Pillar of Fire (21 page)

Lowenstein popped up from Mississippi with a breathless report to a national student congress while fielding skirmish bulletins from the Raleigh movement (“Dear Al, Bad news! The Western Lanes Bowling Alley went and resegregated on us again.”). Within a few weeks, he passed through the Stanford campus with a stemwinding speech called “Mississippi: A Foreign Country in Our Midst?,” describing an alien culture in which “you can't picket, you can't vote, you can't boycott effectively, can't mount mass protest of any kind, and can't reach the mass media.” To escape this dead end, he told the assembled students, “we've come up with two ideas”: the mock election and another plan “still being toyed with” for a “massive assistance campaign from outside Mississippi next summer.” The second notion developed into the Freedom Summer project of 1964, which brought among other fateful results the first sizable integration experience among movement activists themselves.

 

T
HESE BLUEPRINTS
offered no immediate benefit to the Greenwood and Itta Bena prisoners languishing through a second month of isolation in Mississippi prisons. Their rescue fell indirectly to an unlikely explorer trailing just behind Lowenstein. In Robert Spike, the new head of its Commission on Religion and Race, the National Council of Churches deliberately selected a novice. Trained in social justice theology at Union Theological Seminary and elsewhere, Spike had distinguished himself as pastor of a new “outreach” church in Greenwich Village, but his published work revealed practically no interest in racial questions until May of 1963, when he reviewed James Baldwin's
The Fire Next Time
in a church journal. Behind his fastidious exterior of tie clasps and three-piece suits, Spike gained a reputation as a subtle manipulator of church bureaucracy, and national leaders of the white Protestant clergy promptly showed how much they valued maverick qualities. On July 4, only six days after naming Spike as the founding executive of the CORR, Rev. Eugene Carson Blake led a dozen clergy and some 270 laypersons to jail protesting segregation at the Gwynn Oak Amusement Park outside Baltimore.
*
The
New York Times
placed a large photograph of Blake's arrest on its front page, and Spike lost no time plunging after his eminent boss. Even before assuming his CORR duties on July 15, he tracked down Andrew Young in Savannah about the time Lowenstein reached Clarksdale.

Martin Luther King had sent Young into Savannah after the arrest of local leader Hosea Williams. Within a year, King would bring Williams close on his staff at SCLC, calling him affectionately “my wild man, my Castro,” but in 1963 Williams was still a full-time chemist for the Agriculture Department, testing pyrethrum and other pesticides as a pioneer Negro scientist in federal service. As the local youth council adviser, and regional supervisor for voter registration, Williams had used his superabundant energy to build his candidacy for a Georgia seat on the NAACP national board, until Roy Wilkins sought him out before the 1962 convention and told him with characteristic directness that Williams simply was not board material. Family background was a mark against him. His mother had died in childbirth after running away from a school for the blind, having concealed her pregnancy by another blind student, and Hosea Williams had lived twenty-eight years as an orphan before stumbling upon his birth father, “Blind Willie” Wiggins, quite by accident in Florida. Waifish country flaws poked through his deportment. He refused then and later to drink coffee, having been raised to believe it would turn his skin darker, and he broke into uncontrollable tears when called unsuitable for the board. “I am very emotional,” he told Wilkins.

Hosea Williams had always been volatile—some said it stemmed from head wounds received in Germany with an all-Negro unit of the 41st Infantry—but he was also irrepressible, and he refused to rest until he could complain of his NAACP treatment to Martin Luther King, who laughed, telling Williams not to worry too much because the national Baptists had expelled King himself as unfit. This celebrity confession endeared King to Williams, who vowed to redouble his efforts as the most prolific recruiter of students for King's new citizenship schools near Savannah. He became like a son to the venerable teacher Septima Clark, whose practice of asking her most stammering adult pupils to speak out loud of what was inside them led Williams to develop his tongue for nonviolence. King saw evidence of his powers on his occasional visits to Savannah's historic Negro pulpits such as First African Baptist, founded by the legendary slave preacher Andrew Bryan in 1788. No one soon forgot the gasp of astonishment when the local seaport gangster “Big Lester” Hankerson accepted nonviolence by marching down the aisle of First African to surrender both of his trademark .38-caliber pistols to a collection table in front of Martin Luther King. This was in response to preaching by Williams, just after the Birmingham breakthrough in May.

