And All Our Wounds Forgiven (3 page)

what did i know? i was a dumb colored boy getting a ph.d in philosophy. i could not have imagined that the south would defy the supreme court. we were a nation of laws, were we not? public officials, from the president to congress to governors and mayors and county sheriffs, took office with their hands on bibles swearing to uphold the law and the constitution. i was to learn otherwise.

conventional wisdom is that the civil rights movement started with the bus boycott i organized in atlanta or the sit-in movement of the students in 1960. that is not so. historians overlook the enormous impact on the consciousness of the negro when we saw governors and mayors and u.s. senators and congressmen actively defying the highest court in the land, aggressively urging white people to resist desegregation. i still remember the cover of an issue of look magazine; the south says never.

philosophically, the issue was framed as states’ rights, that is, the states had rights that the federal government could not contravene. but, i argued silently, what happens when affirming states’ rights violates the constitution that binds the states into a nation of laws? america was facing a constitutional crisis that, a hundred years before, had led to civil war. this time, however, war was declared on the negro.

across the south the crude violence and terror of the ku klux klan was replaced by the white shirts and ties of middleclass southern business men and leaders who organized the white citizens council. it terrorized negroes in more sophisticated ways. in mississippi the council threatened the job of any negro who looked like he or she wanted to desegregate the schools. the number of registered black voters in the state dropped from 12,000 to 8,000 in less than a year. in georgia, where fate was to send me, the state board of education ordered all teachers who were members of the naacp to resign from the organization or have their teaching licenses revoked. the year following the school decision, the supreme court ruled that segregated public golf courses, parks, swimming pools and playgrounds were unconstitutional. many southern towns closed their public parks, playgrounds and swimming pools.

for me, the final straw came in 1956. i was now DR. john calvin marshal!. with my bride of a year i moved to atlanta where i had secured a position at spelman college, the school for black women. i remember the evening we sat in the living room after supper, andrea looking at the newspaper while i went over my notes on plato’s
symposium,
wondering how did i teach a treatise on homosexual love to the creme de la creme of negro society?

andrea: have you seen this?

what? i asked.

southern congressmen have issued a manifesto urging the use quote of all lawful means unquote to overturn brown v. board of education.

she read me the names of those who signed the so-called manifesto. they were some of the most prominent in the congress:

strom thurmond of south carolina who race-baited when that would keep him in office and in the seventies learned to say black instead of nigra when that would keep him in office; j.w. fulbright of arkansas, the same fulbright whose name is associated with graduate fellowships for the best and brightest, as in, “i got a fulbright”; i didn’t; wilbur d. mills, prominent member of the house who would be arrested for cavorting in a d.c. fountain with a very attractive and very young woman; hale boggs, congressman from louisiana who would die in a plane crash in alaska and one of whose daughters would become a prominent newscaster and political analyst; and sam ervin, the folksy, country lawyer, the principal author of the manifesto, who would become hero of the Watergate hearings, which led to the downfall of president nixon. in all 101 senators and congressmen signed. the only ones who did not were lyndon Johnson, and the two senators from tennessee, estes kefauver and albert gore, sr.

something broke inside me as andrea and i discussed this ignorant insistence on continuing the cruelty of racial segregation. i had been resolutely denying the evident: the south had no intention of obeying the law of the land. that evening i acceded to the story and i saw: if white senators and white congressmen, white governors and white mayors would so openly and brazenly and willfully disobey the constitution, why couldn’t the negro brazenly disobey laws that were
un
constitutional. if southern whites broke the law to uphold
in
justice, the negro had to break the law and uphold justice.

how ironic that in the late sixties president nixon was elected by decrying the breakdown in law and order. white people, northern and southern, saw their cities go up in flame and smoke as summer after summer, blacks took to the streets in blind fury, no more so than after my assassination. the flame and smoke could be seen from the white house. how hypocritical the outrage of white americans at what they considered a criminal disregard for law and order by blacks. law and order had broken down a decade before when southern elected officials encouraged and applauded defiance of the supreme court. the sixties were created by white people who thought their prejudices and bigotry were rights that had precedence over the constitution. their open defiance of the law as well as the refusal by other whites to decry
that
breakdown in law and order were what thrust me into a history i had always feared. what else would have motivated an alabama colored boy to learn greek and find a security in fifth century b.c. athens that he found nowhere in twentieth century america?

andrea and i knew i would be killed eventually and decided we should not have children. to be a widow was one kind of pain. to be an orphan was another entirely, she said. i agreed, but reluctantly. it was a decision i always regretted. by not having children we broke faith with the future. we also broke faith with each other.

around this time i saw a picture of jackie kennedy in the newspaper or a magazine. she was still the wife of the senator from massachusetts then but this was no ordinary politician’s wife. she was young and she was beautiful and she was smiling a smile that had confidence in tomorrow. after that i looked for pictures of her in the paper and periodicals. jackie’s smile gave me hope the world didn’t have to be the way it was, that the world couldn’t remain as it was in the face of that smile and confidence in what i didn’t know but it gave me confidence too and i don’t know if any of what happened in the sixties would have if not for jfk and the kennedy hair blowing in the wind on a sailing boat off nantucket, the spiral of a football in the autumn air on the white house lawn, the easy self-mocking sense of humor (something harvard men do better than anyone) and jackie’s smile.

