A Time to Speak: The Story of a Young American Lawyer's Struggle for His City—and Himself

By Charles Morgan and Doug Jones

Brings back into print a classic account of courage and calamity in the long march toward racial justice in the South, and the nation
 
On September 15, 1963, a bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young Black girls. The very next day, a prominent white lawyer named Charles Morgan Jr. was scheduled to speak at a luncheon held by the Young Men’s Business Club of Birmingham. A well-regarded figure in the city’s legal and business establishment, Morgan had been mentioned frequently as a candidate for political office. To the shock of his longtime friends and associates, Morgan deviated from his planned remarks, instead using his platform to place the blame for the murder of the four young girls squarely on the shoulders of the city’s white middle-class establishment, those seated before him.
 
As much as his stand was admired nationally, in Birmingham the results were destructive for him personally. Threats against his life and the lives of his family poured in daily by phone and mail, his political career was finished, and he was faced with financial ruin. Within weeks, he moved his family out of the state, and thenceforward committed himself to legal action in the name of racial justice. In 1964, he established the regional office of the ACLU in Atlanta. In the 1964 Supreme Court case Reynolds v. Sims, Morgan successfully argued that districts in state legislatures needed to be of nearly equal size, establishing the principle of “one man, one vote” to effectively end the use of gerrymandering.
 
A Time to Speak was originally published in 1964, a mere year after Morgan and his family fled Birmingham. The memoir recounts not only his speech, but his entire upbringing and the political, cultural, and social milieus in which he was raised and which gave rise to the cowardice, institutional silence, fear, and hate that those conditions nursed. This new edition features a foreword from US Senator Doug Jones.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9780817394080

Book preview

CHAPTER I

The City of Churches

THE NOONTIME CARILLON played Dixie. It was Monday, September 16, 1963. A warm Indian-summer smog hung heavy in the valley. And something else: an indefinable but thick human smog that seemed to slow the pace of the downtown lunch crowds, to muffle the usual clamor of the business district at peak of day.

This was to be the moment for silent prayer. Birmingham, the News boasted, has more than 700 churches and temples where weekly attendance is one of the highest in America. On Sunday one of those churches had been ripped open by dynamite. Four young girls, attending Sunday-school class, had died, and others had been maimed and mutilated. Jewish temples had twenty-four-hour armed guards protecting them now.

On Sunday night, as the shock wave of the day’s atrocity rolled through the valley and beyond, the mayor, the chief of police, the sheriff and a clergyman had appeared on television to call for civic calm and community prayer. Wherever you may be at noon tomorrow, the clergyman said, stop for a moment to bow your head in prayer during this hour of grief for our community and its people.

Mayor Boutwell asked for calm and restraint. The law-enforcement officers assured us that the vile perpetrators of this dastardly deed would be caught. We must pray and the guilty must be caught. Birmingham’s image was in the balance.

Now it was noon Monday, and as I looked from my office window to the slow-moving city traffic below I remembered the clergyman’s plea and thought to say a silent prayer. I recalled Chief Jamie Moore’s stern pledge that the guilty party or parties, whoever they might be, would be apprehended and brought before the bar of justice.

For more than eighteen years Birmingham had been my home. To others it was a problem, a recurrent blur of headlines, a flash of disaster. But to me it was home. That should have been enough. It wasn’t.

How many hours had I spent working to build that medical center on the south side? That was the city’s hope, an enterprise other than steel and coal and railroads. And it was expanding, bringing new people and research and the twentieth century to the city.

Here I was, thirty-three years old, in my ninth year of law practice. Those hours, days and months crisscrossing the state in one campaign or another; the late nights and long days on the phone or at meetings, hoping, working for change in the city and state; those long hours spent away from my son and my wife—where had they gone, what good had they done?

This was my home. There had been the presidency of the Junior Bar and the local Heart Association, the Advisory Committee on Schools, the State Mental Health Association’s legislative chairmanship and that year when I was chairman of the Man of the Year Award. I had done those things a man should do at home. But what good had it done? All of the conflict and controversy of the city—I had been there but there was something strange about the place. It wouldn’t change. Neither could I. And the burden of all those wasted years was with me now. I felt angry and very, very tired.

I watched the lunch crowds move and thought: the clergyman failed. It was noon in Birmingham, Alabama, and nobody stopped to pray. The noontime carillon played Dixie, slowly. It was a dirge, not for the four who had died but for the city, and its sound rang through the valley and echoed back to the building top where the carillon played.

It was the Protective Life Building.

I left my office in the Bank for Savings Building. Just over a year ago I had watched the lighting ceremony that celebrated its completion. It was the first multi-story office building constructed in downtown Birmingham in three decades. At eight o’clock Labor Day evening the lights were to be turned on, ushering in a new era in city progress, according to the News and the Chamber of Commerce.

Automobiles had lined the streets for blocks and people stood on corners or craned their necks from car windows to watch. There were children and little old ladies, the over-the-mountain rich folks and the working folks from the steel mills, the rednecks from outlying rural areas and Negroes from Tuxedo Junction.

The lights went on. As each floor was lit in the beautiful new seventeen-story building, the crowd reacted with a murmur of awe. And it dawned on me that thousands of people had driven downtown on a muggy September night just to see a new building lit up. They were that hungry for a sign of progress. After thirty years they had their new building. The frustrations of decades were wrapped in the hope that those lights represented a new era for