Surviving Alabama

Chapter 1

The Election

I was 32 years old and had only been on the City Council for less than two years when an unexpected and violent incident in June of 1979 changed the trajectory of my life and politics in Birmingham.

Shy, insecure, and prone to introversion, I was ill-suited for the backslapping, backstabbing, and the wheeling and dealing of local politics. But my desire to change the school board that had made mine a household, though mostly mispronounced, name and destroyed my carefully constructed plan to launch my career as a White House Fellow caused me to run for the City Council. I had originally planned to be near the Oval Office when Jimmy Carter, with whom I had worked desegregating the Sumter County, Georgia schools just a few years earlier, arrived to begin his new job. I smiled imagining the look on his face when I would greet him at the door to the Oval Office and recalled the last time we had met at an Institute of Politics event at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government where I was studying as its youngest mid-career student. Rhode Island governor Frank Licht introduced him in 1973 as a rising star in the Democratic Party from whom we should expect great things in the future. As Jimmy spoke with his syrupy  drawl that most could not appreciate, he noticed me in the audience and during the questions period called on me with my raised hand. Before I could ask my question, he grinned broadly and asked, “What are you doing here, John? You just keep showing up like a bad penny.” Though no one likely knew what he meant, they laughed anyway and I became an instant celebrity with other students who gained a new appreciation for what some had incorrectly described as my “Appalachian accent” and a vague connection to this obviously Southern guy. My accent and connection were assets I planned to use to make it to the White House where I would make myself useful. I had a plausible plan and could not wait to implement it. But it was not to be.

After recruiting me to return to the same job I had held as an intern in Superintendent Wilmer St. Clair Cody’s office the summer before my year in Sweden studying with a Fulbright grant to complete my doctorate, the Board had eliminated my job, angry over my role in implementing the final desegregation phase of Armstrong v. The Birmingham Board of Education. The Equity Study I had spearheaded, documenting the clear racial disparities in facilities, equipment, and staffing, was the final straw for them. I had to go and preferably take Dr. Cody with me. Because the Court order under which the board was operating required that displaced staff be offered the next available open job for which they might be qualified, the Board was forced to eliminate one position after another to stay a step ahead of me and make certain I could not continue and slide back into work anywhere in the school system. The standing joke at the main office  became “Don’t let Katopodis come near you or your department will get axed.”  Every position for which I applied, bit the dust with no hesitation or apology from board members.

The Southern Regional Panel for the White House Fellowship, which consisted of former Secretary of State Dean Rusk, astronaut and Eastern Airlines president Frank Borman, the first female senator from Florida- Paula Hawkins, and other prominent figures from across the South, had unanimously recommended me and I was excited about my upcoming final interview in the long process that was to culminate at Airlie House in Northern Virginia where I was expected to be a shoo-in for one of the internships with the President or Cabinet officials. The South seemed to be rising again with Jimmy Carter as the Democratic nominee for president and it would be a total anomaly for someone nominated by the Southern Regional Panel not to be selected. But with extensive, almost invasive, up-to-the minute FBI background checks, the national panel knew of my termination in Birmingham, and I was loathe to explain it,  especially to panel members who had no real experience with my part of the South and its deeply embedded attitudes about race and integration. No matter how rational my reason, I was now embroiled in controversy which the program did not need. I came home disappointed and dejected and decided to sue the school board.

Federal Judge Foy Guin gave Katopodis v. The Birmingham Board of Education, expedited treatment and I was successful. My case even make it to the Federal Supplement, a reference Bible of sorts for lawyers. The Board was forced to purge and obliterate from employment records any mention of my termination; return me to my old job; and pay me back pay for months I was away from my job. During my hiatus,  I had been hired by the Alabama Education Study Commission to work with other school systems around the state to teach and implement something called program budgeting, so I had not been idle or destitute. But returning to my old office, next to Dr. Cody’s, and overlooking Woodrow Wilson Park, which was bounded by the school board offices on one side and by City Hall, the County Courthouse, and the Birmingham Museum of Art on the other three, was going to feel good. I missed my view of the park, although it contained the standard monument to Confederate soldiers which was common in most Southern cities. Its presence was a little perplexing since Birmingham had been founded in 1871 and had no real ties to the Civil War except for some schools named for Confederate generals like Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

