At Canaan's Edge (54 page)

L
OST TO
obscurity beneath the Ia Drang battles and other national news, the first racially contested elections in modern Alabama selected local farmers to supervise programs for the U.S. Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service (ASCS). Movement hopes had dimmed in Greene County when five aspiring black voters were evicted and many received envelopes missing the official mail-in ballots. Only one farmer agreed to run in Hale County, none in Sumter. “Folks there are understandably jumpy,” reported a SNCC memo on these pioneer campaigns across five rural counties. Since an unexpected federal edict that any six farmers could put a nominee on the local ballot, which sustained the first Negro candidates, SNCC-sponsored workshops had sparked interest in the practical workings of ASCS crop loans and soil erosion payments. Poor farmers learned how the elected county committees also shaped price supports, distributed vital cotton allotments, and controlled indirect subsidies that could double their money-losing price of two and a half cents per pound for okra. In Lowndes County, where nearly two-thirds of the eligible farmers were black, optimism rose until ballots arrived listing seventy “extra” Negroes nominated by whites. Under deadline, lacking telephones, the unpracticed movement voters failed to sift out the last-minute decoys. The Lowndes County ASCS committee remained white, and a New Deal structure designed to foster citizen participation in governance (like the community agencies newly created for the War on Poverty) devolved again into the hands of the largest landowners. Stokely Carmichael decried the results announced on November 16. “We did it fair and square,” he told a mass meeting. “We believed in them, and they cheated us.”

Solemn resentment gave way within hours to a sauciness reflected in the circulating SNCC bulletin for the day: “Mr. Stokely Carmichael (star of stage, screen, and television) feels that there is ‘something fishy.'” Out of natural verve, protective calm, and hard calculation, he advertised a bigger lesson that movement strategy had the ruling minority of Lowndes County “running scared” already, before the first Negro ever voted in a regular election. The next night, Carmichael drove to a twenty-first birthday party for Sammy Younge, one of the many Tuskegee students who had been drawn into demonstrations since the Selma march. Younge resisted further canvassing for the election workshops. Conflicted, he told Carmichael with droll sarcasm that he needed to “kick Snick” and look out for himself. Younge came from a light-skinned Tuskegee family of relative privilege, having attended boarding school in Massachusetts. The mother of another SNCC worker served as a maid in his household. He had lost a kidney to disease during Navy service, then abandoned schoolwork for the lure of civil rights. When he confided that friends put him down for retreating into a nice car and his favorite Pink Catawba wine, Carmichael soothed familiar movement stress by endorsing the personal retreat. “Makes me no never-mind,” he said lightly, adding that he would be glad to share wine with Younge.

With the help of Younge's friend Jimmy Rogers and other Tuskegee students, the Alabama SNCC staff carried roving schools on basic politics especially into Lowndes County, which supplied the bulk of some thirty farm-based activists for a trek to Atlanta at the beginning of December. They gathered at SNCC headquarters for all-day seminars, deciphering Alabama code books with the aid of charts and graphs prepared by the research staff. “The workshop spent one day on the electoral machinery,” wrote research director Jack Minnis, “and the rest of the time on the county governmental structure.” To nominate candidates for local offices in the 1966 elections, the participants learned strict statutory rules governing the establishment of independent political parties. If even one founding member participated simultaneously in an existing party, for instance, or cast a nominating ballot without verifiable proof of registration, a judge could disqualify the new party and all its nominees from the general election. By Alabama law, a new party also had to gain approval for a visible ballot symbol to aid voters of marginal literacy, meeting specifications of size and distinctiveness. The Lowndes County citizens reacted negatively to several proposed choices, finding a cotton boll sketch too vague, a dove too remote, clasped hands (modeled on SNCC's own logo) too passive, and called instead for an active, farm-based symbol to compete with the Alabama Democratic Party's official logo of a white bantam rooster topped with the motto, “White Supremacy for the Right.” Several suggested a cat as the best farm image. “Cats chase chickens,” said John Hulett, and Carmichael asked his volunteer artists to draw cats.

