At Canaan's Edge (15 page)

He watched the President lift up by adaptation more themes of his message for and from the movement. “The real hero of this struggle is the American Negro,” Johnson told his audience. “And who among us can say that we would have made the same progress were it not for his persistent bravery, and his faith in American democracy?” His address in the House chamber burst through resistance to applause as Johnson raised the stakes still higher. “The time of justice has now come,” he declared. “And when it does, I think that day will brighten the lives of every American. For Negroes are not the only victims.” He told the story he had urged on Goodwin only hours before, of his first job teaching Mexican-American children of Cotulla, Texas. “My students were poor, and they often came to class without breakfast, hungry,” said the President. “And they knew even in their youth that pain of prejudice. They never seemed to know why people disliked them. But they knew it was so…

“Somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child.

“I never thought then in 1928 that I would be standing here in 1965…that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students, and to help people like them all over this country. But now I do have that chance, and I let you in on a secret: I—mean—to—use—it.”

A second standing ovation answered the peek behind the veneer of Johnson as oil-state politician. Its personal revelation added consistency to the surprise force of the voting rights address, and tumultuous acclaim engulfed the President's exit from the House floor. “Manny, I want you to start hearings tonight,” he shouted to Celler through a sea of outstretched arms. Beaming, electrified, he waved off the Judiciary chairman's abashed reply that the voting rights bill—not yet introduced—was rushed for next week.
“This
week,” said Johnson. “And hold night sessions, too.”

Noise collapsed to quiet adrenaline in the presidential limousine. No one spoke for blocks. “Jack, how did I do?” the President finally asked. Goodwin and Moyers shrank from the enormity of the question, but Valenti was ready with stabilizing facts of the White House trade: thirty-six interruptions for applause consuming eight minutes, forty seconds; total delivery time, forty-five minutes, twenty seconds.

March 15–17, 1965

A
POCALYPSE
briefly wore a smile of dizzy surprise. “There cannot be anyone alive,” wrote columnist Murray Kempton, “who knows the names of all the children who carried us and Mr. Johnson to the place where he stood last night.” The
Atlanta Constitution
surrendered to the “unanswerable detail” of Johnson's argument for Negro voting rights, and many Southern newspapers frankly expressed awe for his unabashed idealism. “Rarely has the American conscience been so deeply stirred,” said the
Houston Post.
In the
New York Times,
James Reston hailed Johnson's gift for oratorical ambush, saying he “waited out his critics…to channel all these emotions and struggles into legislation at the right moment.” Other public voices offered gasps instead of the usual guarded appeals to reason. Joseph Alsop saluted “the speech of a big man dealing with a big problem in a big, bold way.” William S. White opposed Johnson's voting rights bill as a violation of state prerogatives “at the very heart of this Republic,” but he openly admired the sudden revelation of a President who “lifts this terrible pack uncomplainingly upon his back.”

Past midnight, then all day Tuesday, President Johnson harvested the tribute of potentates turned gushy. Chicago mayor Richard Daley called to praise the address as “terrific, magnificent, and impressive,” adding that all his aldermen and precinct captains agreed. “They said one of the greatest they've seen,” the mayor reported. “Do more of them. That's what people want to hear from you. God bless you and Mrs. Johnson.” The President kept interjecting, “Bless your heart, Dick,” as Daley bubbled on: “One of the greatest presentations on this subject since Lincoln. Talked about the government. Talked about the people. Obey the law, the Constitution. Know your duty. This is the only way to treat people…above all they had hope on that television…. May the Lord continue to give you good health. I'll be talking to you.”

IBM president Tom Watson wanted to discuss Selma instead of Johnson's search for a new Secretary of the Treasury. “That was a terrific speech you made last night, sir,” he said. “I think that thrilled the whole nation.”

“I don't know,” Johnson replied. “Did the best I could.” Down-home modesty evaporated as the President recited the exact running count of White House response: 1,436 pro telegrams and 82 cons. He read the text of a stirring wire from Harry Truman, repeating the ex-President's name with warm satisfaction, and rose to full dramatic ardor in reliving for Watson how he had coaxed Republicans to their feet through his peroration about teaching Mexican-American children. “I just put my head back and I'd look at them,” said Johnson, “and I'd look at the camera. They looked at all the damn cameras on them, and I wish you'd seen them get up.”

He and Watson roared with laughter. “I saw them get up,” said Watson, “but I didn't know how you pulled it off.”

“Yeah, that, that's what I was doing,” beamed Johnson.

“I'll be darned,” said Watson.

“They all of them had glue in their britches, and they were just
stuck,
and they wouldn't come at all,” Johnson boasted. “And when they saw that camera start circling around on 'em, that little red light—it was the funniest thing I ever saw.”

