In Love with Defeat. H. Brandt Ayers
with, “She’s going to jail.” Intrepid reporter that I was, I entered the elevator with them, and found myself belly-to-belly with an ax murderess. My congealed brain could produce only the question, “Are you afraid?” Matter of factly, she replied, “No. Why should I be?” She had me there. We chatted through the bars for a few minutes, but I didn’t have the experience and composure to get her to talk much about her life. Viola—ever mysterious and taciturn—pleaded guilty, was a model prisoner in Julia Tutwiler Prison, and returned home after 10 years to lead a quiet life until she died in 2000.
The saga of the prince began with a cryptic note in my typewriter from the city editor, Cody Hall: “Talk to African prince in hospital with kidney stones.” “A prince,” I thought, “How do you talk to an actual prince, especially African royalty in the segregated South?” Dr. Phil Noble, minister of the First Presbyterian Church, was already there in the administrator’s office when I arrived. Soon a dignified young West African, Majuba Lapola Setewayo, eldest son of the Emir of Upper Volta, joined us. Regal in bearing, he tapped a cigarette on a gold lighter and lit it, sending thick tusk-like streams of white smoke curling from his nostrils. He explained that he was an exchange student at Stanford and had been taking the train to Atlanta for research at Morehouse University when he had a kidney-stone attack as the train approached Anniston. He was feeling better when we met, and told intimate tales of other African rulers such as the anti-imperialist first president of an independent Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah. Writing the story, I was acutely conscious that Prince Setewayo would one day rule another nation and I wanted to make a good impression—for Alabama and for the United States. Then, a few days later, Phil Noble called with shocking news. The prince was an impostor. Majuba Lapola Setewayo was in fact Eddie Lee Woods of Waycross, Georgia. He was a drug addict who to get a fix faked kidney stones by pricking a finger to show traces of blood in his urine samples. He was a talented actor. One of his many successful performances earned him a police escort from O’Hare Airport to a Chicago hospital. Under my shamefaced byline, the Star’s second story about him began: “The African prince, who was paid court briefly in Anniston last week, actually is only the Prince of Phonies.”
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As far as I could see, the Old South was under no immediate threat in 1959, when my search for a “real” job—away from the sheltering family—led me to Raleigh, North Carolina. But it was not without a sense of adventure and its sibling, anxiety, that I headed down Quintard Avenue pulling a U-Haul-It filled with furniture from Mother’s attic. I had landed a job as a political reporter for the now-defunct Raleigh Times, an afternoon paper owned by the Daniels family that was a training ground for at least one other publisher of a family paper, Arthur Sulzberger of the New York Times. A gubernatorial election was going on up there, and the issue was the same as it had been—which one of the segregationist candidates was the better man? Present, however, was a North Carolina difference that wasn’t immediately apparent to me at the time: a patina of moderation covered the race issue there that would have melted in the blazing racial rhetoric of Alabama and Mississippi.
Once in Raleigh and situated in a one-bedroom apartment in Cameron Village, a real estate development surrounding one of the South’s earliest suburban shopping centers, I began to sniff around, looking for girls and absorbing the different character of the place. There were three things afoot about which I knew little or nothing. A now-celebrated research park was forming in a wasteland bordered by Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, a crucible where government, business and education came together in a chemistry that produced a fabulous sprouting of wealth and social enrichment. A non-hysterical, undefiant roadbed of laws, lubricated by moderate rhetoric, was allowing social revolution to overturn the established order without Alabama’s blood and fury. And finally, the state was making sense of its scattered colleges and universities by assigning accountability for the planning and coordination of the system to a single entity, the Board of Higher Education.
The Daniels family, which owned the Raleigh Times and the famous News and Observer—Frank Sr., Frank Jr., and most assuredly, Jonathan, a former press secretary to President Truman—were Carolina natives, steeped in its culture and politics. They knew what was going on. They had been cussed and discussed by Tarheels since the time of Josephus Daniels, the founder of the old “News and Disturber,” a lifelong progressive Democrat who had been Wilson’s Secretary of the Navy and later ambassador to Mexico for Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who had been Daniels’s assistant secretary at the Navy Department). Mr. Josephus and my grandfather were contemporaries as Bryan Democrats in the late nineteenth century and the Danielses have been friends of our family for three generations, prominent in the network of a dozen or so moderate-to-liberal Southern papers.
As a pea-green reporter for the Times, I could see clearly about six feet in front of me. Unaware of the labors of gubernatorial and legislative commissions, and what in time their labor would bring forth, I had only a vague sense that North Carolina and Alabama were not the same. They were, in fact, remarkably different. Geology and history combined in North Carolina to create a culture defined by a business-political oligarchy so unashamed of its more humble past as to be, in Jonathan Daniels’s phrase, a militant mediocrity, yet one that was a model of progressivism in the South. Alabama’s more numerous land barons continually fought to control affairs of the state, subduing the white yeomanry and working class by scaring them with the threat of taxes and black domination. The result was an almost anti-progress electorate, a plurality which was willing to accept things as they are, whose buried resentments flare only when breached by meddlesome government, do-gooders, and liberals. Alabama‘s culture is one of fighting-mad resignation.
North Carolina did not regard itself as a kind of agricultural Versailles, the self-image held by the haughty “plantaristocracy” of South Carolina and Virginia. Neither did it have the nouveaux land-riche pretensions of Alabama’s Black Belt plantation society and the Delta planter culture of Mississippi. It had no reason for such pomposity, because its “black belt”—soil suitable for large-scale cultivation by slave labor—was a comparatively little patch in the northeast corner of the state. In 1860, North Carolina had 744 plantations (fifty slaves or more) while Alabama had 1,687 and Mississippi had 1,516. If you think of slave labor as the human equivalent of thousands of six-figure modern combines, imagine the capital investment that vanished with the end of the Civil War. North Carolina didn’t lose so much in the Lost Cause and so the state was not quite as enthralled by the dry bones of past graces and glories. It might have taken some pleasure from its snobbish neighbors being brought low. The lofty disdain of its two adjoining states, however, wasn’t lost on my wife’s family, which came from the plantation patch.
The Ehringhaus clan took pride in having an ancestor who served on George Washington’s staff during the Revolution. In 1932, it gave the state another in a line of “education governors,” J. C. B. Ehringhaus, my wife’s grandfather. If not unique, Ehringhaus was an unusual candidate who promised during the campaign that if it took raising taxes to keep North Carolina schools open during the Depression, he would raise taxes. From a tax-toxic Alabama perspective that was a damn fool thing to promise and Alabama would have set him down. Tarheels elected him anyway. The new governor found keeping that promise hard going. Discovering that increases in corporate franchise and income taxes wouldn’t cover school expenses, he turned to a sales tax. In a 1934 address to the Medical Society, he fixed on the results of the battle: “After trying to find any form of tax that would eliminate the danger . . . we went to the much ‘cussed’ and discussed sales tax, and whatever may be said in criticism . . . , we have saved the schools of North Carolina for the little children.” Another address piped into schoolrooms statewide would be remembered for its surprise ending, a notorious example of the misplaced pause. Emphasizing the use of every resource in a time of scarcity, he concluded, “Now children, remember, every night when your momma puts that supper plate in front of you, I want you to eat every bean (pause) and pea on your plate.” Necessity being the mother of invention, a more lasting and significant claim to the title “education governor” rests on his consolidation of the state’s universities as a Depression inspired, cost-cutting measure. Later governors would thank him.
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