At Canaan's Edge (70 page)

Four of five Americans consulted in polls believed the drastic new bombing campaign would end the war soon, and majority approval rebounded for the balance of the year. Meanwhile, military analysts confirmed secret projections that the actual flow of war matériel would recover in spite of the bombing, as the North Vietnamese dispersed not only oil supplies and transportation lines but urban families into the countryside. (The population of Hanoi dropped by December from 800,000 to 200,000.) Knowing that the Vietnamese could replace their losses indefinitely, and were doing so, American war planners counted on the psychological wear of modern airpower upon a land-bound adversary. McNamara pictured enemy soldiers under combined assault in the South, utterly devoid of flying machines for mobility or retaliation in the sky. “They also know that nobody is protecting North Vietnam,” he told Johnson, “and we have a free rein.” The mismatched punishment lured McNamara to defy his own numbers that pointed stubbornly to a savage stalemate. “The only thing that will prevent it, Mr. President, is their morale breaking,” he said. More than faith in the cause, or the steely will to marshal sacrifice, a strange identification across the line of slaughter consoled American leaders through their own dire apprehensions. “And if we hurt them enough, it isn't so much that they don't have more men as it is that they can't get the men to fight,” McNamara anticipated. “I myself believe that's the only chance we have of winning this thing…because we're just not killing enough of them to make it impossible for the North to continue to fight. But we are killing enough to destroy the morale of those people down there, if they think this is gonna have to go on forever.”

Ho Chi Minh responded with a national appeal on July 17, warning that “the Johnson ‘clique'” may send a million men into a war that could last twenty more years. “Hanoi, Haiphong and other cities and enterprises may be destroyed,” he said, “but the Vietnamese people will not be intimidated.” Ho advised Washington by indirect channels that much of his population had never known anything but war. Weakened by lung disease at age seventy-six, he called for mobilization of reserves in words that soon would be carved on his mausoleum: “Nothing is more important than independence and freedom.”

Beyond males of every age, some 1.5 million North Vietnamese women formed combat and support brigades that included air defense units. By 1967, seven thousand antiaircraft batteries, two hundred missile sites, and a meager hundred airplanes would oppose U.S. bombers overhead. The government already celebrated as a patriotic heroine twenty-year-old Ngo Thi Tuyen, who would defend and repair the Dragon's Jaw Bridge under perpetual bombardment until laser-guided American bombs wiped out the vulnerable link of Highway 1 in 1972.
Nhan Dan,
the Communist newspaper, acknowledged “feudal” resistance to the policy of equal advancement: “Many Party members do not wish to admit women because although they think that they are courageous and diligent, they also believe that ‘women cannot lead but must be led.'”

Ho Chi Minh's call generated 170,000 emergency youth troops, nearly all girls, who marched south with knapsacks, cooking pots, and shovels to maintain the heavily bombed Ho Chi Minh Trail. Vu Thi Vinh said she defied her parents, lied about her age to join at fifteen, and wrote competitive essays to be selected for “dare to die” teams that defused unexploded ordnance. A cohort volunteered even though she loathed socialism and the “peasants” running the government. “Many of us temporarily lost our hair from malaria,” recalled Nguyen Thi Kim, “and living in the jungle for so many years made us look terrible.” By 1975, the emergency troops had shepherded war matériel south and an estimated 700,000 wounded soldiers back to North Vietnam, while helping air defenders bring down some of the 8,558 U.S. aircraft lost in Southeast Asia. Women survivors, who often would be left sterile, disfigured, and bitterly alone in a society that treasured the extended family, adapted to unspeakable carnage in war. “It was terrible,” said volunteer Le Minh Khue, “but we were young and we made jokes.” They arranged work choruses according to a proverb that songs are louder than bombs, and made up nicknames for dreaded jets such as the “genie of thunder” F-105. “When the helicopters dropped soldiers,” a female veteran observed of American deployments, “they looked like dragonflies laying eggs.”

