At Canaan's Edge (37 page)

Only forty-eight Negroes managed to reach Fort Deposit in time to register. The new era in Lowndes was a mute, constricted version of celebrations in the next county, where applicants outside Selma's courthouse sang the spiritual “Great Day,” receiving water and cheers from supporters who passed along their lines in the hot sun. By nightfall in Fort Deposit, resolve took hold among the teenagers who first sneaked to hear SNCC speakers under a tree. Being too young themselves to register, they aimed to lift the blanket of fear from their segregated streets and thereby encourage their elders to journey all the way to the forbidden zone at the southern tip of Lowndes. “There will be demonstrations this Saturday in Ft. Deposit,” advised a bulletin disseminated over the SNCC WATS line. The state of Alabama and the Justice Department would be asked to supply protection. “This will be the first demonstration ever held in Ft. Deposit,” added the notice. “It is a KKK headquarters…THEY ARE REALLY AFRAID OF VIOLENCE.”

J
IMMY
R
OGERS
stayed behind to prepare the young volunteers, and Carmichael drove to Birmingham for the ninth annual convention of King's SCLC, where optimism crested on its theme, “Human Rights—Basic Issues—The Grand Alliance.” Some remembered the same event during the siege to integrate Ole Miss in 1962, when they had been confined to Negro venues within the bastion of segregated Birmingham, and a Nazi had slugged King in the face. They could not stop mimicking novel courtesies they received now by contrast in the finest hotels, saying to each other, “Anything else I can do for you, sir?” On Monday, seven hundred registrants fairly promenaded from the Thomas Jefferson to the Redmont for the opening banquet honoring Rosa Parks, featuring an address by NAACP attorney Constance Baker Motley.

On Tuesday, swelling numbers paraded freely to City Hall past blockade spots made landmarks when police dogs and fire hoses had been loosed on marching children in Kelly Ingram Park. They decried the gridlock failure of Birmingham to hire even the first Negro police officer or firefighter, as agreed in the settlement from those 1963 demonstrations and required since by federal law. At the convention, a panoply of speakers represented the movement's cumulative experience along with options for the future. From Washington came Mordecai Johnson, former president of Howard University, a pulpit peer of Howard Thurman and the late Vernon Johns in the front rank of senior orators. He had just resigned from the District of Columbia school board in stinging protest that its appointed members, being accountable to Southerners in Congress rather than to voteless local citizens, were hiring incompetent Negro teachers for patronage. Among speakers from Chicago were the Catholic layman Matthew Ahmann, chief organizer of the 1963 ecumenical conference on religion and race, plus the top union officials of the United Packinghouse Workers, Ralph Helstein and Phil Weightman, who had fought decades to integrate the Midwestern meat plants, then supported the Southern movement since the bus boycott. Joining them among program speakers for one mass meeting, theologian Harvey Cox of Boston questioned his assigned topic, “God's Business,” doubting that any movement audience still needed a shove into the pains of the secular world. “You'd be surprised,” King replied.

FBI agents reported to headquarters that the chief investigator of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan went unnoticed in the crowd, disguised as a reporter, and wiretaps in New York intercepted a call home from the Jefferson Hotel on Wednesday, August 11. “We are having a good convention,” Stanley Levison told his wife, Bea, though he was exhausted and “Martin worked all last night until seven o'clock this morning.” The perpetual jostling for King's attention obliged volunteer Wall Street lawyer Harry Wachtel to send in a handwritten note that his legal contact, Carol Agger—“the wife of (newly appointed Justice of the Supreme Court) Abe Fortas”—had secured from the Treasury Department a long-sought tax-exempt status for SCLC's fund-raising arm. Wachtel languished in the background with news of scattered demonstrations, poll tax suits, and Senate confirmation of Thurgood Marshall as Solicitor General. He waited in the hotel lobby to make an appointment as King passed by with Coretta. Later, the frustrated Wachtel wrote a second appeal—“I will need to do this with you,
alone”
—which listed ten pressing questions of finance and Washington strategy.

