IN ATLANTIC CITY, NEW JERSEY, THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY WAS TO HOLD ITS national convention from August 24 to 27. The Democrats would nominate Lyndon Johnson as president. Although the presidential nomination was a fait accompli, numerous bits of palace intrigue abounded, including who would be named as Johnson’s running mate. Robert Kennedy’s mournful speech eulogizing his slain brother proved cathartic and served as a symbolic passing of the torch. By the New Year, Bobby Kennedy would be elected senator from New York, swept into office by sheer star power and the national Johnson presidential landslide. Racial politics hovered over the entire convention, punctuated by press speculation about how Johnson would defuse the MFDP’s rogue presence.
Stokely and dozens of SNCC activists traveled to Atlantic City to challenge Mississippi’s segregated delegation to the convention. It was a historic mission, but one destined to crush his faith in mainstream American politics and begin his journey toward independent political organizing. The movement’s political strategy rolled along two lines, with some civil rights workers lobbying various state delegates on behalf of the unseated Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation while others camped outside the convention to bear witness to the coming week’s events. Demonstrators carrying massive posters with photos of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman lined the city’s famous boardwalk. The certainty of Lyndon Johnson’s nomination made the Freedom Democratic Party challenge a wild card that received considerable press. Fannie Lou Hamer’s televised afternoon testimony to the convention’s credentials committee described the horrors of Mississippi racism in poignant enough detail to compensate for being cut off when television channels switched to a hastily organized news conference by President Johnson. Hamer’s plainspoken sincerity would serve as a testament to SNCC and Carmichael’s belief that poor, unlettered sharecroppers could be not only citizens but political leaders.1
Armed with a walkie-talkie, Carmichael joined one hundred activists who surrounded the Convention Center for a Sunday night vigil of freedom songs that would triple in size the next day. Carmichael helped coordinate a silent vigil between the Convention Center boardwalk and Temple Baptist Church, where demonstrators crafted large picket signs. High drama played out inside the Convention Center over the next few days as Freedom delegates milled around courtesy of spectator tickets provided by party officials. The official all-white Mississippi delegation mulled over a compromise offer of two nonvoting seats for Freedom Party delegates coupled with a promise of an integrated state delegation by 1968. Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin, Roy Wilkins, and Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey (whose nomination as vice president purportedly depended on brokering a deal with the MFDP that would not embarrass Johnson or alienate the white regulars) alternated between passive advice, gentle scolding, and behind-the-scenes arm twisting in an effort to negotiate a deal.2
At stake in Atlantic City were two competing but equally critical issues: whether black Mississippians were full-fledged American citizens and whether the Democratic Party was willing, once and for all, to become the party of civil rights. Emissaries from the Johnson administration, national civil rights leaders, and MFDP delegates met in secret on Wednesday morning to debate a compromise. Bayard Rustin’s passionate insistence that the “difference between protest and politics” necessitated accepting the compromise anticipated his evolution from socialist dissident to liberal power broker. His speech elicited groans from his former Howard disciples and at least one outburst. “You’re a traitor, Bayard, a traitor!” screamed Mendy Samstein, a Brandeis graduate and one of Carmichael’s favorites in SNCC. Samstein voiced the thoughts of those, including Stokely, Courtland Cox, and others who vocally opposed the idea of dishonorable compromise. Jim Forman would remember the entire spectacle as producing an epiphany among Rustin’s former acolytes. “They had seen the light,” Forman observed. Carmichael’s anger over Rustin’s words overcame the heartbreak of watching the demise of someone he now considered a false prophet.3
Stokely was one of a handful of organizers trusted by the MFDP delegation. Shell-shocked activists peppered him with questions and sought out his advice before ultimately rejecting the offer. Carmichael took special pride in the fact that some of the most resolute voices opposing the compromise were black women from the Delta. For Carmichael, the political outcome in Atlantic City followed a familiar pattern. He privately hoped that the entire process would strengthen the MFDP’s political independence through the invaluable, if dispiriting, experience in the bruising world of major-party politics. MFDP supporters, however, would remain committed to changing Mississippi’s Democratic Party from within rather than building an independent political base.4
