August 3–14, 1965
THE government of the United States matched King’s pace for the last days of his Northern tour. On Tuesday, August 3, while he pushed from street rallies to a speech at the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, plus a “unity” photograph with local NAACP president Cecil Moore, then joined five thousand pickets outside segregated Girard College, the House of Representatives passed the voting rights conference report, 328–74. A bomb threat the next day altered King’s departing flight for eight speech appearances in Washington, during which the U.S. Senate passed the identical bill, 72–18, to sweep aside the last parliamentary obstacles along with the dominant political reality since the end of Reconstruction. On the White House lawn, President Johnson was greeting ten thousand college interns as “fellow revolutionaries” in the American tradition, exhorting them to surmount “the tyranny of poverty” and the “oppression of bigotry.” On Thursday, Katzenbach and John Doar informed Johnson that the Justice Department stood ready to file suit against the Mississippi poll tax by one o’clock Saturday, to deploy federal registrars to at least ten counties on Monday, and to file additional suits on Tuesday against the poll tax laws in Virginia, Alabama, and the President’s home state of Texas. Johnson disclosed this breakthrough agenda when King arrived for a small presidential meeting scheduled to discuss conditions in Northern states and the upcoming national conference on race. Thursday night, King returned with several thousand people for an unusual vigil outside the White House gates, rallying for Johnson’s “home rule” bill to let District of Columbia residents elect their own representatives.
At La Guardia Airport in New York, David Dellinger was delighted to see Bayard Rustin dash aboard his flight early Friday, brimming with news of an invitation to the President’s sudden enactment ceremony for the Voting Rights Act. “Wonderful,” said Dellinger. “Be sure to get one of the pens he uses to sign it.” Dellinger proposed to call Rustin forward at the Vietnam demonstration to sign the Declaration of Conscience with the same pen. The idea sorely tempted Rustin with just the sort of dramatic flair he had pioneered over decades of nonviolent witness. Like Dellinger, he had gone to prison rather than fight even in the “good war” against Hitler. Often since, he had warned of nuclear danger by risking jail on this August 6 anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb, and with Dellinger he had just drafted the Vietnam peace declaration for their common mentor, A. J. Muste, America’s foremost pacifist. Still, Rustin could not bring himself to celebrate the historic partnership with President Johnson and protest his new war on the same day. He and Dellinger separated uncomfortably in Washington.
The President and his Cabinet reached the Capitol by motorcade at noon. Two sculptures of Abraham Lincoln flanked a special podium in front of John Trumbull’s imposing Surrender of Cornwallis, which hung on the Rotunda wall. “Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory won on any battlefield,” said Johnson. Reviewing the five tumultuous months since the “outrage of Selma” on Edmund Pettus Bridge, he praised the vote as “the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice,” and urged every Negro to make use of it. “You must learn,” he said, “so your choices advance your interests and the interests of our beloved nation.” To opponents of the new law, those reluctant to “bend long years of habit,” he advised “simply this: it must come…and when it has you will find a burden has been lifted from your shoulders, too.” He beckoned all sides to treat “the wounds and the weakness—the outward walls and the inward scars—that diminish achievement.”
Led by escorts down a corridor toward the Senate, more than a hundred people jammed into a space twenty feet square, known as the President’s Room because Presidents before Franklin Roosevelt had journeyed there to sign bills into law. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act there on a small walnut table he had used as Majority Leader. He handed signing pens first to Vice President Humphrey and Senator Dirksen, then to more legislators, to leaders of civil rights groups, and, as solemn ritual broke into celebration, to invited guests that included Rosa Parks, Rustin, and Vivian Malone, the first black graduate of the University of Alabama. A souvenir pen reached Detective Sergeant Everett Cooper of the protective unit assigned to King.
