“What are you going to do if they spit in your face, if they hit you, if they knock you down?” an old man asked me. “You going to hit back?”
“I’m going to try not to.”
The old man shook his head. “We can’t use you.”
“You can’t use me? Why the hell not?”
“Mister Gregory, you got to know you’re not going to fight back.”
I couldn’t believe I was standing on a Greenwood street and listening to an old Mississippi Negro, a man I had come down to do a favor for, tell me he can’t use me. I told him I’d have to think about it. He nodded his nappy old head and said he’d be back, and shuffled away.
I thought about it, and the more I thought the more I realized how beautiful this thing really was. It was my second day in Greenwood. Monday morning, Jim Sanders and I had caught the eight o’clock flight from New York to Memphis. The plane was filled. I didn’t find out why until we landed and a man came over and said he was from the Department of Justice.
“How long are you going to be here, Mister Gregory?”
“I’m not staying in Memphis. I’m going on to Greenwood.”
“I know that. We have orders to stay until you leave.”
A SNCC car picked us up and drove us to Greenwood. The press was there, the national magazines, the national television networks. They all asked me how long I was going to stay because they had to stay as long as I did. I couldn’t believe it. Just for me. I didn’t know, until I got to Greenwood, that the SNCC kids had announced to the press that I was expected.
There were no demonstrations that first day, but I spoke at a crowded church rally, that night. First I answered all the charges that the local newspapers and public officials had made against me. I told them if they didn’t believe I had brought 14,000 pounds of food, they should check the records of Delta Air Lines. I told them that they weren’t just dealing with Dick Gregory when they threatened to take all the Negroes off relief, they were dealing with America. They weren’t big enough to threaten the whole country. And I’d be glad to take a lie detector test if the governor thought I was doing all this for publicity.
Then I got on the Negro church. There were fifteen Negro churches in Greenwood, and only two of them had opened their doors to the demonstrators. I stood up there and told that crowd how the Negro preachers had brought us all the way to the battle lines and then had abandoned us. They were scared of losing their jobs, of having their churches bombed, of coming up empty in their collection plates. Our church was failing us in this battle for civil rights. It was the preachers’ fault that whenever we made a gain we said: “Thank the United States Supreme Court,” instead of saying “Thank God.”
I looked at those people in that church, those beautiful people who were taking chances with their lives, with what little they had in the world. There wasn’t a single Negro doctor in Greenwood. When Negroes demonstrate they forfeit their medical attention. A Negro couldn’t even afford to get sick. And they were going out, maybe to die, without any of their local Negro leaders. The preachers were scared, and the Negro schoolteachers and principals were too afraid for their jobs to go out in the streets. That night, standing in front of those people, I told them I’d be proud to lead them in demonstrations the next day. I really hadn’t planned to lead the marching, but looking at those beautiful faces ready to die for freedom, I knew I couldn’t do less.
It was the next morning, while we were getting ready to march on the courthouse, that the old man came up to me. We were standing in front of the SNCC headquarters, about fifty of us and dozens of press and television people, when he told me he couldn’t use me. By the time he came back again, my anger was gone. I understood what he meant.
“We’re ready to go, Mister Gregory, what do you think?”
“Okay, I’ll do it.”
So we marched. Old people, kids, voter registration workers, women. We marched for one block, and every step of the way I was scared, waiting for that bullet to come from a rooftop, waiting for that car to come by and shoot me from the ground.
The police stopped us after one block and told us we couldn’t parade through the city. So we jumped into cars, made the two-mile trip to the courthouse, and reassembled. We caught the cops off-guard. They closed the courthouse early that day so no Negroes could register to vote. We started walking away in small groups, and suddenly there was a hand on my stomach and I heard a cop say: “I oughta kill him,” and the next thing I knew someone had twisted my arm behind my back and was pushing me across the street. It was a Greenwood policeman.
“Move on, nigger.”
“Thanks a million.”
“Thanks for what?”
“Up North police don’t escort me across the street against a red light.”
“I said, move on, nigger.”
“I don’t know my way, I’m new in this town.”