King remained swamped, largely in preacher politics. The convention did hold a rally led by Fred Shuttlesworth in the bombed 16th Street Baptist Church, but not before its pastor wrung permission from the deacons by threatening to quit. In private, King again faced more than thirty headstrong preachers on his SCLC board, including his father. They frowned over tentative plans to take the movement somewhere north, observing that the first word in SCLC was “Southern,” doubting that a Northern movement would “pay its share of the freight,” suggesting that big cities take guidance instead from an SCLC brochure, and referring the proposed shift to a committee. Hosea Williams tried to win board approval for a year-round extension of his SCOPE project, predicting great gains in registration if the board members would lend their presence. His flattery melted no criticism of current results, however, as Williams himself conceded with a revised proposal to terminate SCOPE by the end of the month. King, for his part, ran into trouble with his carefully worded resolution calling for Vietnam peace negotiations. Board members, bridling against intrusion into foreign policy, amended his text to reaffirm that SCLC's “primary function” was to secure the rights of Negroes, in what biographer David Garrow would call an “implicit rebuke” to King. Undercurrents from the leadership disputes seeped into the hotel corridors.

Andrew Young shot high above them in his keynote address at Wednesday's convention midpoint, proclaiming that “the very survival of mankind is at stake in the day-to-day action which grows from this organization.” He said the past ten years of the nonviolent movement “have been but our infancy, and like an infant, we have stumbled and stammered,” and yet those years had turned a powerless and invisible race into the transforming engine for a great nation. “We are not a rich people,” he said. “We are not an especially brilliant people. We are not, God forgive us, even a particularly industrious people. And we are hardly what moralists would call a good people. But somehow, God has chosen us as his people, and called his children from the far corners of the world…to gather around us in a glorious procession.”

The speech mixed apocalyptic hope with Madisonian balance. The “redistribution of Southern power” was irresistibly in motion, and the Goldwater forces “ran us out of the Republican Party,” Young declared, but Negroes “must still find every opportunity to encourage the development of a two-party South.” Civil rights had stimulated kindred movements, but he charged that not all of them, specifically the peace movement, understood the value of long-range regard for adversaries. “We have taken power and political reform seriously, while dramatizing an issue,” Young boasted, warning that the need for discipline would only grow. “People will not lightly throw off a century of fear and go gaily skipping down to the courthouse to register,” he said. “Civics is not taught in the schools.” The burden of the nonviolent movement had fallen thus far on the most dispossessed people, he asserted, and they, like others, required constructive coalitions “to insure a balance of power and checks against its abuse.”

Young told the Birmingham convention that he felt both exalted and frightened by the awesome power of “that beloved soul force about which Gandhi spoke so much, and which we have only begun to explore.” Already, nonviolence was advancing miracles of the deepest, most distinctive patriotism—once again creating ties of democratic strength where hierarchy had reigned. Now he declared from recent experience that the movement could raise a nonviolent army of a hundred thousand or better in almost any large city, “and I tremble to think what might happen if it is not organized and disciplined in the interest of positive social change.” So telescoped was movement history that the implications were running decades ahead of adjustment, throwing up new frontiers before most Americans perceived Negroes to be full participants in national politics, let alone modern Founders. “There will not be the same kind of press support or financial support that we have received from the North, as the movement comes closer to home and threatens vested interests,” Young predicted. “But if we are true to Gandhi, and seek to attack issues rather than people, we can hope to inspire even our opposition to new moral heights, and thereby overcome.”

O
N THAT
Wednesday afternoon of Young's speech, Ronald Frye celebrated his discharge from the Air Force by drinking vodka and orange juice with two young ladies and his older brother, Marquette. A California Highway Patrol motorcycle officer followed their weaving 1955 Buick northward on Avalon Boulevard and pulled them over at the corner of 116th, just inside the Los Angeles city limit. Onlookers gathered to watch driver Marquette Frye tightrope-walk a sobriety test in the street, then grandly offer to repeat his performance backward. Raucous laughter prompted a Highway Patrol backup officer to pull out a shotgun, adding taunts and tension to entertainment that built the crowd to some five hundred before a tow truck arrived twelve minutes later, simultaneously with Rena Frye on foot from her home two blocks away. She berated her sons for drinking, then defended them from the officers in caroming rounds of disputed blame and wound up handcuffed herself, thrown into the back of a cruiser. When Marquette Frye refused to follow, shouting, “Go ahead, kill me,” police drew revolvers. One officer would testify that he missed Frye's shoulder and inadvertently struck him in the forehead with a nightstick. A witness said Highway Patrol officers drove motorcycles onto sidewalks to push back crowds that saw them as intruders and resented being called “black” instead of “Negro.” Officers waded in to arrest two bystanders for insults, delaying their departure. All three arrested Fryes left the scene with bruises twenty-six minutes after the traffic stop, as crowds now swelled to 1,500 greeted regular Los Angeles police units with jeers and rocks.

