Mac Secrest is a modest man. That is apparent from his memoirs, Curses and Blessings: Life and Evolution in the Twentieth Century South.
He devotes his book largely to two themes, neither concerned with himself: One is the heroic struggle of members of his family, especially his mother, to live full lives despite the effects of clinical depression. The other is an extraordinary range of affectionate memories of family, friends, and chance acquaintances. The chance acquaintances are especially intriguing, and range from the famous - like Richard Nixon, who as a young law student let Mac crash with him while visiting the Duke campus, or a young boxer who would later change his name to Muhammed Ali, next to whom Mac sat on an airplane - to people in pre-World War II Monroe, North Carolina who would be totally forgotten if Mac did not tell their tales.
But Mac cannot tell these tales without recalling things he has done. And even his modesty cannot prevent the simple telling of the tales from revealing that he too has the e normous heroism he so much admires in others.
Nowhere is this more evident than the huge if unsung role he played in averting a tragic bloodbath in Selma, Alabama at the time of the 1965 demonstrations that changed America, a role Mac modestly tries to downplay.
Mac would probably laugh at the idea that he is "modest." He is not shy, something clear on even the briefest acquaintance - and I, now 54, met him when I was 16. He is also self-analytical and has spent a lot of time trying to understand what Carl Jung would have called his "dark side." But if he is not modest in the sense of being shy about displaying his wit and humor and sense of fun, he is modest in not exaggerating the importance of his own contribution to things. Which is why, in an age of shameless self-promoters which he most definitely is not, he will probably remain an unsung hero. But a hero he is, and I will try to "sing" some of the reasons why.
Mac grew up in a small Southern town where he cherished numerous friends, white and black, poor and rich, cultured and unlettered, female and male. Whether it was this background that led Lyndon Johnson to select him as a founder of the Community Relations Service to mediate racial disputes in a South in the 1960s, or his prodigious talents and achievements - award-winning newspaper editor, Harvard scholar, speechwriter to John F. Kennedy - he does not say. (Here again, modesty dominates; Mac scarcely mentions the period during which he was a scholar at Harvard, except when necessary to make sense of chronology.) But whatever the reason, Lyndon Johnson, who did not suffer fools gladly, thought him the right man for the job, along with distinguished former Florida Governor Leroy Collins, and in this role, sent him on an Air Force jet to Selma, Alabama in early 1965 to keep an already bloody and tense situation from degenerating into utter tr agedy. In Selma, Mac's small town Southern background and ability to appreciate people of different backgrounds helped him establish rapport across the tense racial divide.
One of the people with whom Mac established a bond was Martin Luther King. The bond was established in part by commonplace things far less intellectual than their shared Christian values or liberal values. Mac relates how he and King shared their experiences as Southerners living Up North and finding how much they preferred Southern "soul food" over Northern cooking.
Even more telling is a story Mac does not relate, but which his sister told me years ago, about how Mac refused to let even King dish it out to him without dishing back, and how this helped establish a bond. King, said he didn't like Secrest's Southern pronunciation of certain words, which he thought carried overtones of the way racists spoke. Mac shot back that he didn't care for some of King's pronunciations, either, but that didn't keep him from liking and respecting King and shouldn't stop King from respecting and working with him.
King laughed. He probably liked being stood up to. Like Gandhi, he probably was impatient with people who tried to treat him as a living icon or saint, and probably was more comfortable with men who were willing to treat him neither as an enemy nor a saint, but talk to him as one man to another, and even tease him a bit about his foibles.
However the bond was established, when the time came to approve a compromise settlement that let the voting rights marches go on without bloodshed, in a way that allowed the Alabama authorities to save face, it was to Mac Secrest that Martin Luther King turned just before he made the decision. "Do you really think I ought to do this, Secrest?" he asked, and it was only after being assured by Mac Secrest that he should that King decided to approve the deal.
But the deal required the approval of another strong personality, Governor George Wallace, and it was here that Secrest's ability and willingness to use his Southern background to influence fellow Southerners was even more remarkable. Secrest, like Wallace, was a Methodist, and some of his family had been prominent Methodist clergy. Through them, Secrest had a connection dating back to his boyhood with the Methodist bishop of Alabama. Though Se crest makes clear his own skepticism about some aspects of religion and of the church, he also understood the vital role that religion and the church played in Southern communities, black and white alike. And so he sought out his bishop friend - or "played the Bishop card," as he himself puts it - to intercede with George Wallace to let the deal go through.
Mac was also a hero before and after Selma as a small-town Southern newspaper editor championing civil rights. It may be in part because of this role that he was chosen as a mediator for places like Selma.
With the same modesty he brings to his work as a mediator, Mac downplays the heroism he showed as editor and publisher of the Cheraw (South Carolina) Chronicle. Ever one to accentuate the positive, Mac emphasizes the good people he knew in Cheraw and the civic projects less marked by controversy he worked with others to promote. But he also mentions in passing, while speaking of other matters, having guns fired into his home, and being disappointed that only two local pastors sided with him on the civil rights issue during the decade and a half he not only edited but owned and published the paper. And he tells - a great story, and a funny one, from a man who has the Southern gift of telling a good story - of how Strom Thurmond once offered him a ride into town from the airpo r t and then, discovering who he was, left him standing in the parking lot as he drove off without him. It is clear from the little hints he lets slip out that it took courage to stand up for the voiceless when there were many dangerous and unscrupulous people who wanted the voiceless to remain silent.
