At Canaan's Edge (68 page)

A historical moment teetered for six hours. By supper, King issued a statement from Chicago on the Mississippi crackdown. FBI wiretappers forwarded from New York to Washington Stanley Levison's judgment that political pressure was hardening Governor Johnson, along with King's comment that he “had expected something like this” because the “the police were too polite” and the march “just did not feel like Mississippi.” In Greenwood, where the morning
Commonwealth
warned against King as a hate-monger “who can be compared to Josef Stalin and Mao Tze Tung,” local officials thought better of dispersing his hordes. They reversed themselves to allow the school campsite, which added jolts of vindication to the mass meeting that night. Willie Ricks guided Carmichael to the speaker's platform when he made bail, saying most of the locals remembered him fondly. “Drop it now!” he urged. “The people are ready.”

Carmichael faced an agitated crowd of six hundred. “This is the 27th time I have been arrested,” he began, “and I ain't going to jail no more!” He said Negroes should stay home from Vietnam and fight for black power in Greenwood. “We want black power!” he shouted five times, jabbing his forefinger downward in the air. “That's right. That's what we want, black power. We don't have to be ashamed of it. We have stayed here. We have begged the president. We've begged the federal government—that's all we've been doing, begging and begging. It's time we stand up and take over. Every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned down tomorrow to get rid of the dirt and the mess. From now on, when they ask you what you want, you know what to tell 'em. What do you want?”

The crowd shouted, “Black power!” Willie Ricks sprang up to help lead thunderous rounds of call and response: “What do you want?” “Black power!”

K
ING RETURNED
to a movement flickering starkly in its public face. At the mass meeting on Friday, June 17, after a tense march to the Leflore County courthouse, Willie Ricks dueled Hosea Williams in alternate chants of “Black Power!” versus “Freedom!” On Saturday's march past the tiny hamlet of Itta Bena—James Bevel's hometown, three years after sharecroppers there had braved their first civil rights ceremony to mourn the assassination of Medgar Evers, only to be hauled from church by way of Greenwood jail to Parchman Penitentiary, where some were suspended by handcuffs from cell bars in the death house—King and Carmichael faced persistent interviews in motion down Highway 7 toward Belzoni. “What do you mean,” asked a broadcast reporter, “when you shout black power to these people back here?”

“I mean,” Carmichael replied, “that the only way that black people in Mississippi will create an attitude where they will not be shot down like pigs, where they will not be shot down like dogs, is when they get the power where they constitute a majority in counties to institute justice.”

“I feel, however,” King interjected, “that while believing firmly that power is necessary, that it would be difficult for me to use the phrase black power because of the connotative meaning that it has for many people.” Carmichael walked alongside, hands clasped behind his back with beguiling pleasantry. Both wore sunglasses.

A small story the same day from southern Mississippi revealed a first hint of Klan conspiracy attached to the corpse fished out of Pretty Creek, quoting the police statement by James Jones that deafening shots had blasted the head of Ben Chester White and left “parts of it all over my new car.” King left to raise funds for the Meredith campaign at a rally of 12,000 on Sunday in Detroit's Cobo Hall, sponsored by Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers. The FBI received death threats against King from a Klan unit among Reuther's members at Cadillac Assembly Plant Number 1, which they didn't disclose, but inquiries about black power generated headlines along his trail back to Mississippi: “Supremacy by Either Race Would Be Evil, He Says.” On Tuesday, June 21, King and Ralph Abernathy detoured by car with twenty volunteers from the main column to commemorate three victims of Klan murder exactly two years earlier, on the first night of Freedom Summer. Several hundred local people joined a rattled walk from Mt. Nebo Baptist Church to the Neshoba County courthouse in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Shocked employers along the sidewalk pointed out their family maids. (“Yes, it's me,” the matronly Mary Batts called out to acknowledge a stare, “and I've kept your children.”) Hostile drivers buzzed the lines at high speed, and one young woman shouted from the back seat of a blue convertible that swerved to a stop: “I wouldn't dirty my goddamned car with you black bastards!” When a line of officers blocked access to the courthouse lawn, Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, face-to-face with King, granted respite for public prayer among the bystanders closing in from both sides of the narrow street, scores of them armed with pistols, clubs, and at least one garden hoe.

