Selma’s 7-Term Mayor Is Planning to Step Off the Racial Balance Beam : Politics: Joe Smitherman has survived his city’s history and created some of his own as chief executive for a quarter-century.

Shortly before a heart attack laid him up recently, Mayor Joe Smitherman was ruminating on the formula that has kept him in office for a quarter-century. Could it be that the one had something to do with the other?

“You start a project,” he was saying, “and before you finish it, start another, and before you finish that one, start another, and so on.

“Be the busiest person in town, doing things for Selma that the people can see and touch. It never fails. It keeps your friends happy and your enemies off balance.”

Those who know Joe Smitherman, be they friends and enemies, agree that he is a man of action. They say he seems driven. He shoots from the hip--runs on high octane and bases decisions more on gut instinct than deep thought. On this Sunday morning, though, Smitherman was in a reflective mood.

The mayor observes a sort of Sabbath ritual. He rises early, drives downtown and parks behind City Hall. He enters through a back door, plugs in the coffeepot and meditates, alone, for an hour or so. On Sunday morning City Hall, on many occasions here the epicenter of shattering tumult, is as peaceful as a shrine.

The upheaval that rocked Selma a generation ago changed the political landscape of the South and rippled across the nation. It is where black Americans, systematically disenfranchised, won the right to vote freely, to have a say in their own governance. From that day until this, Joe Smitherman has been mayor of Selma, surviving all the predictable aftershocks.

With coffee mug in hand and feet on his desk, Smitherman was saying he intends to leave office when his current four-year term--his seventh--expires in two years.

Selmians (as they call themselves) have heard that tune before. In 1979, after 15 years in office, a tired Joe Smitherman stepped aside for a year and passed the gavel to the president of the City Council. When the next election came around, Smitherman was back in the race. He has never lost an election. This time, though, Selmians are betting that the heart attack may influence the mayor’s resolve, and some wonder what is to become of Selma after “the Smitherman reign,” as one recent history book calls it.

“Selma will do just fine,” Smitherman said. “It will have to, because it’s time for me to go. I’ve walked this tightrope long enough, and I’m getting tired. Do you know how wearing this job can be?”

Wearing, yes. According to a researcher at the U.S. Conference of Mayors, it is rare for anyone to last as mayor of a city for 25 years. The figures would include complacent towns where nothing much happens to cause anything to change.

And this storied town on the blood-red banks of the Alabama River surely is not one of those.

Whatever happens in Selma, good or bad, has for the last 25 years been viewed against the backdrop of its past. Visitors still drop by daily to see the city that became a symbol, its very name a curse, a rallying cry for passage of the Voting Rights Act back in 1965.

The old conjure women on the river bank used to whisper the legend that stars once fell on Alabama, a powerful sign that the land was cursed. Some in Selma find reason to believe it.

A historical marker outside City Hall commemorates the two pivotal events, 100 years apart, that have marked Selma for all time.

One side marks the day in 1865 when Yankee soldiers sacked the town and burned its Confederate arsenal. The other side commemorates “Bloody Sunday,” that day in 1965 when troopers and mounted deputies whipped and tear-gassed blacks demonstrating against the blatant scheme that had denied them the ballot.

That event, and the 10 weeks of angry protests leading up to it, occurred the year after Joe Smitherman took office. It fell to him to preside over what could be called Selma’s second Reconstruction.

Selma, then and now, is a city of about 27,000 people, about 52% of whom are black. The differences between then and now, however, are striking.

The Selma in which Smitherman grew up was a cotton town ravaged by the boll weevil and the Depression. He was born in 1929, the youngest of six children. His widowed mother died when he was 11 and he was reared in a shotgun house on a dirt street in East Selma--on the wrong side of the tracks, where scrawny chickens scratched around outhouses.

Back then, Selma was so rigidly segregated that even the fishing ponds, side by side, were designated “colored” and “white.” To Smitherman it was an unquestioned way of life, as normal as waiting in line on Water Avenue to get government surplus food on Saturdays. Those lines, though, included both blacks and whites.

“In retrospect,” said Smitherman, “especially after I took office, I knew good and well we were wrong. If I were black, I would have agitated too. And if I couldn’t vote, I’d have been an activist probably more extreme than some who came here.”

And Selma today? The mayor likes to take visitors on his personal tour. What they see at first glance could serve as a model of civic progress and racial harmony. Side by side, blacks and whites work, live, shop, worship, vote, serve on the City Council and the school board and patrol in police cars.

