At Canaan's Edge (73 page)

S
UNDAY, ON
a ninety-minute edition of
Meet the Press,
King revealed a temporary decision not to defy the injunction. Questioners passed lightly over Chicago to focus on a general theme that black initiatives had turned noxious across the country. “Isn't it time to stop demonstrations that create violence and discord?” moderator Lawrence Spivak asked a panel of guests. King insisted that nonviolent demonstrations neither caused nor cured anything in themselves, and were designed to bring hidden conditions into conscious public responsibility. Floyd McKissick of CORE said King's process was endangered for the simple reason that “nonviolence is something of the past.” Prompted on this point, James Meredith endorsed black vigilante groups while Stokely Carmichael distinguished between vigilantes and self-defense. Carmichael, in a business suit, refused invitations to rescue his black power doctrine from a storm of alleged press distortions, saying SNCC had just banned further attempts to clarify the term. He did acknowledge defining any black soldier in Vietnam as a mercenary, which provoked a surge of comment. “I personally think that one of the greatest things happening in America today is the war in Vietnam,” said Meredith, “because for the first time black men, Negroes, are fighting [without unit restrictions] in a war.” Carmichael sheepishly denied reports that he had called King and Roy Wilkins “Uncle Toms” in recent speeches—“I couldn't have possibly said that”—citing a SNCC policy that forbade speaking ill of any black leader. Wilkins claimed a larger unity in the historic purpose of civil rights, and tried to make light of the nationally televised bickering that so “terribly distressed” fellow panelist Whitney Young. It was a kind of promotion, Wilkins observed with his laconic smile, for young radicals to call him a tool of the black power structure instead of the white one.

King had cut short his appearance and slipped out of Chicago's NBC affiliate less than halfway through the contentious broadcast. Aides said only his presence could contain the fierce yearning to break the injunction. (“Get your grandmother up from the South!” Bevel cried. “So she can keep the kids while we're in jail.”) At Liberty Baptist Church, the new march headquarters for the South Side, King defended the chosen course. Exactly five hundred volunteers—the maximum number permitted—filled an eighty-six-car caravan that arrived punctually for once at the lone demonstration site for the afternoon. In a steady rain, King led a march five miles through East Side neighborhoods near the city steelworks and Trumbull Park, where novelist Alan Paton had recorded a year-long siege against the last pioneer black family in 1954. “About 2,000 residents lined the route despite the downpour,” observed one correspondent, hurling jeers and projectiles over a buffer of four hundred officers. Some held signs denouncing “Archbishop Cody and His Commie Coons.” King detoured with his nervous escort toward one clump of angry teenagers. “You are all good looking and intelligent,” he said, as they backed away. “Where did all that hate come from?”

Sunday's East Side march, which made front pages in distant cities, fueled only one of several burners underneath local politics. In Marquette Park, American Nazi commander George Lincoln Rockwell invited four robed Klansmen and the anti-Jewish polemicist Connie Lynch to share a swastika-draped spectacle that mortified Chicago's civic dignity. At a rally on the North Side, Republican senatorial candidate Charles Percy denounced the “failed” Democratic machine. In suburban Evergreen Park and Chicago Heights, Bevel, Jesse Jackson, and American Friends Service Committee activist Jerry Davis led satellite marches in two areas not covered by Judge Harrington's injunction. Such deployments, as an alternative to jail-going defiance in the city, revealed a calculation that dispersal into Cook County suburbs would intensify rather than relieve pressure on Mayor Daley. King himself announced preparations to take three thousand marchers the following Sunday into Cicero.

Instantly, Jesse Jackson's prior outburst about Cicero was reborn a strategic thunderclap. Mayor Daley showed hints of panic at a press conference: “We've got commies, we've got Nazis, and everybody else you can name showing up. I wish they'd go home!” Sheriff Ogilvie declared marching in Cicero “awfully close to a suicidal act,” and Governor Otto Kerner dispatched National Guard units in advance. While daily marches ventured into new areas such as West Elsdon, the
Chicago Daily News
denounced King's Cicero plan as blackmail by threat of martyrdom. On Thursday, when the
New York Times
pleaded for a moratorium on Chicago demonstrations to avoid “the present downhill course to nowhere,” all seven black aldermen joined a 45–1 solidarity vote for Daley and rejected a consolation motion simply to disapprove of segregated housing. Still, votes of every color were leaking beyond the chamber, and all sides seized a last chance for reprieve.