The cop yanked on my arm and turned his head. “Send someone over to show this nigger where to go,” he hollered.
They were pushing the marchers around, dozens of regular policemen and auxiliary policemen with clubs and guns, and the press and the cameramen moved in and out of the crowds of white men and women and children standing on the street corners. I pulled one of my arms free and pointed at the crowd.
“Ask that white woman over there to come here and show me where to go.”
The cop’s face got red, and there was spittle at the corner of his mouth. All he could say was: “Nigger, dirty nigger . . .”
I looked at him. “Your momma’s a nigger. Probably got more Negro blood in her than I could ever hope to have in me.”
He dropped my other arm then, and backed away, and his hand was on his gun. I thought he was going to explode. But nothing happened. I was sopping wet and too excited to be scared. We walked on back to the headquarters, the police yelling and shoving and harassing us all the way. We decided to march again that afternoon.
I learned a lot that day. I felt the poisonous hate in an American city, a nice-looking little town that had a Confederate flag flying just as high as the American flag on the U.S. Post Office. I saw the beauty of those college kids from SNCC, day and night, around the clock, hardly ever sleeping or eating as they sat in hot and dirty rooms teaching old Negroes how to read and write so they could pass the voting tests. And I saw the Southern white man who has nothing between him and the lowest Negro except a segregated toilet. No wonder so many of them have shithouse ways.
When we started back to the courthouse late that afternoon, a skinny old woman who said she was ninety-eight years old came up to me. “Mister Gregory, you be embarrassed if I walk downtown with you, me and my snuff box? I want to come down and be with you today. I don’t mind dyin’.”
And so we marched again.
Demonstrating in the South must be a little like being in a battle in a war. There’s noise and confusion and pushing and quick huddles over strategy and running back and forth on both sides. You’re never really sure of what’s happening. You see snatches of things, hear sounds, you keep moving long after you’re exhausted because you’re too excited to know how tired you are. There are little victories that make you feel good for a while. That afternoon, we changed our route to the courthouse, and instead of marching through the center of town we cut through a white neighborhood. It took the police almost a half-hour to catch up with us.
“Dirty nigger.”
“Your mother’s a nigger,” I told the cop.
“Damn black monkey.”
“Who you calling a monkey? Monkey’s got thin lips, monkey’s got blue eyes and straight hair.”
“Just keep movin’, boy, just keep movin’. . . .”
The police seemed disorganized. They tried to break us up again and one of them shoved a woman pretty hard. She stumbled and smashed her head against a brick wall and fell on the sidewalk. One of the SNCC workers couldn’t stand that, and he turned on the cop. They dragged him off into a police car, and five cops climbed in after him and started working on his head and stomach. One of the cops was saying in a loud voice, mostly for the benefit of the other demonstrators: “George, gimme ma knife. . . . I’m gonna cut the balls right off this little nigger, he ain’t never gonna do nothin’ no more.”
Now I was at the head of the line and I refused to move an inch until they brought the SNCC kid back. Two cops grabbed me and threw me into the back of a police car. One of them asked the driver: “You want any help with this nigger?”
“Why you always think a Negro’s going to hurt somebody? Close the door and let this fool take me to jail.”
He slammed the door and walked away.
The cop who was driving turned around and started slapping at my head. I held my hands up over my face.
“Get your hands down, nigger,” he yelled and kept swinging at my head. He didn’t do much damage. Then he started the car and drove about three blocks, away from everything. He pulled the car over to the curb, and when he turned around again he was crying.
“My God, what are you trying to do to me?”
He sat in that car and he looked at me and he told me that when he went home at night his kids looked at him funny, that they made him feel bad. I sat there, and I couldn’t believe I was hearing these words from a white cop who had been hitting me and niggering me a few minutes before. He said: “As right as you are, you’re down here helping these people and I got to stop you and I can’t and sometimes I think you’re a better man than I am.”
He didn’t take me to jail. He drove me back to registration headquarters. I got out of the car and handed him two dollars.
“What’s this for?”
“I always tip chauffeurs. Hell, if you don’t take me to jail, you’re my chauffeur.”
