At Canaan's Edge (187 page)

McNamara warned that news “may begin to leak out, because it is quite a substantial operation to move 15–16000 men, 450 helicopters, 10,000 miles, and get them there within eight weeks from today, roughly.”

Norman's younger sister Jessye, then a student at Howard University, would become a noted opera singer.

“Because he has got to die, and if you have got to do something that you don't want to do, and it's going to be the last thing that you do, then you have been licked. So instead of fearing death, let us learn with the young man who wrote Thanatopsis, not an old man but a young man…to approach our graves by living daily so that we can subordinate ourselves to the greatest thing that comes our way, and then the soul will finally throw off the body like a worn-out feather without consequence. Amen.”

“As always your eloquent and generous words are a source of strength and comfort,” Johnson replied to King. “The struggle to end oppression, and to heal the scars of oppression will not be easy, but it is easier because of your courageous leadership. No cause—no goal of my Presidency—is dearer to my heart or more important to our nation than the achievement of full emancipation in our time.”

Troy X (Augustine), Clarence X (Jingles), and Robert X (Rogers) were arrested both in 1962 and 1965. An account of the April 27, 1962, incident, in which Robert X received four gunshot wounds, forms the first chapter of
Pillar of Fire,
the second volume in this series. Prosecutors dropped charges against these three defendants. Eleven others were convicted in 1963, and remained in prison during the Watts uprising.

“The master of hate, who planned the operation,” Clark asserted, “was in the White House.”

“I was wrong about Johnson on voting,” Minnis said thirty-eight years later.

In December 1965, Attorney General Katzenbach quietly bemoaned the school board's first self-study as follows: “The report, to say the least, is not very good.” A second attempt in January of 1967 backed toward concession that some school policies defied explanation “by factors which do not include race.” By then, Keppel's successor, Harold Howe II, said publicly that Northern school segregation fell “beyond the clear purview of the Civil Rights Act.”

Blumenbach, a founder of anthropology, discovered no empirical boundaries to support classification by race. “Innumerable varieties of mankind run into one another by insensible degrees,” he wrote.

“Since he won the Nobel Peace Prize, something tragic and unexpected has happened to Dr. King,” Friedman wrote on August 20, the day of the Daniels murder. “He has become pompous and dull.”

As a white married couple conspicuous in civil rights work, Francis and Elizabeth Walter decided they could not “emotionally take living in Selma.” Walter covered his territory from the university town of Tuscaloosa, where his Selma Inter-Religious Project found office space in a black funeral home.

“Mere knowledge or belief is too feeble to be a cure for man's hostility to man, man's tendency to fratricide,” Heschel told a convention of rabbis, introducing King. “The only remedy is
personal sacrifice,
to abandon, to eject what seems dear, even plausible, like prejudice, for the sake of a greater truth, to do more than I am ready to understand for the sake of God.”

“We strongly believe that the objectives of the march do not justify the danger and the resources involved,” declared the SNCC letter mailed to King that day. A stand-in signed Lewis's name.

McNamara, without confirming that he actually saw the immolation, focuses in the memoir on a vivid image: “When he set himself on fire, he was holding his one-year-old daughter in his arms. Bystanders screamed, ‘Save the child!' and he flung her out of his arms. She survived without injury.” This implausible account contradicts witnesses who said Morrison first set his daughter aside, and disregards uniform reports that she suffered not so much as a scratch or singe mark. McNamara's conflicted portrait recalls empathy for Morrison—“I believed I understood and shared some of his thoughts”—yet bends logic to dehumanize him as fiendishly indifferent toward his own offspring. By contrast, the Vietnamese poem interprets innocent life as the embodiment of Morrison's conscious purpose.

Stationed with troops on alert to suppress the riots feared during the 1963 March on Washington, Forrest had been unaware that his own parents were among the marchers. He stood three months later in the honor guard for President Kennedy's casket at the Capitol Rotunda. Forrest would return to the Ia Drang Valley for a 1993 reunion of combatants from both sides, and later became chief administrator for St. Mary's County, Maryland.

After twenty ballots, an all-white jury convicted Hubert Strange on December 2 for the random murder of Willie Brewster on the way home from a July 1965 white supremacy rally, at which Connie Lynch and J. B. Stoner had praised the Liuzzo ambush as a model extermination. Stoner, who served as defense counsel for Strange, denounced the jury as “white niggers.” Civil rights supporters celebrated in the Anniston courtroom by tearing up leaflets that protested an expected acquittal.

Gandhi: “Men say I am a saint losing myself in politics. The fact is that I am a politician trying my hardest to be a saint.”

Moynihan would go on to serve as counselor to President Richard Nixon, 1969–71, ambassador to India, 1973–75, ambassador to the United Nations, 1975–76, and U.S. senator from New York, 1977–2001.

Reagan's January 4 announcement speech set a dual tone. He warned darkly of oppressive liberal government, “neurotic vulgarities” on the college campus, and disorder from thinly disguised minorities—“Our city streets are jungle paths after dark”—balanced by flourishes of hopeful disposition. “Our problems are many,” he said, “but our capacity for solving them is limitless.” On
Meet the Press,
to a barrage of skeptical questions about how he could hope to escape a landslide defeat running on discredited Goldwater positions, Reagan patiently replied, “I think by simply telling the truth,” and he brushed off suggestions of political stigma from his opposition to civil rights: “I am just incapable of prejudice.”

