Another Side of Splendor


by

Monday, July 12, 2010


From Sean Howe, friend of Comics Comics, comes an unexpected discovery:

Detroit, 1963: Alberta Hunter, black, and Walter Stovall, white, arrive in town, five days after unsuccessfully attempting a marriage in Ohio, and seven days after graduating from the University of Georgia. At the University, Hunter and classmate Hamilton Holmes had been the first two black students accepted for enrollment, a desegregation that had been covered extensively by Calvin Trillin in The New Yorker. Now, before they themselves settle in New York City, Hunter and Stovall go before a Detroit judge. They’re accompanied by a young white couple, Harvey and Karen, who have traveled with them from Cleveland to serve as witnesses.

They are finally wed on June 8. Because of Hunter’s history in the newspapers as a civil-rights figure, the marriage, secret for three months, becomes a mini-scandal in September—especially in Georgia, where such a union is illegal. Upon hearing of the marriage, Georgia Attorney General Eugene Cook responded, “We’re waiting to put both of ’em in jail.”

They never went to jail, of course. Alberta became better known as Charlayne Hunter-Gault; she was the first black staff member at The New Yorker, and an Emmy- and Peabody-award-winning broadcaster. While working at the New York Times, she successfully lobbied to have the paper change “Negro” to “black” in its standard usage. She and Stovall had a daughter before divorcing.

Harvey and Karen, the other young married couple who accompanied Hunter and Stovall from Cleveland to Detroit, were also divorced, in 1972.

Had the couples only met that week, when Hunter and Stovall breezed through Cleveland? There’s nothing to suggest why their paths would have intersected, except that Harvey apparently made friends easily with out-of-towners. In June of 1963, he was working odd jobs, collecting records, writing reviews for Downbeat, and talking about comics with another new friend, a recent Philadelphia transplant named Crumb.

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7 Responses to “Another Side of Splendor”
  1. Jeet Heer says:

    I’m guessing that there is more to this story than just a couple passing through town. Pekar was a fairly political guy and might have had some connections with the Civil Rights movement. I’d certainly like to know more about all this.

  2. EH says:

    Has anyone read Pekar’s SDS book? Might explain more of his personal connections to organized collective actions, as opposed to just his personal beliefs and support.

  3. Rob Clough says:

    I’ve read the SDS book, and it’s pretty much just a straight-up history.

  4. Mike Rhode says:

    Wow, very cool and I can’t believe he never told this story in his comic, and now we can’t ask. For someone who lived his life in public, there are some big ellipses.

  5. frag says:

    It seems that he rarely brought up events involving his exes in his work, at least since he married Joyce.

  6. Sean Howe says:

    I neglected to give proper credit when I passed this on to Tim: much of the information about the marriage—and the images—come from an extensive article by John H. Britton in the September 19, 1963, issue of Jet magazine. (I also referred to those Trillin New Yorker articles, which have been published in book form as An Education in Georgia, and various online Hunter-Gault interviews and profiles.)

    Britton himself has led an interesting life:
    http://www.idvl.org/thehistorymakers/Bio1183.html

  7. Robert Cass says:

    Walter Stovall is my uncle, but I didn’t know until today that Harvey Pekar was a witness to his and Charlayne’s marriage in Detroit. On a lark I was googling my grandmother’s name when I came across Walter and Charlayne’s marriage license in the issue of JET magazine mentioned above (via Google Books). That’s when I found this site.

    Walter went on to write for the NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE and, from 1967 through ’76, the Associated Press, where he met fellow reporters Thomas Harris (THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, BLACK SUNDAY) and Nicholas Pileggi (WISEGUY, CASINO). Both contributed dust-jacket blurbs to Walter’s first novel, PRESIDENTIAL EMERGENCY (1978), which was followed two years later by THE MINUS POOL. If you like John le Carré-style spy novels, you’ll enjoy Walter’s books.

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