After the Tall Timber (14 page)

The more cultivated elements of the segregationist community have evolved their own schizophrenic logic. “Negroes have always been able to vote here,” the Greenwood newspaper proudly editorialized, and added, “This county was one of the first in the country to receive federal registrars.” “You better get out of here before you need an undertaker,” a sheriff said to a voter-registration task force. Then he muttered to himself, “They just came in here, mouthin’.”

But there are signs of progress, or at least of resignation. “We didn’t want this to happen, but what the hell!” said Joseph Lee, the editor of the newspaper in Grenada—a town that had twice run out a team of COFO (Council of Federated Organizations) workers, but in which the marchers registered more than twelve hundred voters. “There are things we used to do that we don’t know now why we did them. We didn’t know why we did them then. There are still some people who hang back and look sore. And a man who’s a little weak in the head can make as much trouble as a Rhodes Scholar. But these days I tell my own Negroes to get their fanny on over and register.” The Grenada city manager, however, was reconciled in his own way. “Most of your Negroes registering are either very old or young,” he said. “Your old ones—well, the vote isn’t till 1967. And the young ones—a lot of them will be going to Vietnam. And some of them won’t be coming back.”

There are advances in law enforcement. Despite the fact that several marchers were kicked and beaten by troopers during the tear-gas episode (a medical worker suffered three broken ribs and a collapsed lung), the troopers were not—by the standards of Watts, for example—especially brutal; they exercised what might be termed self-restraint. The sheriff of Sunflower County, where the White Citizens Councils were born, is a graduate of the FBI school and, like many other local officials whom the Justice Department has quietly encouraged to attend federal schools, cooperates in seeing to it that federal law is observed. Charles Snodgrass, in charge of the march for the Mississippi Highway Patrol, won the marchers’ respect for his integrity; and he worked closely with John Doar—an Assistant Attorney General so respected by blacks and whites alike that, in the words of one marcher, “He seems to be the only one left in the Justice Department who knows what’s going on. Without John Doar, there’d be a lot more dead in Mississippi.”

Even the most extreme elements are, almost unconsciously, changing. The mob in Philadelphia, shouting, surging forward, throwing eggs and Coke bottles, listened to every phrase spoken by Dr. King long enough to scream an ugly answer to it. (Sometimes they listened and screamed so carefully that Dr. King appeared to be leading them in a responsive reading.) And a waitress in Jackson readily conceded, “Your whites in Neshoba County, they’re the meanest people in the state.” (Then she added, as if overcome by her own liberalism, “They got Indian blood in them.”) And there are some real liberals. “It takes about ten drinks for me to say what I really think,” a lady in Jackson said. “Why, we’ve never done anything that’s right for the Negro. All we did was starve him, and work him, and shoot him in the back. I don’t see how they could run their counties any worse than the whites have been running them.”

THE LOCAL BLACKS: Strong leadership is developing in the small communities, and the march left little registration teams everywhere in its wake. Canton alone already had Annie Devine, of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, who, with mud still on her dress and with her eyes still red from the tear gas, rose to announce, simply, “We are not going to stay ignorant, and backward, and scared”; and young Flonzie Goodlow, of the NAACP, who, despite white intimidation and jealous opposition from misguided workers for SNCC in the past, brought so many blacks to vote that she could announce her own intention of running for registrar in 1967; and George Raymond, of CORE, who was a voice of gentle moderation throughout the march, and diverted the marchers at moments of crisis with singing. Then, there are the local non-leaders, like the delegation from Holmes County that came to offer the marchers lodging, and, upon learning that the march was skirting Holmes, acknowledged, “There are other places in badder shape. Whichever way they go, we’re going to support it.” And like Hura Montgomery, a black farmer in Louise, who permitted the marchers to pitch their tents on his land. “I was possibly hoping they wouldn’t ask,” he said, “but somebody had to let them in.”