When I strode triumphantly to my office, there was applause by administrators and staff in the building. Attendant publicity had also made me a hero of sorts to teachers and school workers across the City who had their own issues with the non-elected Board members. Jack Cress, who headed the Special Ed Department, left a painting for me done by his brother George, who was head of the art department at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga and a note thanking me for the fight I had waged and taking an interest in special needs children. Clara Harrison, the school system’s first black director, a level below assistant superintendent, left an array of small gifts as she had done on every holiday since the summer I first worked there and she came to my office weeping because she had screwed up a federal program she ran and was fearful she would lose her job. I had calmed her with assurances that we could straighten out the mess and immediately called my friend Frances Pauley in the Office of Civil Rights who had monitored my work in Sumter County for advice. I then booked two flights to Washington for the next day to meet with officials at HEW to attempt to salvage her Title I programs. We were there and back by the end of a very long day with assurances that the programs were safe. I told Clara not to tell anyone, including Dr. Cody, that she had come close to disaster. It would be our secret. She said it was not necessary because no one would believe that anyone in the superintendent’s office would give a good damn about what happened to a lower-level black administrator or her programs; certainly not enough to personally buy tickets and accompany her to D.C. to argue for her. Her gratitude was boundless and embarrassing. She never missed a holiday of occasion to express her thanks with small gifts of snacks or greeting cards to cheer me, especially during the firing crisis. Moreover, when I decided to run for the City Council, she introduced me to her husband who turned out to be a prominent and influential pastor of a large church in the Black community. Thereafter, he regularly sang my praises from his pulpit and volunteered, without hesitation or fear, to help in all my campaigns or when opposition to something the mayor wanted to do got me accused of racism. His support was also an unexpected gift.  

Another surprise benefit of being fired, although not an adequate consolation prize for losing the Fellowship, was Professor Walter McCann’s invitation to address his class on Law and Education at Harvard to speak about my “landmark case”. He commented that he remembered well that when I was his student, I did not know that yelling “fire” in a crowded theatre was not protected speech under the First Amendment. Now I was the instigator of a lawsuit that protected the rights of administrators in a case being used around the Country in other suits and some sort of alleged expert. But none of this was enough to satisfy me. I felt I had been grievously wronged just for doing my job and doing it competently with integrity and compassion. The ordeal had left me disillusioned and injured. It was just wrong and I wanted blood.

The City Council appointed school board members and it seemed like a perfect and ironic means to exact revenge. Dealing with their ignorance and spite for almost two years and their intentional sabotage of my White House Fellowship just weeks before my sure-thing interview had given me ample reason to agree with Mark Twain who said, “In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.” I should have reminded myself of this before I accepted their offer when I would get phone calls in the middle of the night in Stockholm from board members, like Winnie Mae Schaffner, who could not seem to understand that it was six hours later than in Birmingham as she begged me to come home and help them with the aloof and bureaucratic Dr. Cody who could not win their support. I was to be his replacement, something I would not ethically entertain but thought I could navigate and avoid if I decided to return to my summer position in a full-time capacity.It seemed like it might work. In that summer I was supposed to be writing board policies, I had also developed a plan to pass a millage increase to increase revenues ot the schools that had been implemented by my replacement, Belle Stoddard, a lawyer, after I left for Stockholm. I had made a lot of friends at the board, which was a term used to describe the school board staff, the board member, and the building in which worked and met, depending on the context. So while I had friends at the board, I had few on it. My refusal to play ball with those on it who opposed Dr. Cody, contributed to the havoc they had wreaked on my life. Armed with a significant court victory, I began work to sort it all out but decided to resign the position I had fought hard to retain and accept a one at the Alabama School of Fine Arts where I thought my world might be less conflictual. I was again naïve and foolish.

Angi Grooms Proctor, the daughter of the presiding judge appointed to the federal bench by Eisenhower, and a former Miss Alabama and runner up to Miss America decided to leave the City Council where she was under continuous scrutiny and a favorite topic for gossip as the closest thing to a movie star celebrity in the community. She was beautiful, had immense charm, and was also articulate and disarmingly honest. Her talent in the Miss America pageant had been her singing, which might explain why she did not win the title.But to be sure, was a positive force in the community. And her like-minded cohort, which consisted of an outsized number of yuppies, was concerned that her departure would leave a major void on the Council with no one near her age or with a moderate point of view to be there to offer balance to the old guard and protectors of the status quo in a city desperately in need of change and progress, often negatively compared to Atlanta which was booming.  

Almost immediately after arriving on the scene where I also served as the school system’s liaison to the City, mutual friends had tried to pair us. We dated after she announced she was divorcing her philandering husband who was a handsome and dashing airline pilot with a girl in almost every port. During their divorce, Reed Proctor would sometimes stop by my Southside apartment for advice, ostensibly on real estate investment because of the building in which I lived and had bought to renovate to show slumlords how to be a responsible landlord and still make a profit. But the conversation invariably turned to Angi and became more awkward when two popular radio talk show hosts, Tommy Charles and John Ed Willoughby, did a take-off  on the popular “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” series with their own satirical radio soap opera skits called, “Angi Proctor, Angi Proctor”, complete with a theme song and a regular cast of characters.

Tommy Charles had tried to date Angi and had been rebuffed. He was charming and intelligent enough, but she apparently had an aversion to polyester leisure suits and white patten leather shoes and men with multiple ex-wives. He apparently did not take his rejection lightly and every morning for at least fifteen minutes, eviscerated her under the guise of comic parody. It was  tolerably funny until my name somehow crept into the program. Suddenly, I was a nerdy wonk who had broken up her marriage. Of course there was no way to sue over a parody of public figures, even when the program descended into the gutter with crass speculation about what her attraction to me might be. Thereafter, in restaurants and movie theatre lines, we would be subjected to “fans” wanting autographs or clues about the next episode in the series as if we were its authors. She handled it better than I did, having become desensitized to criticism and public curiosity about our private lives long ahead of me. While being the number one subject for local gossip was somewhat flattering, it was also embarrassing, annoying and sometimes humiliating.

