Voices in Our Blood (46 page)

The decade of the 'fifties was an incredible era for the Negro leadership class, particularly for the NAACP. That the NAACP hung together at all is a monument to its vitality as well as to the effectiveness of its muffling curtain.

First off, by suing for school integration the NAACP immobilized the majority of the Negro leadership class. The entire structure of the Negro community was designed to function in a separate but equal America. Negro newspapers, in addition to being protest organs, were the social Bibles of Negro society. They had their “400” and a list of the year's best-dressed women. The Negro church was ofttimes more Negro than church. Negro businesses depended upon the concept of a Negro community for survival (as late as 1958 Negro businessmen in Detroit criticized the NAACP for holding its annual convention at a “white” downtown hotel, which meant that local Negro merchants failed to benefit from the gathering). The dilemma of the Negro teacher was even more agonizing. If Negroes really meant business about integration, then it was obvious that the Negro leadership class could remain leaders only by working to put themselves out of business.

The Bitterness Under the Glamor

To this one must add the internal problems of the NAACP itself. In 1948–49, Walter White, then the executive secretary of the NAACP, divorced his Negro wife and married Poppy Cannon, a white woman. This brought on an organizational crisis that might have resulted in ruin if the board of directors had not given Mr. White a year's leave of absence. Nobody expected Mr. White to return to his post and Roy Wilkins, who had been Mr. White's loyal assistant for almost twenty years, turned in an excellent performance as acting executive secretary. But the following spring Mr. White did return. Another organizational crisis was averted by making him secretary of external affairs and Mr. Wilkins secretary of internal affairs. Things remained that way until 1955, when Mr. White died. Nor was that the only separatist movement going on within the NAACP. Since 1939 the entity known to the public as the NAACP has actually been two organizations: the NAACP, headed by the late Walter White and now by Roy Wilkins, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, headed by Thurgood Marshall.

The initial reason for the separation was to provide tax relief for contributors to the Legal Defense and Education Fund, which functions solely as a legal redress organization. The NAACP, on the other hand, maintains a lobby in Washington and so its contributors are not entitled to tax exemptions. For fifteen years, however, the two organizations maintained quarters in the same building and shared an interlocking directorate. In 1952 the Legal Defense and Education Fund moved to separate quarters and in 1955 the interlocking directorate was ended. The tax matter aside, the cleavage came about as a result of deep internal troubling, the details of which are still in the domain of “no comment.” In the midst of all this, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt left the NAACP board for reasons that have never been fully disclosed.

The lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi produced yet another crisis for the Negro leadership class. Mrs. Mamie Bradley, Till's mother, became a
cause célèbre
and Negro leadership organizations became locked in a bitter struggle over just where Mrs. Bradley would speak and under whose auspices. But even before Mrs. Bradley started her speaking tour there was the famous Chicago wash-pot incident. Till's body lay in state in a Chicago funeral home: somehow—nobody, including the funeral director, knows just how—a wash pot covered with fine chicken wire was placed at the head of the bier. Thousands of Negroes filed by to see the grim remains, and as they passed they dropped money in the wash pot. How many times the pot was filled and emptied, nobody knows; nobody knows where the money went. I was among the newsmen who went to check the wash-pot story but when we got there the pot, complete with chicken wire and money, had vanished.

After the funeral, Mrs. Bradley embarked on an NAACP-sponsored speaking tour, traveling by air, with secretary. Bitter disputes about money raised during her appearances came from all sections and her tour finally petered out.

Nevertheless, these were glamorous years for successful Negroes; almost all got the title of Negro leader. Their names and faces appeared on ads endorsing soap, cigarettes, whiskeys, and ladies' personal items. Adam Clayton Powell endured in Congress, always reminding his flock that, some ten years earlier, he was the first Negro to call the late Senator Theodore Bilbo, of Mississippi, a “cesspool”; Paul Robeson called a press conference and announced that Negroes would not fight with America against Russia; Jackie Robinson took a day off from the Brooklyn Dodgers to assure the House Un-American Activities Committee that Mr. Robeson was wrong. Indeed we would fight. Joe Louis, who had dispelled doubts during the dark days of Dunkirk by proclaiming, “America will win 'cause God is on our side,” made an all-expense-paid visit to a Washington, D.C., courtroom and embraced the defendant, James Hoffa, in full view of the jury, peppered with Negroes. Father Divine announced that he brought about integration, and he had a white wife to prove it!

