Voices in Our Blood (47 page)

The Genius Behind It

When I talked to the students and their mass supporters I heard them quote the
Wall Street Journal,
of all things, to show that they had hit the segregationists in the pocketbook. I also discovered that in March five Southern cities had already yielded to the demands of the demonstrators and were serving Negroes at lunch counters without incident. Eighteen other cities had interracial committees working to resolve the matter. In each case the students have made it plain that they will not accept segregation in any form.

But neither the students nor their real supporters dwelt unduly on such practical results. For them, individually and as a group, the victory came when they mustered the courage to look the segregationists in the face and say, “I'm no longer afraid!”

The genius of the demonstrations lies in their spirituality; in their ability to enlist every Negro, from the laborer to the leader, and inspire him to seek suffering as a badge of honor. By employing such valid symbols as singing, praying, reading Gandhi, quoting Thoreau, remembering Martin Luther King, preaching Christ, but most of all by suffering themselves—being hit by baseball bats, kicked, and sent to jail—the students set off an old-fashioned revival that has made integration an article of faith with the Negro masses who, like other masses, are apathetic toward voting and education.

Now the cook, the maid, the butler, and the chauffeur are on fire with the new faith. For the first time since slavery the South is facing a mass revolt against segregation. There is no total explanation for what has happened. All I know is that as I talked with the participants I realized that people were weary of the very fact of segregation. They were no longer content “to let the NAACP do it”; they wanted to get into the fight and they chose the market place, the great center of American egalitarianism, not because it had any overwhelming significance for them but because it was there—accessible and segregated. Tomorrow—and they all believe there will be a tomorrow—their target will be something else.

Few of the masses who have come to the support of these students realize that in attacking segregation under the banner of idealism they are fighting a battle they refused for five years to enter in the name of legalism. But there is a twinkle in the Southern Negro's eye. One gets the feeling that he is proud, now that he has come to full stature and has struck out with one blow against both segregation and the stifling control of Negro leaders.

In all truth, the Negro masses have never been flattered by the presence of these leaders, many of whom—justifiably or not—they suspected were Judas goats. The Negro masses will name leaders and will give them power and responsibility. But there will never again be another class of white-oriented leaders such as the one that has prevailed since 1900.

What's Left?

For the Negro masses this is the laying down of a heavy burden. As the deep South is slowly learning, it faces a race of Negro
individuals—
any of whom, acting out of deep religious faith, may at any moment choose the most available evidence of segregation and stage a protest. And when he does the entire Negro community will close ranks about him.

If Negro leadership organizations accept this verdict of change gracefully they can find a continuing usefulness as a reservoir of trained personnel to aid the local Negro in pressure techniques and legal battles. Indeed, within four weeks after the lunch-counter demonstrations began, just such a pattern was established. I have investigated the mechanics of the demonstrations in twenty-six cities and in each instance I found that the students and their local supporters moved first on their own; CORE came in by invitation and provided classes in techniques of non-violence; and the NAACP provided lawyers and bondsmen for those who were arrested. If Negro leadership organizations don't accept this state of affairs, they will be replaced, as they were in Montgomery.

Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund have already set an excellent pattern which other leadership organizations will do well to study. As a symbol, Mr. Marshall inspires local citizens to act; when they do act, and at their request, Marshall brings the skill of his organization to their defense. Thurgood Marshall's role as the inspiring servant of the masses accounts for much of what has been accomplished to date in and for the United States—including his appearance in London as counsel to the Kenya natives.

Negro leadership organizations know what the revolt means and are about reconciled to being servants rather than catalysts—at least I think so. I cannot say the same for the Negro leadership class as a whole. My month-long investigation unearthed a good deal of foot-dragging by moneyed Negroes in high places. They are not too pleased to see young Negro students sit down at the conference table with Southern white city officials. Some Negro college presidents are set to execute strange maneuvers. I would not be surprised, for example, if some of the student demonstrators who are studying under grants from foundations suddenly find their scholarships have been canceled on recommendation from their college presidents . . . for “poor scholarship.” But nobody noticed their scholarship until they sat down at a previously all-white lunch counter.

