E-mail a friendKarl Fleming
airdate July 13, 2005
Karl Fleming stumbled into journalism. He grew up in a church orphanage during the Depression and escaped poverty via a stint in the Navy. He began his career with small dailies and later became Newsweek's chief civil rights reporter, covering the South's hot spots during the '60s. While covering the '65 Watts riots as L.A. bureau chief, he was seriously injured. Fleming went on to work for the L.A. CBS affiliate. In Son of the Rough South, he recounts his life story against the backdrop of the civil rights movement.
Karl Fleming
Tavis: Civil rights hero John Lewis has often said, "Without the American press, the civil rights movement would have been a bird without wings." One of those brave journalists who perhaps unwittingly helped give flight to the movement was Karl Fleming. As the chief civil rights correspondent for "Newsweek" in the 1960s, he witnessed firsthand many of the most critical and dramatic moments of the civil rights era. In 1965, he took over the Los Angeles bureau for "Newsweek" and a year later was beaten and left for dead while covering the Watts riots. His compelling new book is called "Son of the Rough South: An Uncivil Memoir." Karl Fleming, an honor to meet you, sir.
Karl Fleming: Thank you, sir.
Tavis: Glad to have you on the program.
Fleming: You do good work.
Tavis: Well, you do great work, too. Coming from you, that's a huge compliment, so thank you, I appreciate that. Speaking of doing good work, how did you, of all the things you could have done as a journalist, end up letting somebody talk you into doing this kind of work, life-threatening work?
Fleming: You mean being in the civil rights movement?
Tavis: Absolutely.
Fleming: When I got an opportunity to do it, I thought it was the gift and the break of my life. I had grown up in a Methodist church orphanage in North Carolina, all white, where there was a lot of bullying and a lot of bullying of Karl. So, I grew up with this deep, deep, deep hatred of bullying and the misuse of power, and when I first saw it in my first days as a newspaper reporter in this little town in eastern Carolina, it just made me sick. And so when I got to Atlanta, and got this opportunity to go to work for "Newsweek," just when the civil rights movement was just cranking up, I thought, you know, this is a gift that I get to be a part of this. I was so passionate about it and so deeply moved by what these young people were trying to do. I mean, when I think of the fact that I could have missed all this, it kind of makes me shudder.
Tavis: To do justice to this book, which I can't do in 15 or 20 minutes, to do my best attempt at justice to this book, I want to hit some various events that you have covered and just kind of talk about them. Before I do that, though, kind of, you know, move around on that front, you talked about this orphanage that you were in and the bullying and the particular bullying of Karl, I can't pass that up. I'd be missing--I shouldn't be sitting in this chair to hear something like that and not go back and get that. Please tell me more.
Fleming: Well, this was at the tag end of the depression and there were 9, in fact, orphanages like the one I was in. Just in North Carolina alone, there were 300 of us there. It was very tough, very disciplined, very impersonal, and on the other hand, we were taught very good values there: honesty, decency, fair play, hard work, don't steal, you don't rat on your brothers, but I came out of there kind of an incipient tough guy.
Tavis: Why were you there, to begin with?
Fleming: Well, my father died when I was 5 months old. My mother tried to sell dishes and Bibles door-to-door and couldn't make any money. Then she became ill and got tuberculosis. And so she had no option but to put me in this place along with my half-sister, and I was there until I went off at 17 and joined the Navy.
Tavis: Wow. Tell me how you found your way to Atlanta right quick and how you found your way to "Newsweek's" newsroom.
Fleming: I started off, as I said, on this small paper in eastern Carolina where I rode with this racist cop. We'd ride across the tracks at night into the black part of town and one night we were--as I describe in this book--we pulled up in front of a shack and he got out of the car and I said, "Where are you going, Ray?" And he said, "I heard this S.O.B.--" didn't say S.O.B.--"I heard this son of a bitch belongs to the
Tavis: You referenced earlier about how you didn't like bullies, and that's what really turned your stomach, when you saw how certain white people, certainly not all, but many white people were treating African-Americans, colored folk, Negroes back in the day. What did you think of these black folk when you finally got a chance to be exposed to them?