The summer of 1964 transformed Stokely Carmichael. “I felt, after the pressure and intense discipline all summer,” he would confess, “a kind of deflation.” Carmichael’s ennui mirrored that of SNCC, which experienced the departure of some Summer Project volunteers and the unexpected offer by many others to stay. The influx of new members, many of whom had participated in civil rights activism for the first time, changed SNCC, transforming a tight-knit unit into a sprawling and diffuse entity. Meanwhile, Carmichael continued as project director for the Second Congressional District, which in the fall directed precious energies to supporting the MFDP in the November elections. Photos of Lyndon Johnson and his running mate, Hubert Humphrey, appeared on top of SNCC posters for the MFDP just above pictures of the congressional candidates in the Second, Fourth, and Fifth Districts, Fannie Lou Hamer, Annie Devine, and Victoria Gray.5
Freedom Summer’s chaotic conclusion in Atlantic City overshadowed the project’s remarkable achievements. On August 29, SNCC issued a press release that summarized the Summer Project’s official results. The drive, which began on June 21 and ended that week, recruited hundreds of students, doctors, lawyers, preachers, and ministers to Mississippi to coordinate efforts that centered on Freedom Schools, voter registration, and political action. One hundred and seventy-five Freedom School teachers taught over two thousand students enrolled in forty-one Freedom Schools spread through twenty different communities. Project workers organized an additional thirteen community centers that established libraries, literacy programs, and health and child care programs. In the towns of Mileston and Harmony, civil rights workers and local people were building two new centers from the ground up. More than 55,000 African Americans successfully filled out Freedom Registration forms symbolically proving that democracy remained in the hearts and on the minds of Mississippi blacks if it was not yet a political reality.6
In September, a contingent of SNCC activists took a life-changing journey to Africa. The group, including Ruby Doris Smith Robinson (now married to Clifford Robinson, the mechanic for SNCC’s Sojourner Truth Motor Fleet) and Fannie Lou Hamer, would spend three weeks in the west African country of Guinea. Harry Belafonte had arranged the journey, which would have lasting consequences on Stokely, even though he did not accompany the others on the trip. Belafonte counted the dashing Guinean leader Sékou Touré as a personal friend and arranged for SNCC to have full access to the president. Touré’s insistence that Guinea, a former French colony, remain independent of French assistance had come at the high cost of economic hardship but made him a hero to black Americans who connected their own struggles at home to anti-colonial struggles in the Third World. A country the size of Oregon, Guinea, despite its own travails, offered generous assistance to other embattled African nations. Robinson would name her son Kenneth Touré in honor of the Guinean revolutionary, and Fannie Lou Hamer cried after meeting the president, overwhelmed at being afforded courtesies undreamed of back home. Jim Forman, Bob Moses, and John Lewis also came back with stories extolling the wonders of visiting a country whose entire government was led by blacks. Forman returned with gifts from Touré, including an African robe that he gave to Stokely.7
On October 3, Stokely was a featured speaker at the Mississippi Report Dinner in Chicago. It was the first organized tribute to the Freedom Summer, destined to register in the national conscience as a mean season of historical reckoning. Fannie Lou Hamer spoke about “A New Politics for the South” and Bob Moses about “Mississippi: Future Prospectives for Change.” Hamer presented the summer’s highs and lows as a one-woman performance: she sang and shouted her story so enthusiastically that attendees clasped hands and offered “amens” as if in a Baptist church. Guest-of-honor field workers regaled the audience with tales of racist terror that garnered immediate donations totaling $2,500. Carmichael delivered a memorial to the civil rights workers martyred during the Summer Project. The Chicago dinner turned out to be more than a commemoration of the Summer Project; it served as an unwitting memorial to the spirit of trust that had allowed young organizers to almost singlehandedly implement an “operation as diverse and complicated, as radical in intent and operation, and as dangerous” as Freedom Summer.8
During that summer, SNCC had come as close as it ever would to being a cohesive organization. If SNCC began its early period as a loose confederation of independent campus-based groups, after 1964 it functioned as a collection of autonomous local projects bound together by mutual political objectives. The odds were huge. Mississippi was the battleground for America’s soul. During the event, SNCC activist David Llorens asked a poignant question that would haunt Carmichael well into the next year: “Will Mississippi become a part of America or will America become Mississippi?”9
But after the Chicago dinner, political tensions in SNCC grew. In November, a week-long SNCC staff retreat highlighted divisions. It was held at Waveland, Mississippi, a resort on the Gulf of Mexico, a relaxed setting for increasingly fierce debates over the group’s political direction and organizational structure.