we are taught that history is powered by ideals and men and women of vision and greatness. not at all. what we remember is the jut of fdr’s jaw, the uptilt of his cigarette in its holder, the air of command and easy confidence even from a wheelchair. what we remember of jack and bobby are the unruly hair, the free, open and boyish grins, the insouciant shine in the eyes giving them the sheen of eternal youth. camelot it was called because we all felt young and because we did, we partook of immortality and the surety we could do no wrong. it was a dangerous time.

i liked but never trusted either of the kennedy brothers. but we needed their exuberance and playfulness after the shock of the cold war, eisenhower, joe mccarthy.

social change does not occur when people suffer most acutely. totalitarianism works as long as a government has the stomach to impose terror every hour on the hour. a terrorized people can do nothing more than focus their attentions on recognizing and seizing an unguarded moment during the day. the psychological terror of segregation in the south was a totalitarianism that succeeded until jackie’s smile and jfk’s wit gave us hope that things could be different.

i remember my phone ringing early the evening of february 1, 1960. it was a monday. (in a few years I would look back with longing to that time when i could answer my own telephone.) it was a colleague from greensboro, north Carolina, telling me that four black students from north Carolina had sat down on lunch-counter stools at a variety store that afternoon and did not move when they were refused service. they had just been arrested.

(that was no spontaneous act, i learned later. a white professor at the college had been looking for students to challenge segregation by sitting in. Finally, history produced four.)

my greensboro caller wondered if i would make some calls to see if demonstrations to support the students could be organized in a few cities like atlanta and nashville, cities with a number of negro and white colleges and universities and therefore prone to be more liberal in their racial attitudes if not in law.

by the following wednesday, sit-ins were underway in fifteen cities in five states across the south. let me hasten to add that i take no credit. when i called a colleague at fisk in nashville, they were planning sit-ins of their own, an action that went far beyond a sympathy demonstration.

we think an individual can sit astride hi-story and direct it to the right or left as if it were a tennessee walking horse. that is not so. (people talk as if i made the civil rights movement by myself. what did they think they were accomplishing by making a holiday of my birthday or putting my face on a stamp? what surer way to rob my life of value, integrity and meaning than turn me into a monument.)

i did not act as much as i made myself available to be used by forces i desperately sought to understand. i heard hope whispering through the needles of the southern pine trees during the late fifties and i gave it voice. that does not mean i always knew what i was saying. that does not mean i understood the depth and extent of the transformations with which everyone now wants to credit me.

hi-story is the imperceptible accretion of private acts and silent gestures, of separate and solitary decisions to do something today that you would not have yesterday. our sense of humanity and its possibilities expands and contracts as we decide each day how much beauty we will permit to pour through our voices.

“Blacks did not hate whites then. We were black and white together, as we sang in ‘We Shall Overcome.’ White southerners were right. The civil rights movement
was
about mixing the races. How could it have been otherwise? If keeping the races separate was the problem, mixing them had to be the solution.

“But something happened and blacks became racist. I’m not supposed to say that, am I? But I can’t rationalize and call the current black antipathy to whites ‘antiracism racism,’ or some such doublespeak. Being black does not confer automatic immunity from being racist.

“I miss the innocence of black and white together. Innocence is as much a knowledge as experience. We deride innocence as unworthy of maturity, but we need it to safeguard us. Without innocence, experience makes us cynics.

“Until the four children were murdered in the bombing of the church in Birmingham in 1963, nobody told me I couldn’t know what it was like to be black. People were eager for me to know, eager for me to come into their homes and listen to their stories. The black experience was not an exclusive preserve like beachfront property. No one thought there was anything to gain by putting a no trespassing sign on his race.”

But blacks no longer cared that there had also been whites in the civil rights movement who had inhaled and exhaled mortality with the monotonous regularity of their heartbeats and, three decades later, had been left alone with the pain of neglected idealism and the shame of murdered hope.

Elizabeth did not want a parade or a plaque, but she resented the contempt and derision of a generation of blacks still in diapers when Cal was killed, a generation of
African-Americans
who had become mesmerized by the melodious knell of victimhood.

“What happened? How did we get from ‘We Shall Overcome’ to ‘It’s a Black Thing’?” Elizabeth whispered earnestly.

In those lonely last months of his life, Cal understood as little as she did now. He had become an anachronism before his very eyes, he who had single-handedly demonstrated against bus segregation in Atlanta, boarding buses and sitting alone in the white sections and being beaten by whites, arrested, beaten a second time by policemen, and the first opportunity after getting out of jail or the hospital, he was back on the buses. Rifle shots were fired into his home one night barely missing Andrea. On another, a bomb exploded at the front half of his house seconds after Andrea had walked into the back. Yet he had stood amid the smoking rubble and calmed a crowd of angry blacks aching for the catharsis of retaliatory violence. He was 31 years old, a philosophy professor at Spelman, but he articulated the black cry for freedom with the accent of the Alabama minister’s son he was and the sophistication of the philosopher-savior he was becoming. He took the suffering of years when hope lay stillborn in watery ditches and melded it with the dignity of fortitude that would not be shattered during nights when stars fell and days when the sun stood still. There had never been a figure quite like him, a black man who could quote Plato in Greek and, in the next breath, sing a country blues, who was as comfortable eating pate with President Kennedy in the White House as he was eating ham and grits with redeye gravy in a sharecropper’s cabin.