At Canaan's Edge (65 page)

By dawn on Saturday, May 14, Lewis stood painfully isolated among those who stripped him of reelection. Julian Bond, who avoided the endless staff sessions whenever possible, publicly announced the result from Atlanta as “just a normal organizational change,” and the shift in student leadership attracted modest press notice. One story found Lewis to be “obviously shaken by his defeat” at the hands of those who favored “third-party politics for Southern Negroes.” The
National Guardian
disclosed that Stokely Carmichael had acquired the nickname “Delta Devil” for his fast-driving getaways in Mississippi. A
New York Times
profile identified the new chairman as a twenty-four-year-old “organizer of Alabama's all-Negro ‘Black Panther' political party,” and characterized his philosophy on a spectrum reserved for civil rights figures: “Mr. Carmichael does not advocate violence, but neither does he believe in turning the other cheek.”

M
ARTIN
L
UTHER
King contained troubles through the week of the SNCC elections. Rivals from the Blackstone Rangers and East Side Disciples exchanged gunfire inside a Chicago YMCA just before he arrived for a speech on May 13. King defended as a setback what critics took as definitive proof of lunacy in James Bevel's effort to convert the notorious street gangs into nonviolent brigades. Stanley Levison, visiting from New York, privately admired “the instinctive drama” of SCLC staff members who ran the gang workshops, and predicted that James Orange, the fearsome-looking teenager recruited from the 1963 Birmingham demonstrations, would become “a living legend” for his work in Chicago. Orange had taken nine beatings to prove his nonviolent discipline to gang members who respected his hulking three-hundred-pound frame and convincing street wisdom. “The people in the North are more beaten down,” Orange observed.

Levison huddled in King's Hamlin Avenue tenement rooms over launch delays for the Chicago demonstrations. King had abandoned the slum “trusteeship” under legal pressure, in part because his Chicago lawyer, Chauncey Eskridge, turned out to own substandard ghetto property himself. Levison pushed for consolidation of SCLC to avert a deficit he projected at $450,000 for 1966 in spite of the windfall from Europe. This was five times his most recent estimate and nearly half SCLC's annual budget. Levison detected a sudden adverse shift in the country. “The Vietnamese War is increasingly seizing the emotions of people,” he advised. “The impression that people gained [is] that the civil rights struggle is over…. Finally, the recent stock market decline has an effect.” (The Dow Jones Industrial Average would not recover its April 1966 peak of 995.15 for sixteen years, until 1982.) His warning of massive layoffs or swift bankruptcy was firm—“Dear Martin…. The publicity that would ensue would be a disaster for both the organization and you personally”—and King resolved to take drastic action by the end of the month. King said other groups fared even worse, confiding that CORE had just begged him for a $28,000 loan to forestall government seizure of its office furniture for delinquent payroll taxes. Publicly, King renewed his commitment to begin a new march soon. “If anywhere,” he declared, “it is in Chicago that the grapes of wrath are stored.”

The new SNCC chairman, Stokely Carmichael, presented a novel guest speaker in Berkeley on May 21, then again in Los Angeles the next day. John Hulett, on his first trip west, took it as a calming sign that the sun poked through dark clouds the moment he faced a giant rally of the Vietnam Day Committee. “There was something in Alabama a few months ago they called fear,” he said. He introduced Lowndes County in simple sentences, ending with a detailed story of the May 3 primary. To answer curiosity about the local party emblem, he described the black panther as a creature who retreats “backwards, backwards, and backwards into his corner, and then he comes out to destroy everything that's before him. Negroes in Lowndes County have been pushed back through the years,” said Hulett. “We have been deprived of our rights to speak, to move, and to do whatever we want to do at all times. And now we are going to start moving.”