The role of women, increasingly discussed in the country at large, took center stage at Waveland. Mary King and Casey Hayden (the wife of SDS leader Tom Hayden) had written a paper, “Sex and Caste,” which challenged SNCC to confront sexism within its own ranks. The authors compared discrimination against women to that suffered by blacks. “Sex and Caste” would come to be recognized as a watershed document of second-wave feminism, but at Waveland, not only the men but some of the women dismissed it as an unnecessary intrusion into what many activists still erroneously viewed as primarily a racial struggle. SNCC’s most powerful female member, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, disagreed with “Sex and Caste.” She believed that its arguments were based on the frustrations of white female staff who had tired of administrative work but whose presence in the field was considered too dangerous. Confident and tough, Robinson considered herself the equal of any man in the organization and commanded their respect.10
After a long day of haggling over the fate of the world, Carmichael once again offered comic relief. Carmichael’s natural charisma lent a patina of celebrity and showmanship to everything he did. At the conclusion of one of his patented monologues that made fun of a wide range of targets, he turned to a discussion of position papers. “What is the position of women in SNCC?” he asked rhetorically. “The position of women in SNCC is prone!” he impishly answered. Carmichael and his audience, men and women included, laughed for a long time. Retrospectively, this quote would take on a life of its own, becoming a symbol of the era’s sexism. Mary King remembers it differently. “It drew us closer together, because, even in that moment, he was poking fun at his own attitudes.” If Carmichael shared the sexist views of his generation regarding women’s roles in politics, he fought hard against these blinders, and Mary King remembered him as “one of the most responsive men” to “Sex and Caste.” Howard student, SNCC worker, and Summer Project volunteer Jean Smith Young similarly recalled that Carmichael treated her with respect, a sentiment echoed by Martha Prescod Norman Noonan. The joke’s lasting reverberations, however, would prove overwhelming. Shorn of context, Carmichael’s words damaged his personal reputation, cost him political credibility in feminist circles, and unfairly minimized SNCC’s democratic culture. Almost fifty years after Waveland, Hayden attempted to correct this error in an essay, “In the Attics of My Mind,” which discussed how she viewed women in SNCC:
Nonviolent civil disobedience created a new community of folks willing to risk everything for their beliefs. Together as this community, I thought, we were new people, free of the old stereotypes of gender, class, and race. This was the beloved community and the point was to organize it everywhere, redeeming the culture, undermining the old power structures. Women’s culture and black culture, merging for me in the southern freedom movement, especially in SNCC, free of the constraints and values of the white patriarchy, would lead the way.11
In the short run, SNCC’s precarious financial health overwhelmed Waveland’s historic significance. On November 22, Cleve Sellers, the project director at the Mississippi town of Holly Springs, wrote to Jim Forman about his local project’s dismal economic situation. Mounting costs for auto repairs, utility bills, legal aid, and office rent far exceeded the $200-per-month stipend from SNCC’s Jackson office. Without northern aid, Sellers informed Forman, all would be lost. Sellers said he had remained relatively silent about debates over structure at the last staff meeting since it was only “the service the structure renders” that really counted. Sellers concluded his letter with an ultimatum disguised as a plea. Unless Forman could provide Holly Springs with the necessary resources to effectively operate, he would resign in two weeks. Carmichael, Sellers’ good friend and mentor, was the first person copied on the letter.12