I got into a SNCC car and rushed back to the demonstration. When I climbed out, the police commissioner, Hammond, came right over.
“Boy, what you come back here for?”
“Hammond, anytime you arrest me you better carry me to jail because if you don’t that’s kidnapping and that’s a federal offense.”
A little cop came over. “Nigger, you want to go to jail.”
I said: “Come here, boy, let me tell you something. I could take you to Chicago today and let you walk through my home, then come back here and walk through your home, and out of the two of us you’d know which one was the nigger.”
Then the cops turned their backs and walked away, leaving us there on the corner. The parade was over and we did exactly what they had been screaming at us to do—we broke up into twos and threes and went in different directions.
That night, Jim Sanders and I drove fifty miles to a mass meeting in Clarksdale. There were more than 800 people jammed into the Centennial Missionary Baptist Church there, and we had to push our way through the police to get inside. I was sitting on the stage, waiting to speak, when the bomb came flying through an open window. It hit a man on the head, bounced off a lady’s hand, then rolled to the middle of the floor.
I just sat there, frightened, and saw my wife and my kids and everything decent in my life and wondered why I was sitting here, fixing to die and leave all that, and it flashed through my mind that it was worth it. When I looked up, I saw the reporters and the photographers standing still, writing in their notebooks and taking their pictures while hundreds of Negroes around them were on their feet running for the door. I jumped up and grabbed the microphone.
“Where are you going? The man who threw it is outside God’s house. The Man who’s supposed to save you lives here.”
They stopped in their tracks. Somebody picked up the bomb and threw it back out the window.
I walked outside the church after a while, and looked at the cops lounging around outside, leaning on the hoods of their cars in the evening, talking softly and laughing. I walked across the street and into a Negro grocery store to make a phone call. The police commissioner was in there. He didn’t know who I was yet.
“Hey, boy, come over here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You just come from the church, huh? That Gregory’s in there. He funny, boy?”
“How could any man be funny when a dumb superintendent of police lets these heathen cops do the things they do?”
He got red and walked out. I went back to the church. We found out that the bomb had been a special U.S. Army gas grenade, more powerful than tear gas, which could have killed the people nearby had it gone off. Whoever threw the bomb forgot to pull the pin. And people were surprised a few months later when they blew up that church in Birmingham.
We held our meeting and I spoke. The Clarksdale Negroes weren’t as responsive as the Greenwood Negroes because they were more scared of the police, of losing their jobs. And they were all pretty shook up by the grenade. When the meeting was over, a man came in to tell me that I was going to be killed that night. A roadblock had been set up for me on the highway back to Greenwood. The messenger was a Negro, but he said he had been sent by the police commissioner.
Outside the church I could hear one of the police officers screaming, almost hysterical. “If one of our men threw that bomb you’d better believe it would have gone off, we don’t make mistakes like that, no, sir, we don’t. Our boys don’t miss, no we don’t.”
The folks from the church made a ring around Jim Sanders and me and took us around the corner. We ducked into the drugstore owned by Aaron Henry, the powerful Negro leader, and lay there for an hour until a car was brought up to the back door. Jim and I crouched in the back of the car, and we were taken to the home of a Clarksdale Negro.
We didn’t sleep that night, lying on the floor of the house, keeping away from the windows. The Negro had a telephone, and we weren’t sure just how afraid he was, and who he was afraid of. We stayed awake to make sure nobody used that phone that night. In the morning, we were driven back to Greenwood along side roads.
They knocked down that ninety-eight-year-old lady that day, right in the streets, and I’ll never forget the way she looked up at me from the gutter, her head bleeding. “Don’t let them make you mad, honey. They ain’t after me, it’s you they after.”
They arrested Jim that day, the first time he ever went to jail. I told the press I thought it was a good experience for him, make him a better writer. But I was worried, he’s such a sweet, patient, good-natured man. They hauled eighteen other Negroes away, bouncing one kid along the pavement, slamming another down on the floor of a bus. They grabbed the Reverend Robert Kinloch so hard his collar came off. One cop threw his club at a registration worker who was taking pictures. It only hit his shoulder. And the police were on their best behavior that day because there were FBI agents in town with movie cameras.