Angi was determined to stop the madness by focusing on her business interests. She had earned a degree in industrial design at Auburn and bristled when people mistook her for a decorator. I was impressed with the work she did for a business I owned where we built new offices she planned and beautifully outfitted. And while I was uncertain that I was a suitable replacement for her on the Council, things kept unfolding in a positive way to push me further in that direction when Helen Shores Lee, the daughter of Civil Rights icon Attorney Arthur Shores, who had filed the 1956 lawsuit that integrated the University of Alabama with admission of Autherine Lucy, called me to say her family had discussed me at dinner the night before and wanted me to run. Her father was a colleague of Angi’s on the City Council, where he had been appointed as its first Black member, and he had also decided to retire. I did not know Helen and only learned later that the Shores family decision to support me had come after she saw me on the roof of the substandard school her oldest son with multiple, severe intellectual and physical disabilities attended. Lewis-Slossfield School was a WPA era facility with many problems that the Board refused to address, always with the lame excuse that they did not have the money to make the repairs and other changes needed.  

I had been badgered by parents of some of the children who were enrolled there to visit the school and see for myself why they were unhappy. I was not prepared for what I found. Aside from a leaking roof with pails throughout the building to catch the water, there were broken glass panes in five-foot steel framed, rusted windows, all without screens. And all the rooms in the building were small with as many as ten kids in them with nothing in common except for the fact that they all used wheelchairs crammed in spaces where they could not move from the spot they were assigned. The paint on the walls was peeling from the moisture from the leaks and the floors were wet and slippery and unnavigable by kids on crutches.

I had intentionally planned my visit at lunchtime to see what the kids were eating and was surprised when peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in paper sacks were handed out along with half pints of milk which was the routine daily menu. Some children who required special diets brought their own lunches, but no one received a hot lunch. “Why is that?” I asked the principal, Hosea Turk. His response was shocking to me. “We don’t have a lunchroom or kitchen and we used to get hot lunches from the kitchen at Lewis School, a few yards away. But the kitchen staff stopped making them when they got the idea that they could catch whatever these children had that caused their disability and they refused to even wash the returned trays.” As I drove back to my office, dismayed by what I had seen, I tried formulating in my mind what I could say to the parents. No matter how bad things were, I had no power to change them and would only make more work and trouble for myself trying. I had enough on my mind dealing with the school board over integration. Taking on another side project did not seem prudent.

My mother’s sister and my favorite aunt, Edna Ruth Morgan, lived in Pleasant Grove, a suburb of Birmingham, and was dying from complications of scleroderma and Raynaud’s disease. I would regularly visit her to reminisce about better times, like all the summers I spent there so I could swim in the pool of the comfortable ranch style house she and her husband had built themselves soon after they married. And I had lived with her and my Uncle Carl in the summer before I left for Sweden because I was afraid she would not be alive when I returned after my year abroad. I had not planned to be in Birmingham after being awarded an internship at the National Institute of Education in Washington. I liked the idea of spending my summer in Washington and intended to take the offer until I answered the phone in my dorm room, and it was Dean Ilvisaker from the Graduate School of Education with a question. “Aren’t you from the South?”, he asked. “I had a call from Bill Cody, superintendent of Birmingham and he needs someone to create a policy manual. The board has no written policies and it’s a problem. Could you do that? How about giving him a call?”

The next day, I called Dr. Cody’s office and was put through. “Paul (the dean) says you’re from the South and can write. Is he correct? I only need someone for the Summer to put together a policy manual. He says you have an offer for an internship at NIE. I was associate director there and can teach you all you need to know about the place. Besides, I think you would find Birmingham a lot more interesting.” A plan formed in my mind as I responded that I had been born in Birmingham and had a sick aunt there with whom I wanted to spend more time before leaving for Sweden. “I could stay with her,”  I said. “ I’ll tell them at NIE that I’m going to Birmingham and hope I won’t regret it”.

My aunt had given me unconditional love and support all my life. I owed it to her to spend as much time as possible helping her in any way I could before she died. But I had mixed emotions about my Uncle Carl who worked at U.S. Steel in Fairfield. They were the ones that daily belched from their many tall smokestacks, pollution so thick that every morning there would be a fine layer of black soot on my car and all over the damp grass where I parked. I carried Windex to clean the windshield so I could see to drive, but never considered what was being done to my lungs. My uncle had a fairly high-paying job in the rolling mill and kept cash boxes brimming with hundred-dollar bills hidden throughout his house and garage because he did not trust banks. He was as tight as a tick and proud of his frugality which he imposed on my aunt who was only free to spend money at the grocery store. When I asked to stay with her for the summer, I knew she would not allow me to pay rent so I had already decided to buy her a clothes dryer so she would not have to stand in the cold to hang laundry on the wire clotheslines. Carl said he would allow it if it ran on gas and used no electricity. I decided to placate him further by buying him a color TV so he could watch Hee-Haw and football, which reigned supreme in Alabama.