Fleming: Well, I thought they were underdogs. And I always, my entire life, up until now, sided with underdogs, and I saw the humility that was visited upon them, physical brutality. The fact that they walked in fear all of the time, that they had, there was kind of a falsity in the relationships, even between me and the black people I ran into in the civil rights movement. Until I ran into one guy named Jim Foreman who was the executive secretary of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating--
Tavis: SNCC.
Fleming: He was totally straight and honest and he looked at me like as if to say, "If you think you're going to get cut any slack because you're a white reporter coming down here to do me a favor, forget about it. What newspapers," he said, "have you worked on where there were any black reporters?" I said, "Zero," and so, you know, that's the way the world was, but I was absolutely entranced by it and drawn to it in a way I had not even thought possible.
Tavis: I referenced a Congressman John Lewis, a hero in his own right at the start of this conversation when he suggested, "The civil rights movement would never have taken flight had it not been for the American media." They were a little late getting there, but they finally got there, people like you, were courageous in your work. When you were covering these various events, which I'm gonna get to here in just a second one by one, did you ever process it that way, that you were in fact, doing a service that you were helping this thing take flight by the courageous work that you were doing? Did you ever think of it that way as a young man?
Fleming: Absolutely not. I was totally in awe of the bravery and the commitment of these young people, young black people, a few Jewish kids from New York, mostly young black people and King, that I thought it would have been presumptuous beyond belief to think of myself as some kind of hero. It was dangerous, I was threatened, I was beat up, I was shot at, I was followed at night, I did have my phone tapped, but this was nothing compared to what the ordinary black people lived with every day in the south and particularly the young people who were down there working, the young CORE and SNCC. workers. What I was going through was nothing compared to what--so I thought it would have been unseemly, at best, to think of myself as being some kind of significant figure.
Tavis: There's so much in this book, as I've said a moment ago, I can't even begin to do justice to it, but let me jump through some of these events that I'm fascinated about--by...with regard to the writing in this book "Son of the Rough South: An Uncivil Memoir." You covered a Klan event one night and were hiding in the bushes. Well, you tell the story. There's a picture I want you to see, but tell the story.
Fleming: Well, Stone Mountain, Georgia, had for many years, been the setting of an annual Klan rally.
Tavis: The same Stone Mountain that Dr. King referenced in his 'I have a dream' speech.
Fleming: Correct, and there were hundreds of people, came in their robes. And I decided to go out and check it out. So, I parked some distance away and then crept up through the weeds and lay down in the weeds, hiding, and took this picture, which is in the book. Then I went back and put the camera back in my car. I was dressed in jeans. At this time, I had a crew cut hair cut. I weighed about 210. I smoked 3 packs of cigarettes a day, and I could talk and walk like these guys. So, I just walked right up amongst them and then I decided that it would be safe if I walked up and introduced myself to the Imperial Wizard, a guy named Bobby Shelton who came from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and Calvin Craig, who was the Grand Dragon of the Georgia Klan. And I did introduce myself because I thought they would give me some protection and in fact, they did because at this particular time, as insane as it may seem, they were kind of on some sort of PR campaign to prove they were not such bad guys. Although the speeches were always about, you know, "The Catholics and the Jews and the niggers and you really want our women and they want to spoil our blood." But, nonetheless, they thought they were gonna do a little PR with me.
Tavis: But you walk into this rally. Put that picture back up, Jonathan, right quick. I want to make a point here. You walk into this event of these Klan members and you are, in fact, white, you don't have sheets and a hood on, you didn't fear walking into this crowd once you had taken this picture from the bushes?
