George Wallace is confronted by Nicholas Katzenbach while blocking the integration of the University of Alabama, June 11, 1963. (Library of Congress)

Of course, Wallace’s ploy might not have been futile without the determined actions of federal officials like Katzenbach, notes civil rights lawyer Fred Gray, author of Bus Ride to Justice. Gray had more than a passing interest in the events in Tuscaloosa on June 11, 1963, because Katzenbach was there to enforce a court order obtained by Gray and fellow civil rights attorney Arthur Shores of Birmingham.

“The nation has lost a faithful and forceful advocate for civil and constitutional rights with the passing of Nicholas Katzenbach,” Gray said this week. “It was his and other Justice Department officials’ responsibility to enforce the federal laws, not only those enacted by Congress but also the orders of federal courts across the nation. In the Malone/Hood case, Katzenbach had the courage to face the governor and ask him to step aside so the court’s order could be enforced. He was one of many such federal officials who were so important to bring about equality under our Constitution, because those court orders were of no value if they could not be enforced. If Wallace had been able to thwart the federal judges who were applying Constitutional rule, then we would not have gotten anywhere.”

After making a bombastic speech, Wallace finally did step aside, and the federal court order obtained by Fred Gray and his colleagues was enforced, and Malone and Hood did enroll and segregation thus ended at the University of Alabama. Katzenbach went on to become Attorney General under President Lyndon Johnson. Wallace was paralyzed in an assassination attempt in 1972 but was elected governor a record four times and eventually apologized for his segregationist past and crowned a black homecoming queen at the University of Alabama.

And Fred Gray and Arthur Shores (now deceased) kept on filing civil rights lawsuits and obtaining federal court orders which the Justice Department enforced. Gradually, Gray’s famous pledge to “destroy everything segregated I could find,” as revealed in Bus Ride to Justice, was realized with scores of successful civil rights cases. Gray is now 80 years old, but he still gives speeches around the country explaining how the civil rights movement succeeded, in part because of the roles played by civil rights lawyers like himself, federal judges, and federal officials like Nick Katzenbach, who were all determined that the words of the U.S. Constitution would mean in practice what they said on paper.

Bus Ride to Justice has remained in print since it was first published in 1995. It is being reissued this summer in a revised edition to include the more recent events and developments in Gray’s life and in civil rights.

Writer John Sledge of the Mobile Press-Register called Carolina Planters “magnificent” in a review in his “Southern Bound” column. Sledge raves that the letters from the Spencer, McKenzie, and Roberson family in the book are “so beautifully expressive in their writings and so immersed in the issues of their day that their story is not only entertaining and instructive, but nothing less than a history of the antebellum South in genealogical microcosm.

“The book is further strengthened by Pattillo’s considerable skills as a historian and gifted prose style. I cannot emphasize this last point strongly enough. Pattillo writes so well and so gracefully and weaves in his documentary selections — letters, wills, diaries, photographs, property inventories — so seamlessly that the book is pure pleasure to anyone who loves the past.”

Pattillo discussed the book himself recently on the Walter Edgar’s Journal show on South Carolina’s ETV radio. Pattillo grew up hearing how his ancestors had come to Alabama from South Carolina; in 1850, Edgar notes, half of white individuals in US census who listed South Carolina as their birthplace lived elsewhere, part of the country’s western expansion in the nineteenth century. When Pattillo graduated high school, he travelled to South Carolina to research family history. and there found the family letters that form the basis of Carolina Planters.

In the interview, Edgar and Pattillo discuss that while the families in the book were privileged and had a great deal of money and furnishings, they were often starting from scratch when they moved to new, burgeoning territories. Pattillo described it as “country where no white people had ever lived before. and they were literally creating plantations and a civilization, they hoped, out of the wilderness. It was rich land, but they had to do everything; they had to clear the land, cut down the trees, build log cabins at the very outset and so forth.”

Not only were the settlers unused to the work, but disease was rampant. “In heartbreaking letters,” Pattillo explains, they lost their children “constantly.”

Among his favorite ancestors, Pattillo tells Edgar, is Confederate General James Holt Clanton, whom Pattillo describes as a “hothead” that “kept making the higher ranking generals upset because he was always dashing off and doing things he wasn’t supposed to do.” After the Civil War, Clanton became a politician, but was shot on the street by a former Union soldier; ten thousand people followed Clanton’s funeral procession, the first state funeral in Alabama history. Clanton was, Pattillo says, a “rash but very romantic figure.”