The President escaped clamor by ducking into the Senate chamber, where the startled presiding officer, Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, pretended he was still a member. “The chair recognizes the Senator from Texas, the Majority Leader,” said Morse in a refrain echoed from the 1950s. Johnson sat briefly at his old desk—front row center, carved of mahogany in 1819 to replace the original burned by British troops—and apologized to its rightful owner for the awkward intrusion. “I’m sorry, I forgot,” he told Mike Mansfield, as though he had wandered back in time. Then he recovered his unique, manic perspective to spend the afternoon lashing allies forward by telephone from the White House. “We just got to, you got to make it,” he told Katzenbach, to stiffen his assurance that immigration reform would pass. With House Majority Leader Carl Albert, Johnson lurched from sentimental congratulation to a sudden announcement that no conference report counted as a significant week’s work. “You didn’t do a damn thing,” he charged. Over Albert’s stammering defense—“We’re going to pass one of the big ones next week”—Johnson peppered him with tactical comments: “You ought to have told me, you didn’t call me…. I’ll call every human being that you want…. I can’t get him to pee a drop ’til y’all pee…” Desperate to beat a closing window in history, he invoked the late Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas. “You and John McCormack have got to be Mister Rayburns,” needled Johnson. “Now I’ve been letting you all off…. I’ll tell you what you’ve got to do…”
Dellinger was among roughly six hundred pickets walking the Pennsylvania Avenue sidewalk in front of the White House. From the vigilant guard of two hundred police and fifteen Secret Service agents, solicitous officers brought out water and a chair to give the eighty-year-old Muste respite from the heat. His fellow marchers carried signs such as “WITHDRAW U.S. TROOPS FROM VIETNAM NOW!” and “JESUS CHRIST DID NOT CARRY A DRAFT CARD.” A remnant of twenty-five pickets would lay unmolested all night on the sidewalk, then rejoin the larger group for weekend events called the Assembly of Unrepresented People, featuring workshops by and about Puerto Ricans, migrant laborers, Washingtonians, children, Pacific Islanders, ordinary voters, American Indians, and the poor, among others.
Bob Moses of SNCC, still calling himself Parris, brought to the four-day assembly a delegation of thirty black Mississippians. To memorialize John Shaw, killed weeks earlier in Vietnam—nearly four years after he had followed Moses as a teenager into the first bloody demonstrations for the vote in McComb—several of them had written a “McComb statement” for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party newsletter listing five reasons why “Negro boys should not honor the draft here in Mississippi,” and hostile reactions were crackling. NAACP field secretary Charles Evers and the Mississippi movement’s own lawyer denounced them. John Lewis, though he had signed Muste’s antiwar declaration months before, met with President Johnson before attending the Capitol ceremony that day and issued a pained statement dissociating himself from the assembly. MFDP chairman Lawrence Guyot defended the right to dissent but felt obliged to say he would accept military service. On Sunday, the white Mississippi editor most favorable to civil rights would call the McComb statement “close to treason” and flay Guyot for “collaborating in the Communist line.” On Monday, August 9—the twentieth anniversary of the second nuclear blast, at Nagasaki—uniformed American Nazis would throw buckets of paint on Moses, Dellinger, and Staughton Lynd as they led the concluding assembly march of eight hundred. A photograph in the next issue of Life would present the trio as pariahs branded vividly in red, among three hundred assorted pacifists arrested near the Capitol steps. Dellinger, refusing bond, would serve his full thirty days and hear vaguely in his cell of national upheaval later in August.
Already on Friday afternoon, the assembly’s first picket line drew transfixed stares. “Sometimes I wish I had their degree of involvement,” one bystander mused, but most reacted viscerally. Xenophobes jeered. Some Negroes and civil rights veterans bristled at the mostly white peace marchers for spurning the hard-won day of jubilee for the Voting Rights Act. Jack Newfield of New York’s Village Voice disparaged an “incestuous” gathering of “hyper-militants and the authoritarians.” Moses, a legend of the black movement in the midst of the peace assembly, floated as usual above crossfires of sentiment. In remarks to a rally of the pickets in Lafayette Park, he analyzed why Americans reacted more intensely to the obscure McComb statement than to the equivalent call for Vietnam war resistance in Muste’s Declaration of Conscience, which was signed by five thousand petitioners and handed publicly through the White House gate. He traced much of the disparity to race. Untamed tribal instincts, flushed to the surface, still demanded that minorities submit to prescribed battle lines or be designated enemies themselves. “Negroes better than anyone else are in a position to question the war,” Moses said softly through a bullhorn. “Not because they understand the war better, but because they better understand the United States.”
