ELMA, Ala. - Ask Joe Smitherman to defend himself, ask him what a former segregationist is doing still in power in this majority black city at the heart of the civil rights movement, and Smitherman will appeal to the good name of his former adversary, John Lewis, Democratic congressman from Georgia.
On March 7, 1965, Lewis was leading 600 freedom marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma when they were attacked by state troopers wielding billy clubs, cattle prods, and tear gas. He got his head cracked open that day, which came to be known as Bloody Sunday.
Smitherman, in those days, was holed up in his City Hall office, trying to figure out how to quell the uprising of blacks demanding their right to vote. He once referred to Martin Luther King Jr. as ''Martin Luther Coon,'' though he says it was a slip of the tongue.
Today, the mayor is still sitting in his cluttered office, adorned with, among other things, several photographs of himself with former Alabama governor George Wallace. Now, though, Lewis is saying reasonably nice things about him.
''Joe Smitherman is not the same person who called me a troublemaker and an agitator. I think he's grown,'' Lewis said in a recent interview. ''There's one thing about Southern politicians: They can count, and Smitherman can count, too. After the Voting Rights Act, some of them got religion.''
Smitherman certainly can count, and does talk as if he got religion now that he professes to be a reformed segregationist.
Those who know him say Smitherman, 70, is a shrewd politician who has done what it takes to stay in power for nine terms, even though more than 60 percent of Selma's voters are black and the city is mired in poverty and unemployment.
But tomorrow, the mayor faces what some say is his most difficult contest yet: a runoff election with a black businessman, James Perkins. A win for Perkins, at least symbolically, will usher in a new era for Selma.
This time, also, the vote will be held under the watchful eyes of a group of unofficial election monitors who have come to Selma because critics charge that past mayoral elections were tainted by fraud at the ballot box.
One of those monitors is Kevin Peterson of the United Way of Massachusetts Bay. He said many black voters in Selma are afraid to vote their preference, or vote at all.
''Smitherman has been an intimidating force in the community for over three decades, and that alone leads to the reticence of people in the African-American community,'' said Peterson, former director of Part of the Solution, a voter advocacy group based in Boston.
Still, observers give Smitherman a better-than-even chance of holding on for a 10th term. While outsiders find this nearly impossible to understand, Smitherman's seemingly endless tenure makes sense in Alabama. His strategy for survival - changing with the times - is straight out of ''the George Wallace playbook,'' in the words of one analyst.
Supporters say he's done well by a city stuck in the poverty-ridden Blackbelt - named for the color of its soil, not its population. Political observers argue that the black community in Selma has never been united enough, or active enough, to mount a serious challenge.
But Smitherman says that blacks have no reason to challenge him, that he understands their struggles.
''I used to be looking out at the marches; I would be looking mean and tough at City Hall, trying to show defiance,'' Smitherman said as he chain-smoked Winston cigarettes. ''But I'd wonder at times if I was black what would I have done. I would have been out there marching, too.''
Smitherman's excuses for his past bigotry are disarmingly frank. Apparently, he defines a politician as something distinct from a leader.
''Politicians change their tune with the times. I changed mine,'' said Smitherman. ''I was playing a political role.''
When Smitherman ran for mayor in 1964, race was barely on his mind. He wanted to pave city streets and attract new jobs. But then, civil rights leaders chose Selma as one of their main staging grounds for massive demonstrations in favor of voting rights. Bloody Sunday and the murders of activists such as Jimmie Lee Jackson and the Rev. James Reeb sparked passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Smitherman said his own humble, Depression-era beginnings give him sympathy for blacks. The youngest of six children, he grew up poor, with a sharecropper father who died when he was an infant and a mother who succumbed to tuberculosis when he was 12. Smitherman still remembers the powdered potatoes and barley bread the family got from public assistance, and the shame he felt when middle-class fathers would not let their daughters date him.
He was an appliance salesman when he decided to ''make something'' of himself and run for office. The modest issues that concerned Smitherman then - roads, town services - are still essentially his issues. His newspapers ads for tomorrow's election boast of cheap water rates, back door garbage service twice a week, and a good recreational program.
It's a platform that works well with his main constituency, the white population, which votes for Smitherman almost 100 percent. ''He's a great fellow; he takes care of garbage and city streets,'' said Milton Godwin, 82.
Smitherman takes pride in having hired nine black department heads, a black schools superintendent, and a black police chief. But he also tells whites they will be under siege if his opponent wins.
''These people are trying to make the town all black, and that's a bad thing,'' Smitherman said. ''It used to be all white; that was wrong, too, but we need some white inclusion.''
To stay in office, of course, Smitherman has had to earn some black support as well. And he has. ''I don't see anything that he's done bad,'' said Police Chief Earnest Tate. ''He's brought the town a long way.''
That attitude infuriates civil rights activists who remember the Selma of the 1960s. Lillie Brown, 69, says she sees little progress in the town since Bloody Sunday, when she was stepped on by a trooper's horse.
''Every time I come back to Selma, I ask, `What done change?''' said Brown, who makes frequent visits from Birmingham.
Certainly, inequality persists. For example, while the city's overall unemployment rate is 18 percent, it's 27 percent for blacks. The public scohols are virtually all black. ''We still have the same fights we had in the '60s,'' said Joanne Bland of the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute in Selma.
''I'm beginning to think there's something wrong with Selma, to keep a man that's done some ugly things to us,'' Brown said.
Part of the reason for that has been divisiveness among blacks. This year, the black candidate who was eliminated in the first round of voting, Yusuf Salaam, is accusing Perkins of anti-Muslim bigotry. Activists, however, are trying to unite black voters behind a simple slogan: ''Joe Gotta Go.''
Yet D'Linell Finley, a political scientist at the University of Alabama, said the state has had enough blacks in public office for voters to know that ''black folks are not going to somehow magically get treated fair'' just because they have a black mayor.
Smitherman's opponents say they want a chance to see for themselves and that the mayor has denied them that chance through dirty tricks. In last month's general election, he came in behind Perkins at the polls, but pulled ahead after winning more than three-quarters of the 1,500 absentee ballots. The fact that 1,500 absentee ballots were cast in a city with 21,000 registered voters raised suspicions.
Citizens have complained that elderly relatives' absentee ballots were taken from them. Others went to the polls only to be told they had already voted.
''Vote fraud is not uncommon in Alabama,'' said Carl Grafton, a specialist on state politics at Auburn University in Montgomery. ''Particularly in rural counties, there are examples of vote buying, miscounts, and on and on.''
Certainly, Smitherman is a man who loves politics and can't see a life without it. He says he could have been governor, if not for Bloody Sunday. And he says time will show he did well by Selma.
''I'll have some black pallbearers when I die, I'm sure,'' he says.