Sellers was not alone in his frustrations. Ruby Doris Smith Robinson in Atlanta had earlier complained to Forman about feeling overworked and underappreciated. The quick-witted and intelligent Ruby had been among Forman’s first recruits in 1961 and among his best decisions. Her no-nonsense demeanor endeared her to some while alienating field staff and Summer Project volunteers, who found her too rigid. A dedicated administrator and occasional field participant, she stretched her considerable talents beyond human capacity. She found herself juggling the needs of local staff, the executive committee, and Forman, whose enduring wish was to build a structure capable of handling competing interests. Ruby dismissed talk from northern whites that she was “bossy” just as she rejected staff complaints of her ill temper. On the brink of resigning, she pulled back out of a principled sense of responsibility. Growing tensions between field staff and headquarters found project staff sniping that headquarters remained disconnected from the routine dangers they faced every day and administrators reporting that SNCC members brandished recklessness like a badge of honor.13
The debate over structure versus improvisation was important, and Carmichael sympathized with both sides. He remained in Greenwood through December 1964, running interference for local activists harassed by authorities and plotting a strategic retreat to the relatively virgin territory of Alabama. He based this decision on his experience supporting programs designed by others. Intent on implementing a project based on his personal understanding of American politics, Carmichael relentlessly pursued the creation of independent politics capable of transcending the Democratic Party. He hoped that this new project might transform democracy from the ground up by investing political power in poor blacks in the rural South’s Black Belt. The “test case” for Carmichael’s theory that independent politics offered black people the best chance for both freedom and self-determination would take place in Lowndes County, the buckle of Alabama’s Black Belt.14
CARMICHAEL WAS DETERMINED to make 1965 a year devoted to independent black political organizing. But he remained unsure of just how to achieve this ambitious goal. He found the cure for his troubles in a most unlikely example: Martin Luther King’s audacious voting rights campaign, which quickly turned Alabama into a center of national civil rights protest.
Carmichael’s quiet admiration for King grew steadily after each encounter, and he credited him with teaching other blacks how to face racial terror without fear. King entered the New Year as a Nobel Peace Prize winner, an award he received the previous December in Oslo and that cemented his status as a global human rights leader. SNCC officially judged King’s campaign for voting rights in Selma to be a diversion from the real work of long-term organizing. In keeping with organization philosophy, however, individuals remained free to participate. For a variety of reasons, Selma mesmerized SNCC, including members who voiced their disapproval of the entire proceedings only to reverse course and others too afraid to admit to being drawn to King’s celebrity. Carmichael belonged to a third contingent determined to build a sustained project in the rurals—the plantation-strewn areas most dangerous yet critical to bringing full citizenship to sharecroppers—and gambling that King’s presence in Selma might help facilitate such organizing. Alabama’s burgeoning civil rights activity had even attracted Malcolm X, whose February 3 visit to Tuskegee and trip to Selma two days later marked his last appearance in the South before his assassination on February 21. Malcolm’s death upset Carmichael and other SNCC workers who were becoming increasingly open to his radical politics. SNCC had carefully observed Malcolm’s political evolution during his last frenetic year alive. Malcolm’s two tours of Africa in 1964 touched SNCC’s internationally minded activists, including John Lewis, who toured Kenya shortly after Malcolm’s visit. Malcolm’s overtures to the young radicals in SNCC included sharing a stage with Fannie Lou Hamer in New York three months before his assassination. From the grave, Malcolm offered Stokely a portrait of a revolutionary life cut short but jam-packed with Middle East pilgrimages (where Malcolm embraced orthodox Islam and became El Hajj Malik El Shabazz), fearless political debates, and a personal sincerity that Carmichael would spend the rest of his life emulating.