In Carolina Planters and in the interview, Pattillo is quick to note his ancestors’ ownership of slaves and the role that slaves played in settling the new territories. Sledge praises Pattillo for the same; “conscientious historian that he is,” Sledge writes, “Pattillo does what he can to tease out the less-celebrated and often difficult story of the family’s slaves … Where and when he can, he includes ‘every scrap’ about the slaves that he can find, ‘not only in an attempt to give back to them some of their own lost history, but also in hope that their descendants might find clues to their ancestry here.’”

Sledge concludes that “Carolina Planters on the Alabama Frontier is a thoroughly grounded labor of love that manages to be unblinking in both its admiration and its criticism. This is no mean accomplishment, and an object lesson in how to be at once both proud and realistic about one’s Southern heritage.”

Read John Sledge’s “Southern Bound” column at the al.com website. You can also download Eddie Pattillo’s interview with Walter Edgar at the Walter Edgar’s Journal website.

Carolina Planters on the Alabama Frontier is available direct from NewSouth Books, Amazon.com, or your favorite bookstore.

When my husband and I married, he was astonished to see that I owned a photo of my great-uncle, Albert Caldwell, on the deck of the Titanic. In the photo, Albert stands in a shadow, holding his baby son, Alden. Albert’s wife, Sylvia, stands beside them, propping her arm on the ship’s railing and glancing at the baby to make sure he’s happy. Albert had owned the rare photo, and it came to me when he died in 1977.


“If I had known you were a Titanic nut,” my husband joked, “I’d never have married you.”

I still love the Titanic, but after an intense couple of years of researching and writing my great-uncle’s story in A Rare Titanic Family, I can now see what my husband was worried about. I can see now that our entire family has been pulled through time by the Titanic, just as my great-uncle was. The ship has us and won’t let go.

Not that I want it to.

One hundred years ago this weekend, the Caldwells stumbled into history as they reluctantly agreed to get off the Titanic and onto Lifeboat 13. And they have reached across time to bring so many of us with them.

It’s been an interesting hundred years.

Although the ship sank in 1912, it never loosened its grip on the Caldwells. Albert and Sylvia tried to rebuild their lives but found the Titanic was forever part of their identity. Albert went on the Chautauqua circuit in 1912 and got rave reviews for his lecture on the Titanic. Sylvia wrote a booklet, Women of the Titanic Disaster, which she sold by subscription. Both were interviewed and gave lectures on the ship across many decades.

The Titanic glowered over Alden as he grew up. He wanted a job with the US government when he graduated college in the Depression. But his birth records had gone down with the Titanic, and he couldn’t prove he was an American. Thus, he couldn’t get the job.

He got another. Years later he was about to retire and still couldn’t prove he was an American – and therefore couldn’t qualify for Social Security. Albert had to make out a lengthy affidavit, and Alden at last was granted his citizenship.


Albert thrived in the brilliant spotlight of the Titanic. He loved talking about the Titanic to clubs, churches, and anyone who invited him to. He gloated about being part of the advertising scheme for the movie The Unsinkable Molly Brown in 1964 (he got to ride around in a car with star Debbie Reynolds).

By the time Albert died at age 91, he had given the same speech about the Titanic and the same interview for almost 65 years.

But the Titanic was not done with the Caldwells yet. Not long ago someone sold a watch at auction in London, claiming the Caldwells had used it to bribe their way off the Titanic. Although all available evidence has skewed against that allegation, it’s remarkable that the ship still hangs over them.


Nor was the Titanic done with Albert’s descendants. My mother and her cousins loved the story and passed around a now-treasured copy of Albert’s speech. One cousin thought to tape Albert telling about the Titanic. My parents invited Albert to speak about the Titanic to a huge gathering of our friends. The adults made sure we children understood Albert’s interesting place in history.

I was deeply fascinated with the Titanic story told by Albert. I told and retold the story to my friends, whether they wanted to hear it or not. Eventually I majored in history and became a media historian. I made my journalism students conduct interviews about the Titanic. I named my own son Alden.

Albert’s story was so much a part of me that I eagerly jumped on the chance to write A Rare Titanic Family, which I thought was going to be a straightforward biography of the Caldwells on the Titanic. Piece of cake, I thought.

By the time I was finished, however, I realized I had hardly known their story at all. To my shock, I discovered that the Caldwells were in a cat-and-mouse chase around the globe – with themselves as the mice – as they fled from their employer. The Titanic was the dramatic last leg in their frantic rush to go home. These were things that Albert had kept mum for all those 65 years.

It was both a delight and a shock to uncover the story he had never told us.

