When he was a boy, Judge John Trice Nixon’s mother Anne Nixon told him to stand up for what he believed in regardless of the consequences.
In 1960, John Nixon and his bride went to rural Alabama to work for social change, pointed south by his “moral compass” and following his mother’s advice. He was the city attorney of Anniston, not far from Possum Trot and his father’s father’s plantation, where two dozen families of tenant farmers, white and black, worked the land.
Judge Nixon’s daughter Mignon Nixon ’79 says “The most important thing to understand about John is the profound influence of his parents in his life.”
His father, Professor H.C. Nixon, devoted his life to fighting for the rights of poor Southerners like these on the family farm. He wanted to help tenant farmers move “from serfdom to yeomanry.” After he had to leave Tulane University, where he chaired the History Department, because he stood up for what he believed in, Professor Nixon came to Nashville and taught at Vanderbilt, enrolling his son John in second grade at Peabody Demonstration School.
So after graduating from Harvard College and from Vanderbilt Law School, he went to Alabama. “I hated the injustice,” John Nixon said, describing Alabama in the early 1960’s. His work for justice put him in touch with black leaders, in meetings that sometimes had to occur under cover of darkness. Soon this work attracted the attention of the U.S. Attorney General, Robert Kennedy.
As Mignon explains, “In 1964, John became a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, which meant that the federal government was able to send a white Southerner to the Deep South to prosecute its most sensitive cases. Most of the time he was on the road. It was only years later when I visited those places with him that I really began to understand that he was routinely risking his safety going into these small towns all alone, staying in the local motel and eating at the local greasy spoon, completely unprotected and known to all. He went about this with great serenity and humility.”
In March, 1965 he was sent from Washington, where he was working for the Justice Department, to Selma, Alabama, where Martin Luther King, Jr. seemed in danger of being assassinated. Flying south, John wondered “What can I do about that?”
But in Selma, there on the street was Anniston’s KKK head, whom John Nixon had prosecuted for shooting into a black church. He told the F.B.I. of the man’s suspicious presence in Selma.
John Nixon remained in Alabama for 125 days, serving as “something of a go-between” for the white and black leaders. He was there until the Voting Rights Act passed in August. He went to Camden, where no black people were registered to vote. Young people, mainly high school students, attempting a peaceful march had been “knocked around and mistreated.”
“I talked to the mayor and the black leaders and explained as best I could the first amendment of the Constitution of the United States and the right to assemble and to petition one’s government,” said Judge Nixon. He took a parade permit request for a 600 person march to the mayor.
“The mayor gritted his teeth and said, ‘They better have 600 and I’m going to count them, and if they don’t have 600 they can’t march.’ They did march, and I headed back to Selma, pleased with what I had accomplished.” He had done as his mother commanded, standing up for what he believed in.
Driving back to Selma, “I said to myself this is April 9, 1965, the 100th anniversary of Lee’s surrender, and I am the great-grandson of 2 Confederate soldiers, and what better way to celebrate. It was moving to see the courageous black people of Alabama turning this nation into a democracy. What they did resulted in the 1965 Voting Rights Act and resulted in people in the U.S. being registered to vote, not being denied the vote because they were the descendants of slaves. I got to be a small part of that. The Congressional district that Selma is in, once represented by a white racist, is now represented by a young black man who is a graduate of Harvard College. Hands that once picked cotton are now picking Congressmen.”
“Go for the goosebumps,” Judge John Nixon said to the young people in the audience that night. “Try to make a difference in the world. Have fun while you’re doing it.”