Summit negotiators reconvened at the Palmer House hotel on Friday, August 26, with television cameras posted outside the stately Walnut Room. Thomas G. Ayers, president of both the Commonwealth Edison power company and the Association of Commerce and Industry, delivered subcommittee recommendations that strengthened the August 17 commitments in minor respects. The parties accepted a modest goal of at least one percent black occupancy in all seventy-five Chicago neighborhoods within a year, but they omitted the figure from the written document to avoid specific quotas or ceilings, and also to minimize potential ridicule for the great furor and effort over such nominal stakes. Mayor Daley moved immediately to approve the report, but Raby asked first to hear the assembled leaders embrace steps to reach the one percent goal. Archbishop Cody rose for the first time to say that the Roman Catholic association of Rogers Park already had resolved to accept Negro residents, and that priests in all 454 parishes would pursue the seven-step campaign outlined for religious groups. “We are like a little United Nations,” he said, “and we will commit our moral, financial, and religious resources to the fulfillment of this agreement.” Rabbi Marx said likewise for the Reform Jewish congregations. Heads of labor, business, and civic groups followed suit until Ross Beatty wavered on behalf of the Chicago Real Estate Board. King interrupted to ask whether Beatty could reconcile support with his complaints on radio that real estate companies would go out of business if forced to sell or rent to Negroes. Beatty filibustered. “We'll do all we can, but I don't know how we can do it,” he replied. “Frankly, I'm confused.”

Daley fidgeted and scowled through a miserable soliloquy from the refined Princeton graduate. (Beatty said, “I hope everyone will understand that we are not all bums.”) He moved again for a vote, and glowered impatiently when the rattled parties secured a recess instead. Staff members stalled the waiting reporters. Bevel and Jesse Jackson urged the movement caucus to demand more guarantees, but others predicted that Daley would walk out and leave them to face jail or Cicero. Back in plenary session, King declared a willingness to vote despite misgivings on his side, especially about the surviving injunction. Rev. Donald Zimmerman, chairman of the Church Federation of Greater Chicago, benignly suggested that a court review of the injunction would set fair limits for protest, and King, taken aback, asked if he knew that the appeals would consume several hundred thousand dollars of scarce civil rights money over at least three years. Raby also bristled at the casually academic idea, and charged the city with bad faith for seeking to cripple the movement only two days after forming the Ayers subcommittee.

The mayor stood up. People could make any statement about bad faith, he shrugged, then offered a testimonial. “I was raised in a workingman's community in a workingman's home,” he said. “My father was a union organizer, and we did not like injunctions. I know the injustice of injunctions. But I faced the decision of what to do with three and a half million people.” His police force was battered, said Daley. Violence was draining protection from much of the city, and he had resisted advice to shut down the marches altogether. King thanked the mayor for his candor and confessed a reciprocal dilemma. “If that injunction stands,” he said, “somewhere along the way we are going to have to break it.” Chairman Heineman, seizing a moment of favorable chemistry, brokered a compromise with a proposal to keep the ban only for marches in residential areas, reflecting the agreement, and to restore protest rights elsewhere for the movement agenda on schools and employment. Daley agreed—“we can amend our injunction”—and King adjusted a few words to fit his constitutional position. “I don't think that we can accept a conference ‘to modify the injunction,'” he said, “because we are opposed to the injunction totally, but we can accept ‘a separate negotiation through the continuing body on that issue.'” With that final nuance, the ten-point Open Housing Summit Agreement passed unanimously.

“This is a great day for Chicago,” Heineman told the press.