The caravan to Atlanta had passed Montgomery, where federal prosecutors weathered secret drama at the third trial of the Klansmen charged with the bushwhack murder of Viola Liuzzo in Lowndes County. Given the two prior failures in state court, their optimism sagged with the notice that star informant Gary Thomas Rowe refused to testify anymore, complaining of stress and isolation as the sequestered target of angry Klan associates. When FBI director Hoover discouraged measures to compel his cooperation, Attorney General Katzenbach himself enticed Rowe with a secret promise of relocation under a new identity. “I am prepared to help you obtain suitable employment either with the federal government or elsewhere,” he wrote. “This is not contingent on the performance of any further services or assistance that you may give to the United States at any time in the future.” Reluctantly, Katzenbach also sent Assistant Attorney General John Doar to argue the case before U.S. District Judge Frank Johnson—risking a higher government profile for a chance to end the string of abject humiliations in racial hate cases. Doar prepared hastily in the face of restrictions that had chafed Alabama attorney general Richmond Flowers before the state trials. FBI handlers, who never left Rowe's side, severely curtailed acquaintance with the reluctant witness. They instructed Rowe not to answer questions about his background, especially his five previous years as a Klan informant, and forbade inquiry beyond “what happened in the car.” Unfamiliarity made for awkward examination, but did limit the scope of a wobbly performance on the stand. Rowe testified that Klan orders for the night of Liuzzo's murder were to preserve white supremacy “by any means necessary, whether bullets or ballots,” in an unlikely paraphrase of the late Malcolm X.

FBI director Hoover startled Katzenbach on December 3 with word that the all-white, all-male jury returned verdicts of guilty, and that Judge Johnson promptly sentenced all three Klansmen to the ten-year maximum under a federal civil rights statute. (By coincidence, a second Alabama jury returned a breakthrough verdict almost simultaneously in a trial of less notoriety.
*
) Katzenbach rejoiced. Congratulating Hoover, he said the prosecution strategy had emphasized the FBI's reputation this time to support the evidence, which he believed swayed the jury. In Montgomery, on his forty-fourth birthday, Doar lapsed briefly from stoic reserve to tell reporters that the case made him proud to be an American. Katzenbach called Texas with news vindicating the arrests announced from the White House on the day after the Selma march. “Really, it was quite a trial,” he told Johnson. The President, still recuperating from gall bladder surgery, issued a statement that “the whole nation can take heart” from the outcome.

Barely nodding at the trial news, the Atlanta workshops sank into the mechanics of Alabama government for long hours through the weekend into Monday, December 6. Presenters shared legal research to make plain the duties of elected officers from tax assessor to probate judge. “During the discussions,” recorded an internal memo, “it became clear to everyone that the mysterious deaths of Negroes in the South could never have gone uninvestigated and unpunished without the connivance or the collusion of the county coroner.” Research director Jack Minnis taught that field organizers and citizens alike could glean a working knowledge of “who's pulling the levers of power.” Familiarity reduced exalted positions to specific tasks. “We went into the concept of the
posse comitatus
of the sheriff, quoting statutes all the way,” he wrote a friend, “and showing how, theoretically at least, most anything could be done with the other offices if the sheriff chose to enforce what they did.” New awareness seeded the first imaginings of actual candidates among the participants themselves, who took home a skeletal plan for legal steps required to field an independent slate drawn from their own first-time voters. “News about the new freedom organization travels fast in Lowndes County,” observed SNCC's South-wide circular.

Antagonism spread also, so widely that the National Council of Churches already had asked Rev. Francis Walter to help investigate reprisals. On December 9, having documented twenty of the eighty reported cases in neighboring Wilcox County, the assigned replacement for Jonathan Daniels followed a wilderness road off the map from Possum Bend to a bridge-less dead end at a pig trail near skiffs tied in the Alabama River. He hiked toward bright colors on a distant clothesline, but Ora McDaniels fled her cabin upon sight of an approaching white man. Embarrassed, Walter spent the remainder of Thursday backtracking the river-looped county to find a Negro acquaintance who could mediate an affidavit about her being fired as a maid, and struck with a broom, for registering to vote. The bright colors turned out to be homemade patchwork quilts in distinctive patterns, sold locally at three for $5. Their striking quality inspired Walter to initiate a sustenance project that commanded auction space at New York galleries within six months. William Paley of CBS and Diana Vreeland of
Vogue
bought variations of the 1966 Chestnut Bud quilt. Artist Lee Krasner, widow of Jackson Pollock, would venture into Wilcox County to pick out Crow's Foot originals. Bloomingdale's in 1970 and
Life
magazine in 1972 offered tributes to the Freedom Quilting Bee, sustained more than two decades ahead by Ora McDaniels and her colleagues—among them Lucy Mingo, Polly Bennett, “Mama Willie” Abrams, Mattie Ross, Estelle Witherspoon, and China Grove Myles. Nearly all the folk artisans, who remained in their cabins, dated a new life from the wonder of a courthouse registration march the previous spring.