What makes Mac's courage in this regard all the more remarkable is that he had young kids and a wife, to whom he clearly was an is tenderly devoted, and was also the mainstay of an extended family that relied on him for help in many crises. Surely Mac worried that his loved ones could be victims, and worried that if anything happened to him, they would somehow have to weather these storms without him. Knowing he must have had this awareness makes his courage all the more remarkable.
Mac might protest that there are plenty of others who were brave besides him. He might say that his wife Ann, knowing the dangers they all faced and who stood by him, deserves as much credit as he. If he did say this, I would not disagree. I myself know other unsung heroes and heroines from the same era. Mac's sister Lil, for one, who not only showed the same kind of courage as a small town school teacher in standing up for civil rights and for African-Americans, but who suffered professional reprisals for standing up against restraint of free speech by the superintendent of her own schools. Or my parents, who lived in the same county as Lil and who took the same kind of stand, and like Mac, attracted gunshots at the house - a fact they successfully concealed from us kids so as not to worry us. I heard the sounds but when I asked what they were, I'd always be told it was just a car, backfiring.
But the fact that there were other heroes - and had there not been many heroes in the Sixties, black and white, sung and unsung, America might be a very different and less blessed country today - does not reduce in the slightest the heroism of those who were. The fact that someone else in your town or another Southern town hundreds of miles away might also face gunshots, or nasty gossip, or be favored with that last refuge of a coward, anonymous threatening letters, did not in the least reduce the feeling you got in the pit of your stomach when those things happened to you.
One of the lessons that stands out to me from Mac's book is the universality of human experience. Though at the beginning he talks about himself as a child being "set apart" because of unusual characteristics other kids held against him, in some ways, Mac makes you feel you are reading Everyman's story when you read about his life. Not that this is what every man is like, but it is what every man could be like. Certainly Mac doesn't suggest he had any mystic experiences or any superhero gifts.
And this to me is what makes him especially a hero - and a hero worth identifying with. Reading Mac tell his story, you feel that we can all be heroes, if when push comes to shove we decide to stand up for what's right rather than following the path of least resistance. That is what Mac did, not just in Selma or in Cheraw but over and over again in life, whether standing up for a family member being ill-treated or ignored by hospital staff, or even as a child standing up to his father for a beloved pet who might have caused a mess.
We all can be heroes. And we all need heroes, to help us discover we have the makings of the heroic in us, and to inspire us to let those qualities shine. Mac Secrest is one of mine. As is his sister Lil he describes with so much appreciation and empathy, and as are my parents, who shared her struggles for what was decent and humane in Scotland County, North Carolina. And heroes not just because of the heroic share in dramatic events like the civil rights struggle, but in bringing no less respect and quiet heroism to daily struggles no one will ever celebrate, like the care of a sick relative or seeing the good in a quirky neighbor others might make fun of.
Mac Secrest will probably remain an unsung hero. Certainly, I don't think he will ever think of himself as a hero, or describe himself as such to others. George MacDonald says, in Phantastes, "He who would be a hero, will scarcely be a man." The heroic consists in concentrating, not on what your own inner qualities are, but on what needs to be done. Just as a batting champion keeps his eye on the ball rather than daydreaming about his batting statistics, so moral heroism consists in seeing other human beings as worthy of respect and figuring out what it takes to treat them accordingly, not in trying to live up to your image of a hero. Mac Secrest has kept his focus on not only treating other human beings with great respect, but on seeing them clearly enough to see how much there is to respect in people he has met others might have taken for granted. As the Episcopal Sunday School hymn about the "saints of God" says, " you can meet them in school, on th e street, in the store, [or even] in the house next door," and the same is true of heroes.
Mac Secrest is one of my heroes. Perhaps not least of all, because he sees the heroic in many other people who are heroes to him, and who might be wholly unsung, if he had not seen their heroism. But along the way, he quietly can't help letting a little of his own heroism show. Giving me hope that I may, when the times call for heroism, respond in a way not unworthy of his example, and that of my other heroes. And so can you, Reader.
Drill Deeper:
Bruce's essay is certainly very complimentary and nice, and I appreciate it, but it should be received with a certain grain of salt, or lots of grains of salt.
I had completely forgotten the language exchange that Dr. King and I had in 1965 that Lil recalled and Bruce mentioned. But I do remember it clearly now.
He thought I pronounced Negro carelessly ("nigra," as was common in the South then) and I told him he and most of his followers, all southerners, sounded much the same but there was another word which he consistently mispronounced and suggested we say it correctly and spell it out phonetically five times out loud together, which we did and he laughed.
I told him i would do better about Nigra and think phonetically, Knee-Grow, before i ever said it again, and proceeded to do so five times, and again he laughed.
All the while time was awasting, the crowds grew larger, and Andrew Young and I became increasingly nervous. But King was not nervous in the least...as cool as could be and in no hurry. Maybe he'd already reached the mountain top and seen the promised land.
Posted by: Mac. Secrest | 10/05/2007 at 11:04 AM