Selma by Robert Mikell

The author provides a detailed, investigative account of the “civil rights debauchery” in Selma in response to the “distorted facts and slanted reports” of the media. He reports on the civil rights agitation in Selma with a whole chapter devoted to the “loose morals of its leaders.” He covers the freedom march to Montgomery, the murder of Viola Luizza by the Klan (including an interview with United Klans of America Grand Dragon Robert Shelton) and
the legal case that followed, and concludes with his assessment of the disruptive, law-breaking, and boycotting activities of the demonstrators (with particular disdain for the public interracial sexual improprieties). The descriptions of sex between interracial protestors was the cause of an embargo placed on the book in apartheid South Africa when it was imported there in 1966 (“Embargo on Rights Book Placed By South Africans,” The Montgomery Advertiser, Fri, Sep 02, 1966 ·p. 12).

Robert Mikell was born in Hawaii, but moved to Alabama at a young age. After attending Auburn Univ. he worked for a short time in Florida where he began his writing career. The same year that his Selma account was published, Mikell published his first novel with a vanity press, The Mother Seekers: A Novel of Sexual Futility (1965), which was described as “A close-up of the strange, wild, rebellious world of the hipster-beats.” He doesn’t appear to have published any other books.