We had had regular arguments and conflict over his continuous use of the word “nigger” . He blamed Black people for everything that was wrong at “the Plant”, in the State, and in the Country. Martin Luther King was evil and George Wallace was his man and he thought I was a Communist for refusing to join in his prejudice or use the offensive word. He never participated in the “gift thing”, as he called it, not at Christmas nor birthdays. So I was stunned when I was in the middle of my senior year in high school and he and Aunt Sis, as I called her, visited me. He asked me to show him the field I was tending behind my house in Pine Mountain. As we strolled along in ankle high weeds, he said, “You know, I would have liked to go to college, but I was never smart enough and my family did not have the money anyway. But you are.” Then he said he wanted to pay for my first year in college and that I should “choose the best college I could find with as few niggers as possible”. For a split second, I thought he was kidding. But he was not on either count. I had already decided I would work my way through school without anyone’s help, but it was comforting to know he had my back and cared enough about me to make an offer that was so out of character for him. Sensing an opening for a higher level of discussion, the next day I tried to get him to go with me to nearby Warm Springs to visit Roosevelt’s Little White House, but he refused saying there had never been a bigger “nigger lover” in the White House than him and old lady Eleanor. As much as I wanted to hate him, I couldn’t. He was typical of almost every white person I knew in Alabama and Georgia. I was the one marching out of step.

As I sat with my aunt searching for words to make her feel better about her dire situation, I did what people often do and brought up an example of someone worse off as if someone’s distant, but more intense pain would ease hers. “Have you heard of Lewis-Slossfield School?” I asked. She shook her head from side to side as I continued. “Well I was there today, and it was a place out of a horror movie. There were all these kids with various disabilities crammed into these tiny, dark and dismal rooms with wet floors and no air conditioning or fans.  Just large open windows with no screens and it must have been 80 degrees in the building.” She said it sounded bad. “It was”, I continued. “And there was this little Black girl sitting in a plastic bucket in a wheelchair. She didn’t have any legs or arms and only rudimentary fingers sticking out from her shoulders. She was sweating profusely as flies swarmed around her head.” My voice broke as I tried to finish my sentence. “And she could not….she could not, shoo them away.”

Suddenly, I began sobbing uncontrollably with tears streaming down my face. I quickly fled to the bathroom to regain my composure and wash my face. When I returned to the sitting room, I apologized and told Aunt Sis I had to leave. “Now I’m angry mad and I need to go to my office to make a plan”, I said as I walked toward the door.  “But, honey,” she said. “It’s late and you’re upset. And is it safe to be downtown?” “Not anymore,” I replied as I hurried out the door, still wiping away a stray tear or two. I was embarrassed for sure. She had heard me cry before, like when I called her to tell her I had gotten into Harvard and was going to get out of Sumter County alive. But these were a different of tears, ones of anger and disgust; mostly with myself. I was angry, not just at with the Board that had ignored the needs of children like those I had met that day, but at myself for almost joining them in turning a blind eye and being not being willing to even try to find a solution.

The janitors were the only ones in the building when I arrived at my office. I stayed there until 2 am or so drafting a short range and long-range plan to do something about Lewis-Slossfield. I decided, for starters, I would find a way to replace the leaking roof, maybe hiring the same crazy guy who had hung off my apartment building two hundred feet above the ground, tapping slate tiles into place to stop roof leaks. Then I would visit the cafeteria workers at Lewis to educate them about how nothing the children at Slossfield had was transmissible and they would have to prepare the hot lunches needed or be transferred to other schools. And I would solicit donations of window air conditioning units and paint for the walls. I had friends that I had made when I was buying things to renovate my apartment building. I’d call on them and Joe Armstrong, head of maintenance for the Board. I was certain they would help.  But that would not solve the problem of children learning nothing because they were of various ages and stages of intellectual development and should not have been grouped together like they were just because they used crutches or wheelchairs. I did not consider how long it might take. I would find a suitable long-term solution; maybe a special school designed for them. Or maybe we could mainstream these children into a school my friend Paul Houston was planning to function as a demonstration school to help teachers become better ones. Paul had also graduated from Harvard and had lots of good ideas about how to run his department of Programs and Staff  Development. He called the proposed school EPIC, which stood for educational program for the individual child. It seemed to call out to me with a message that each of the children I had seen were individuals with their own special needs. I discuss it with Paul and see what he thought we might do. But I was going to do something, no matter who or what stood in the way.  was mad, motivated, and determined.  