Today’s generation of Selma blacks takes integration for granted. To them Bloody Sunday was something long ago, something they learned about during Black History Month, like slavery.

But Selma still feels the ache of what has become a nationwide migraine reduced to a one-syllable word: race .

Blacks eligible to vote in Selma’s Dallas County now barely outnumber whites. Under Smitherman, Selma has gerrymandered its wards so that four blacks and four whites sit on the City Council. The council president, elected at large, currently is a white member. Council members have an unwritten agreement that should any one of them leave office in midterm, the replacement will be a person of the same race.

Very often in Selma, seemingly neutral issues that come before the council are resolved along racial lines. The city’s heritage of confrontation seems to have left it as fragile as a house of cards: The whole town hopes no one will bump the table.

Somehow, Smitherman has managed to keep the balance, to walk the tightrope, as he says, without losing control.

“Joe Smitherman is a man of great cunning,” the Rev. Fred Reese said. “He knows how to manipulate the white people to accept changes that will benefit the black people--and them, too, really. He knows just how far to go and still keep white support without losing black support.”

Reese, a black man, is the principal of Selma High School. Back in 1964, he headed the Dallas County Voter’s League. He was the one who lured Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Selma for the voting rights crusade. Reese was one of the few blacks who managed to register to vote despite the obstacles of the time. In the 1964 mayoral election, he voted for Smitherman.

“Joe and I are the same age. We grew up in the same part of town in similar circumstances,” Reese said. “Blacks can identify with him.”

For the 30 years before Smitherman ran for mayor, there hadn’t been a real election. The elite of Selma passed the office from one of their number to the next, like a fiefdom. The only requirement was to keep things as they were.

Smitherman, then, was a brash upstart. He was a gawky young appliance salesman with a long neck and big ears and no friends at the country club. He managed to get elected to the City Council, where he became a royal pain. He wanted the city to conduct its business in the open, for example, instead of in the back room. Brash.

He ran for mayor pledging to represent “all the people, not the favored few,” and the word all was underscored on his campaign fliers.

“I figured everybody had a favored few they didn’t like,” he said. “I was right. When I won, the Old Guard wouldn’t even give me a key to City Hall. I had to get one made.”

After the civil rights demonstrations, Smitherman became the busiest man in town. He pushed through a penny sales tax and did things that people could see and touch--paved and lighted streets, new garbage trucks, fire engines, sewer lines.

He became an expert at wheedling money out of Washington, money the Old Guard had shunned as “tainted,” as inviting federal interference in local affairs.

“Only thing tainted about it is t’aint enough of it!” Smitherman told them.

Still more visible, touchable changes happened, each new project overlapping the last--new libraries, a new City Hall, housing projects, schools, museums, fountains, trees and flowers and parks.

Railroad crossings were hazardous, so Smitherman stopped a 180-car freight with a police car and ticketed the conductor for blocking the streets. The railroad rescheduled the run.

He refused to pay the city’s electric bill until the power company explained its “pass-on charges” so that customers could know what they were paying for.

When Ku Klux Klan members showed up on the City Hall steps, he called them “white trash” and ran them out of town. Blacks applauded. He padlocked the anti-poverty office because only 5% of its paid employees were white--not enough. Whites applauded.

At the 20th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, Smitherman went to the pulpit of Brown Chapel, where King had preached, and said: “My hands are as dirty as the others’. We were wrong. I’m sorry.” He shared a hymnal with Jesse Jackson and sang “We Shall Overcome.”

“I suppose I’ve been the most visible person in the state, short of the governor,” Smitherman said, “and a lot of people expected me to run for higher office.

“When I was younger I gave some thought to it, but after a few terms, I discovered it’s hard for mayors to do that.

“Mayors can’t duck issues or avoid taking sides. For mayors, the public is as close as the sidewalk. You either get the garbage picked up or you don’t. You either remove the dangerous tree or you don’t. You can’t tell an angry citizen that you’ll have a committee look into it, not if you want to get reelected.

“Also, you need what I call the Big Mules, the money boys who finance your campaign and don’t let you forget where you got the money. I’ve shifted around so much politically--backing Democrats, Republicans, whatever--that the Big Mules who know me could never be sure if I’d stay hitched.

“Anyhow, Selma is all I really care about, and being mayor of Selma has been sufficient. Two more years and I’m history.”