A
MERICAN WOMEN
stirred politically on the day U.S. bombers first struck Hanoi and Haiphong. A small caucus convened over a seminal speech that accused the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of trivializing the legal rights accorded women two years earlier by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Rep. Martha Griffiths of Michigan said the EEOC had reduced thousands of sex discrimination complaints to amusing asides, wondering in its newsletter whether punishment could reach employers who refused to hire “a woman as a dog warden or a man as a ‘house mother' for a college sorority house.” She cited two exceptions to prove the rule of heedless condescension. First, the EEOC had just allowed “Help Wanted Male” and “Help Wanted Female” advertising sections to continue in newspapers nationwide, with a declaration that the separation rested on a lawful intent to “obtain a maximum reader response and not on a desire to exclude applicants of a particular sex.” Griffiths called this precedent a capitulation to the newspaper lobby as well as a transparent contradiction of the EEOC's moves to abolish separate job listings by race, and she denounced no less sharply a second sex discrimination case in which the EEOC reserved BFOQ (bona fide occupational qualification) status for the airline industry's policy of firing any stewardess who married or reached the age of thirty-three. “Is it because the Commission does not want to recognize that women's rights are human rights?” she asked on the House floor. “Or is it an unconscious desire to alienate women from the Negroes' civil rights movement? Human rights cannot be divided into competitive pieces.”

Tempers flared in the June 29 caucus at the Washington Hilton Hotel. Legal strategist Pauli Murray among others proposed a new organization modeled on the NAACP to push for gender equity in the enforcement of Title VII, but some dissenters felt the parallel would diminish women. Several women with influential positions believed they could seek parity more effectively within regular channels, and others argued that a self-proclaimed women's lobby would be perceived as arrogant and unprofessional. The last point was too much for Betty Friedan, author of
The Feminine Mystique,
who had been recruited as an independent voice. “Get out! Get out!” Friedan cried. “This is my room and my liquor!” The quarreling confederates fell back on plans to petition the state and federal agencies represented at the Third National Conference of Commissions on the Status of Women, but overtures were rebuffed the next morning as improper for advisory bodies and government employees.

By noon on June 30, Dr. Kay Clarenbach of Wisconsin led a handful of well-tailored but chagrinned moderates to concede that the activists may have been correct, and Friedan made up for shortcomings in collaborative tact with her facile pen, sketching on a lunch napkin the consensus brief for an ad hoc civil rights group “…to take the actions needed to bring women into the mainstream of American society, now, full equality for women, in fully equal partnership with men. NOW. The National Organization for Women.” Twenty-eight charter members contributed $5 toward the initial expenses. The founding announcement in October drew no major press notice until November 22, when the
New York Times
covered a repeat performance by Friedan on the fashion page beneath Thanksgiving recipes: “Speaking in a gravelly alto from the depths of the large fur collar that trimmed her neat black suit, the ebullient author suggested that women today were ‘in relatively little position to influence or control major decisions. But,' she added, leaning forward in the lilac velvet Victorian chair and punching the air as if it were something palpable, ‘what women do have is the vote.'”

To protest government inaction, NOW members first carried giant balls of red tape on thin picket lines. Martha Griffiths, their forerunner and inspiration, spoke sometimes as brashly as Diane Nash or Stokely Carmichael on the Freedom Rides. “If you are trying to run a whorehouse in the sky,” she told airline executives at a congressional hearing, “then get a license.” Too slowly for participants, but swiftly relative to the antecedent momentum in race relations, a new women's movement coalesced to transform daily life through politics.

July–August 1966

B
LACK
power followed the civil rights movement up the Mississippi River heartland, from the Delta's primitive soil to Chicago's granite expanse. Hosea Williams stayed behind in Grenada, where police outside the jail clubbed three hundred people to break up a sympathy vigil for forty-three others arrested earlier, and King charged publicly that local officials had reneged on “every promise made” during the Meredith march. Headlines favored the new national controversy—“CORE Hears Cries of ‘Black Power,'” “Black Nationalists Gain More Attention in Harlem,” “NAACP Head Warns ‘Black Power' Means ‘Black Death'”—which framed the front-page coverage even for Chicago's grand kickoff rally on July 10: “Dr. King and CORE Chief Act to Heal Rights Breach.” Floyd McKissick trimmed his speech at Soldier Field to fit a movement trumpeted with warm-up music that ranged from the Singing Nuns of Mundelein College to blues legend B. B. King. Reporters chased a roving band of the Blackstone Rangers gang to photograph their black power banner. A white limousine delivered Martin Luther King, who spoke under a parasol in clammy 98 degree heat. His children begged to see the headquarters of the famous Mayor Daley, but three-year-old Bunny collapsed on Andrew Young's shoulders before the baked remnant of five thousand walked three miles downtown. She slept while King ceremoniously taped the parchment of fourteen demands to a locked door at City Hall.

