witness.  The local and regional media, solidly white, would carry on in the conviction that to suppress the news of anti-black violence would suppress its victims, as well.

Network television showed no appetite for the story.  For Newsweek’s model and arch rival, Time, Mr. Fleming reports, it was a story to be “ignored at first and then reported from a distance and with distinct distaste.”

But Newsweek editor Oz Eliott knew a good story when he saw one, and in his new recruit in the magazine’s Atlanta bureau, Karl Fleming, he had the right reporter.

Karl was born poor in North Carolina in 1927.  His father, then his stepfather, died while he was quite young, and his mother, deciding that she just couldn’t cope, dispatched her two children to an orphanage. 

Karl spent much of his life trying to forgive the abandonment.  Here’s a recollection of his mother, from the summer after, having survived the orphanage and served a short hitch in the Navy too late in the second World War to see action, he spent an aimless year at Appalachian State College:

“She was, in her words, ‘about the most unfortunate person who ever lived.’  I was formally solicitous, but all I felt was a knot in my stomach and an urge to run away.  Instead, I would walk sometimes down to the little store called the Millhouse and buy her a bladder of her favorite snuff, Sweet Railroad Mills.  She dipped snuff constantly — had since her childhood — spitting the juice into a Dixie Cup she always kept handy.”

Karl dropped out of school that summer to take a job with the local Wilson Daily Times as a cub reporter at $30 a week. 

His first serious instruction in journalism came from a detective who enjoyed having an audience on his rounds on the wrong side of the tracks.

Here’s a description of Detective Ray Harris, “my first bad cop”:

“He was about 40, married but childless, a longtime cop who carried a .38 Smith and Wesson pistol on his hip and a blackjack in his rear right pocket.  He invariably wore a tan Stetson hat and was a natty dresser, adorned usually in a Hickey-Freeman suit, a Hathaway shirt, and Johnson and Murphy shoes — all of which he got at discount prices at Oettinger’s.”

Their night rides were colorful enough, often featuring a stop at one of Wilson’s two bordellos, whose customers left the detective with a cynical view of the society he served:

“The general clientele of the whorehouses, though, were the local regulars, Ray said contemptuously, who were solid members of upper- and middle-class Wilson families, married to women encased in girdles, with their frozen hair and repressed urges.”

Then one night Harris led Karl into a black man’s home to look for a membership card in that subversive organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. 

The search woke the homeowner:

“Whatcha doin’, Mistuh Hottis? You got a search warrant?’ he said.

“Ray turned, his face all red, lunged at the black man and slapped him hard across the cheek.  Down the old man went on his back to the floor and Ray said, ‘That’s one side of my goddamned search warrant.  You wanna see the other one?’”

In the car later, the cop instructed the young reporter:

“You don’t know them like I do. You can’t let ’em get ideas in their heads.  You can’t let ‘em talk back to you.  There ain’t nothing that pisses me off like an impudent nigger.” 

Harris comes to a bad end, virtually emasculated by the brothers of a serviceman he was cuckolding, and leaves town.

“It would have been hard to find many people in Wilson who said they were sorry for what had happened to Ray. There wasn’t anyone who didn’t know him or his brutish reputation.  He had done the dirty work of keeping the niggers in line.  They had wanted him to do it, and they hadn’t wanted to know any of the unpleasant details.  And that he had done it well hadn’t won him any friends.

“I did not know it then, but he was the pitiless prototype of countless bigoted cops and sheriffs I would encounter across the segregated South in the years ahead.”

Karl moved from paper to paper in a fashion typical of young reporters, specializing as a sports writer. He returned to general-assignment reporting to save his job on the AshevilleCitizen, seized a chance to become a craftsman of soft, life-style features for the Sunday magazine of the AtlantaJournal-Constitution.

It was in Atlanta that Karl recognized the story that would become his career. 

“I had lived among and around Negroes all of my life, but it was not until I was 34 years old that I had my first man-to-man conversation with a black person, one equal professional talking to another.  That happened in early 1961 right after I had gone to work for Newsweek magazine in its Atlanta bureau.”

The black man was Jim Forman, executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which had led sit-ins at segregated department store lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina. 

Karl was cultivating contacts in the civil rights movement.  “I was powerfully drawn to this story, more than to any other, right from the start,” he writes. “It was the underdogs against the bullies, and I immediately and strongly identified with the underdogs. Plus that, I could see right away that the civil rights story was going to be an epic and long-running one, and I wanted to be in on it as much as possible.”

Karl was an ideal candidate for the job.  He knew how the South worked – how cops like Ray Harris did the dirty work, maintaining a reign of terror to protect the privileges of the polite southern leadership who spent their days at the country club and their nights at the whorehouse.   He left the orphanage with a deep dislike for authority and a natural sympathy for its victims.  And he had a reporter’s sharp eye for a good story. 