September 1966

C
HICAGO
nationalized race, complementing the impact of Watts. Without it King would be confined to posterity more as a regional figure. The violence against Northern demonstrations cracked a beguiling, cultivated conceit that bigotry was the province of backward Southerners, treatable by enlightened but firm instruction. Already the campaign has “shown Chicago what it has known in its secret heart, that it has a terrifying and terrible race problem,” wrote a Chicagoan for the
Washington Post.
Editors at
The Saturday Evening Post
confessed starkly for Americans at large: “We are all, let us face it, Mississippians.”

Since King's first scouting trip to Boston, Northern expansion had aimed to promote awareness for the nationwide challenge of equal citizenship, and Chicago advanced this understated purpose perhaps too well. Its realism eroded sectional support when a fresh mandate to overcome segregation was still sinking in. With King himself expressing dismay over the severity of Northern resistance, diverse public voices embraced reasons to stand aside.
The New Republic
magazine held out for a suitable start, saying, “King has hardly begun to do the work which could force necessary basic changes.” Columnists Evans and Novak allowed that “fanatical, indefensible violence” had precipitated “major concessions for open housing, even from the Chicago realty board, long a champion of existing segregated housing patterns,” but they discounted the “pillow” settlement because “King has not and will not come to terms with the basic problem of slumism,” and pronounced him “in a state of decline with the young Negro leadership class.” A
Chicago Daily News
reporter called the agreement “only a paper victory.” Angry white residents picketed City Hall with charges of treachery (“Daley Sold Out Chicago”) and surrender (“Summit Another Munich”).

Catcalls of “black power!” drowned out the presentation of terms at Liberty Baptist Church, moving King to invite a dissenter into the pulpit. SNCC's Monroe Sharp declared that black people should tend to their own problems without supplication to Mayor Daley or hostile white neighbors, but he also scolded King for giving up the supreme test of Cicero. Like James Forman through the agonizing attempts to cross Pettus Bridge, Sharp blew hot and cold on the efforts to balance sacrificial zeal with long-range purpose. His rump coalition vowed to march regardless of the settlement, without Raby or King, jettisoning the commitment to nonviolence. The
New York Times
profiled allied CORE leader Robert Lucas: “Prefers Action to Talk.” Early on Sunday, September 4, King surprised Lucas with good wishes for the ordeal, setting aside the implicit rebuke. (“I was pleased but also shocked to think,” Lucas recalled, “that Martin would call a little old guy like myself.”) An anxious few gathered in Franklin Park to hear leaders with bullhorns assert an inner defiance apart from political demands. “We are
not
marching into Cicero to appeal to the white conscience,” shouted Chester Robinson of the West Side Organization. “We do
not
come hat in hand, scratching our heads, shuffling our feet to beg for a few concessions.”

A column of 250, including fifty white people, crossed the Belt Line Railroad into Cicero, engulfed within a protective brigade of two thousand National Guardsmen and five hundred helmeted Cook County officers. Three thousand residents shrieked and hurled rocks with a savagery that earned the anticipated raw headlines—“Guards Bayonet Hecklers in Cicero's Rights March.” Some demonstrators used baseball mitts to catch and fling back missiles, fulfilling their vow to fight.

O
N
S
EPTEMBER
6, two days after Cicero, most of SNCC's national steering committee asked for an impromptu appointment in the Atlanta City Hall. Stokely Carmichael offended the courtly mayor, Ivan Allen, by declining to shake his hand, and petitioned directly for release of twelve SNCC workers who had been arrested three weeks earlier at an anti-Vietnam picketing vigil outside the main induction center for Army draftees. To the mayor's reply that such a case was a federal matter beyond his power, Carmichael insisted that the city should do something. He did not reveal his group's distress over its inability to raise the collective bond of some $30,000, but he did express outrage that one of the protesters had been charged with capital insurrection, like the celebrated Depression-era black defendant Angelo Herndon. Mayor Allen herded the disruptive group from the building with polite but pointed suggestions to become registered Atlanta voters.