I was still groggy from lack of sleep when I met the next day with Dr. Henry Sparks, Assistant Superintendent for Finance to solicit his support. We spoke for an hour, and I intentionally did not mention the girl in the bucket for fear of crying all over again and making a fool of myself in front of a peer. But it was clear that the establishment bureaucracy of which he and I were a part would not help. I would have to work around them. And I was encouraged when I called young Mike Cochrane of Cochrane roofing to tell him what I needed and he said he’d supply the equipment and materials for a new roof if I would supply the manpower. So that’s how I and a half dozen young men wound up on the roof of a dilapidated building in the poorest part of the City. We ripped off the old asbestos sheets using a small Bobcat that none of knew how to run and, miraculously, had only one casualty when Alton Parker, a lawyer at Spain Gillon was cut by some flashing and had to have stitches on his arm. Despite this casualty, we eventually finished the work. We were all tired, sore, and filthy at the end of the day and that’s how I looked when Helen Shores Lee had driven by the school and seen me on the roof, prompting her to make the case to her family, especially her disabled son Robert’s doting grandfather, to support me.  

I did not fully comprehend the implications of her call. Support from Arthur Shores, who headed the powerful Jefferson County Progressive Democratic Council, meant I would be handed a large block of votes from the Black community. With those and what I could secure in the white community on my own, I was a certainty to be elected at the unremarkable age of twenty-nine. Almost inexplicably, the opportunity to bring  real change to Birmingham seemed to be opening before me though I was not certain I was up to the task. Without being aware of it,  I pushed limits by asking Helen if she would agree to chair my campaign. She reminded me that no one white in Alabama had ever had a Black campaign chair. “Good,” I said, “Then its past time for it to happen.” She agreed and we were off to the races.

With twenty-seven candidates, including Imperial Wizard Don Black of the KKK, in the race for five seats, I came in at the top, a close second to Nina Miglionico, an iconic and historic figure in Alabama’s history. A graduate of Howard College, now Samford University, she was one of the first women admitted to practice law in Alabama and the first woman elected to the Birmingham City Council as voters rejected the bloody reign of Bull Connor and the commission form of government. She was one of few white people subjected to violence when the home she shared with her immigrant Italian parents was bombed and had crosses burned in the yard in the early Sixties. She had paid her dues and the Black community repeatedly rewarded her with unwavering support, respectfully, almost reverently always referring to her as “Miss Nina”. In fact, she was a shrewd, experienced lawyer and a tough and savvy politician. And she seemed a little threatened by my political ascension without paying the same price and dues she had. On the campaign trail, she did not take me seriously and had condescendingly offered that,

“ I think it’s wonderful that you’re running. It will, at least, give you a chance to learn something about your city.” She was right and I was about to learn more about Birmingham than I could have ever imagined or wanted to know.

Needless to say, she sent no flowers or telegrams when I was elected along with another newcomer, Larry Langford, who had been the first African American reporter for any local TV station. His clipped, crisp, no-nonsense style and hard stance on crime had made him a darling of  the police who worked hard to elect him. Even so, he came in last in the group of five elected that round. Everyone ran at large, which made it expensive, difficult, and exhausting to campaign in a city as diverse and large as Birmingham. And Council terms were staggered, supposedly so there would always be experienced members present. Half the Council was elected every two years with the lowest vote getter relegated to a two-year term. So Larry would have to run again in 1979. Instead, when he learned I was planning on running for mayor, he decided to join in the fray and risk his seat on the Council.

But he knew, like everyone else did, that David Vann’s days as mayor were coming to an end. Glaringly brilliant, Mayor Vann had clerked for Justice Hugo Black and was the most progressive mayor the City had ever had. He was instrumental in keeping the peace after the Sixteenth Street Church bombing where the four little girls were killed and had led the effort to change the City’s form of government to rid Birmingham of Bull Connor. And when Police and Fire Commissioner Connor and his fellow commissioners refused to accept the results of the election, Vann and the newly elected Council would meet on alternate days at City Hall while the legal arguments made their way through the courts to decide which was the legitimate government. Departments would have orders given to them by city commissioners, only to have them rescinded hours later by the new mayor and Council. It was chaos, but Vann helped steer the City through the morass and obtain a victory and the change Birmingham sorely needed.

As brilliant and well intentioned as he was, he was a slob who wore crumpled suits and ties stained with Bar-B-Que from Ollies, a well-known whites only hangout. He was overweight and sometimes overbearing and did not relate well to those who were not his intellectual equals, which was near everyone. When I was first elected to the Council, I proposed ordinances aimed at eliminating the shacks that lined many of the City’s side streets. His progressive aura dimmed a bit for me when he called me to his office and scolded me, saying that enforcement of my proposed ordinances would cause landlords to throw people out and onto the streets, making more people homeless. He did not offer any alternatives. I understood what he was saying but remained undeterred and he essentially threw down a gauntlet when he predicted I would fail against the slumlord realtors. Greater Birmingham Ministries, with which I worked on this problem, had a different point of view and we would mobilize support. Still, I held his ability and intentions in high regard. Birmingham could do worse and historically had.