“It was apparent that big showdowns were coming, and I had a dawning and happy realization that I was in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to see and be a part of the historical drama.” 

And Newsweek, with its technique of crafting well-written summaries of the news the daily press necessarily treated in summary fashion, was just the place to master his craft.

A writer at the magazine’s New York headquarters had received a stringer’s account of a confrontation between an archbishop who had desegregated the parochial schools of New Orleans and an angry white member of his flock. The writer sent a memo to Karl, who was heading for New Orleans on another story.

“’I just need two questions answered,’ Bill said.  ‘Number one, what does the archbishop’s house look like?  Is it wood, stone, brick, two-story, or what?  Is it Victorian with ivy on the walls?  What kind of day was it?  Was it balmy and sunny or overcast and muggy?  Was it hot?   What does the archbishop look like?  Is he old and bespectacled, or what?  How did he walk when he came out of the house?  Did he stride angrily?  Or did he walk haltingly, leaning on a cane?  What is the walkway like?  Are there oak trees, magnolias, jasmine and roses?  What was happening on the street outside the grounds?  Was an angry crowd assembled, or was it business as usual with people oblivious to the drama going on inside?  What were Mrs. Gaillot and her friends wearing?  Did they have on their Sunday best, or just casual clothes? What happened just as the archbishop approached the women?  Was he stern and silent? Or did he rebuke Mrs. Gaillot?  What did she say, exactly?

“‘And, question number two…..’”

Karl filed a 1,500-word answer, which was boiled down to an elegant 250-word “scene setter” that sought to put the reader in the archbishop’s front yard. 

The lesson took.  Here, from Karl’s typewriter, is a picture of James Meredith on the day he tried to register at that perfectly segregated university, Ole Miss:

“Meredith was five feet, six inches tall, weighed 130 pounds, and had long girlish eyelashes, setting off doe-like eyes and a delicate little ebony face.  He was meticulously dressed in a brown suit, white shirt, and red tie and carried a brown leather briefcase.  He was as still as a stone, even though the governor of Mississippi himself, backed by armed men, was there to deny him enrollment.”

Early in his memoir, Karl summarizes the years that followed.  By the time he arrived in Los Angeles, he writes, “I’d covered John F. Kennedy’s assassination and its aftermath and I’d covered the assassination of the three civil rights workers — Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner — in Philadelphia, Mississippi.  From Selma, Alabama, beatings to Birmingham, Alabama, bombings, from Greenwood, Mississippi, threats on my own life to watching cops club children and old people carrying American flags in a march in Jackson, Mississippi, from being shot at in the riot the followed James Meredith’s admission to Ole Miss, I’d seen enormous cruelty, brutality, and bloodshed, and I was sick with it all.  I slept too little, drank too much, and hovered daily in a jagged state between depression and rage.  I was sensitive and cynical, anxious and bellicose at all the same time.  I was pretty burned out.”

Worse was on its way.  In May 1966, nine months after the black riots that destroyed Watts, Karl dispatched himself to a disturbance that followed a police shooting of a black man who was rushing his wife to a hospital delivery room.  “As for me,” he recalls, “driving down there once more on this hot, smoggy afternoon to cover yet another ‘incident,’ a lone white man in a Brooks Brothers suit, white shirt, and repp tie, driving a sedate black Chrysler that Newsweek leased for me, made me, to say the least, more than a little tense.  For the first time in my life, I was frightened of black people, rattled and apprehensive — feeling as if I had no place to run if there was trouble.”

There was trouble.  He was followed by a group of young men, felled with a blow to the back of his head with a two-by-four, and left lying in a pool of his own blood with a serious skull fracture.

In the hospital, he was asked by a colleague how he felt about the people who attacked him.  His reply:

“If I was a young black man growing up on the streets of Watts, seeing what they had seen and going through what I know they went through to survive, I might feel like hitting some white guy in the head, too.”

The irony was not lost on Newsweek, which devoted its “Top of the Week page” to Karl: 

“No journalist was more closely tuned into the Movement; once when a Newsweek Washington correspondent asked the Justice Department to name some Dixie hot spots, the Justice man replied, ‘Ask Fleming. That’s what we do.’  And none did more to bring the story of the Negro revolt to the public in such vivid, thorough, detail.”

A campus stringer

I went to work for Karl shortly after that, thanks to a series of lucky breaks.  Karl took me on as Pomona College’s campus stringer.  The job didn’t amount to much.  In that turbulent era, Pomona was dismissed by the radicals up at Berkeley as “Sleepy Hollow.”