Mayor Richard Daley once again bracketed the challenge with official events. He announced one day before the rally that Chicago had moved to repair 102,847 apartments in 9,226 substandard buildings so far, with housing fines double those of the previous year, then hosted preliminary negotiations two days later on July 11. King conceded Daley's evasive points that slum conditions existed in every major city and had preceded his administration, but declined entreaties to join or critique the local abatement drive. Likewise, Daley endorsed King's goal but avoided comment on his “Open City” demands for integrated housing and employment. With each side firmly refusing to be drawn into the other's agenda, the mayor complained of nonconstructive pressure and emerged ever the booster for Chicago—“We will expand our programs”—while King called for nonviolent direct action to reveal “the depth and dimensions of the problem.” James Bevel and Bernard Lafayette were leading drills for five hundred nonviolent volunteers to be deployed the next day, but a pothole intervened on the Near West Side corner of Roosevelt and Throop.

While calling for roadside assistance, the driver of an ice cream truck saw children dart from his paralyzed vehicle with purloined treats, and he told the first arriving police that the culprits were playing in the spray from nearby fire hydrants. Officers shut them off, drawing protest from adults who cited long-standing tradition and pointed to gushing hydrants only three blocks north. Beneath a crossfire of shouts—that the Italian neighborhood was in a different police precinct, with no reported ice cream thieves, versus complaints that three of the four closest swimming pools were off-limits to black residents—a sporadic duel of wrenches turned the hydrants on and off until officers arrested Donald Henry, who appealed to the gathering crowd: “Why don't you do something about it?” A cascade of curses, splashes, and rocks brought thirty backup police cruisers. Broken windows radiated from street reports of black children whacked with truncheons for trying to cool themselves.

King and Coretta, on their way to a mass meeting, detoured around jolting sights of zigzag marauders and a crescendo of sirens. Confused reports filtered into Shiloh Baptist Church about the terms set by gang leaders to parley about the ongoing violence—expulsion of white people from the church and/or proof that prisoners were alive. Responding to the latter, King made his way with gospel singer Mahalia Jackson to the 12th District police station and negotiated the release of six battered teenagers who presented their own grievances to a tumultuous Shiloh crowd, chiefly police brutality and the lack of playgrounds or swimming pools. King preached against riots and halfhearted reform. “It's like improving the food in a prison,” he said. “One day that man wants to get
out
of prison.” He invoked President Kennedy on the urgency of the movement—“those who will make this peaceful revolution impossible will make a violent revolution inevitable”—and confessed his own anguish: “We have stood up for nonviolence with all our hearts…. I need help. I need some victories. I need some concessions.” For once he could not hold an audience against hecklers inside and the noise of urban chaos beyond the walls. Hundreds of young people stalked out. At a roadblock of garbage cans on Ashland Avenue, gang members shattered windows on a car and surrounded the occupants until Bill Clark of the West Side Organization jumped among them, pointing to familiar faces and shouting, “You gotta beat me if you're going to beat these guys.” Rev. Archie Hargraves and Al Sampson of SCLC joined Clark in a human shield around three terrified Puerto Rican men. Nearly all night, leaders from the Chicago movement coalition roamed at their own peril with pleas for angry people to go home.