That same afternoon, the strained introduction affected Atlanta's worst riot in sixty years. Allen waded into Summerhill residents enraged over a car theft suspect who had been shot twice by police as he fled on foot. The mayor dodged flying rocks and bottles, pleading for people to go home, and tried unsuccessfully to borrow a cigarette to keep his hands from trembling with the realization that he had underestimated the hostility of the crowd. When he climbed on a police car to be heard, its roof buckled. Hosea Williams, arriving at the scene, saw the silver-haired mayor in a sea of black faces with Stokely Carmichael among SNCC colleagues on the fringe. He credited Allen with “the guts of a lion” but no street sense—saying Carmichael “would have
paid
Ivan Allen to jump up on that car”—and assumed that his SNCC rivals from the Meredith march had whipped up another fever. Angry people rocked the exposed target until Allen tumbled down among them, then the crowd backed away and set off marauding. A thousand officers and tear gas restored order by midnight, leaving sixteen people hospitalized and seventy-five jailed. No fatalities and only one burned building softened the blow to Atlanta's progressive image, and Allen's staff recovered their boss shaken but unharmed, wearing heavy leg pads under his suit. They suspected an uncanny premonition of violence on his part until the mayor sheepishly disclosed that he had blistered his shins in a leaf-burning accident on his forested city property.

A biracial commission soon hedged reports of riot conspiracy, citing numerous warnings of unrest in Summerhill since Atlanta had condemned the overcrowded acres there to build the major league baseball stadium. “SNCC members are not responsible for parking space for four thousand cars in the middle of an area which has no parks for children to play in,” declared the civic panel. (With the taxpayers too strapped to develop replacement housing, Allen had financed stopgap projects such as swing sets and paved alleys by dunning Coca-Cola magnate Robert Woodruff to match contributions from his own pocket.) Also, the mayor knew the neighborhood smoldered against retrograde police conduct, if only from the hushed August scandal over an officer demoted for arresting and pointing his gun at Barbara Aaron, wife of Atlanta Braves star outfielder Henry, when she questioned an instruction that no nigger women belonged at the players' entrance. On the other hand, Carmichael had summoned protesters to the shooting scene over radio station WAOK, and the first two people arrested had been SNCC staff members Bill Ware and Robert Walton for inviting bystanders to broadcast inflammatory accounts of the original shooting from a sound truck. This was more than enough for Allen to blame Carmichael's black power doctrine. “S.N.C.C. Assailed on Atlanta Riot,” announced the
New York Times
front page. Eugene Patterson, the normally tempered editor of the
Atlanta Constitution,
diagnosed robotic mayhem from his office. “Negroes didn't have any clear idea of what had hold of them Tuesday,” he wrote. “Demagogues had hold of them; SNCC was in charge.”

The
Times
reported that rioters spat on its correspondent Roy Reed. On September 8, Reed withheld from his dispatch a far more unnerving encounter with a friendly news source after Atlanta police arrested Carmichael on charges of incitement to riot. “I think it's only fair to warn you,” said Willie Ricks, “that when the revolution starts, if I ever see you in the sights of my gun, I'll kill you.” The incident put a lasting chill on Reed just as renewed unrest gripped the Boulevard section over the shooting death of a black teenager on his own doorstep by a passing motorist. (The suspect, a white parolee, would be sentenced to life in a precedent-breaking 1967 case.) Crazily, with Carmichael in jail, Hosea Williams declared his intention to lead properly disciplined marches for justice in the Boulevard case, only to be arrested himself, reportedly with the connivance of SCLC board members. Rev. Sam Williams scolded Hosea Williams as “a hired hand” who had forgotten Martin Luther King's promise not to mount demonstrations in his hometown.

K
ING WAS
in Memphis for a confidential retreat about staff morale, hosted by James Lawson. One by one, nearly forty young workers outlined depression and conflict. Many said Hosea Williams berated them beyond endurance. Williams had countered with his own personal crisis over the plight of “Big Lester” Hankerson, the Savannah seaport gangster converted to nonviolence but left dysfunctional by a beating in Grenada, Mississippi. He demanded to know if it was right to expose his friend to such damage for nothing. “We screamed for help and there was no help,” said Williams. “Is this in keeping with nonviolence?” The Grenada staff had revolted against his solution: schemes to induce more newsworthy violence upon white volunteers. They said violence was a hazard, not a purpose. Andrew Young said nonviolent risk should be shared, never imposed, but he fared no better at supervision than the departed Randy Blackwell. Williams often reduced SCLC executives to tears, and King finessed the conflict with sermons on love. Privately, he recruited Lawson to intensify his counseling of young workers who suffered battle fatigue and personal dissipation. In Chicago, Bevel avoided visits from his Nashville mentor like a scourge.