So after 100 years of the Titanic, I have a completely new perspective on the story that I thought I knew so well, the story that has been recounted faithfully by my family for three generations now. It’s a story even my reluctant husband now loves.

I love how history is never static. It always changes. Albert Caldwell’s Titanic story has certainly made that lesson clear.

A Rare Titanic Family: The Caldwells’ Story of Survival, Julie Williams’s account of her great-uncle and his family’s survival of the Titanic disaster, is available in print and ebook direct from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite bookstore.

In celebration of National Poetry Month and in anticipation of the 2012 Alabama Book Festival, a 24-hour poetry marathon will be held April 19–20 in downtown Montgomery. Any interested poet may participate by reading her/his own work or that of another poet, or both. Get on the list to read by calling 334-834-3556 or by sending an email to noelle@newsouthbooks.com.

The event is co-sponsored by NewSouth Books and the Village Gallery, at 105 and 107 South Court Street, respectively, at the corner of Court and Washington, just one block south of Court Square Fountain, and by Cool Beans at the Cafe d’Art, a block west of the fountain at 115 Montgomery Street.

The event will begin Thursday, April 19th, at 6 p.m. at the NewSouth Bookstore. At 8 p.m. it will move next door to the Village Gallery. Around daybreak on Friday morning the reader for that time slot will move to Court Square Fountain for reading as the sun rises over the Alabama Capitol. At 6:30 a.m. the event will move to Cool Beans for a caffeine jolt, then back to the NewSouth Bookstore, and the last reader will end at 6 p.m.

On Friday evening, April 20th, the Alabama Book Festival will have its opening reception for the writers who will be on the program Saturday, April 21st. A full poetry track will be featured at the Festival, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. (gates open at 9 a.m.), at Old Alabama Town (Hull and Jefferson streets, six blocks northeast of the fountain).

The NewSouth Bookstore
105 S. Court St.
334-834-3556

The Village Gallery
107 S. Court St.
334-538-0680

Cool Beans
115 Montgomery St.
334-269-3302

— all at Montgomery, AL 36104 —

In From Healing to Hell Wall tell show his father, former Georgia state senator and physician W. Henry Wall, was arrested on federal drug charges and involuntarily subjected to the CIA’s infamous MKULTRA drug experiments. Wall’s father’s trauma and flashbacks affected the entire family, and Wall recounts both his family’s struggle and his own work to clear his father’s name. Much of Wall’s story takes place in his hometown of Blakely.

“We were happy to have Dr. Wall signing his book with us during Peanut Proud,” said Debra Anderson, owner of 3 Diamonds. “His book tells about an important event in his life and in Blakely history, and people seem to be really responding to his book.”

Peanut Proud is an annual event held in Blakely’s historic Courthouse Square. Visit 3 Diamonds online at 3dcbs.net.

Henry Wall’s From Healing to Hell is available from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite bookstore.

In addition to our book A Rare Titanic Family by scholar Julie Williams, which relates the account of her great-uncle Albert Caldwell and his family surviving the disaster, NewSouth is now releasing a special audio podcast in which Caldwell himself talks about his memories of that night in April 1912.

Download survivor Albert Caldwell’s recollections of the Titanic disaster now, free from iTunes.

Caldwell made the recording with his nephew, Bill Romeiser, in the early 1970s. In the podcast, Caldwell discusses how a series of coincidences put he, his wife, and their ten-month-old son on the Titanic, including that originally Caldwell was told there were no seats on the ship but later he was able to secure tickets. He relates how the night before the disaster, the ship happened to have a pastor speaking and praying with travelers. “How little did that happy throng … who were worshipping God at that time,” Caldwell says, “realize that within a few hours, the great majority of them would meet Him.”

When the ship hits the iceberg, Caldwell is initially assured that there’s no danger, but later his family is ushered on deck with the other passengers. Seeking more information about the ship’s condition, Caldwell and his family happen to encounter a half-full lifeboat, saving their lives.

“We pulled away to a distance of perhaps half a mile,” Caldwell recalls, after his lifeboat was in the water, “and watched the Titanic sink. At first glance it seemed unharmed; as I looked toward the front of the vessel I could see that the lower line of portholes ran down into the water. … The last I saw of the Titanic was the stern of the boat outlined against the starry sky, and then with a gentle swish she disappeared from sight.”