On Friday, December 10, as Walter began to collect quilts along with affidavits, two public events flashed lingering travail for Alabama. A state trial acquitted the three men charged with the beating death of Rev. James Reeb after the March 9 “turnaround” attempt to cross Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge. The Dallas County courtroom erupted in applause. Richmond Flowers denounced a trial process epitomized by the blatantly prejudiced all-white jury that included a Klansman who had escorted Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell to assault Martin Luther King. “Reeb Verdict Outrages Justice Department / How Hard Did Prosecutors Try?” declared a blunt
Washington Post
headline. Simultaneously
New York Times
reporter Gene Roberts surfaced the first hint of volcanic legend from a scouting visit that found young movement workers at the Atlanta SNCC headquarters crushed by “battle fatigue” and spiraling debt—“the worst in its four and a half year history”—yet still “generating more ideas than money.” Courtland Cox described the launch brochure for an Alabama pilot project to “bypass Southern institutions.” Ruth Howard and other SNCC artists traced a cat logo from the mascot of Atlanta's Clark College Panthers. “The Lowndes County Freedom Organization will function as an all-Negro ‘third party,'” Roberts disclosed in Friday's
New York Times.
“It will operate in only one county and use a black panther as its party symbol.”

K
ING CHASED
his schedule through the week between Alabama trials, laboring to refine a prophetic message on the relative strengths of violence and nonviolence. He called Stanley Levison with word that rabbis from the Synagogue Council of America were pressing for Vietnam remarks because the American Legion of Boston had just canceled a citizenship award to Rabbi Roland Gittelson over his sponsorship of the Washington peace march. King felt obliged, saying he had preached in Gittelson's synagogue only six months earlier, and called for specific quotations from the Hebrew prophets. Levison dictated paragraphs by relay through Dora McDonald, advising her to keep intact King's favored adaptation of Amos 5:24—“Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream”—as an improvement in rhythmic force on the exact biblical translation. King rushed to accept an award at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York. “The stirring lesson of this age is that mass nonviolent direct action is not a peculiar device for Negro agitation,” he told the Synagogue Council. “Rather it is an historically validated method for defending freedom and democracy, and for enlarging these values for the benefit of the whole society.”

By refusing to give up a bus seat in 1955, King argued, Rosa Parks sparked nonviolent power that opened prospects a decade later for Negro seats in the Alabama legislature. Protests against a constricted economy unleashed reforms that “ultimately will benefit more whites than Negroes,” he added, just as the crusade against segregated schools “brought to the fore” a larger realization that the antiquated educational system had been designed for nineteenth-century rural America. “When Negroes by direct action sought to participate in the electoral process,” said King, “they awakened the apathetic white who so took his rights for granted that he neglected to use them.” But he warned that an undertow of violence against new enemies threatened the bright promise of nonviolence to overcome old ones. “War enlarges itself inexorably,” he declared, discounting the repeated official assurance that the military conflict would remain limited. Pointing to “ugly repressive sentiment” against Rabbi Gittelson and others, he asked if dissent were not already “being shot down by bombers in Vietnam,” and wondered “whether free speech has not become one of the casualties of the war.” King summoned the bold protest of ancient sources—“Today we particularly need the Hebrew prophets”—whose words had goaded the movement past fear and silence. “They did
not
believe that conscience is a still small voice,” he said. “They believed that conscience thunders, or it does not speak at all.” He quoted Amos on justice, Micah on beating swords into plowshares, and Isaiah on what King called an “inescapable obligation” to renounce violence of spirit: “Yea, when you make many prayers I will not hear/ Your hands are full of blood/ Wash you, make you clean/ Put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes.”