Unfortunately, Vann’s image did not match the reality of who he really was. And his re-election as mayor was dependent on Black support. That all dissipated when some hoodlum, whose name no one remembers, decided to rob a convenience store in the majority black Kingston neighborhood in the summer of 1979. He fired a shot from behind a gas pump into the store, wounding the clerk who managed to immediately trip an alarm that summoned the police. There was confusion and intentional misinformation spread about what happened next. But one thing is certain, the perpetrator of the crime left behind a female companion, later identified as Bonita Carter, who attempted to drive off in the car he had abandoned.

She had no time. The police were there in a matter of minutes and approached the car with guns drawn. Ms. Carter was wearing some sort of pull over knit cap and, according to witnesses, it was not apparent that she was a young woman. And when she inexplicably bobbed down in the seat and came up suddenly, Officer Mike Sands opened fire and she was pronounced dead on the scene within minutes.

The Black community seemed only mildly shocked or enraged. But their leaders saw opportunity in the incident and fanned the flames of discontent and outrage that had lain just beneath the veneer of acceptance for decades. There were no massive marches or protests but the concern and idea that this was another example of unwarranted police brutality took hold. Mayor Vann seemed determined to quell the discontent, but he walked a shaky tightwire as he tried to satisfy whites who argued Ms. Carter was an accomplice to a felony and deserved to suffer the consequences and those who felt she had been needlessly murdered. And as he tried to appease both sides, chasing two rabbits at the same time, he satisfied neither as the deadline for filing for re-election as mayor fast approached. His most ardent supporters and personal friends told him he could not win, but it was something he would not accept. He loved being mayor of the city he knew and adored. He would not retreat with his tail between his legs.

The clamor from both sides grew louder and it was abundantly clear to everyone but the mayor that he could not win another term when the powers that be in the Black community dealt his campaign a death blow and recruited Richard Arrington Jr., an administrator and teacher at Miles College with a doctorate in Zoology and a quiet, unassuming member of the Council, to run. With the Black community coalescing around him, he became the prime contender to become the first Black mayor of Birmingham. The potential to make history and the significance of this opportunity was not lost on anyone, least of all me. The future seemed predictable.

But there was a vacuum in the race and various groups, including Fraternal Order of Police leaders did not believe Larry Langford could win, and heavily lobbied me as the only candidate with Black and white support across the City that could possibly beat Arrington in an anticipated city-wide run-off. Some of their opposition was just the traditional racism for which Birmingham was well known and part of everyday life in Alabama. Others cloaked it in the usual language of the City not being ready for a Black mayor. Of course, that day of readiness would never come voluntarily. While I thought that day would eventually come, I reasoned, or conveniently rationalized, that delaying it for four years would give me the chance to reverse white flight that was killing the city on many fronts, not least of which was measured by the growing failure of the schools where integration was not working as planned to lift every student. So, after two academics turned pollsters at Birmingham Southern College, Natalie Davis and Irving Penfield, came to me with their very first attempt at serious polling, arguing that with just ten percent of the Black vote, I could win, I was all in. I believed in numbers, and this seemed easy enough to achieve based on my past support from the Black community. And having a biracial city with a mayor that held a doctorate from Harvard seemed like a good way to help change the city’s image, jump start its progress, and get the city moving again. Some saw me as the last “great white hope”. For them, the only reason to consider me was that it would be downhill if any Black man were ever elected to lead the City.

I was exhausted and losing my voice after waging a non-stop all-out campaign for mayor across the City where I tirelessly went door to door in search of votes and a place in the run-off that was predicted. It was an unforgettable experience. At one home, a lady in her worn chenille housecoat greeted me enthusiastically. “Oh yes, I’m voting for you and telling all my friends to”, she gushed. “But I have a problem with your last name and still can’t pronounce it. So I just tell them your name starts with a K and is something like kaopectate”. When the reporter walking with me heard the story, it made it to the pages of the News and took weeks to live down as people referred to me as Dr. Kaopectate. But more often, men collecting garbage or a waitress serving me a sandwich would greet me by my middle name, John, that was less formal and pretentious than my first, Gregory. Katopodis was seldom uttered. Somehow, I had seemed to become a populist and was gaining momentum as we hurled toward the finish line.

According to Davis-Penfield Associates, the company Natalie and Irving formed after their initial foray into polling using my race as their launch pad, Richard Arrington would make it to the runoff with solid Black support and the help of some liberals from my Southside neighborhood. Larry Langford, however, and other weaker candidates would fall by the wayside. And while I seemed likely to make it with solid support from the Eastern, almost all white neighborhoods, like Roebuck and Huffman, another candidate with strong connections to the fundamentalist community, Baptist churches, and lots of money, Attorney Frank Parsons, was holding down the spot as the choice for most white voters with his anti-crime rhetoric and close to racist campaign issues. The fact that I was not the candidate of choice for many of these voters was best demonstrated in a fundraiser given for me by John Harbert III who was, at the time, the richest man in Alabama. One of his friends, prominent businessman Tom Bradford, offered his opinion at the event, saying that there “wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Katopodis and Arrington; one was a black nigger, the other was a white nigger”. I could not help but wonder why he was there and if he had rehearsed this line to amuse some of his and Mr. Harbert’s country club friends. I was mildly amused years later when he accepted the honor bestowed on him with a park in the eastern section of town named for him by a majority black government. He was born a racist and died as one. There was no way to change people like him or secure their vote. And, to the chagrin of my campaign, I did not want to try.   