CONFLICTED TRIUMPH scattered to worlds apart on Sunday, August 8. King preached at New York’s Riverside Church and addressed a convention of morticians. John Lewis was arrested with SCOPE volunteers at one of two renewed kneel-ins outside the biggest churches in Americus, Georgia, while from deep inside Lowndes County, Stokely Carmichael composed a warning against the illusion of change. “I have my own personal fears about how the Federal Government can swallow us up,” he wrote. “Signs of this are appearing in Alabama daily. My own feeling is that SNCC is about to be isolated. If indeed we feel that we should have nothing to do with the ‘Establishment,’ then it is imperative that we form coalitions of people without power.”
Carmichael sent out his proposal for an autumn assembly of unrepresented people from across the South, and presided that night at the first mass meeting yet dared in Fort Deposit. A convoy of thirty cars drove bumper to bumper for nearly twenty miles along remote country roads, southward from Highway 80 into what SNCC records called “the toughest area in Lowndes County.” SNCC workers Bob Mants and Jimmy Rogers had been “run out by the Klan” there, Carmichael indicated in reports, but they kept returning until they gathered “forty local kids under a tree.” One of them, John McMeans, had prevailed upon his sister-in-law to give Rogers lodging, and Bessie McMeans finally prevailed upon her divided church elders to open a door to the movement itself. Most of the local people arrived on foot to greet the convoy of relative veterans from White Hall, forming together a spirited crowd of some four hundred inside Bethlehem Christian Church, singing hymns, hearing John Hulett and others give testimony as registered voters. Rabbi Saperstein was presented and received as a welcome amazement, but Carmichael seemed too busy to appreciate the freedom message he tried to deliver in the call-and-response of black Christians. There were whispered huddles at the doors, then a supervised evacuation. Just outside, FBI agents held back five carloads of menacing whites until the convoy departed. Carmichael told the Sapersteins to lay across laps to keep their white faces below the window of his back seat, and the cars streamed across the railroad tracks safely out of Fort Deposit.
Early on Tuesday, August 10, crowds of both races were milling tensely around the Lowndes County courthouse when official sedans glided conspicuously into Hayneville, bearing the attorney general of Alabama from Montgomery to investigate radio reports about enforcement of the new national law. Known as a golden orator from Dothan, Richmond Flowers had been elected in 1962 with his friend and schoolmate George Wallace, whom he hoped to succeed as governor, but Flowers had forfeited his history as the more diehard segregationist by announcing that he would tolerate no violence. Since then, rumors encouraged by the Wallace camp marked him as “soft” on race. Meeting only puzzled shrugs on the courthouse lawn, Flowers walked with his aides across the street to the post office.
“Can I help you?” asked the clerk.
“I understand the federal registrars are over here,” said Flowers. “Can you tell me where they are?”
Tom Coleman preempted the clerk’s reply. “Richmond, we ain’t telling you a goddamned thing,” he said from behind the counter. Coleman advised leaving the county in a hard voice that made the attorney general feel Coleman’s reputation as a lifelong special deputy who had killed more than one alleged troublemaker at the prison farm. His sister Hulda still ran the Lowndes County schools, and he was known to ride with the Klan.