On Sunday, March 7, Alabama state troopers routed civil rights workers attempting to march into Montgomery over Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. John Lewis sustained the day’s most visible wound, a gaping skull fracture courtesy of a club to the head. That same day, Carmichael arrived in Selma by charter flight from Atlanta (where he had been in town seeking an official transfer to Alabama) with Jim Forman and Faye Bellamy, a new staff member who had arranged Malcolm X’s Selma visit. During a 3:00 AM meeting with King and his trusted second-in-command man, Ralph Abernathy, Carmichael urged SCLC staff to defy an injunction prohibiting marching. Staff who had privately chided Sunday’s march as showboating now supported Tuesday’s efforts as a defiant stand against fear. Sunday’s violence emboldened the resolve of local organizers such as Willie Ricks, a theatrical orator nicknamed “Reverend” for his preaching abilities, who on Tuesday led a portion of the crowd in exhortations from Brown Chapel. Carmichael marched at the head of the line with King on Tuesday. Stokely, in jeans, work boots, and a hooded overcoat, was impassively smoking. It would be the last time that Carmichael participated in a demonstration of this scale in virtual anonymity.15
Monday, March 15 was the day Alabama law specified for voter registration. Carmichael was staying at the Ben Moore Hotel in Montgomery. From his fourth-floor window, he saw mounted police officers rout helpless demonstrators. He tried to get to the marchers to help them, but shuttered exit doors at the hotel delayed him. Waves of despair overcame him. Carmichael’s emotional response to the police violence against demonstrators pushed him over the edge. SNCC workers found him only intermittently lucid and staggering afterward and hustled him to the Montgomery Airport. Carmichael’s delayed response to the day’s trauma left him shrieking in grief before a bewildered police officer. He crumpled to the floor as friends and colleagues soothed him.16
On the evening of that day, March 15, 1965, President Johnson spoke about civil rights to a joint session of Congress. The televised address upstaged both quotidian struggles being waged in Selma and the plight of democratic warriors such as Carmichael. President Johnson invoked “the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy” in an address that cast events in Selma as part of a historic pantheon that stretched from Revolutionary War battles at Lexington and Concord to the South’s surrender at Appomattox, ending the Civil War. “There is no pride in what has happened in Selma,” said Johnson. “There is no cause for self-satisfaction in the long denial of equal rights of millions of Americans.” The president openly confronted, like Kennedy before him, a national reluctance to publicly admit to historic and contemporary racial oppression against blacks. “But there is cause for hope and for faith in our democracy in what is happening here tonight,” he said. At a high point in a speech of many peaks, Johnson concluded with a signal quote from the movement that he now held up as embodying American democracy’s very essence: “Because it is not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And—we—shall—overcome.”17
Johnson’s speech represented the strongest presidential endorsement of civil rights since John Kennedy’s historic televised address on June 11, 1963. Johnson’s forty-five-minute speech elicited a wave of conflicting emotions that ranged from joy to disbelief and anger among the elected leaders in attendance. Three dozen separate bursts of applause rewarded the speech’s uncanny mix of poetry and politics.