On election night, the results seemed to trickle in more slowly than in my race for the Council. As usual, the large black boxes were the last to report and it was clear I was not getting near the ten percent of the vote I needed. When the final vote count showed me slightly ahead of Parsons with a few dozen votes, I headed to my mother’s house in the upscale Redmont neighborhood to hide out. I decided I would spend the night there away from phones and cameras and nurse my sore throat and failing voice. My mother was of Scottish descent with blonde hair and green eyes. She had married a Greek when she was sixteen to get away from the abject poverty of the Wylam neighborhood in which she was raised. She had me at age eighteen and still looked more like my sister than my mother, so people seldom connected us with her last name being Alexander and Moore when she married my stepfather. I gave only one interview by phone from her living room and crawled off to a guest bedroom. I told the reporter for the Birmingham News that because of the closeness of the race, I expected there to be a recount but was gratified by the support I had received and hoped to ultimately prevail in a runoff with my colleague Dr. Arrington. Right now I needed a nap.

The next morning, my mother knocked on the door as the sun was rising. “It’s Steve” she said. Steve Moon was a former police officer I had hired as my staff assistant and who was guiding the campaign. I had been disturbed by the shooting of a black man at a downtown business parking lot. He was armed with a box cutter and clearly mentally ill. I wanted to know why he was killed, instead of being wounded or captured, and asked to ride the night shift with some cops to quiz them about this incident. Always thinking and ahead of me, the politically astute  members of FOP Lodge One making the call, assigned me to the car of the police officer who had actually shot the man. I was locked in the back seat of the police car and more than a little nervous when I found out that it was one of the officers in the front seat giving me the tour,  Steve Moon. He explained that he was following his training but never expressed any regret for the incident which made me more curious than ever about the “police mentality” in Birmingham. I was clearly more disturbed about the event than was the guy who pulled the trigger. I rode with him and his partner for a couple of more nights and they did not disguise their delight in showing a rookie the seamier side of Birmingham, stopping at brothels, illegal gambling holes in the wall, and drug user alleys. But I refused to let them see my shock or disgust and asked for their ideas about solutions, especially in the wake of so much needless violence. We met more times in the coming weeks to thrash out what could be done to prevent further incidents and soon he and his partner were stopping my apartment for a cup of coffee to shoot the breeze on other topics, like his pay and workload. Ultimately, I told Steve, who was about to be married, that the answer was to become more ambitious and change jobs. I offered him a newly created position of Council staff assistant, which he took. No one was more shocked than me when he asked me to be in his wedding. He was a natural and loved the intrigue and politics of City Hall a lot more than I did. And he was good at running  campaigns.

In his call that morning, he said he had bad news. During the night, the head election official said one of the clerks had discovered a mistake had been made and numbers were transposed. I was now allegedly ninety-nine votes behind Mr. Parsons. We were both skeptical, but it seemed futile to challenge the results. When the press called, I gave them the same answer that I had given the night before. I expected there to be a recount, especially with a separation of fewer than a hundred votes between candidates with tens of thousands cast. But it would not be that easy.

As we considered our options, the voting machines were being loaded and transported back to the voting machine warehouse on Eighth Avenue North. It was next door to the old Eva Comer home for unwed mothers I had negotiated with the County to be the new home of the Alabama School of Fine Arts where I worked my full-time job as Associate Director. I joked that it would be easy for someone to break in and make the machines say what they needed them to. Wasn’t that what the election officials had done during election night? The easiest and legal way to find out would be to obtain a recount that would require a court order. No one could remember one ever being sought or granted in a city where elections were usually routine and unquestioned by the power structure who were used to controlling who voted and for whom. It was not uncommon, especially in the Black communities, to see blue marked ballots strewn on tables in the voting places. The common practice was for them to be dropped off in bundles at churches on Saturday night. Then the ministers and pastors would preach from the pulpit on Sunday holding the ballot and reminding congregants of their sacred duty to vote and vote for the slate that had been selected by their leaders and God.

Arthur Shores Progressive Democrats had used this tactic for years to increase Black political participation and power and it had proved successful in electing Black candidates and those sympathetic to their cause. In my election to the Council two years earlier I had worried about election stealing and met with poll workers the night before the election to instruct them as to what to do if they observed irregularities. I was adamant that if people were not at least twenty feet away from the polling place door with their marked ballots, they should be warned that the Sheriff would be called. Sure enough, early on election day, Etta Howard, the wife of a prominent Black dentist and one of my staunchest supporters called campaign headquarters to report that there were marked ballots all over the tables and even taped to the outside of some voting machines. I took her call and instructed her to get one of them and hold onto it until I could get the Sheriff to her polling place to stop this illegal nonsense. Clearly, some group was trying to steal the election.