Flowers complied without another word, and learned later that the registrars were discovered far from the normal seat of public business. Local officials, pronouncing themselves “just sick” that their July 6 suspension of literacy tests failed to stave off federal posting—in fact, did not gain a reprieve even from the first South-wide target list of ten counties—had ushered the four freshly trained arrivals to the hometown of Lowndes registrar Carl Golson, touting the benefits of the county’s largest and oldest settlement. Fort Deposit had been founded by order of General Andrew Jackson during territorial wars against the Creek Indians in 1813, as a supply depot perched at the highest elevation between Montgomery and New Orleans. This was not very high, nor was the modern population of 1,200 very big. Still, the hamlet offered two traffic lights and the most concentrated minority of white people in a vast Black Belt area staffed by a single public health officer one day a week, lacking ambulance service or a hospital. Three of the county’s four doctors and dentists lived there.
Only forty-eight Negroes managed to reach Fort Deposit in time to register. The new era in Lowndes was a mute, constricted version of celebrations in the next county, where applicants outside Selma’s courthouse sang the spiritual “Great Day,” receiving water and cheers from supporters who passed along their lines in the hot sun. By nightfall in Fort Deposit, resolve took hold among the teenagers who first sneaked to hear SNCC speakers under a tree. Being too young themselves to register, they aimed to lift the blanket of fear from their segregated streets and thereby encourage their elders to journey all the way to the forbidden zone at the southern tip of Lowndes. “There will be demonstrations this Saturday in Ft. Deposit,” advised a bulletin disseminated over the SNCC WATS line. The state of Alabama and the Justice Department would be asked to supply protection. “This will be the first demonstration ever held in Ft. Deposit,” added the notice. “It is a KKK headquarters…THEY ARE REALLY AFRAID OF VIOLENCE.”
JIMMY ROGERS stayed behind to prepare the young volunteers, and Carmichael drove to Birmingham for the ninth annual convention of King’s SCLC, where optimism crested on its theme, “Human Rights—Basic Issues—The Grand Alliance.” Some remembered the same event during the siege to integrate Ole Miss in 1962, when they had been confined to Negro venues within the bastion of segregated Birmingham, and a Nazi had slugged King in the face. They could not stop mimicking novel courtesies they received now by contrast in the finest hotels, saying to each other, “Anything else I can do for you, sir?” On Monday, seven hundred registrants fairly promenaded from the Thomas Jefferson to the Redmont for the opening banquet honoring Rosa Parks, featuring an address by NAACP attorney Constance Baker Motley.
On Tuesday, swelling numbers paraded freely to City Hall past blockade spots made landmarks when police dogs and fire hoses had been loosed on marching children in Kelly Ingram Park. They decried the gridlock failure of Birmingham to hire even the first Negro police officer or firefighter, as agreed in the settlement from those 1963 demonstrations and required since by federal law. At the convention, a panoply of speakers represented the movement’s cumulative experience along with options for the future. From Washington came Mordecai Johnson, former president of Howard University, a pulpit peer of Howard Thurman and the late Vernon Johns in the front rank of senior orators. He had just resigned from the District of Columbia school board in stinging protest that its appointed members, being accountable to Southerners in Congress rather than to voteless local citizens, were hiring incompetent Negro teachers for patronage. Among speakers from Chicago were the Catholic layman Matthew Ahmann, chief organizer of the 1963 ecumenical conference on religion and race, plus the top union officials of the United Packinghouse Workers, Ralph Helstein and Phil Weightman, who had fought decades to integrate the Midwestern meat plants, then supported the Southern movement since the bus boycott. Joining them among program speakers for one mass meeting, theologian Harvey Cox of Boston questioned his assigned topic, “God’s Business,” doubting that any movement audience still needed a shove into the pains of the secular world. “You’d be surprised,” King replied.
FBI agents reported to headquarters that the chief investigator of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan went unnoticed in the crowd, disguised as a reporter, and wiretaps in New York intercepted a call home from the Jefferson Hotel on Wednesday, August 11. “We are having a good convention,” Stanley Levison told his wife, Bea, though he was exhausted and “Martin worked all last night until seven o’clock this morning.” The perpetual jostling for King’s attention obliged volunteer Wall Street lawyer Harry Wachtel to send in a handwritten note that his legal contact, Carol Agger—“the wife of (newly appointed Justice of the Supreme Court) Abe Fortas”—had secured from the Treasury Department a long-sought tax-exempt status for SCLC’s fund-raising arm. Wachtel languished in the background with news of scattered demonstrations, poll tax suits, and Senate confirmation of Thurgood Marshall as Solicitor General. He waited in the hotel lobby to make an appointment as King passed by with Coretta. Later, the frustrated Wachtel wrote a second appeal—“I will need to do this with you, alone”—which listed ten pressing questions of finance and Washington strategy.