THE MARCH LEADERS: Robert Green, of SCLC, a tall young professor of psychology at Michigan State, was liaison man for the march. Addressing the local police with quiet authority, planting an American flag on the statue of Jefferson Davis in Grenada (“The South you led will never stand again. Mississippi must become part of the Union”), leaping over the cowcatcher to board a locomotive moving toward the line of march in Jackson (he commanded the engineer to stop, and persuaded the angry marchers to keep marching), reassuring a troubled white worker for the Urban League (“We need the conservative groups, too. We need to engage the problem at every level”), and reasoning quietly with the few advocates of arms among the marchers (“The whites will simply seal you off and crush you, as they did in Watts. Our only course is to confront them again and again with the force of non-violence. It’s the glory of the movement”), Green played a part in the march which itself changed the face of Mississippi. The police respected his fearlessness and his dignity. The towns were so shaken by his treatment of the monument in Grenada that several other monuments along the route were guarded by six black trusties from the state penitentiary, to prevent a recurrence of the desecration. And the marchers were sufficiently impressed by his courage and intelligence to respond consistently to his leadership.

Floyd McKissick, the national director of CORE, was always called upon to lead the marchers on days when they had to start promptly and walk fast, and to make practical announcements concerning strategy and finances. McKissick, an attorney from Durham, North Carolina, marched for the most part with patience and good humor. When a lady from Charleston, Mississippi, a black woman, came to the campsite at Enid Dam in the night to wish him well, and to tell him that “there are [liberal] whites in Charleston who are just as scared as we are,” he discussed with her for an hour the question of whether it was time for the movement to make contact with white liberals in Mississippi. It was McKissick who served the marchers their lunch on days when he led them, and who, after many nights disrupted by the arguments of ideologues, the buzzing of transistor radios, and the nervous jokes of the night security guard, announced that “anyone who disturbs the marchers’ sleep tonight will be hauled out and sent home.” It was McKissick who mediated between SNCC and SCLC. But on the night of the tear gas in Canton McKissick’s patience simply broke. The contrast between police treatment of peaceful black trespassers on the grounds of an illegally segregated school and the reluctance of the police in Philadelphia to intervene against an armed white mob seemed to overwhelm the lawyer in him. He was almost incoherent with rage, and close to tears. “I’m tired of having to
negotiate
for our constitutional
rights
,” he said. “Some people said we ought to confront President Johnson. I say the hell with it. When the tear gas came, I fell off that truck like a scrambled egg. You didn’t want that school, but they made it yours. They don’t call it
white
power. They just call it
power
. I’m committed to non-violence, but I say what we need is to get us some
black
power.”

Stokely Carmichael, the young chairman of SNCC, argued most persuasively for black political power, and when, as he saw it, he was continuously misrepresented by the press, he became obdurate and began to make himself eminently misrepresentable. What he had in mind throughout the march was a Populist movement in the South: White SNCC workers would address themselves to the white poor, black SNCC workers would address themselves to the black poor, and since the blacks would outnumber the whites, the new Populists would naturally be under black leadership, and would present an encouraging example of black effectiveness to blacks throughout the country.

Tall, lean and intellectual, Carmichael spoke to the crowds at night, punctuating his words with a finger pointed at the ground, enunciating a phrase slowly and then repeating it rapidly, bending his knees to add emphasis to his soft, tense voice. It was Carmichael who said, “It is time to stop being ashamed of being black. It is time to stop trying to be white. When you see your daughter playing in the fields, with her nappy hair, and her wide nose, and her thick lips, tell her she is beautiful.
Tell your daughter she is beautiful.”
It was Carmichael who, wherever he went, picked up children and carried them, and who, when the marchers swarmed into a black lady’s house for a drink of water, reprimanded them by saying, “None of you asked where that lady got the water. None of you bothered to find out that she has to carry that water in buckets a mile and a half. These are things we ought to be talking about.” (Carmichael himself hauled water for the lady.)

