At Canaan's Edge (102 page)

Empirical results from the freedom movement advanced quietly by inertia. On March 11, in
Washington v. Lee,
the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the wholesale segregation of state prisons and local jails by race. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission resolved after two years to challenge industry rules requiring flight attendants to be single young women, but it would take another five months to ban the separate “Girl Friday” want-ad sections. In Memphis, where the sanitation strike entered its second month, more than a thousand black students now integrated Memphis State University, but school officials, still worried that Tiger fans would not accept any change in their Saturday spectacle, pressured the athletic department to defend the all-white football team on competitive grounds. “We would like to recruit Negro players in Memphis, if they can play,” the head coach announced before spring practice. Such contortion seemed antiquated already, which united all sides in belittlement of strained or outdated racial news. White students made front pages with a hippie “be-in” at New York's Grand Central Station in March, but it was a tiny squib that the South African government introduced three measures to “complete” the apartheid system, including abolition of the four seats in the National Assembly for which mixed-race Coloreds had been allowed to elect white representatives. Only a small movement journal recorded the brazen clash at Tuskegee Institute when student followers of Stokely Carmichael pelted four State Department visitors with eggs, calling themselves a simulated “Vietcong air force” to show the panel of experts what it felt like to be bombed in their own country. The same journal headlined the plea from a rural rally outside Tuskegee, where no utility service reached farmhouses or the Negro school: “‘A Phone Before I Die.'”

On March 15, a dozen white men returned a guilty verdict for the 1966 firebomb attack on Vernon Dahmer. “It was the first time a state jury in the South has convicted anyone for murder in a civil rights case,” reported the
Los Angeles Times.
Judge Stanton Hall, who whittled on the bench with a confiscated razor, sentenced Klansman Cecil Sessum to life. District Attorney James Finch, always proclaiming that he never voted for LBJ but considered the Negro victim one of the hardest-working farmers in Hattiesburg, prosecuted and convicted three more Klansmen with an emotional summary: “You twelve men represent Forrest County to the world when it comes to justice.” Star witness Billy Roy Pitts testified each time that he had dropped his gun in the Klan posse's wild flight after their bullets pinned Dahmer in the firebombed home to suffer mortal burns, and had confessed since “because I done what I done and the Lord wouldn't let me go on livin' that kind of life.” The four trials exhausted the pioneer courage in the local courts, leaving eleven indictments unresolved, and the story lapsed nearly thirty years before reporter Jerry Mitchell noticed that Mississippi had neglected to have Billy Roy Pitts serve even a day of his life sentence. This invisible dereliction—a wonder in the annals of jurisprudence—made news until Pitts surrendered from Louisiana. His testimony then buttressed one of the atonement prosecutions revived by a new generation of elected Southerners, aimed at surviving figures long admired, forgotten, or excused. On August 21, 1998, Mississippi peers convicted Sam Bowers of ordering the Dahmer murder, among others, and sent the former Imperial Wizard to prison at seventy-three.

B
LIND VIOLENCE
alone could seal a more dogmatic estrangement than race. Earlier in March, toward the end of the Tet offensive, one wounded medic from the 101st Airborne Division whispered a prayer from the evacuation helicopter: “God help you guys for what you did.” His elite Tiger Force platoon had been detached into central Vietnam with orders to drive the inhabitants of selected villages into refugee camps, thereby depriving enemy soldiers of food and shelter. Isolated, victimized by snipers and booby traps on patrol, platoon leaders surrendered the unit to sporadic but indiscriminate revenge. Twenty-seven of its forty-five soldiers later told Army investigators that it was routine to wear shoelace necklaces of human ears. Private Sam Ybarra, who had joined the Army on the day of his release from an Arizona jail, pushed ahead in pathological displays. He scalped “gooks,” shot a boy for his shoes, and decapitated a Vietnamese infant to remove the “Buddha band” from its neck. At least one fellow soldier pondered killing Ybarra, but pulled back to “creepy” fatalism. “The way to live is to kill,” said Sergeant William Doyle, “because you don't have to worry about anybody who's dead.” Ybarra stood three courts-martial in Vietnam for drug abuse, and would drink himself to death from nightmares on his mother's couch. So many soldiers filed complaints, and even confessions, that the Pentagon's longest war crimes investigation waited years at the threshold of White House authority to prosecute, until the cases were dropped with quiet relief at the war's end. Official aversion to the anticipated publicity proved stronger than distaste for the alleged crimes, and the Tiger Force history would not surface until a 2003 newspaper series in the Toledo, Ohio,
Blade,
full of haunted, cathartic recollections from aging veterans.