The student demonstrators have no illusions. They know the segregationists are not their only enemies. But the students told me they are not prejudiced—they are willing to stand up to their enemies, Negro and white alike.

It is not premature, then, to write this epitaph to the Negro leader while at the same time announcing the birth of the Negro individual. The christening has already begun; the funeral is yet a few days off. This is as it should be, America being committed, as it most certainly is, to orderly social transition. But there is no reason whatsoever to doubt that both events will come off on schedule.

III

The Mountaintop

F
or a moment—a brief one, running roughly from the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, to the signing of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965—the movement hit its peak. In retrospect, King's stirring sermon at the March is one of the high notes of the American Century. As James Reston (1909–1995) and Russell Baker (1925– ) pointed out in the next day's
New York Times,
white Washington had been braced for the worst, and there were complications ahead as the politicians tried to figure out where to go from here. Reston was the newspaper's Washington bureau chief, and Baker had just become a columnist but was writing a feature for the front page—and he started the day in a helicopter. “There was great fear there would be rioting,” Baker recalls, “so the
Times
chartered a chopper. But it was so quiet that I had the pilot go over my house and I checked out the roof. Finally I had him land at National Airport and went to the Lincoln Memorial.”

The Civil Rights Act passed in 1964; the next goal was federal voting rights legislation. The bill would be passed in Washington, but the forces that produced the law met far from the capital, on a bridge in Alabama. In an excerpt from his memoirs, John Lewis (1940– ), the young activist who had conquered a childhood stutter by preaching to chickens on his Alabama farm and whose Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had been at the forefront of the movement, recalls the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march, and the televised beatings he endured when white officers assaulted him and his comrades on the Pettus Bridge. The images from that attack galvanized the nation, and the Voting Rights Act was not far behind.

Walker Percy (1916–1990), physician and novelist, explains how the death of the Southern white moderate fueled the anarchy that afflicted Mississippi in the early and mid-1960s, concluding on a note of hope: “Someday a white Mississippian is going to go to New York, make the usual detour through Harlem, and see it for the foul cheerless warren that it is; and instead of making him happy as it does now, it is going to make him unhappy. Then the long paranoia, this damnable sectional insanity, will be one important step closer to being over.” William Styron (1925– ) details his discovery of Nat Turner, the leader of the slave rebellion. Willie Morris of
Harper's
had written Styron around 1964 and asked if he would do something for the magazine. Styron declined the first time, but when Morris contacted him again and asked for a piece to include in a special issue of the magazine marking the centennial of the end of the Civil War, Styron, who had been at work on
The Confessions of Nat Turner,
offered what became
This Quiet Dust.
Two years later,
Harper's
would publish a 45,000-word excerpt of Styron's novel.

As the sixties wore on, temperatures rose. Stanley Crouch (1945– ) was working as a speechwriter for an antipoverty program in Los Angeles in 1965, the summer Watts burned. “I went up because there had been some static,” Crouch says. “I wanted to check it out, and then all hell broke loose. The Malcolm X rhetoric was beginning to affect how people thought—you know, ‘You can't love your enemy.' ” More than 2,000 National Guardsmen were called in, and by the time it was over, there had been 3,934 arrests and 37 people were dead. Crouch recalled the scene for
Rolling Stone
years later, and the novelist and critic Elizabeth Hardwick (1916– ) analyzed “Violence in the City—An End or a Beginning? A Report by the Governor's Commission on the Los Angeles Riots,” when it came out the spring after the violence.