But the job led to a stint as a summer intern, and when a new hire at the bureau was judged to be unequal to the job, I accepted an invitation to stay on while Newsweek repeated its slow and careful recruitment process.  The job lasted from June until February, when I returned to Pomona to put in a final semester and claim my degree. 

It was a terrific ten months, living atop the Pickwick Book Store in Hollywood and spending my days in a small office staffed by three good journalists and one dazzling journalist. 

Karl was demanding, exacting, outrageous, and even 40 years ago something of a throwback.  Here is his description of the trade, with a reference to one of his heroes, H. L. Mencken:

“Reporters were outsiders, a special breed, poorly paid and proud of it, poorly schooled, usually, but highly educated in the school of hard knocks — hard-drinking, hard-living ‘ink-stained wretches’ on the side of the underdog and the outcast but ruthlessly fair. Most of them wanted to write a novel someday.  They looked at newspapering as a calling, not a job.  They considered themselves — to the extent they admitted being part of any class at all — members of the working class.  They were reporters.  A journalist, said Mencken, was a reporter ‘with two pairs of pantaloons.’”

For a young reporter, working for Karl was an intense, invaluable education.  I learned quickly that news magazines have their limitations.  Chief among them is that they are (or were, in the 1960s) driven by the writers in New York rather than the reporters in the field.  If a writer approached a cover story with certain ideas already fixed, it was no great matter to cull supporting material from the flood of responses to “query letters” that went out to the magazine’s large network of reporters and stringers. 

Karl was fully aware of the dangers and took steps against them.  Query letters received in Los Angeles were never to be answered point by numbered point.  Instead we were to research and write full-blown stories, some running to thousands of words, that covered the local aspects of the issue as thoroughly as they could be covered.  If that got boiled down to a few dozen words in the final piece, so be it.  That writer in New York would be working from a full, richly detailed account of what was happening in Los Angeles. 

Karl insisted on another protection.  If a bureau writer made a major contribution to a story, he was to call New York on Saturday night, just before the magazine went to press, and demand a reading of the final piece. 

Even that didn’t always work. I reported a piece for the business section about Wham-O, a company that came up with a long list of very simple but highly marketable toys, among them the Frisbee and the Hula-Hoop.

Wham-O had just announced the “Shoop Shoop Hula-Hoop,” which featured ball bearings inside the hoop.

The real point, the Wham-O executive told me, had been less to improve a popular toy than to replace it with a more complex version that could be patented, and thus protected from copy-cat competitors.

In the piece he read over the phone from New York Saturday night, the writer explained the tactic and wound up with a direct quote from my source:

“This time, there won’t be any ringers.”

That wasn’t in my file, I told the writer.

“I know,” the writer replied, “but isn’t it a great quote?”

It would be, I said, if the guy had said it.

After some discussion we compromised.  I would call the source and ask if we could attribute the line to him.

It was a reluctant and painful call.  Very clever words, my source said coolly, but not words he wanted placed in his mouth.

I reported my failure to New York, but when the magazine arrived in Los Angeles, the line was still there, still in quotation marks.

I took the problem to Karl, who immediately launched a battle royal with New York.  But he was also angry and – worse – disappointed that I had agreed to do something as lame as ask a source to stand behind a fabricated quote. 

I don’t think I ever recovered the respect the incident cost me in Karl’s eyes. 

That would have been early in the terrible first half of 1968, just before I returned to Pomona.  Martin Luther King Jr. was shot down in Memphis early that April.  The book includes a remarkable photograph of King’s funeral procession, with Karl walking close beside the mule-driven coffin in a sea of black faces. 

On the June day he won the California Presidential Primary Bobby Kennedy was shot down in Los Angeles.  Karl rallied his staff to cover the assassination in every detail, but the grief and the bloodshed was taking its toll.

In a late chapter he titled “Fall from Grace” Karl writes of his departure from Newsweek, his late-life introduction to marijuana, his profoundly embarrassing role as the victim of a nationally publicized journalistic hoax, his hospitalization and treatment for severe depression.

But in this, too, Karl seems a product, as well as chronicler, of his times.  If the ’60s were one long adrenaline rush for him, the years that followed were the hangover in which the superb reporter, like so much of America, seemed to lose the sense of where he was going, of what great story he should turn to next if, indeed, there were great stories to be covered. 

The good news is that Karl Fleming retains his voice – his raspy, funny, impious, deeply serious voice.  It speaks to a trade that threatens to wear its second set of pantaloons down a steep slope towards pomposity, political advocacy and corporate monopoly.  It recovers for us a brave period of our recent history, and delivers it with all the sharp and painful edges perfectly intact.