Additional information about Caldwell, including how his life changed after surviving the Titanic, can be found in Julie Williams’s aforementioned book, A Rare Titanic Family. Library Journal praises Rare Titanic Family as “a warm biography … related with obvious affection,” and a Christian Science Monitor reader called the book “gripping.” Ben Steelman of the North Carolina Star-News profiled Julie Williams and Rare Titanic Family on his “Bookmarks” blog.

Publishers Weekly included the book in their roundup of Titanic titles, “Still a Night to Remember,” quoting NewSouth publisher Suzanne La Rosa who said Rare Titanic Family “stands out because the author ‘gives voice to the drama such that the human dimensions of the tragedy emerge.’” The New York Times mentioned the book in a similar list on their ArtsBeat blog.

Albert Caldwell’s audio recording can be downloaded from iTunes. A Rare Titanic Family is available in print and ebook formats from NewSouth Books, Amazon.com, or your favorite bookstore.

It’s for these elements that Professor Michael Thomason praises Henrietta McCormick Hill’s A Senator’s Wife Remembers: From the Great Depression to the Great Society, in a new article in the Mobile Press-Register. Hill was the wife of Alabama senator Lister Hill, and her book is compiled from diaries and letters written during her husband’s political career, collected by the Hills’ daughter.

“[Mrs. Hill's] acquaintances were from all across the political spectrum, from the very conservative to Eleanor Roosevelt,” Thomason writes. “Her description of entertaining the first lady and accompanying her on a whirlwind tour of central Alabama is one of the high points of A Senator’s Wife Remembers. She liked people, and it was their personalities and manner that impressed her, perhaps more than their politics.”

Thomason notes that Mrs. Hill’s “life was hardly frivolous; it was real work. For example, she tried to help the mentally ill (at the horribly named Home for the Incurables).”

As modern political battles grow ever more bitter, Thomason points out that Mrs. Hill “is always very complimentary about the people she talks about and is quite proper in what she writes and how she describes her world. This may be the book’s strong suit. It is an honest and clearly-stated view of the world she lived in.” Thomason suggests that the book will be of interest both to general readers and those with an interest in Alabama or American political life, as well as to those studying gender or the role of women in politics.

Read the full article from the Mobile Press-Register.

A Senator’s Wife Remembers is available direct from NewSouth Books, Amazon.com, or your favorite bookseller.

A native of Mobile, Alabama, Frye Gaillard has published numerous works, including Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement that Changed America, which won the Lillian Smith Award, and Watermelon Wine: The Spirit of Country Music, republished by NewSouth Books for its twenty-fifth anniversary. In 2002, he won the NAACP’s Humanitarian award for his writing on civil rights. Gaillard is currently writer in residence at the University of South Alabama.

At the awards ceremony, Gaillard shared a few words about eye-opening experiences during his career. One profound instance involved interviewing the father of a girl murdered in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham and discovering the father’s remarkable sense of forgiveness. Another memorable, but very different, moment occurred while writing the biography of a NASCAR driver, who surprised Gaillard with his passion for reading.

NewSouth will publish Gaillard’s The Books That Mattered: A Reader’s Memoir this fall. Watermelon Wine is available from NewSouth Books, Amazon.com, or your favorite retail or online bookseller. Gaillard is also a contributor to the collection American Crisis, Southern Solutions: From Where We Stand, Promise and Peril.

I cannot claim to have known William Gay well. But I admired him very, very much, and my life was touched by him in more than just an abstract way. Indeed, he blurbed my second book, The Yazoo Blues.

That piece of good luck came about because Middle Tennessee State professor Randy Mackin, director of the Tennessee Literary Project, put me in touch with William, who purposefully made himself difficult to contact.

My relationship with William was brief and almost entirely telephonic. We enjoyed a couple of exceedingly long chats over the telephone, and as a result of those talks, I knew I really liked him and understood how unusual and perhaps how massively significant he was in terms of what, where, and when he was. I always meant to get in the car and go over to Hohenwald, Tennessee, to see William, but I never did.  I should have.

Still, telephone conversations cannot be underestimated. They have sustained the bond of many a friendship for decades. Plus, it is easy to hear that other voice inside a person on the far end of the line that tells us who we are talking to. And when we hear it in that way, I say it is the human analog of a hound-dog’s infallible sense of smell. Therefore, the impressive value I place on William Gay is what any writer might assign if he or she, like me, were equipped with only two marathon telephone calls — lightly reinforced on each occasion by a semi au courant awareness of the life, work, and general gestalt of the man himself. Thank God for Alexander Graham Bell.