King turned to raise his voice above the lines kneeling back along the pavement. “In this county, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner were brutally murdered,” he cried. “I believe in my heart that the murderers are somewhere around me at this moment.” Reporters heard “right behind you” and “you're damn right” among grunts and chuckles in response. One wrote, “King appeared to be shaken.” King knew Deputy Price himself was among eighteen defendants in the pending federal conspiracy indictment, which had been filed in the absence of a state response to the murders and remained stalled in pretrial legal maneuvers.

“They ought to search their hearts,” he continued out loud. “I want them to know that we are not afraid. If they kill three of us, they will have to kill all of us. I am not afraid of any man, whether he is in Michigan or Mississippi, whether he is in Birmingham or Boston.” Jeers soon drowned out the closing chorus of “We Shall Overcome.” Only darting blows struck the return march until someone toppled newsmen carrying heavy network cameras. “Some 25 white men surged over the television men, swinging, and then flailed into the line of march, their eyes wide with anger,” observed
New York Times
correspondent Roy Reed. “The Negroes screamed.” Attackers “hurled stones, bottles, clubs, firecrackers and shouts of obscenity,” he added, and police did not intervene “until half a dozen Negroes began to fight back.” That night, careening automobile posses sprayed Philadelphia's black neighborhood with gunfire. Riders in the fourth wave narrowly missed a startled FBI agent posted near the mass meeting at Mt. Nebo. Return shots from one targeted house wounded a passing vigilante, and this noisy postlude attracted a misleading headline for Reed's dramatic front-page account of the courthouse standoff: “Whites and Negroes Trade Shots.”

The Philadelphia trauma intensified conflict within the movement over strategy. King, lamenting “a complete breakdown of law and order,” requested federal protection in a telegram to President Johnson, and rejoined the main march in Yazoo City during a fierce debate that erupted during the Tuesday night mass meeting. Ernest Thomas of the Louisiana Deacons for Defense and Justice ridiculed hope for safety in the hands of federal agents he said were always “smiling, writing a lot of papers, sending it back to Washington, D.C.” He advocated vigilante committees to meet lawless repression. “If I must die, then I have to die the way that I feel,” Thomas shouted to a chorus of cheers.

King came on late with an impassioned rebuttal. “Somebody said tonight that we are in a majority,” he said. “Don't fool yourself. We are not a majority in a single state…. We are ten percent of the population of this nation, and it would be foolish of me to stand up and tell you we are going to get our freedom by ourselves.” He challenged boasts of armed promise in the isolated black-majority counties: “Who runs the National Guard of Mississippi? How many Negroes do you have in it? Who runs the State Patrol of Mississippi?” Any vigilante campaign would backfire “the minute we started,” he argued, not only in military result but also in public opinion—“And I tell you, nothing would please our oppressors more”—so that “it is impractical even to think about it.” King won back the crowd with a sermon against violence. “I am not going to allow anybody to pull me so low as to use the very methods that perpetuated evil throughout our civilization,” he said. “I'm sick and tired of violence. I'm tired of the war in Vietnam. I'm tired of war and conflict in the world. I'm tired of shooting. I'm tired of hatred. I'm tired of selfishness. I'm tired of evil. I'm not going to use violence no matter who says it!” Then he retired to internal debates through the night and most of Wednesday. Carmichael rejected “black equality” as an alternative to black power, insisting there was nothing inherently violent in the word “power.” King vowed to leave the march if the inflammatory rhetoric continued. The leaders compromised on a pledge to avoid the overtly competitive sloganeering, which advertised divisions at the core of a small movement based within an impoverished racial minority.