It was also Carmichael who, having lived for six summers under the fear and strain that assail a SNCC worker in the South, became hysterical for several minutes after the tear-gas episode in Canton. “Don’t make your stand here,” said Carmichael, the militant, sobbing and wandering about in circles. “I just can’t stand to see any more people get shot.” The following evening, it was Carmichael who wanted the marchers to risk putting up the tents again in the schoolyard, and who, overruled by Dr. King and the local people, sulked. (When James Lawson, a member of SCLC, and a founder of SNCC, told him later that he had been wrong, he accepted the criticism and agreed.) Although on the night of the Philadelphia riot [
1
] Carmichael said, “This is SNCC’s night, man. This is our suit,” he never forced an issue, never exhorted the marchers to violence, never, in spite of his militancy, put people in unnecessary danger. And it was Carmichael, the militant, who, in the words of one reporter, “came all over shy” when fifteen thousand people, assembled in Tougaloo, sang “Happy Birthday” to him (twenty-five) and James Meredith (thirty-three); and the night itself seemed to break out in smiles. (As for Meredith, who had been such an enigma throughout his personal ordeal, he simply melted before this friendly, sentimental face of America. “This is the happiest birthday I’ve ever had,” he said.) In later interviews, Carmichael (like Meredith) was as uncompromising in not urging non-violence—and in not urging violence, either—as he had ever been.

Dr. Martin Luther King, of SCLC, proved on the march that he is still
the
leader of the movement, and perhaps the most forceful voice of conscience in the country. People came from all over Mississippi to see him, and responded to the measured, rational cadences of his voice. Time after time, he averted a crisis among the marchers, and his aides—Hosea Williams, leading gentle hymns and silent night marches, and Andy Young, making soft, persuasive speeches—called forth the same extraordinary discipline with which he is able to inspire the movement. Turning to Sheriff Rainey, in Philadelphia, and saying, “I believe in my heart that the murderers are somewhere around me at this moment,” and turning back to the marchers, under attack from a far larger crowd, to say, “I am not afraid of any man,” Dr. King set an example of pure courage. Exhorting the marchers in Canton to remain calm under the tear gas, or addressing a church full of blacks in Cleveland, Mississippi, so movingly that a five-year-old girl began to sob and say over and over again, “I want to go with him,” Dr. King was a superb spiritual leader. Bringing a busload of juvenile-gang leaders from Chicago to Mississippi, in the hope of diverting their energies to the non-violent cause of civil rights, Dr. King proved himself again an incomparable strategist and pedagogue. And a few phrases like “America, land of the free and home of the brave. Land of free white men, and home of brave Negroes” proved that Dr. King’s rhetoric has not lost its cutting edge.

The march was led by complicated men with divergent ideologies, just as the movement is, and their differences are the same ones that divide the nation at large. The response of the white community—alarm and hurt among liberals, and, among reactionaries, alarm and threats to use the white man’s undeniably superior force—conceals a failure to hear what the movement is saying. For too long, civil rights has been treated as though it were only the blacks’ struggle, with some benevolent white liberal support to help it along; what the movement seeks now is not benevolence but a recognition of reality: the black man’s rights are
law
—and for the white community to resist or ignore the law implies the collapse of an entire legal and moral system. It has become intolerable to the black man to win so slowly what is his by right, and it has become too costly, in every possible sense, to go on denying him his just place in this society.

The New Yorker
July 16, 1966

THE PALMER HOUSE

THE NATIONAL New Politics Convention, which was held at the Palmer House in Chicago over the Labor Day weekend, began as a call from the National Conference for New Politics—an organization that has given financial support to radical candidates in various elections since early in 1966—for delegates from all radical and liberal groups opposed to the American involvement in Vietnam to unite on a course of political action for 1968. The convention presented, from the first, a travesty of radical politics at work. In the quality of its radical dissent, the no longer New Left—which had seemed in its youth somewhere midway between the plain frivolity of a college prank and the struggle of a generation out of apathy into social consciousness—now seemed a vulgar joke, contributing as much to serious national concern with the problems of war, racism, and poverty as a mean drunk to the workings of a fire brigade. Throughout the convention, delegates seemed constantly to emerge, wet-lipped and trembling, from some crowded elevator, some torrent of abuse, some marathon misrepresentation of fact, some pointless totalitarian maneuver, or some terminal sophistry to pronounce themselves “radicalized.” Being “radicalized” had, among alumni of earlier New Left conventions, two possible meanings: voting against one’s principles with an expression of Machiavellian deviousness, or discussing one’s politics as a most interesting turn in one’s personal psychology. Among novices, being “radicalized” meant having been persuaded of something by radicals.