They wouldn’t arrest me. Shoved me a little and pushed me around some, and got mad when I started bad-mouthing Hammond, but they had decided that putting me in jail would bring too much publicity. One cop came up to me and spat right in my face. I started to jump him, but I remembered what I had promised the old man and I held myself back. Just stood there and let the spit run down my face and into my mouth.
“I guess that makes me as white as you now, boy. I got your spit inside me.”
It was another long day. I called Lil, who had just come home from the hospital, and told her to take the first plane on down. I wanted her to see the beauty of this Southern Negro, the old people learning to read and write, young and old marching, the women cooking all day so there would always be food ready on the chance a demonstrator might run in for a bite to eat. Lil said she’d be down by morning.
That third day in Greenwood—Wednesday—turned into night and I was alone and scared. You never know what fear is until you walk through the streets of a quiet town at night and it suddenly dawns on you that if anyone attacked you, you couldn’t even call the police. You know if you tripped on a curb and broke your ankle, when the ambulance pulled up and found out who you were it would drive away. Or run you over. It’s a feeling that takes all the guts out of you.
And on you walk and pace the streets because you have no place to sleep. You’re afraid to go into a Negro home. They might see you go in there and blow the house up and you have no right to take a chance with someone else’s family. Or it might be the house of a very scared Negro and he might tell them where you are.
And I thought about St. Louis and how we used to rap for Mister Roosevelt every night, and how he once said that there was nothing to fear but fear itself, and I said: “Bullshit.” Out loud. Sometimes it makes you feel a little better to talk to the dark. “Bullshit.”
I walked around a corner with my head down and when I looked up I saw one of the most vicious white men I ever saw in my life, a big, fat man with a bald head and tobacco juice running out of his mouth. He swung that double-barreled shotgun like it was a toy. It was no toy. He stuck it right into my stomach.
“I’m going to blow your black nigger guts out.”
And I was too tired and too gut-scared to move. Then I felt that goddamned monster rise up and I looked in his eye.
“Is that all you plan to do, boy, just kill me? Pull that fucking trigger, boy, you just pull that fucking trigger.”
And that no-good dirty mother-fucker was so hung up on his hate weed that he lowered his shotgun and turned and walked away. He just couldn’t do anything a Negro told him to do.
On Thursday and Friday I marched with Lil. To the cops, she was just another demonstrator, another face in the crowd. A lot of people said I was crazy to have her come down, but I wanted to share this thing with her, I wanted her to see this beauty and ugliness. We stayed in the home of Reverend Tucker. The police harassment picked up, and the television people started asking us to demonstrate early so they could make the six o’clock news with their film clips. As it turned out, we didn’t do much more demonstrating. When the police began taking pictures of the marchers, I turned the group back. The police would use the pictures to permanently blackball and harass the local Negroes, and I didn’t want that to happen. They would have to stay in Greenwood long after we left.
I left Greenwood on Saturday morning, April 6. Things had quieted down. Deals had been made. The demonstrators were released from jail, and the city promised to supply the Negroes with buses so they wouldn’t walk through town on their way to the courthouse to register. In return, a federal injunction against local harassment was dropped and I promised to leave town. I had learned a lot and I felt so much stronger now; less afraid, like a soldier who has been through his first battle.
A lot happened down there that I’ll never know about, a lot happened that I can’t talk about now because this war is still going on. And when I got back North, a lot happened that scared me all over again, in a different way.
I found out, for example, that some of the Northern press had reported that the bomb in Clarksdale was only a football bladder. And some had reported that we had lost in Greenwood, and I had played the fool. I knew it couldn’t have been the newsmen who had been down there, but it was editors up North who turned and twisted the stories that were sent to them.
But what scared me most was when Negroes asked me if it was true that I had gone down to Greenwood for publicity.
And it dawned on me that anytime you help a Negro in America, even the Negroes will question your intentions. I could have quit show business and joined the Peace Corps and gone to Vietnam and no one, white or black, would have questioned why I did it. But to help Negroes . . .
I was just beginning to realize what a long hard row it would be.