As the national riots of the mid-1960s—after Watts came Detroit, Newark, and many others—unfolded, the Black Power movement began to gather force. Arguing that the time had come for confrontation, not compromise, Stokely Carmichael wrested control of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee from John Lewis. Bernard Weinraub (1938– ) was a young
New York Times
reporter when
Esquire
called and asked him to do a freelance piece on Carmichael. Weinraub's profile of the Black Panther's frenetic life on the road, “The Brilliancy of Black,” was one of the first major looks at this rising figure. “I think he was a bit flattered that someone from
Esquire
would want to follow him around,” Weinraub recalls. “He was accustomed to news coverage, but not magazine pieces.” Carmichael's rise, and the appeal of Panther-like tactics, were forcing King and his nonviolent lieutenants to the margins of the movement. Charlayne Hunter-Gault (1942– ), who had integrated the University of Georgia and then moved to New York to work for
The New Yorker,
caught up with Julian Bond, one of the key strategists of the movement's glory days and by then a Georgia state representative. In a “Talk of the Town” (the editorial “we” was standard style for that section of the magazine for years), Hunter-Gault asked what Bond made of the future. “[F]or the Movement,” Bond told Hunter-Gault, “lack of interest is more killing than lack of money.”

David Halberstam (1934– ), just back from overseas duty with
The New York Times,
sensed the same thing. As a young reporter in Mississippi and Tennessee in the fifties and very early sixties, Halberstam had covered the first civil rights days. After tours for the
Times
in Vietnam, Africa, and Eastern Europe, he came home in the spring of 1967 and soon moved to
Harper's Magazine.
The movement he saw now was different from the one he had known. For his first
Harper's
piece, Halberstam caught up with King as the minister—still improbably young—turned his attention from segregation to the poor and Vietnam. “I spent about two weeks with him,” Halberstam recalls, “and it was clear that Martin was about to hit a wall. As he came North, everybody wanted something from him, and you could feel the burden he was carrying on his shoulders.”

Halberstam's article was published in August 1967. Eight months later, in Memphis, James Earl Ray killed King on the balcony outside Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel. Garry Wills (1934– ) was living in Baltimore at the time. “The minute I heard King had been shot,” he says, “I got one of the last seats on the plane to Memphis.” Once Wills landed, he headed for the funeral home where King had been taken; there were only three journalists—Wills, a
Detroit Free Press
reporter, and a photographer from
Life—
inside the building when the undertakers emerged with King's body. Wills had been writing regularly for
Esquire
and called the magazine's editor, Harold Hayes, the day after he got to Tennessee and asked if Hayes wanted a piece. “Absolutely,” the editor replied.

“I Have a Dream . . .”

The New York Times,
August 29, 1963

J
AMES
R
ESTON

Abraham Lincoln, who presided in his stone temple today above the children of the slaves he emancipated, may have used just the right words to sum up the general reaction to the Negro's massive march on Washington. “I think,” he wrote to Gov. Andrew G. Curtin of Pennsylvania in 1861, “the necessity of being ready increases. Look to it.” Washington may not have changed a vote today, but it is a little more conscious tonight of the necessity of being ready for freedom. It may not “look to it” at once, since it is looking to so many things, but it will be a long time before it forgets the melodious and melancholy voice of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. crying out his dreams to the multitude.

It was Dr. King who, near the end of the day, touched the vast audience. Until then the pilgrimage was merely a great spectacle. Only those marchers from the embattled towns in the Old Confederacy had anything like the old crusading zeal. For many the day seemed an adventure, a long outing in the late summer sun—part liberation from home, part Sunday School picnic, part political convention, and part fish-fry.

But Dr. King brought them alive in the late afternoon with a peroration that was an anguished echo from all the old American reformers. Roger Williams calling for religious liberty, Sam Adams calling for political liberty, old man Thoreau denouncing coercion, William Lloyd Garrison demanding emancipation, and Eugene V. Debs crying for economic equality—Dr. King echoed them all.

“I have a dream,” he cried again and again. And each time the dream was a promise out of our ancient articles of faith: phrases from the Constitution, lines from the great anthem of the nation, guarantees from the Bill of Rights, all ending with a vision that they might one day all come true.