“Well, that was a stroke of genius,” said Watson. “Well, they damn well
ought
to have gotten up, because it was magnificent.”

Before the end of the day, Johnson applied the full energy of boyish celebrations to hard business. He summoned Vice President Humphrey and the entire Democratic leadership of the House—Speaker John McCormack, Majority Leader Carl Albert, Majority Whip Hale Boggs, and all eighteen assistant majority whips—for a strategy session on his determination to use the cresting tide of national support to secure four new cornerstones in American law: federal aid to education, Medicare, voting rights, and immigration reform. The fourth and least heralded bill would replace the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 among others back to the nation's first immigration law in 1790, all heavily restricting immigrants by race or nationality to the favored “stock” of northern Europe. Johnson's reform sought to limit newcomers by number but not by origin, which promised slowly to absorb all the world's faces and cultures under the Constitution. Each of the bills established a landmark national commitment—to the young, the elderly, minorities, and even aspiring foreigners. Together they extended America's distinctive horizontal bonds of popular strength, in keeping with the founding principle of equal citizenship.

Johnson exhorted the House leaders to pass these four above all others. This year, he said, while the momentum of Selma augmented the political mandate of the 1964 election. He worked them over, then retired upstairs in the White House to dicker toward the same goal with Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen.

S
EMINARIANS
J
UDITH
Upham and Jonathan Daniels suffered an acute letdown when Selma woke up Tuesday unchanged. They debated whether speeches and tumultuous marches were more than vanishing noise, and agreed that demonstrations were “sort of stupid”—making a spectacle of themselves to communicate a simple point in a stubborn world. Outside Brown Chapel, where James Bevel told morning crowds he hoped to have court permission soon to march to Montgomery, eager new arrivals tried to circumvent the blockades. Negro seminarians from Atlanta confronted Sheriff Clark, and a group of three hundred sat for hours in witness on Sylvan Street. Upham and Daniels meant to go back to school, but missed another departing bus. Paralyzed—“blinded,” wrote Daniels—they could not bring themselves to wrap up Selma in one “slam-bam” visit, like tourists in ministry, and it registered within hours that they could leave only on a solemn pledge to return for keeps. “The imperative was too clear,” Daniels explained in a letter, “the stakes were too high, my own identity was called too nakedly into question…and the road to Damascus led, for me, back here.” Liberated by resolve, they headed for Boston just long enough to drop seminary for the term and pack Upham's Volkswagen.

They passed through confusion at the Montgomery airport, where SNCC recruiters intercepted pilgrims bound for Selma and diverted them to downtown Montgomery. From Jackson Baptist Church, James Forman led a crisis march of some six hundred students to answer Monday night's violent siege near the Ben Moore Hotel, which had gone virtually unnoticed. They intended to deliver a voting rights petition to Governor Wallace, but police blockaded them at the corner of Decatur Street and Adams Avenue. Montgomery County sheriff Mac Sim Butler led a charge of fifteen mounted horsemen into the standoff, “wearing a cowboy hat”—wrote an observer confirmed by photographs—“and swinging a cane by the tip end.” Howls and screams sounded. One handful of demonstrators protectively circled Forman, many clutching a telephone pole until blows forced them to scatter backward. Helmeted possemen followed the horses on foot. A rabbi among the demonstrators spun from a yard with a lit cigar between his teeth, holding a sheaf of papers with one arm and the legs of a wounded Negro girl with the other; a SNCC worker in bib overalls and a dress shirt held her shoulders, shouting, “Can we get a doctor?” When one blow struck a skull in an eerie moment of quiet, “the sound of the nightstick carried up and down the block,” wrote correspondent Roy Reed for the
New York Times.
“Across Decatur Street, the larger crowd was almost hysterical…. When the smaller group was routed, the mounted officers waded into the larger one.”

The demonstrators retreated to the street outside Jackson Baptist, where an exasperated Bevel, having rushed over from Selma, dragged Forman aside to find out why he invited such punishment. Couldn't he tell from the President's speech that the right-to-vote movement was on the brink of success? An equally exasperated Forman dismissed the address as empty politics. “That cracker was just talkin' shit,” he said.

“Naw, the man was preaching,” said Bevel.

They muted their ongoing dispute for the benefit of a shaken crowd. From atop a wooden crate, Bevel preached nonviolence and suggested that they save themselves for a more decisive march. Forman followed with an argument that LBJ must guard the right to petition for voting rights until he could deliver them. They stepped down to wait for Martin Luther King to arrive for mediation. The crowd cheered both of them. There were students from Tuskegee, Alabama State, and local high schools, plus mostly white travelers still holding up “One Man-One Vote” placards with identifying signs from nineteen scattered schools, including Antioch, Spokane, Wilberforce, Harvard, Carnegie Tech, Duke, and Wayne State.