Enter the Students

These incidents—some humorous, some tragic, but all of them significant—had a grave impact on the Negro leadership class; a less stout-hearted group would have exploded from so much internal combustion. But it was the tense drama of school integration that provided the bailing wire for a show of unity.

I was there and it was a moving and unforgettable experience to see Negro students at Clinton, Sturgis, Clay, and Little Rock dodge bricks as they raced to and from school under armed guard. It was a magnificent hour for these fortuitously elite youngsters, many of whom became international heroes. But few of us lost sight of the Negro masses in these cities. They were still called “Jim,” “Mary,” “Aunt Harriet,” and “Uncle Job”; they had to buy clothes they were not allowed to try on; their homes were searched by police without warrants; their heads were bloodied, their jobs threatened if they dared protest. They darted in and out of drug and department stores where they dared not sit down. They were denied free access to the polls, and if they received a just day in court it was usually when all parties concerned were Negroes.

Despite the march of well-scrubbed, carefully selected Negro students into previously all-white schools, it was crystal clear that the fundamental question of the Negro's dignity as an individual had not been resolved. The glory was the NAACP's and nobody begrudged it. Yet, there was a widespread doubt that a nationally directed battle of attrition that took so long and cost so much to bring so little to so few would ever get to the heart of the issue.

There were many local heroes during the decade of the 'fifties: they all had a brief hour, were clasped to the breasts of national leadership organizations, but when their public-relations and fund-raising value slipped they fell into disuse.

Mrs. Daisy Bates, president of the Arkansas State NAACP and the undisputed moving spirit behind the integration of Little Rock's Central High School, affords an example of life behind the monolithic curtain.

The Spingarn Medal of 1958, voted annually by the NAACP to the person or persons who have contributed most to racial advancement during the previous year, was awarded to the Little Rock Nine. When the students received notice of the award and realized that it did not include Mrs. Bates—whose home had been bombed, her business destroyed—they rejected the citation. The powers-that-be at Twenty West Fortieth Street reversed themselves and Mrs. Bates was included in the award, which she and the students accepted with full smiles, amid thunderous ovations. The Negro press reported the Bates case in great detail and interpreted the incident as overt evidence of the covert pressure the NAACP had been exerting on local Negro leaders for some time.

Dr. King and Mr. Wilkins

The curtain had begun to lift; it had achieved a great good, for it had produced a façade of unity; yet it had cloaked some terrible wrongs, including the smothering of homegrown, local Negro leaders who, even then, sensed the restlessness of the masses. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the lone successful exception, and even he came into international prominence mainly because the NAACP refused to help the Montgomery bus boycotters when they at first demanded something less than full integration.

Acting on pleas from Negroes in other Southern communities, Dr. King organized the Southern Christian Leadership Council (the organization has undergone several name changes but this is the current one) to instigate non-violent protests in Southern cities. The NAACP has a most active program all through the South and a clash between the two organizations—that is to say, Dr. King and Mr. Wilkins—seemed inevitable. To end rumors of a power struggle between them, Dr. King flew to New York and made a public show of purchasing life memberships in the NAACP for himself and his Montgomery Improvement Association. Dr. King and Mr. Wilkins then embarked on a series of infrequent private talks that may go down in history as the Negro leadership class's great and final hour.

The King-Wilkins talks of 1957–58 undoubtedly covered the issue of just who would do what and where, but central in the discussion was the common knowledge that many NAACP members were disenchanted with Wilkins' leadership. The two men came out from the talks as one, each co-sponsoring the activities of the other's organization.