Hulett's panther speeches created a stir within California movement circles, but Ruby Doris Robinson made national news from Atlanta by rejecting President Johnson's invitation to Washington for June 1. Her press statement on May 23 called the grand White House Conference on civil rights a “useless endeavor” and pronounced the federal government “not serious about insuring constitutional rights to black Americans,” then stated that SNCC invitees “cannot in good conscience meet with the chief policy maker of the Vietnam War to discuss human rights in this country when he flagrantly violates the human rights of colored people in Vietnam.” Asked whether the snub of Johnson meant desegregation was no longer a goal, Robinson replied that white people must initiate integration from now on. “We been head-lifted and upstarted into white societies all our lives, and we're tired of that,” she said. “And what we need is black power.” She presented Lowndes County as the model of an independent black movement. (In her crossfire with scandalized reporters, the unfamiliar name came out variously as “Loudon” and “Lawson.”) Columnists Evans and Novak cut through press interpretations with a May 25 attack on “the extreme black racists” led by Carmichael.

Questions about SNCC's attitude chased King to Chicago, overwhelming his formal announcement on May 27 that a protest coalition of some 163 organizations had agreed to begin the “action phase” of the movement against slums, “which we hope will dramatize the problems and call forth a solution.” He tried to buffer any threatened turn from integration as the inevitable sign of “discontent and even despair,” and patiently explained that separatist strategies never had attracted more than token support among the mass of American Negroes. King outlined the schedule for a “mammoth” first march down State Street on June 26 to present goals and demands whether Mayor Daley accepted them or not, “if I have to tack them on the door.”

King shuttled between Chicago and Washington. “I always hate to talk about violence,” he said on the May 29 broadcast of
Face the Nation
as reporters pressed him exclusively on that subject. Did he accept predictions of summer riots worse than Watts, “and what do you intend to do about it?” Did he agree with “the most militant of the civil rights organizations” that “integration is irrelevant,” or feel eclipsed by SNCC's intention to “take the battle for civil rights into the streets” and “be a lot more militant than leaders like you wish to be?” Did he still believe in the face of widespread criticism “that your position on our getting out of Vietnam is necessary for you to take?” King resisted on all fronts the implication that “militancy” carried stronger conviction or a more powerful effect than nonviolence: “Well, I hate to put it like that…. We must be militantly nonviolent.” He repeated his opposition to war as an engine of hatred: “I know that where your heart is there your money will go, and the heart of many people in the Administration and others happens to be in Vietnam.”

King rushed back to Chicago for two days of movement sessions interrupted by an audience that consumed much of May 31. Pacifist leader A. J. Muste had arranged for him to meet the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who had written King a year earlier about the Buddhist concept of nonviolent self-immolation. They conferred privately on religion and the latest crises in South Vietnam. (Five more monks burned themselves in protest of lethal raids on Buddhist pagodas by the military government, and angry students were destroying the American consulate in Hue.) Afterward, they held an impromptu press conference at the Sheraton-Chicago Hotel that attracted perplexed notice in the
Tribune:
“King Equates Rights Fight with Monks.” The two men flew to Washington on separate missions—King for the White House Conference and Thich Nhat Hanh for a tour of witness against war.

The new Vietnamese exile fasted with Rabbi Abraham Heschel and Father Daniel Berrigan. He meditated with the Trappist author Thomas Merton, who became convinced that the Buddhist was “more my brother than many who are nearer to me by race and nationality, because he and I see things exactly the same way.” He met privately with Secretary McNamara for thirty-three minutes, generating a small
Washington Post
story that began as follows: “The purple-robed Buddhist monk, a small, delicate Vietnamese poet, faced a group of American reporters dressed in gray and brown business suits at the Mayflower yesterday.” Thich Nhat Hanh identified himself as an anti-Communist who mourned destruction by 300,000 “dollar-making people” at war in his country of peasants, 80 percent of them Buddhist. “Now the U.S. has become too afraid of the communists to allow a peaceful confrontation with them to take place,” he wrote, “and when you are afraid, you cannot win.”