On March 16, while Robert Kennedy's campaign announcement jolted American politics from the room where his late brother had announced for President in 1960, a fresh unit of the Army's Americal Division raided a remote cluster of hamlets in Quang Nai Province, which was base area also for the Tiger Force. Since arriving in February, soldiers from Charlie Company of the 1st Battalion, 11th Brigade, had endured losses without seeing an enemy to fight—six killed and twelve wounded in a minefield, a sergeant killed two days previously when he picked up a disguised bomb that cost others an arm, two legs, and an eye. On their traumatized march back to camp, the head of the column had come across a lone farmer in a rice field. “They shot and wounded her,” Private Greg Olson wrote home just before the raid. “Then they kicked her to death and emptied their magazines in her head. They slugged every little kid they came across. Why in God's name does this have to happen?…This isn't the first time, Dad…. I don't know why I'm telling you all this; I guess I just wanted to get it off my chest.” Olson, a Mormon from Oregon, rushed early into the reported enemy stronghold of My Lai, with commanders from other outfits poised to reinforce the only major thrust in the region.

From above, pilot Hugh Thompson of Georgia first puzzled that his three-man scout helicopter drew no fire for the hovering big gunships to suppress. Not a hostile shot was reported, nor a weapon captured all day. He dropped green (meaning safe) smoke flares near an alarming number of killed and wounded civilians around the village perimeter, marking them for assistance by the ground troops—only to fly over again and find the wounded all dead. Mounting horror drove Thompson to land three times. At a drainage ditch filled with casualties, a Charlie Company sergeant said the only way to help was to put them out of their misery. Back in the air, Thompson's crew frantically debated whether an artillery accident, enemy atrocity, or any logical military action could explain the methodical rifle fire into stacks of bodies. Groups of soldiers across the scattered hamlets pushed families and isolated peasants into dugout cellars or water wells, then dropped grenades in after them. Several groups of sixty or more were herded into open spaces and mowed down. Some soldiers balked. Some made light of it and paused for lunch. Some sobbed and shot at the same time. Thompson next landed ahead of a pursuit squad from Charlie Company, shouting orders for eighteen-year-old gunner Larry Colburn to shoot his fellow Americans if they fired at him or the ten villagers huddled ahead. Colburn was as stunned as Private Olson, who, from the refuge of his nearby machine gun post, watched the strange pilot interpose himself on the verge of an enraged fight with the 2nd platoon's lieutenant, until unprecedented SOS landings by two gunships evacuated the Vietnamese to safety. Thompson flew back to the drainage ditch to check for survivors and his own sanity. His crew chief waded hip-deep in the carnage to pry from a mother's corpse one silent but squirming small boy, so covered in blood and filth that they were well into the escape flight before they decided he was not hit.

At brigade headquarters, the three helicopter soldiers filed complaints about a massacre of civilians, and South Vietnamese district officials compiled a secret burial list of some five hundred My Lai villagers, including more than a hundred children younger than six. However, only the authorized account of My Lai reached front pages like Sunday's
New York Times:
“American troops caught a North Vietnamese force in a pincer movement on the central coastal plain yesterday, killing 128 enemy soldiers in day-long fighting.” This version remained intact until a young draftee returned home in 1969 with notes of terrible witness unburdened on him by training buddies assigned to Charlie Company. Ron Ridenhour, who inspired confidence in his citizen's gumption, sent thirty registered letters to generals, Cabinet officers, members of Congress, and the new President, Richard Nixon. Eight months later, news tips about a simmering military investigation led to publication in
Life
magazine of graphic My Lai photographs taken by an Army photographer, which triggered a national scandal of colliding emotions: denial, outrage, dogged pride, and wrath against war or disclosure. Nixon freed the one lieutenant convicted by court-martial, of twenty-two My Lai murders, and it took decades to open perspective across enemy lines. In 1998, the Army gave the Soldier's Medal for Gallantry to former pilot Thompson, gunner Colburn, and posthumously to the crew chief, Glenn Andreotta, long since killed in combat. In 2001, returning to Vietnam for dedication of My Lai Peace Park, Colburn was dumbfounded to compare life stories with forty-one-year-old Do Hao, who remembered vividly the day he was yanked into the sky from a ditch full of silent relatives.