Dr. King and Mr. Wilkins joined also with A. Philip Randolph to sponsor the highly successful Washington Prayer Pilgrimage of 1957, during which Dr. King emerged, to quote editor James Hicks, of the
Amsterdam News,
“as the number-one Negro leader.” But the following year King and Wilkins ignored the sentiments of some five hundred Negro spokesmen, representing three hundred leadership organizations, at the Summit Meeting of Negro Leadership and gave their reluctant endorsement to the Senate's watered-down civil-rights proposal. The Negro press reacted with shock.

The criticism was even worse when, a few months later, King, Wilkins, and Randolph met with President Eisenhower to explain why Negroes were displeased with the first civil-rights bill to be passed in eighty-three years. The
Afro-American
's Louis Lautier wrote: “Ike charmed the Negro leaders and neither of them uttered a word of criticism.”

Little Rock kept the NAACP in the foreground, while a near-fatal stiletto wound at the hands of a crazed Harlem woman—and internal difficulties with his own Montgomery Association—rendered Dr. King almost inactive for some eighteen months. But this year, Dr. King moved to Atlanta and began to give the lion's share of his time to the Southern Christian Leadership Council. Mr. Wilkins was on hand and the NAACP appeared as co-sponsor when the Council launched a South-wide voting drive on behalf of the Negro masses.

In one sense it was 1958 all over again. Congress was locked in a civil-rights debate that we all knew would culminate in some kind of legislation. Both Dr. King and Mr. Wilkins were on hand backstage as liberal Congressmen planned their moves. But in another, perhaps more significant, sense the early months of this year were unlike 1958. Negroes, particularly the youth, were restless; they were tired of compromises, piecemeal legislation, and token integration which, as Martin Luther King phrased it, “is a new form of discrimination covered up with certain niceties and complexities.” A small but growing segment of the Negro population had joined a Muslim faith that preaches the superiority of the black man and the imminent destruction of the white man. Then there is the matter of Africa: hardly a week passes that that awakening giant's cries for “Free DOOM” don't ring out over the radio and television into the ears of American Negroes—ashamed, as they most certainly are, that they are still oppressed. The law, particularly in the South, was against them; but for the militant young people this was the time for all good Negroes to be in jail.

Meanwhile the Negro leadership class—itself often guilty of rank, class, and color discrimination—was continuing to operate under a concept that begged the question of the dignity of the Negro individual. The literature of Negro progress is littered with such terms as “the talented tenth,” “the exceptional Negro,” “the new Negro,” “the break-through Negro,” and in recent years “the accepted” and “the assimilated Negro.” Sharing the outlook of the white liberals who finance them, and sincerely so, Negro leadership organizations have focused their attention, by and large, on matters that are of interest to the talented Negro rather than the Negro masses. By so doing the Negro leadership class ignored the basic problem of human dignity in favor of themselves and their white peers—a distinction which the segregationists refused to accept. Thus an impassable void has separated the leaders of both sides for the past decade; and the ordinary Negro has been in the no man's land between.

The lunch-counter demonstrations moved to the center of the void, and menaced both principals: the recalcitrant South, by striking closer to the heart of segregation than any other widespread local movements have ever struck before; the Negro leadership class, by exposing its impotence.

The Negro leadership class, still torn by jealousy, dissension, and power struggles, rushed to the aid of the students and their mass supporters, and attempted to make complete recovery by “correlating” and “co-ordinating” the movements. But as one Southern NAACP branch president said to me, “How can I correlate something when I don't know where and when it's going to happen?”

I found that established leaders don't have the same fire in their stomachs that the students and the rallying Negro masses have. As the Southern Regional Council interim report on the demonstrations reflects, Southern leaders, Negro and white, are saying, “Before this happened we could have integrated lunch counters. Now it is almost impossible.” What the report does not explain is why the lunch counters were not already integrated. This, again, is black power talking to white power about something neither fully understands.