Sadly I am not one of those writers who reads everything, keeps up, and constantly reads. People often ask: “What books do you like?” And I answer: “Seinfeld re-runs.” Thus exposed I must go all the way and admit that I was first taken simply by two of William Gay’s titles. The actual titles of the titles.

They are I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down and The Long Home. The words in both reveal a lot about the depth and weather of William’s character. I thought so when I first saw them, that those titles might just be William to a “T.”

The former, a short story that became the title of a book of stories, is, as you know, the opening line of W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues”; and the latter, as you further know, is from the hand of the world’s first known existentialist writer, the primary author of Ecclesiastes. The words that follow are found in the King James Version, Chapter 12:

. . . man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets: Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.

During the 2009 Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, I thought I was going to see William and talk with him a little, and thank him again for what he had given me. But he fell ill in his hotel room right before he was scheduled to appear and had to go back home.

Still, I was certain that pretty soon I would get up early one morning, hop in my 2000 Ford Explorer, and make the pleasant and relatively easy trip from Memphis to Hohenwald to pay him a call. But that is the nature of not doing something a person knows he needs to do. Time passes, and the day arrives when it cannot be done — that day when “man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets” . . . the day when that evening sun has gone down and there will be no more mornings in which to procrastinate.

William Gay and I were close to the same age, both apparent masters of imperfection, Southerners, and writers. And though there are plenty of differences, I felt we were more alike than not — on more than just a few levels. I caught in him the artist who manages, through his art and by his craft, not necessarily to overcome all the minuses but to outfox them enough so that he is able to place upon the table of our world . . . the silver cord and golden bowl of the self.

He died on Thursday, February 23, 2012. But his silver cord is not loosed, his golden bowl is not broken, and his pitcher is not cracked at the fountain — nor is the wheel on the fritz at the cistern. All those unbroken things stand for what he was and what he produced. They are in good order, and we have them at hand. By declaring this, I do not minimize the incomprehensible permanence of death nor the mind-stumping concept of eternity. Not at all.

But though William Gay has gone to that long home, his intellect and talent along with the world he saw and everything that made him who he was — and in some measure who we are, too — he wrote down on paper . . . and now on that in print and also within every cybernated particle of the very electrified air around us, all of it is still here and will last as long as there are readers to receive it. And I may yet make that trip to Hohenwald.

(For more information on William Gay, see his obituary in the Mobile Press Register.)

John Pritchard grew up in the Mississippi Delta, a place of dark and elemental myth that inspired him to write. He currently lives in Memphis, where he has taught college-level English — often in knickers — for most of the last thirty-two years. Barnes and Noble named his debut novel Junior Ray one of their Top Ten Sensational Debut Novels for 2005. NewSouth published the sequel, The Yazoo Blues, in 2008. The unforgettable Junior Ray Loveblood will return for a third time in the forthcoming Sailing to Alluvium.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution praises Fall Line by Joe Samuel Starnes, recently published by NewSouth Books, as “a quiet dazzler of a new novel” in a review to appear in the Sunday, March 4 issue. The review describes the story about the creation of a man-made dam and the destruction of a rural community as “a love letter to every rural hamlet that has disappeared when the good of the many outweighed the good of the few.” The novel is also favorably compared to the works of legendary Southern authors:

Of all the contemporary Southern novels today that draw comparisons to Faulkner and O’Connor, Starnes’s tale may be one of the few that deserves them. The unsentimental but glorious world seen through the eyes of a “half mutt half chow” fearful of man and guns is pure Faulkner. Elmer, condemning the bigwigs around him for “their fondness for impure women and liquor and money and the love of their own images reflected in shiny glass” echoes the righteous, scathing hatred of Hazel Motes (Wise Blood).

Atlanta Magazine’s Teresa Weaver also praised Fall Line, calling it an “affectionate, eloquent story of loss and survival” in the February 2 issue.

Author Starnes has been busy with interviews, speaking recently to Rowan University Radio and Tennis.com. Starnes described the gestation of his novel, which develop from an idea he conceived in 1989 when reporting on earthquake tremors associated with a large man-made lake in Milledgeville, Georgia. Starnes recounted this story at a reading from Fall Line at the Wolfgram Memorial Library at the main campus of Widener University on January 26.

Starnes will next be in Georgia on Friday, April 27, when he will read from Fall Line at the Old Governor’s Mansion in Milledgeville at 6:00 pm.

Fall Line is also featured on goodreads.com and was included on Deep South magazine’s fall/winter reading list.

The trailer for Fall Line is also available on YouTube.

Fall Line is available in print and all ebook formats from Amazon.com, NewSouth Books, or your favorite bookstore.