Sometimes wearing his chemist's lab coat, Williams went downtown near the docks to Wright Square and climbed upon Tomochichi's Rock, a monument marked in honor of the Yamacraw chief who surrendered Indian land to the original English settlers. At first, his sermons drew crowds of curious whites and the passing notice of Willie Bolden, a uniformed bellhop at the Manger Hotel. When the managers locked the doors against the well-drilled Negro teenagers who sought restaurant service, Bolden listened more intently from his post on the hotel porch, but he stayed aloof until sometime after Williams brought Martin Luther King to speak at his pool hall, with King in his conspicuous silk necktie gamely playing billiards against some of the beer-swilling longshoremen. Bolden eventually sought out Williams to volunteer for a surreptitious scheme: he unlocked the hotel doors from the inside just before hordes of young demonstrators arrived to fan out through the lobby for a sit-in that landed dozens of them in jail. Hotel managers fired Bolden for the betrayal. Williams asked him to explain at a mass meeting why he had cut loose from his established life, and Bolden himself became a stand-in leader after police arrested Williams on July 8.

By then, more than five hundred Savannah Negroes had gone to jail, and the port city bounced through the news alongside Birmingham and Danville. Since Williams himself had not demonstrated, nor even publicly advocated disobedience of the segregation laws, authorities resorted to an obscure Civil War ordinance that allowed white citizens, by sworn affidavit, to command the indefinite imprisonment of any suspicious character who threatened the peace. The twentieth century's first application of this emergency law—designed to stop the hemorrhage of runaway slaves by locking away possible facilitators—provoked a protest march that led to another hundred arrests. When the Savannah movement raised the money to free Williams under the required “good behavior” bond, eleven white citizens stepped forward to swear out additional warrants against him, and the blind local judge, Victor Mulling, ruled that Williams must remain in jail until each bond was guaranteed by a separate piece of property, to be held at risk as long as twenty years.

From a church convention in Denver, incoming CORR director Spike landed in Savannah just as two thousand Negroes marched to free Hosea Williams from open-ended incarceration. There were street clashes, rock battles, gunshots, Klan attacks, and seventy more Negroes arrested—“Two Negroes Shot in Savannah Riot,” announced the
New York Times
—and local white church leaders were grateful to Spike for introducing them to Andrew Young as a Negro with whom they could discuss matters rationally. Menaced by potential violence from every quarter, the pastors made contacts for Young with equally worried local officials, but no whites felt comfortable at large meetings across the color line.

Spike went alone with Andrew Young, who explained undercurrents within Negro Savannah. The local NAACP had denounced the Hosea Williams demonstrations as lawless incitements to strife, and the last four churches had closed their doors to movement meetings, in spite of an organized campaign by church women to withhold tithes and offerings until they opened. Frozen out, the movement was holding mass meetings at the Flamingo Club, a nightspot favored by “Sloppy,” the local numbers game operator. Spike followed Young into the underworld with trepidation, only to be assaulted by the thunderous rhythms of a mass meeting. Song leader Carolyn Barker—a Septima Clark trainee who was teaching her own father in a citizenship literacy class—presided in solos over a foot-stomping, hand-clapping, call-and-response chorus that spilled from one spiritual to another, most memorably for Spike, “Oh, Freedom.” When music spent the crowd, Spike was further surprised to hear Andrew Young introduce an unfamiliar preacher in overalls and a yarmulke. “It was largely the work that James Bevel did with the students of Birmingham,” Young announced, “that turned this whole nation out!” Not only did the articulate, credentialed Young defer to the country youth, Spike observed, he presented Bevel to the Flamingo audience as the one “who has given his life to freeing you people and my people and me, 'cause I'm not free.”

