Joe Louis Reed started fighting for his version of justice in the 1950s, right out of the U.S. Army, and he did not stop even in his last weeks before retirement after 42 years at the Alabama Education Association.
The 73-year-old associate executive secretary of the AEA is retiring Saturday along with AEA Executive Secretary Paul Hubbert, ending one of the most powerful political duo acts in Alabama history.
AEA Attorney Gregory Graves was elected Reed's successor and AEA financial analyst and former state Finance Director Henry Mabry was named Hubbert's successor.
"I like a few things, I like to hunt," Reed said in a Dec. 13 interview. "I'll do my memoirs and be sure we build (the AEA) and help it what I can."Here's what his memoirs will include: born black in 1938 in Conecuh County in the deepest of the Deep South, serves in an integrated U.S. Army, returns to a segregated South, joins the growing civil rights movement, gets involved in sit-ins, and is aided by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who had led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott that ended segregated public transportation.
In 1969, Reed merged his all-black Alabama State Teachers Association and the all-white AEA into an AEA of about 30,000 members. Today the organization is about 100,000 strong.
While some talked about filing federal lawsuits over real or perceived injustices, Reed filed and won landmark lawsuits. They included legislative redistricting and political action committee funding.
Just this month a federal judge, ruled in favor of the Alabama Democratic Conference that Reed chairs over a law that prohibited the ADC's political action committee from getting other PAC money for voter programs.
Reed didn't start the ADC that was formed to support the 1960 Democratic Party presidential nominee, John F. Kennedy.
But he has led the organization for 40 years.
He bucked governors, filed numerous lawsuits in federal court, helped promote education causes at the AEA and created black legislative districts. "I've been a blessed man going from a rigid segregated society when no one pretended to a time when we at least pretend there's justice and fairness to everybody," he said.
Reed hacked a lot of people off because he was successful, but the AEA protected him from economic and job reprisal. "I was employed and paid by teachers, and I had economic security from day one, and everybody knew that," he said.
Former Gov. Don Siegelman called Reed a political dinosaur because he represented the old style of politics that required candidates to appear before the ADC for endorsements.
Thomas Vocino, a retired political science professor at Auburn University Montgomery, said Reed deserves credit for "doing the hard work organizing the black vote in Alabama in the 1960s and '70s."
Reed wouldn't endorse U.S. Rep. Artur Davis, D-Ala., the state's first black major party gubernatorial candidate, who stood a chance of being nominated in 2010. Davis wouldn't appear before an ADC screening committee.
"No Democrat in their right mind would reject a black organization," Reed said.
The 1969 merger with the AEA made the whole stronger than the parts and brought blacks into the mainstream of Alabama political society, Vocino said.
But Reed didn't accommodate younger, emerging black leaders who formed the Alabama New South Coalition around the late Sen. Michael Figures, D-Mobile, and Sen. Hank Sanders, D-Selma, and the Jefferson County Citizens Coalition around then-Birmingham Mayor Richard Arrington Jr.
"Over time, his power has waned, and I think it would be fair to say other organizations have more influence over the black vote but he is still a player until his retirement," Vocino said.
Reed shrugs it off, including attacks from the late Gov. George Wallace. "I told him (at a meeting) what we thought about him," he said.
Reed was chairman of the Alabama State University board of trustees and thwarted gubernatorial efforts to put whites on the board. "That was a no-no," Reed said of Fob James' effort to put the late Montgomery Mayor Emory Folmar on the board.
Athens State University government and public affairs professor Jess Brown said Hubbert and Reed created a bi-racial organization.
They "recognized long before others the impact of the newly enfranchised black vote stemming from the Voting Rights act of 1965," Brown said.
Reed graduated from Conecuh County Training School in 1956 and joined the integrated Army. He worked in a MASH outfit in post-Korean War Korea. On the way back to Alabama, his train entered Arkansas and returned him to segregated life.
"What happened was on a bus we stopped to eat and the white recruits ... went to the front of the restaurant and the black recruits went to the back window. That was on our way in," Reed said. "When we came back to Seattle on a boat, all we blacks and whites rode together. Then when we got from Missouri to Arkansas to be discharged at Fort Chaffee, the black soldiers had to get on separate seats, in different portions of the train, segregated. The troop trains, when they got to Arkansas, they divided us."
At Alabama State, Reed worked for 25 cents an hour, got involved in the sit-in movement and was put on probation. But he graduated.
Reed is referred to as Dr. Reed, although his doctorate is an honorary one. Two years after graduation, Reed became executive secretary of the then-black Alabama State Teachers Association. He was 26.
No sooner than he was hired, merger talks began with the all-white and politically dormant AEA. "We negotiated a merger, put it together and I brought a new dynamic of massive litigation," Reed said. "We just took the position we going to sue and we started litigating for our members."
A redistricting lawsuit created a quirk with back-to-back legislative elections in 1982 and 1983.
The lawsuit increased the number of blacks in the Legislature.
In his later years, Reed was defeated in a re-election bid to the Montgomery City Council and he was not reappointed to the ASU board of trustees.
He even suffered the humility of having his name removed from ASU's Joe Reed Acadome basketball arena and all-purpose facility. "That was jealousy on the part of some board members, and secondly they wanted to spend money they didn't have," he said.
As he looks back at almost 50 years on the front line, Reed said he's proud of the successful merger of black and white teacher organizations.
"We demonstrated the AEA was for everybody," Reed said. "Paul and I worked together to try to make things happen. Over the last 40 years, nothing could divide us but race. If we can keep race out of it, we'll do well."
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