Find Journey Worthwhile

Dr. King touched all the themes of the day, only better than anybody else. He was full of the symbolism of Lincoln and Gandhi, and the cadences of the Bible. He was both militant and sad, and he sent the crowd away feeling that the long journey had been worthwhile.

This demonstration impressed political Washington because it combined a number of things no politician can ignore. It had the force of numbers. It had the melodies of both the church and the theater. And it was able to invoke the principles of the founding fathers to rebuke the inequalities and hypocrisies of modern American life.

There was a paradox in the day's performance. The Negro leaders demanded equality “now,” while insisting that this was only the “beginning” of the struggle. Yet it was clear that the “now,” which appeared on almost every placard on Constitution Avenue, was merely an opening demand, while the exhortation to increase the struggle was what was really on the leaders' minds.

The question of the day, of course, was raised by Dr. King's theme: Was this all a dream or will it help the dream come true?

No doubt this vast effort helped the Negro drive against discrimination. It was better covered by television and the press than any event here since President Kennedy's inauguration, and since indifference is almost as great a problem to the Negro as hostility, this was a plus.

None of the dreadful things Washington feared came about. The racial hooligans were scarce. Even the local Nazi, George Lincoln Rockwell, minded his manners, which is an extraordinary innovation for him. And there were fewer arrests than any normal day for Washington, probably because all the saloons and hootch peddlers were closed.

Politicians Are Impressed

The crowd obviously impressed the politicians. The presence of nearly a quarter of a million petitioners anywhere always makes a Senator think. He seldom ignores that many potential votes, and it did not escape the notice of Congressmen that these Negro organizations, some of which had almost as much trouble getting out a crowd as the Washington Senators several years ago, were now capable of organizing the largest demonstrating throng ever gathered at one spot in the District of Columbia.

It is a question whether this rally raised too many hopes among the Negroes or inspired the Negroes here to work harder for equality when they got back home. Most observers here think the latter is true, even though all the talk of “Freedom NOW” and instant integration is bound to lead to some disappointment.

The meetings between the Negro leaders on the one hand and President Kennedy and the Congressional leaders on the other also went well and probably helped the Negro cause. The Negro leaders were careful not to seem to be putting improper pressure on Congress. They made no specific requests or threats, but they argued their case in small groups and kept the crowd off Capitol Hill.

Whether this will win any new votes for the civil rights and economic legislation will probably depend on the over-all effect of the day's events on the television audience.

The Major Imponderable

This is the major imponderable of the day. The speeches were varied and spotty. Like their white political brethren, the Negroes cannot run a political meeting without letting everybody talk. Also, the platform was a bedlam of moving figures who seemed to be interested in everything except listening to the speaker. This distracted the audience.

Nevertheless, Dr. King and Roy Wilkins, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and one or two others got the message across. James Baldwin, the author, summed up the day succinctly. The day was important in itself, he said, and “what we do with this day is even more important.”

He was convinced that the country was finally grappling with the Negro problem instead of evading it; that the Negro himself was “for the first time” aware of his value as a human being and was “no longer at the mercy of what the white people imagine the Negro to be.”

Merely the Beginning

On the whole, the speeches were not calculated to make Republican politicians very happy with the Negro. This may hurt, for without substantial Republican support, the Kennedy program on civil rights and jobs is not going through.

Apparently this point impressed President Kennedy, who listened to some of the speeches on television. When the Negro leaders came out of the White House, Dr. King emphasized that bipartisan support was essential for passage of the Kennedy civil rights program.

Aside from this, the advantages of the day for the Negro cause outran the disadvantages.

Above all, they got over Lincoln's point that “the necessity of being ready increases.” For they left no doubt that this was not the climax of their campaign for equality but merely the beginning, that they were going to stay in the streets until they could get equality in the schools, restaurants, houses and employment agencies of the nation, and that, as they demonstrated here today, they had found an effective way to demonstrate for changes in the laws without breaking the law themselves.