As an afterthought, I asked her what the ballot looked like. She said, “ It’s blue and has a picture of Arthur Shores and David Hood on it under the banner Jefferson County Progressive Democratic Council. And there are check marks by the names of the people they want you to vote for.” There was a brief audible gasp and then she shrieked, “Oh my God, it has your name with a checkmark beside it.” I was almost struck dumb. “Well hang onto it”, I said. “Maybe I should come and pick it up myself and check out the situation.” I not certain, but don’t think the Sheriff ever showed up.  

By the middle of the day, Steve and I had heard from a cadre of ten or so up-and-coming, idealistic young lawyers, some I knew; some I didn’t, who were willing to take on the task of getting the recount. They came from large and small law firms across the City and, though inexperienced in election laws, were eager to jump into the fray, though to a person, they agreed the chances of opening the boxes even with posting a huge bond were not good. Alton Parker, Sam Frazier, Richard Groenendyke, Tommy Spina, Steve Salter, and a half dozen others joined brothers Gary and Gordon Pate and the Lloyd brothers who often represented the FOP and whose father had been a police officer to work around the clock on the briefs needed. It wasn’t until then that I realized how much they and others were counting on me to change the City and make it a better place for them to live and work and raise their families. If patronage and favor or race was on anyone’s mind, it was not apparent, and I was I was humbled and feeling inadequate in the face of their passion and dedication to the task before us. Somehow, they made it a noble cause for which I felt barely worthy.

Then Steve delivered startling and exciting news that no one could believe. Douglas Arant, a founding partner of Birmingham’s largest, most powerful, and most prestigious law firm, Bradley Arant, had volunteered to help and would go to court himself to appear before the judge, he knew well, to help make our case. Suddenly, the world seemed brighter, and I was optimistic again. Though I had never met Mr. Arant, his reputation for integrity and enormous influence preceded him. Steve and the band of brother attorneys headed to Highlands Bar and Grill for an early celebration. I stayed back to worry.

They were right to do so. The combination of their youthful exuberance and Mr. Arant’s wisdom, and connections, won the day. He gave the cause credibility, and the newspapers gave it favorable coverage and overt endorsement. After only an hour of argument, the judge ordered the boxes be unsealed and a recount to be done under close supervision of election officials and representatives of the candidates. And he did not require that the expected bond be posted as a condition. Steve volunteered to be there for the recount event and set about meeting with all affected parties to get the task underway. I just prayed.

It took a day or two to work out the details and make certain the ground rules would be followed. The entourage of election officials, lawyers, reporters, and candidate reps arrived with the solemnity normally associated with funerals. And it was appropriate for what was to come. After less than an hour, it was clear that the task was futile. There was no way to get an accurate recount on any machine. The old gray, clumsy, mechanical machines had been in use for decades and had seen lots of use. But as these albatrosses were loaded and strapped to the trucks for return to their storage space, Birmingham’s potholes and rough roads across the city had jostled the counters and digits had shifted indiscriminately. So the odometer-like counter that had read 672 votes for Katopodis and was recorded that way, now read 772 votes in one box. In another, the reading fell from 567 votes to 490. In almost every instance, on every machine, the vote counts had changed up and down with no consistent pattern or bias. It was impossible to get an accurate count. What had initially been reported would be as good as any.

When Steve called with the news, I had to smile at the absurdity of it all. “Thanks for trying,” I said. Go home and rest. And remind me to vote to buy new machines as  soon as we can afford them.” I did not need to go to Bucks Pocket to lick my wounds. I sat at my desk and cranked out the thank you notes I needed to send to everyone who had helped, especially Mr. Arant. I never fully understood why he had put his reputation on the line to get involved and never had a chance to ask him. But my mother shed some light on it when she told me he lived one street over from her and walked the neighborhood regularly and they would often speak, She was proud of my service to the community and told him I had bought the house in which she now lived and rehabbed it for her, redoing the kitchen twice when she decided harvest gold appliances were no longer in vogue. Seems they had developed a casual, neighborly friendship.

When he told her that this house had once belonged to the City Attorney, a longtime friend of his, she told him that might explain why the clunky old back dial phone was connected to City Hall’s switchboard and she had to dial nine to get an outside line to make a call. Seems that to garner favor, Bellsouth provided all high-ranking city officials with free phone service, just another hidden benefit of the job. When she told me, I insisted that the phone be transferred to her name, and she protested. “Honey, you need to understand that’s just how things have always worked in Birmingham.”

I did understand and silently vowed to change how things had always worked if I ever gained the power to do it. But I never dreamed that because I wanted to change things and was making steady progress, the law firm of this stately, kind, and wise old man, Bradley Arant, would one day help send me to prison.