T
HE
W
HITE
House Conference, “To Fulfill These Rights,” was born a living anachronism on the first two days in June. A year's gestation made it too awkward to celebrate and too big to hide, full of new burdens turned heavy while ancient ones retained stubborn vigor. Many of the 2,400 delegates arrived at Washington's Sheraton-Park Hotel touched by the apt parable of a Vietnam casualty just refused burial in his home state. “My son was not a shoeshine boy like his father,” nurse Annie Mae Williams had complained. “He was a soldier, a paratrooper in the Green Berets.” Neither the Justice Department nor the Third Army's funeral assistance unit could secure a plot in the hometown cemetery of Wetumpka, Alabama, where Mayor Demp Thrash said the Negro section was full, and the flag-draped coffin sat for a week in limbo until federal authorities made space for Private First Class Jimmy Williams far across the Georgia line on May 30, among Union graves at the notorious Confederate prison in Andersonville. “Negro G.I.'s Burial Placates Mother,” noted the
Times.
Elsewhere, the Mississippi Senate narrowly defeated a bill to disperse Negroes into other states, and Virginia's Supreme Court unanimously upheld the criminal sentence of Mildred and Richard Loving for marital “corruption of the blood.” The latter decision opened to federal appeal the statutes in sixteen states that flatly outlawed interracial marriage, along with subtler “family purity” laws in several others.
*

Outside the Sheraton-Park, SNCC supporters and New York activists carried protest signs—“Save Us from Our Negro Leaders,” “Uncle Toms!” Derisive cries of “Black Jesus!” singled out King in the throng of entering delegates, and several white students who tried to join the all-black picket line told reporters they were not offended to be turned away. White House aides exchanged calls and messages about the dangers of revolt, updating Harry McPherson's memo of worry that “the conference might be demoralized by dissent, by angry radical factions, or by a sense of futility on the part of the Negro participants.” On calmer soundings, a motorcade ventured from the White House at 9:40
P.M.
on the night of June 1. First sight of the unscheduled entrance brought the guests to their feet in a continuous shout of “LBJ! LBJ!” as the President shook hands in the great banquet hall, lingering briefly with King, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and conference chairman Ben Heineman, a railroad executive from Chicago.

The President's short speech set a tone of humble realism. He said the struggle for full equality “does not require that righteous anger be silenced.” He said no one should “expect us, even together, to put right in one year or four all that took centuries to make wrong.” Then he declared himself in one sentence: “I do pledge this—to give my days, and such talents as I have been given, to the pursuit of justice and opportunity for those so long denied them.” A standing tribute began a barrage of seventeen ovations that punctuated his recital of enduring goals since Selma. To close, Johnson deliberately broke status protocol that made it taboo for any speaker to follow a sitting President. He honored the pioneers of civil rights by introducing to the podium one of their own, his new Solicitor General of the United States, Thurgood Marshall, and the motorcade returned from thundering acclaim to the White House by 10:32
P.M.
“In the light of his car, his eyes were large and his face almost incandescent with the pleasure of an unexpected and flawless triumph,” wrote McPherson. “It was about the last one he would have.”

Johnson had engineered a wondrous truce. Louis Martin, the shrewd minority aide he inherited from Truman and Kennedy, packed the conference rooms with security monitors and sprinkled the corridors with attractive female college students who dispensed goodwill Hawaiian leis. A loose debate structure fostered short, disconnected statements about race from the massive array of delegates. There were Rockefellers from three states alongside hundreds of jail veterans and movement workers. James Meredith shared the floor with the segregationist Governor Paul Johnson, who had barred him from Ole Miss.
Jet
magazine marveled to see “towering” Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics sitting beside Rev. J. H. Jackson, King's pulpit nemesis in Chicago. (“Why don't you picket
him
?” Chauncey Eskridge quipped to students of Jackson.) One delegate proposed a racism inquest on “America's number one untouchable sacred cow,” J. Edgar Hoover. Another disavowed hope so long as the cost of war was headed up from $14 billion in Vietnam and down from $1.4 billion on poverty. The conference staff steered the action agenda away from tripwire controversy over budgets or the Negro family, which left Daniel Moynihan “a silent, unnoticed delegate” in the
Times
account. Delegates sustained Deputy U.N. Ambassador James Nabrit by a ten-to-one margin when he declared a rump motion on Vietnam to be out of order, which provided the closing banner headline atop the June 3
Washington Post:
“Rights Session Rejects a Viet Pullout.”