T
HE IMPACT
of Selma reverberated worldwide, with responses to new events feeding off others in the pipeline. In Budapest that Tuesday, embattled under Communist rule, the Hungarian Council of Churches celebrated the twentieth anniversary of liberation from Hitler by a letter of appreciation to King (“We are deeply astonished at the death of Rev. James J. Reeb…”). From one campus alone, which already had sent some people to Selma and fifty others to picket the White House, another 250 Wayne State University students joined Governor Romney of Michigan for a second Tuesday march of ten thousand around the federal building in downtown Detroit. Some of these gathered afterward for discussion at the home of the Episcopal chaplain, where a number resolved to leave immediately by caravan for Alabama. “Prior to today I felt that any personal contribution I might offer to those individuals in Selma was of little or no consequence….” wrote one of them. “Nevertheless, upon reading the content of our president's speech today, I am no longer able to sit by while my people are suffering…. I examined carefully my own possible reaction if I were one of the Selma victims, not just a spectator.” By “my people,” Viola Liuzzo meant fellow citizens. She was the daughter of a Tennessee coal miner, now a married part-time student nearly forty, with five children, and by nature determined. When all the other student volunteers canceled or postponed their trip by morning, Liuzzo, over the fearful protest of her family, headed south in her Oldsmobile alone.

Also on Tuesday at Wayne State, Alice Herz realized she had left the original of her protest leaflet in a commercial copying machine. Afraid the authorities would intercept it and stop her, Herz abandoned plans to carry out her demonstration on the campus where she had taught German after fleeing first from Berlin in 1933, then as a refugee west through wartime internment camps in France and Cuba. With her materials, she hastily boarded an outbound bus along Detroit's Grand River Street. Herz was a bookworm, a trilingual freelance writer, retired kindergarten proprietor, and ardent admirer of Martin Luther King. She had pushed her way into the 1963 rally at Cobo Hall to hear an early rendition of his “I Have a Dream” speech, which Michigan devotees considered superior to the famous version in Washington. She had joined the first giant march around Detroit's federal building on March 9, and could not believe that an American President who so eloquently endorsed the cause of Selma since then could withstand a jolting appeal to stop an incipient war. Herz exited the bus near a parking lot, stuffed her mouth with cotton, poured two cans of Energine dry cleaning fluid over her head, and struck a match. Left behind in her handbag near the flames, the copied leaflets denounced “hatred and fear, deliberately whipped up during the last twenty years,” and accused President Johnson of having “declared his decision and already started to enact it,” to make war in Vietnam. “GOD IS NOT MOCKED,” wrote Herz. “To make myself heard I have chosen the flaming death of the Buddhists…. May America's Youth take the lead toward LIFE!”

Against her will, the eighty-two-year-old body of Alice Herz struggled ten days before she succumbed to burns. She had confided nothing of the plan to her sole surviving child, even though they had been lifelong pacifists together at the urging of her late husband, Paul (a conscript in Kaiser Wilhelm's army), and apartment-mates since his death in 1928. Tuesday evening at the hospital, supported by a co-worker from the Detroit public library, Helga Herz managed to say that her mother had been very upset by the bombing of Vietnam since February. She received a note in the next day's mail begging forgiveness: “When you understand why I've done this, you will accept it. Don't cry and don't complain. I'm not doing this out of despair but out of hope for mankind.” A book of Alice Herz's worldwide correspondence would be published a decade later in Holland—“A holy courage must animate more and more American souls,” she had written a Japanese philosopher in 1952—but America's first Vietnam peace casualty sank invisibly among freakish news squibs.

P
UBLIC SENSATION
did rise from the late mass meeting in Montgomery, despite great efforts to forge a working compromise. King secured a large church from the network of pastors who had refused SNCC, and Forman agreed to emphasize the goal of national action as symbolized by the twice-deferred march from Selma. “There's only one man in this country that can stop George Wallace and those posses,” he told the overflow crowd at Beulah Baptist. “We can present thousands and thousands of bodies in the streets if we want to…but a lot of these problems will not be solved until that shaggedy old place called the White House begins to shake, and gets on the phone and says, ‘Now listen, George, we're coming down there and throw you in jail if you don't stop that mess!'” Over rippling cheers, Forman let slip his corrosive doubts. “This problem goes to the very
bottom
of the United States,” he shouted, “and you know, I said it today and I'll say it again. If we can't sit at the table, let's
knock
the fuckin' legs off! Excuse me.”