Fleming: Tavis, my true feeling, and many people have asked me this question. I think my experience in the entirety of this thing, I was so angry and so ashamed, that I was really probably too dumb to be afraid, and that was the thing. I was just angry all the time, and ashamed and many nights, as I describe in this book, I would go back to my motel room and literally throw up. It was just so shameful, the things--I mean, I saw white people do things to black people that were just almost incomprehensible, and you brought up the voting rights act. It's almost unbelievable today that I could be, which I was, in a place called Greenwood, Mississippi. And black people would come out in their Sunday best and walk up to the courthouse and have dogs turned on them and have cops beat them up just for having the impertinence to try to come and register to vote. And one thing I've tried to do in this book is go beyond giving a mere recitation of the events in the civil rights movement and talk about how I felt about it as a human being. How I came to be who I was and how I responded as a person to everything I saw.
Tavis: Well, we get that in the reading of this book. We just saw some footage. You were talking of Lyndon Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act and passing out pens to a number of African-American dignitaries, colored, Negro dignitaries, including one M.L.K. When I say, there's a picture I want to show just a second here of you marching right alongside the casket of Dr. King at his funeral, before we get to the photo, though, tell me what you think when I say Martin Luther King, Jr.
Fleming: I'll tell you what I feel, and every time I hear his name, I feel this welling up of emotion and I get almost tearful because not only did he have a profound effect on the world, he changed me. I had grown up to be a tough guy and I was swaggering and confrontational and you didn't mess with me because I would fight you and I drank too much and I talked too much. Then saw King in Birmingham and in other places with those kids, walk out into the face of probable death, certain jailing, probable beating, and I thought, "My whole definition of what it means to be brave has been all wrong because that was courage." What I was doing, anybody could do, but talk about guts, now, that guy had some.
Tavis: What do you recall from the funeral services of Dr. King that day and marching through the streets of Atlanta alongside that casket?
Fleming: I recall this almost surreal situation in which there were just thousands and thousands and thousands of people and it was completely silent. Not a word was spoken, and all I could hear as I walked alongside this caisson with the mules, was the crunching of the iron wheels on the pavement. And the blowing of the mules, and just that silent rhythm and...-but this enormous feeling of quiet emotion, which just overcame me because all the times that I had seen him came flashing back. And all the anger I felt, that what my fellow white southerners had done to him and to others who were trying to do what he did came back. And also this feeling of gratitude for him and for myself for having been fortunate enough to be a part of all this.
Tavis: I'm starting to get like the old Karl Fleming. I'm getting angry that I don't have more time to talk to you, but in the one minute I have here right quick, um, this picture of you almost being beaten to death at the Watts riots, how did that happen?
Fleming: Well, it was quite a shock, actually, because I had been down south where black people, they were my friends. It was the white people you were always afraid of. Then I came out here and got into the middle of this riot, and I was just another white face. And it was a tremendous amount of anger toward whites amongst these young urban blacks. I had gone back and put my camera back in my car. And just as I was walking back
Tavis: Let me ask you quick--were you upset with these black people or did you later understand why they were so angry?
Fleming: I had a reputation amongst the media as being a "liberal" reporter who was sympathetic to blacks and so reporters came to the hospital the next day and more or less said, "OK, Mr. Liberal Karl, now what do you think?" And I said, "Had I been a young black kid growing up on the streets of Watts and knowing what I did about how people grew up there, I probably would have wanted to hit some white guy in the head myself."
Tavis: Karl Fleming is a rare breed, a rare breed of journalist whose courage and conviction and commitment has led to a significant contribution to American letters. The new book "Son of the Rough South: An Uncivil Memoir" and if I've ever recommended anything, I certainly recommend this one. Mr. Fleming, it's an honor to have you on the program, a pleasure to meet you, sir.
Fleming: I'm happy to be here.
Tavis: Glad to have had you here. Up next on this program, talented R&B singer Amerie. Stay with us.
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