Artur Davis remembers Redding Pitt: 'The loss is ours'

Artur Davis

By Artur Davis, who served as a member of the United States House of Representatives for Alabama's 7th congressional district from 2003 to 2011.

One of Alabama's most unvarnished idealists is gone now. That is another way of saying that Redding Pitt has died.

He happened to be the public figure I knew the longest, starting with the job he offered me as an Assistant US Attorney after a two minute phone call. He was the first human being to say to me, "you ought to aim at Congress in a few years." We also "had history", as they say, and our interactions were complex to both of us. But for all of my limitations in understanding him personally, I knew this much from our shared history: Redding Pitt clung to a hopefulness about citizenship and public life. It sustained him when his ambitions stalled, it tempered him when he had power.

There was always something faintly sad about the trajectory of Redding Pitt's career. The irony of his life was that the goals he wanted seemed devalued when they actually came true. The US Attorney's appointment he maneuvered so diligently to win ended up being neither a springboard for him politically nor much of a platform to reshape justice in Alabama. If you knew Redding then, you knew that his dream was not the governors' office but Bill Baxley's old job of Attorney General: and for Pitt, it was not the title but the sheer honor of what Baxley had done, from reviving cold cases against segregationist murderers, to unmasking bribers and money changers in the state capital, to providing a launching pad for the best young black lawyers in Alabama during the seventies.

It was not to be. For Redding, being US Attorney often meant a succession of bureaucracy in all its dullness, administrating and not crusading. The secret was that on at least three occasions I knew, Redding passed on the very prosecutions that could have built a statewide profile, and he declined them for the defensible reason that slippery ethics don't always make out the elements of a crime. He did not embrace tearing apart lives and letting the jury sort it out.  When he left after six highly competent, but relatively anonymous years, he looked to me a little liberated; but as a matter of strategy, he had failed to capitalize on his opportunity.

Alabama Democratic Party Chairman Redding Pitt is shown in Tuskegee, Ala., Aug. 6, 2004. (AP Photo/Haraz Ghanbari, file) (HARAZ GHANBARI)

Then he took over the Democratic Party in Alabama. Again, Redding knew what he meant to make of the job. His role model was ex-chairman Robert Vance, who was determined to rip the Wallace shadow from behind Alabama's Democratic Party. You could lunch with Redding in 2002 and get an ear full of what a meritocratic, biracial Alabama politics would look like. What Pitt found instead was a party reeling from investigations and defeat and bills that needed paying. And cruelest for the idealist in Redding Pitt, at just about the same time the Alabama Democratic Party became thoroughly, unabashedly integrated, it started losing.

Politics should matter enough to hurt. For Redding Pitt it did: in one lifetime, he saw Alabama advance, then stop in its tracks, and then start to go in reverse. Redding's fondest war story was of the day he shook Robert Kennedy's hand in 1968 at the University of Alabama and promised to organize the colleges in the state for RFK's presidential run. He knew, and it hurt him, that much of the last generation of young idealists in Alabama have already pulled up their stakes and left.

The hard truth is that you can search the state's last thirty years, and find precious few men and women who have built careers on the value that politics and power can be noble. That means that the Redding Pitts of the world are not being re-generated. The loss is ours.

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