A retired man nine blocks from the scene remarked to his wife that such a din of sirens must mean “the King of Siam” was in town. Rushing to find out, he heard feverish rumors that police had manhandled a pregnant Negro woman, and he saw chunks of concrete hurled through car windows. Police commanders, unable to subdue swirling bands by conventional tactics designed for a stationary mass of rioters, evacuated an area east into the section named for Pasadena Realtor and liveryman C. H. Watts. Some Negroes “milled around inside the blocked-off area, protesting police ‘brutality' by the officers,” reported the
Los Angeles Times,
while others attacked unfamiliar cars, especially if occupied by white people. They burned a television van when reporters fled their approach on foot.

Mayor Sam Yorty first blamed the Highway Patrol for dawdling in city territory. LAPD Chief William Parker appeared on television to defend withdrawal from the riot zone. “What do you want the policemen to do?” he asked brusquely. “Do you want to mass them in there? For what purpose?” His lieutenants had a huge city to protect, said Parker, “and they can't send all the men into Watts and allow…open season to every petty criminal and burglar in town.” He dodged further scrutiny when violence subsided in the night. The Thursday morning
New York Times
carried a two-inch story on a back page—“Arrest Causes Near Riot in Negro Area of Coast”—next to items about the jailing of fifty SCOPE workers who picketed a segregated gasoline station in Dublin, Georgia, and about the slow progress through the Alabama legislature of a bill “to regulate the sale of dynamite in the wake of recent racial incidents.”

In south Los Angeles, crowds returned to Avalon Boulevard as though to work from a night's sleep, and looted a supermarket.

A
T THE
Jefferson Hotel in Birmingham, Bayard Rustin opened Thursday's central panel entitled “Visions of Things to Come.” Now that President Johnson was fully engaged, “and Congress is turning out decisions like sausages to help us,” he prescribed a shift to national economic issues such as jobs and poor schools. Activists must become more pragmatic and yet no less committed to nonviolence, Rustin argued, especially if Vietnam renewed the jingoist climate of the Korean War, “because morally, nothing can move in this country at this moment unless the civil rights movement is moving, and to that extent we have a terrifying responsibility for all of the citizens.”

James Bevel shocked the panel audience with a blunt pronouncement: “This year the civil rights movements are out of business.” Those who believed otherwise would shrivel into “civil rights shells, making noise,” he declared, but Rustin was wrong to suggest that they become lobbyists and administrators. There were dazzling vistas of nonviolence ahead that “Bayard doesn't quite understand,” claimed Bevel, beginning to preach. “One day Jesus was talking to some fellows who were in the same dilemma that the American people are in today,” he said. “He got them together and said, ‘Well, I'll tell you what you do about the whole question of freedom and slavery: know the truth.'” Not truth as dogma from tricky Baptists or bishops, but the healing truth of nonviolence, he quipped, then veered abruptly into his own private life. “I had a girlfriend, I had two,” said Bevel. “I used to go see one at seven and the other one at eight. The one I would see at seven…she got angry and went outside and tore the windshield wipers off the car…in an effort to keep me back.” In a flash, he transformed her alleged misconception about how to stop a car into a lesson about where to apply nonviolence. “You've got to know where the pulpit is!” cried Bevel. “Don't preach in the basement!” He said the whole world “disrespects the peasant in Vietnam,” just as it disrespected Alabama Negroes until the movement “accepted the role of a peasant in Selma.” He wanted to take an international peace army into Vietnam, and also seek the truth of the economy from Harlem to Appalachia. “We must be a nonviolent movement for the world,” said Bevel. “The times are pushing us to this.”