Johnson’s speech boosted King’s efforts to complete the Selma-to-Montgomery demonstration. In Selma, speaking with his advisers, King correctly identified Jim Forman, who advocated night marches and was prone to rhetorical outbursts in full view of the press, as a disruptive force. King complained that tension with SNCC had produced “an agony of spirit” that sapped his usual optimism. Under pressure from journalists and civil rights leaders such as Roy Wilkins to denounce Forman, King refused but off the record judged SNCC to be naïve. King steered a course of public diplomacy while privately confessing his belief that SNCC was under the spell of radical political ideologies. During a conversation with Harry Belafonte on March 19, King accused Forman of purposeful disruption that pushed the movement to the brink of violence, while Belafonte questioned the mental stability of SNCC’s intense executive secretary. Resolved in their judgment of SNCC’s recklessness but convinced that peace offered the best course of action, King and Belafonte made plans to broker a settlement as soon as possible.18
Carmichael matched Forman’s intensity but stayed clear of aggressive outbursts. He preferred to focus on ways to use the planned march to crack open hostile terrain. Stokely recognized Forman as SNCC’s strongest administrator: Jim was patient, disciplined, and a master parliamentarian who coupled a “willingness to listen to people” with a “relentless” work ethic. Carmichael patterned his bureaucratic ambitions and ideological steadfastness after Forman, the man he recognized as having taught him “how to be uncompromising in one’s principles.” But he broke with Forman on the subject of King; Stokely pushed for an organizing approach that avoided “automatic conflict” between SNCC and the SCLC in favor of “getting people together.” Carmichael regarded King as his generation’s greatest political mobilizer, a protean force who easily brushed off criticism from young activists. Unable to compete with King’s star power at the national level or with journalists, SNCC outworked the SCLC and King on the ground, where Carmichael smiled and nodded when local sharecroppers misidentified him as one of “King’s men.” Attuned to these “political realities,” Carmichael proposed to build on the momentum generated by King’s appearance in Selma to help organize a new project. “So the march,” he would recall eight years later, “helped me in my organizing.”19
Carmichael used Selma’s controversy to organize for black political power. Originating in Selma on Sunday, March 21, and concluding in Montgomery four days later, the Selma-to-Montgomery demonstration traveled directly through Lowndes, the county scouted by Carmichael and SNCC field worker Bob Mants earlier in the month. Almost sixty years earlier, W.E.B. Du Bois had conducted a meticulous sharecropping study there, miraculously sponsored by the Department of Labor and inevitably destroyed after its findings proved too provocative. Carmichael participated in the march but spent most of his time making contacts in Lowndes. He resolved to “create order” from the chaos that would remain after King’s departure.20
Carmichael entered Lowndes on Saturday, March 27, in the wake of white volunteer Viola Liuzzo’s murder in that county two days earlier. He was backed by a contingent of hard-nosed SNCC field workers: Bob Mants, Judy Richardson, Ruth Howard, Scott B. Smith, Courtland Cox, and Willie Vaughan. Three days later, Carmichael led two dozen SNCC workers in a procession that stopped along a church near Highway 80, where Liuzzo had been shot. Wright Chapel AME Zion Church was transformed into a place of witness that day and doubled as a staging ground for organizing.21
Carmichael, Mants, Richardson, and Smith distributed leaflets at the Lowndes County Training School in White Hall, the county seat. Confronted by law enforcement while passing out leaflets to students, Carmichael forcefully stood his ground, loudly admonishing officers to arrest him or leave him unmolested. John Jackson, a sixteen-year-old student bus driver and son of a prominent local black family, gleefully accepted one of the flyers and discovered his political vocation as a civil rights activist at the expense of his job. John’s parents, Matthew and Emma of White Hall, lent SNCC an unoccupied house that would serve as a permanent headquarters and base of operations for the next year and a half.22
SNCC staff replayed the lessons of Selma as they organized a new political base in Lowndes County. Although Dr. King was the guiding spirit at Selma, the late Malcolm X was much in their thoughts. Malcolm’s passionate pleas for racial solidarity had hovered over Alabama. Staff members acquired tapes of Malcolm’s weekly lectures at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem and disseminated them to workers. Less than three weeks before his death, Malcolm had visited Alabama, speaking to students and civil rights workers at Tuskegee Institute, a SNCC recruiting ground, and at Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma. Malcolm’s brief stop in the state represented a capstone of his complex relationship with SNCC. A few weeks earlier, he had invited Fannie Lou Hamer and SNCC’s Freedom Singers to one of his outdoor rallies in Harlem, where he lauded the former sharecropper turned civil rights activist as one of the nation’s most important freedom fighters. By the time Malcolm visited Selma, SNCC’s relative caution toward his political rhetoric had bloomed into open admiration. From the grave, Malcolm’s spirit now gripped SNCC’s political imagination, but it would be King’s example that provided cover for Carmichael’s entrée into Lowndes.23