President Johnson deflected King's request for federal protection by relaying assurances from Governor Paul Johnson “that all necessary protection can and will be provided.” Additional units of the Mississippi Highway Patrol “were promptly dispatched,” he advised from Washington, urging King to “maintain the closest liaison with Assistant Attorney General John Doar, who will remain in Mississippi until the end of the march.” Johnson's reply telegram reached King late June 23 on a long day's walk through rainstorms into Canton. Latecomers were building numbers toward the finale set for Jackson, twenty miles ahead, and local supporters swelled the crowd above two thousand for a night rally on the grounds of McNeal Elementary School for Negroes, where Hosea Williams was arrested in a new dispute over permits. As tent workers rushed to put up shelter, a Highway Patrol commander announced over a megaphone: “You will not be allowed to erect the tents. If you do, you will be removed.”

Hushed disbelief spread with the realization that the Highway Patrol phalanx was turning inward. “I don't know what they plan for us,” King called out from the back of a flatbed truck, “but we aren't going to fight any state troopers.” Giving the microphone to Carmichael, he ran his right hand nervously over his head as armed officers spread along the perimeter. Carmichael chopped the air again with his finger. “The time for running has come to an end!” he shouted, soaked in perspiration, his eyes and teeth gleaming against the dark night. “You tell them white folks in Mississippi that all the scared niggers are dead!” Cheers covered an interlude just long enough for newsmen to count sixty-one helmeted officers fastening gas masks in unison. John Doar helplessly parried a cry for intervention: “What can I do? Neither side will give an inch.”

When the first loud pops sounded, King called out above the squeals that it was tear gas. “Nobody leave,” he shouted. “Nobody fight back. We're going to stand our ground.” The speakers' truck disappeared beneath thick white clouds, however, as guttural screams drowned out his attempt to sing “We Shall Overcome.” Choking, vomiting people ran blindly or dived to the muddy ground where fumes were thinner, but charging officers kicked and clubbed them to flight with the stocks of the tear gas guns. Within half an hour, the Highway Patrol units impounded the tents and dragged from the cleared field a dozen unconscious stragglers. They revived a three-year-old boy from Toronto, Canada. Hysteria lingered in the haze. Observers called the violence “worse than Selma,” and Episcopal priest Robert Castle of New Jersey wondered out loud “if democracy in Mississippi and perhaps in the United States was dead.” Two friends held up Carmichael, who had collapsed and kept repeating incoherently, “They're gonna shoot again!” Andrew Young, having leapt from the speakers' truck in panic, bent at the waist to stagger through the streets, shouting hoarsely: “We're going to the
church!
We gotta worry about the
people
now!” Reporters followed King as he retreated, wiping his eyes. “In light of this, Dr. King” asked CBS News correspondent John Hart, “have you rethought any of the philosophy of nonviolence?”

“Oh, not at all,” King replied. “I still feel that we've got to be nonviolent. How could we be violent in the midst of a police force like that?” To the battered remnant that night in a rendezvous church, his remarks brushed with bitterness over the “ironic” assurances received only hours before from President Johnson. “And the very same men that tear gassed us tonight,” said King, “are the men that we are told will be our protectors.” Catching himself, he veered into a strangely subdued reverie: “You know, the one thing I have learned…on this march is that it is a shame before almighty God that people earn as little money as the Negro people of Mississippi. You know the story.” He spoke of the humbling, bonding effect of seeing faces in desperation so closely.

R
EFUGEES SCATTERED
for the night, many to sleep on the floor of a Catholic school gym. While the marchers regrouped in Canton on Friday, June 24, some two thousand white Mississippians converged on Philadelphia to see if any Negroes dared to reappear as promised at the courthouse scene of Tuesday's mayhem. “We were brutalized here the other day,” King declared over a megaphone in their midst, “and I guess someone felt that this would stop us and that we wouldn't come back. But we are right here today standing firm, saying we are gonna have our freedom.” Catcalls and shouts of “nigger” drowned out most of his remarks. A few bottles and eggs landed among the three hundred exposed volunteers who pushed with King back to Mt. Nebo Baptist Church, none too trusting of their Highway Patrol escort.