From Memphis, King called Stanley Levison over the wiretapped line to report euphemistically that SCLC was improving its “administrative controls.” When he asked about attention to the Atlanta riots, Levison said they were on the front page of the
Times
every day, with the latest editions noting Julian Bond's departure from SNCC, following an earlier resignation by John Lewis. King said Bond was a good man struggling to avoid the impression of deserting his colleagues. He thought black power would wane within the movement as its strategic pitfalls became clear, but “the press is keeping it alive.” Cringing in anticipation of pressure for public comment, King said, “Stokely may do time for the riot.”

Schools opened in Grenada a few days later. Officials had postponed enrollment for more than a week to wrestle with the twin dilemma of a freedom-of-choice integration order combined with a flood of three hundred transfer applications from black parents recruited by the local SCLC project. Many citizens figured stern admonitions would reduce the number close to zero before classes finally convened on Monday, September 12, but 150 black students entered John Rundle High and the adjacent Lizzie Horn Elementary. As disappointed white people gathered outside, irate men pushed two latecomers to the ground. They repulsed thirty more—shouting, “Nigger, you better turn around”—then roused neighbors to protest the breach of segregation. Virtually every local officeholder and constable swelled the crowd to four hundred before the schools dismissed their white students at midday. Half an hour later, black students emerged separately into a wall of menacing stares. Once the head of their line departed behind two Highway Patrol cars, taunts escalated to blows and general assault on those behind. High school students Dorothy Allen and Poindexter Harbie crawled screaming through a gauntlet, struck by a man with a tree limb and kicked bloody in the face. A woman tripped twelve-year-old Richard Sigh with her umbrella, whereupon men with pipes broke Sigh's leg near the hip and chased him away in a frantic hop. Others mauled polio victim Emerald Cunningham. Memphis reporter Charles Goodman noticed a woman draw back, cover her mouth, and repeat to no one as she watched a swirling clump of men whip a pigtailed girl: “How can they laugh when they are doing it?” Three reporters were beaten themselves.

Opposing forces responded within hours to mob brutality that injured thirty children. Governor Johnson dispatched reinforcements, prompting nearly five hundred white citizens to denounce him that night in Grenada's City Hall. “You get the Highway Patrol out of here,” declared one speaker, “and in twenty-four hours there won't be a nigger left.” The city manager, who admitted calling the state for help, resigned his office to vengeful cheers. Andrew Young flew in to lead a remnant of thirty black students to school on Tuesday, while John Doar filed for a permanent injunction in Oxford. Hosea Williams bailed out from Atlanta to march with Young Tuesday night, but retreated from the Grenada town square in a hail of rocks. Still, project workers mustered eighty-seven black children for Wednesday's march to class. On Thursday, September 15, having closed Grenada's schools until Monday, U.S. District Judge Claude Clayton ruled that local officials had “virtually abdicated their responsibility.” He enjoined them by name to protect all students and assigned superseding command to the Highway Patrol. FBI agents arrested thirteen men on Friday, including a justice of the peace, for Monday's violence outside the schools.

Segregationists mounted a short-lived drive to impeach Governor Johnson for complicity in the “federal intervention.” White moderates in Grenada, finding no support for cross-racial dialogue, circulated a generic petition for calm. On Sunday, in a widely anticipated sermon of catharsis, Rev. C. B. Burt of First Methodist Church asked forgiveness for the “bestiality” he had witnessed in familiar faces, which reminded him of his stunned entry to the Nazi death camp at Buchenwald as a World War II chaplain. “I can tell you my heart was not filled with compassion for the German people,” he confessed, “but I never saw an American soldier mistreat a German child.” Many wept, and rumors flew. Rev. Burt denied any hidden agenda to make his congregation “ready” for black worshippers.