Bevel scolded the crowd for exaggerating their afflictions. “You think these white folks over here know how to beat up Negroes?” he asked mischievously, beginning a litany on truly “mean” atrocities in Alabama and Mississippi. “When I hear of white people shooting up Negroes,” he cried, “well, I know that's part of their tradition. They have always shot up people, and in fact most of their heroes are somebody who have killed up a lot of people.” What disturbed Bevel was “only what Negroes do.” They could see from the newspapers that a few Negro rock throwers turned a nonviolent march into a “riot,” he said, which meant that both whites
and
Negroes wanted an “excuse” to turn away from the movement. “More Negroes get killed fighting on Saturday night than in the nonviolent movement,” said Bevel. “…We didn't come here to hurt the mayor or the city. We didn't come here to destroy anybody's business. We came here to teach men how to live and love black folks. I'm proud to be a black man.…So I don't want you to be beating up white folks and throwing at them—and you become worse than they are.”

As Bevel preached the crowd into a singing frenzy, assistants circulated with buckets to collect anything that could be a weapon, even nail files and scissors. Streetwise leaders such as Willie Bolden called to the seaport's tougher elements by name, coaxing them to check in the bucket their heavy items such as knives and brass knuckles. By then, the white visitor Spike realized that they were gearing up for precisely what the leaders across town had been saying all day was impossibly dangerous, a street march at night. Savannah's atmosphere had been tense enough in the abstract, but Spike found himself enveloped in a fear that he could taste and touch. “This is the first time in my life,” he recalled, “that I experienced this to be a physical fact and not just a figure of speech.” The crowd filed from the Flamingo Club into the darkness for another march marred by sporadic attack and eventually mass arrest that included Andrew Young's first trip to jail, marking another step in his transition from church executive to movement leader. Spike, struggling two weeks later to convey the impact of the mass meeting to his colleagues back in New York, reached for the starriest images in history. “I had the strongest feeling that I was in Egypt on the night of the Passover,” he reported. “…Or it could have been in the catacombs of Rome in the first century, or in the Warsaw ghetto twenty-five years ago, or in Sharpsville [sic], South Africa, not so very long ago.”

 

S
PIKE EXTENDED
his scouting trip into Clarksdale, Mississippi, where state NAACP president Aaron Henry still sought the modest goal of a biracial committee. When the first group of white emissaries from CORR was promptly served with the same injunction that had restricted Martin Luther King, the clergymen left the state in wounded bewilderment, unaccustomed to treatment as presumed outlaws. By telephone, they negotiated with skittish local ministers who first made and then canceled plans to discuss the Christian view of integration across the state line in Memphis. These talks convinced Spike's group to abandon thoughts of demonstrating in Mississippi on the bleak realization that any public display would doom their hopes of becoming goodwill mediators. Instead, Spike and the CORR delegation returned to Clarksdale at noon on Thursday, August 8, for an integrated worship service, after which they filed out to call privately on local pastors. Even this purpose was thwarted on the sidewalk as inflammatory. “There was constant police surveillance,” he reported to colleagues in New York. “All members of the group were served with the same injunction the first group had received, and a young white student was seized by the police in retaliation against us. The emotion and tension of the occasion are hard to describe.”

The Northern ministers retreated a second time. Some found it difficult to let go of the presumption that the unschooled Negro movement must have erred somehow from faulty tactics, impure motives, poor manners, or garbled communication, harder still to accept that repression in Mississippi went so far as to anticipate and forbid expressions of conscience by white pastors. The only concession that came easily from local authorities was bail for the arrested student, which facilitated the clergy's quick departure. From this, the CORR delegation began to comprehend the movement's crushing burden of leaving people behind in jail. On learning from Aaron Henry that large numbers of movement people had disappeared from Itta Bena and Greenwood nearly two months earlier in June, Spike helped convince the United Church of Christ that a $10,000 bail grant was a wise departure for its Board of Homeland Ministries.