Smith lamented naïveté in SNCC: “Julian Bond (whose parents are wonderful people, one of the finest Negro families in Georgia) is, I fear, pulled this way and that.” Conflicted about Vietnam, she sensed that critics were quicker to loathe LBJ and Dean Rusk as Southerners (“I find myself thinking this”) than to offer practical plans for peace. “So: I am not agreeing with those who criticize harshly,” Smith wrote, “much less those who want to burn their draft cards.”

FBI director Hoover sent agents to warn Cody that King was “influenced by communist-oriented thinking,” and received assurance that the archbishop found King too “glib.” Cody, who had presided over the integration of parochial schools in New Orleans, may have devised this improbable reading of King to placate Hoover. His actions would remain cautious but friendly to the Chicago movement.

The FBI wiretap on Levison, who was not invited to the Riklis dinner, later picked up Wachtel's gossipy report that Bernstein promised Coretta a concert solo and diva Maria Callas flirted with King.

A 1913 Massachusetts law, for example, voided marriages between persons not eligible to be wedded in their home states. That obscure statute would be reapplied from race to gender in 2004 as a legal impediment to the recognition of same-sex marriage. Some states banned miscegnation only if a white person was involved, to prevent what Virginia judges called “the obliteration of racial pride.”

“No American is without responsibility,” King's wire declared. “All are involved in the sorrow that rises from Selma to contaminate every crevice of our national life. The people of Selma will struggle on for the soul of the nation, but it is fitting that all Americans help to bear the burden. I call, therefore, on clergy of all faiths, representatives of every part of the country, to join me for a ministers' march to Montgomery on Tuesday morning, March 9th. In this way all America will testify to the fact that the struggle in Selma is for the survival of democracy everywhere in our land.”

In the fifth Chicago settlement for SCLC's Operation Breadbasket, Jesse Jackson reached agreement with the Bowman Dairy on July 22 to hire forty-five black workers in previously white positions.

The New York counsel for Avis Corporation described one of the rented vehicles for which Williams demanded an emergency replacement: “A subsequent close examination of the Ford indicated, in addition to extensive rear-end damage, that the front door locks had been jimmied, the glove compartment lock had been almost completely removed, the radio antenna had been removed, the radio was disconnected and was almost wholly removed from its place, the spare tire and jack were missing, the upholstery was extensively soiled and stained, and the interior filled with debris, papers, old clothes, and empty liquor bottles.”

The Vatican newspaper accepted Lennon's apology in the simmering scandal, but apartheid South Africa banned Beatles music for blasphemy. In New York, police arrested two young women for threatening to jump from the twenty-second floor of the Americana Hotel unless granted a personal audience with their idols.

Carmichael expected H. Rap Brown to be SNCC's only Alabama fieldworker after the 1966 election. Silas Norman had been drafted into the Army. Bob Moses, though nine years beyond draft age, fled conscription in August, and his future wife, Janet Jemmott, left Lowndes County eventually to join him for a decade of exile in Tanzania. Bob Mants also left, though he later settled in Lowndes. Newlywed Gloria Larry House went to Detroit with co-worker Stuart House on medical advice that their unborn baby would not survive her meager diet at the SNCC Freedom House. She became a Wayne State University professor.

The
New York Times
account conveyed skepticism about King's linguistic goal: “He offered no explanation as to how this could be done.”

“Israel's right to exist as a state in security is incontestable,” King wrote Morris Abram, president of the American Jewish Committee. “At the same time the great powers have the obligation to recognize that the Arab world is in a state of imposed poverty and backwardness that must threaten peace and harmony.”

^*
Joseph L. Searles. King's lawyer Clarence Jones was an allied member through his partnership in a NYSE firm. Muriel Siebert became the first female member in 1967. Beneath the ownership level, Merrill Lynch had hired three black men in 1965 to integrate its sales force of 2,250 stockbrokers.

^*
Abernathy wrote King on January 18 from Saigon's Hotel Caravelle, “I feel so empty away from you and our struggle for the freedom of our people,” adding a self-conscious superscript to his letter: “Please keep for the sake of history.”

^*
Moynihan complained to Bundy of “near demented Black militants,” who dominated a conference “so suffused with near madness as to begin to wonder whether I had not slipped my own moorings as well.”

Hampton, the first black executive hired by the Unitarian Universalist Association, later became creator and executive producer of
Eyes on the Prize,
an acclaimed television documentary series about the civil rights movement that aired on the Public Broadcasting System beginning in 1986.

Including Lester McKinney of SNCC, William Higgs of the MFDP, Rev. Jefferson Rogers of SCLC, and Hubert (Rap) Brown of the Nonviolent Action Group at Howard University.

McNamara here contradicted prevailing judgment. At Little Rock in 1957, and more so at Ole Miss in 1962, most of the violence occurred before rather than after the deployment of U.S. Army troops.

“Before saying any more about this,” Lippmann wrote that week, “let me say at once that this does not mean that we can or should withdraw our troops, abandon our clients in Saigon, retire from the theater and give up the effort to safeguard the independence of the Indochinese states.”

Johnson referred to the laws of 1957, 1960, and 1964, which ended a drought in civil rights acts since Reconstruction. He supported the first two as Senate Majority Leader, and signed the third as President.