Violence subsided until late Wednesday, July 13, when crews from the water department began to refit the water hydrants with tamperproof locks. Bricks flew through windows again, then at firefighters who answered alarms to burning, looted stores. Vandalism and the first sniper shots jumped a mile to housing projects on West Madison Avenue. Thursday night, on his continuous rounds of mediation, King received notice that more serious riots were spreading miles west into Lawndale and Garfield Park. His children at the Hamlin Avenue apartment rushed impulsively to see what caused the sudden bangs and crashes of glass below, which prompted Coretta to shriek, “Get away from that window or you'll get your heads blown off!” Her quotation spiced a scoop for an encamped British reporter.

By Friday morning, when King briefly returned home, the riots had claimed two fatalities nearby: a pregnant fourteen-year-old killed while walking with friends and a twenty-eight-year-old black man from Mississippi, shot in the back. Mayor Daley, who until then had minimized the disturbance as “juvenile incidents,” appealed publicly for National Guard troops to quell a situation he said outsiders had incited beyond his control. He blamed King's staff—“people that came in here have been talking for the last year of violence, and showing pictures and instructing people in how to conduct violence”—and his leading Negro ally indicted the movement at a tandem press conference. “I believe our young people are not vicious enough to attack a whole city,” declared Rev. J. H. Jackson. “Some other forces are using these young people.”

King and Raby reacted within hours by leading what amounted to a sit-in at City Hall, protesting “unfortunate” distortions of their struggle to prevent rather than start violence. When Catholic Archbishop James Cody himself joined them, Daley received the group with conciliatory effusion. “Doctor King, I want to make one thing clear,” he said. “We know that you did nothing to cause the disorders, and that you are a man of peace and love.” King reciprocated with a pared-down list of four suggestions, one of which sealed a heavily satirized truce. “Now there was a program, and Daley liked it,” wrote Mike Royko in the
Chicago Daily News.
“Give them water. He had a whole lake of it right outside the door.” City workers would distribute ten portable swimming pools and refit the hydrants yet again with spray nozzles instead of locks. “We don't need sprinklers,” grumbled a dissenter. “We need jobs.” Attorney General Katzenbach, with White House approval, dispatched two top assistants to Chicago as four thousand National Guard troops rolled in to restore order late Friday, July 15. The riots were a miniature Watts, with the two fatalities and eighty serious injuries, including six police officers wounded by gunfire, plus $2 million in property damage and some five hundred arrests.

John Doar and Roger Wilkins of the Justice Department knocked unannounced at Hamlin Avenue before midnight. For Doar, who had been diverted from a canoe vacation in his native Wisconsin, the big city was unsettling after six years of civil rights field trips to the rural South. A bottle shattered against his car en route from appointments with Chicago officials. Wilkins, nephew of NAACP leader Roy Wilkins, expected King to have slipped after hours to the hotel comforts cherished by his peers, and was surprised to find him in a ghetto “showplace” rattier than advertised. Scores of Vice Lords and Cobras were crammed into chairs and floor spots, questioning King intensely. Some vented hardships and toughness blankly to King as a stranger, saying Molotov cocktails got attention, while others knowingly articulated their gang culture to one of the most famous people in the world. King engaged them one by one, sometimes turning to Abernathy to share their own war stories from jail or the relief of a joke about black preachers. The Washington men waited four hours—“four
hot
hours, four sweaty hours,” Wilkins recalled—mesmerized by an unrecorded seminar on pain and respect that preempted their exalted rank. For Andrew Young, the turning point was a perceptive, heartfelt speech on distinctions between the tactics and philosophy of nonviolence by Richard “Peanut” Tidwell, leader of the Roman Saints, who engineered a pact to give movement methods a try. When the gangs left, consultations between the Justice Department men and King commenced and continued into dawn on Saturday, July 16.