I
N TUMULTUOUS
mid-March 1968, Martin Luther King quietly tested strategies to overcome social barriers by nonviolence, being far from sure they would work. He closed to reporters his anxious summit meeting with seventy-eight “non-black” minority leaders on Thursday, March 14. Mostly unknown to each other, let alone to King, they ventured by invitation from across the United States to Paschal's Motor Lodge in the heart of black Atlanta. Wallace Mad Bear Anderson spoke for a poor Iroquois confederation of upstate New York. A deputy came from the bedside of César Chávez, who had barely survived a twenty-five-day fast in penance for violent lapses by striking California farmworkers. Tillie Walker and Rose Crow Flies High represented plains tribes from North Dakota, while Dennis Banks led a delegation of Anishinabes. During introductions, Bernard Lafayette whispered to King what he had gleaned about basic differences among Puerto Ricans, as distinct from Mexicans (Chicanos), or the defining cause of the Assiniboin/Lakota leader Hank Adams, who spearheaded a drive for Northwestern salmon fishing rights under the 1854 Treaty of Medicine Creek. Lafayette had checked repeatedly to make sure King wanted the hardscrabble white groups, and the answer was always simple: “Are they poor?” Paschal's was dotted with coal miners, some of whom braved fierce criticism from Appalachian rivals, and Peggy Terry admitted being raised in a Kentucky Klan family. After moving to Montgomery during the bus boycott, she had gone once on a lark to see “that smart aleck nigger come out of jail,” and the actual sight of King buffeted by a mob churned into her independent nature. Now Terry kept a few black friends in the Jobs Or Income Now (JOIN) group from uptown Chicago's poor white district, and she wowed movement crowds by asking where else a hillbilly housewife could trade ideas or jail cells with a Nobel Prize winner.

Hosea Williams made no secret of his wish for the nonblack summit to fail. With several other SCLC staff leaders, he mercilessly ribbed young Tom Houck, who had come into the St. Augustine movement as an orphaned high school dropout from Massachusetts, then stayed on to chauffeur the Kings, and since had developed enough grit to scour the country for nonblack leaders under tutelage from Lafayette and Bill Rutherford. “First he was Coretta's boy,” groused Williams. “Now he's taking our money and giving it to Indians.” Internal staff resistance complained that these strangers would slow them down, ruin cohesion, and make it even tougher to compete with the black power trend. Lafayette fretted constantly over the risk of insult to, from, and between the guests. Leaders did rise from the floor to complain of exclusion, but they also acknowledged initiatives adapted from the black movement. Since the bus boycott, said several Native Americans, the model tribal leader no longer was an “Uncle Tomahawk” angling for token promotion. Others questioned nonviolence with doubtful respect. Vincent Harding, who had drafted most of the Riverside Vietnam speech, came late to observe and made note of hushed deliberation on assorted faces contemplating whether to recommend the experimental coalition under King.

In an aside, King first asked, “Tijerina who?” He absorbed a fiery speech about regaining communal lands stolen by noncompliance with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in which the United States had acquired the territory that became seven Southwestern states to end the Mexican-American War of 1848. Lafayette cautioned that Reies López Tijerina was a charismatic, chronic fugitive—hailed as a Chicano Malcolm X, disparaged as a “wetback” Don Quixote—best known for leading an armed protest posse that briefly occupied a New Mexico courthouse on June 5, 1967. At Paschal's, Tijerina asked what mention of land issues would be offered in return for nonviolent discipline, and King said the answer flowed from the movement's nature: a common willingness to sacrifice put all their grievances on equal footing. On reflection, Tijerina proposed that particular stories from Native American groups be dramatized first in Washington, followed by black people second and his own Spanish-speaking groups last. His offer, which deferred both to historical order and the spirit of King's presentation, received acclamation that extended to Chicano leaders sometimes at odds with Tijerina, such as Corky González of Denver. The summit closed on a wave of immense relief. Myles Horton, who helped recruit the white Appalachians, expressed euphoria after nearly four decades of cross-cultural isolation at his Highlander Center. “I believe we caught a glimpse of the future,” he told Andrew Young.