Internal deliberations reeled from a disastrous beginning. The gang summit was regarded as a crucial but tentative step toward recovery, neutralizing a random force prone to sabotage. Stanley Levison thought most Americans would not blame King for the riots but might believe he could have stopped them. He said Daley's cleverly mixed signals would turn the riots against the movement unless the movement turned them against Daley. To retreat now would suggest failure. To go forward meant trying to revive nonviolence from the lingering smoke of a riot. King bemoaned the prior delays, and confessed that an earlier launch for the action campaign might have averted this setback. The sprawling coalition had nothing to show for nearly a year's preparation beyond its own urgent warnings and postponements into a record-breaking siege of heat. (In New York City alone, an extra 650 deaths for the week spiked the mortality rate 40 percent above normal.) Woes had piled up like biblical pestilence with discovery on Thursday of eight student nurses systematically bound, raped, strangled, and stabbed in their South Chicago dormitory. Horror over an unfathomable mass murder sapped low reserves of public trust. Even so, movement leaders mounted rebuilding demonstrations Sunday in Gage Park, then Monday in the Belmont Cragin neighborhood. “We must move on with our positive program to make Chicago an open city,” King declared.

M
AYOR
D
ALEY
hacked at the movement's weakened lines of appeal to the national government. “King's rally on a week from Sunday was fifty percent Johnson—‘Johnson's a killer, Johnson's a destroyer of human life, Johnson is a killer in Vietnam,'” he told the President privately on July 19. “He [King] is not your friend. He's against you on Vietnam. He's a goddam faker.” Daley portrayed the riots as a result of sinister and mystifying ingratitude toward Northern benefactors. His monologue skewed the movement's demands, some of which duplicated Johnson's own legislation in Congress.

The President squeezed in a word to seek an end point. “What shape have you got King in?” he asked. “Is he about ready to get out?”

“I don't think so,” Daley replied. He spilled plans to overwhelm the movement with patronage and the poverty programs—“We got rodent control, we got insects, we destroyed a thousand slum buildings in six months”—while branding King a defector in the great quest for fairness. “What the hell, that's the main thing you've been fighting for,” the mayor exclaimed, “and then to see them run on the goddam foreign question!

“You don't run from people who have been your friends,” Daley continued emphatically. “You stick with them.” Like Richard Russell, he opposed the war but subordinated his opinion in national crisis. Pointedly, Daley pledged Chicago's entire machine to Johnson's Vietnam course by their two-way code of political loyalty. “That's what I've been talking about with our leaders tonight,” he declared. “Eighty of them in the convention, and I told 'em the same thing. I told 'em, ‘We don't run. We might be defeated, but we stand with Johnson on Vietnam. We stand for justice for all our people, and we also stand for law and order, and I'll be damned if we let anyone take over themselves the running of the city.'”

“You're just as right as you can be, Dick,” said the President, who signed off succinctly: “And I'll support you.”

O
N
T
HURSDAY,
July 28, King called for an all-night vigil Friday outside a real estate office that consistently refused to serve black customers. Earlier in the day, several clergy on the agenda committee had argued for a respite instead, to calm potential allies already strained by the daily actions such as integrated shopping trips and “friendship” basketball games on white playgrounds. Others still resisted the movement's emphasis on residence—“All housing should be available to all people”—as a misguided, elitist approach to the goal of ending slums. The heated tactical debates essentially deferred to James Bevel, who in turn relied on his Nashville seminary friend and Freedom Ride cellmate Bernard Lafayette. After Lafayette and his young wife, Colia, created SNCC's first Selma project in 1963, the American Friends Service Committee had hired them on the recommendation of James Lawson to test nonviolent methods in Chicago, where they found comparative weakness in the popular drives for open schools and open employment. The school struggle proved tired after a decade, with its target, Superintendent Benjamin Willis, set to retire late in August, and a diffuse jobs campaign yielded piecemeal results.
*
Housing showed contrasting potential, even though relatively few black people wanted or could afford to live in white neighborhoods. Lafayette called the inner boundaries of Northern cities an invisible indicator of Jim Crow that was anything but subtle—“segregation without signs.” Studies by his American Friends Service Committee colleagues estimated that only one percent of residential listings was open to black applicants, with restrictions traceable from the formal policy of 1917 to a blunt contemporary statement by the Illinois Association of Real Estate Boards: “All we are asking is that the brokers and salesmen have the same right to discriminate as the owners who engage their services.” By harrowing tests from working-class Belmont Cragin to upscale Oak Park, Lafayette's action groups sampled the latent capacity of housing demonstrations to expose human forces that locked people into slums.