King remained swamped, largely in preacher politics. The convention did hold a rally led by Fred Shuttlesworth in the bombed 16th Street Baptist Church, but not before its pastor wrung permission from the deacons by threatening to quit. In private, King again faced more than thirty headstrong preachers on his SCLC board, including his father. They frowned over tentative plans to take the movement somewhere north, observing that the first word in SCLC was “Southern,” doubting that a Northern movement would “pay its share of the freight,” suggesting that big cities take guidance instead from an SCLC brochure, and referring the proposed shift to a committee. Hosea Williams tried to win board approval for a year-round extension of his SCOPE project, predicting great gains in registration if the board members would lend their presence. His flattery melted no criticism of current results, however, as Williams himself conceded with a revised proposal to terminate SCOPE by the end of the month. King, for his part, ran into trouble with his carefully worded resolution calling for Vietnam peace negotiations. Board members, bridling against intrusion into foreign policy, amended his text to reaffirm that SCLC’s “primary function” was to secure the rights of Negroes, in what biographer David Garrow would call an “implicit rebuke” to King. Undercurrents from the leadership disputes seeped into the hotel corridors.
Andrew Young shot high above them in his keynote address at Wednesday’s convention midpoint, proclaiming that “the very survival of mankind is at stake in the day-to-day action which grows from this organization.” He said the past ten years of the nonviolent movement “have been but our infancy, and like an infant, we have stumbled and stammered,” and yet those years had turned a powerless and invisible race into the transforming engine for a great nation. “We are not a rich people,” he said. “We are not an especially brilliant people. We are not, God forgive us, even a particularly industrious people. And we are hardly what moralists would call a good people. But somehow, God has chosen us as his people, and called his children from the far corners of the world…to gather around us in a glorious procession.”
The speech mixed apocalyptic hope with Madisonian balance. The “redistribution of Southern power” was irresistibly in motion, and the Goldwater forces “ran us out of the Republican Party,” Young declared, but Negroes “must still find every opportunity to encourage the development of a two-party South.” Civil rights had stimulated kindred movements, but he charged that not all of them, specifically the peace movement, understood the value of long-range regard for adversaries. “We have taken power and political reform seriously, while dramatizing an issue,” Young boasted, warning that the need for discipline would only grow. “People will not lightly throw off a century of fear and go gaily skipping down to the courthouse to register,” he said. “Civics is not taught in the schools.” The burden of the nonviolent movement had fallen thus far on the most dispossessed people, he asserted, and they, like others, required constructive coalitions “to insure a balance of power and checks against its abuse.”
Young told the Birmingham convention that he felt both exalted and frightened by the awesome power of “that beloved soul force about which Gandhi spoke so much, and which we have only begun to explore.” Already, nonviolence was advancing miracles of the deepest, most distinctive patriotism—once again creating ties of democratic strength where hierarchy had reigned. Now he declared from recent experience that the movement could raise a nonviolent army of a hundred thousand or better in almost any large city, “and I tremble to think what might happen if it is not organized and disciplined in the interest of positive social change.” So telescoped was movement history that the implications were running decades ahead of adjustment, throwing up new frontiers before most Americans perceived Negroes to be full participants in national politics, let alone modern Founders. “There will not be the same kind of press support or financial support that we have received from the North, as the movement comes closer to home and threatens vested interests,” Young predicted. “But if we are true to Gandhi, and seek to attack issues rather than people, we can hope to inspire even our opposition to new moral heights, and thereby overcome.”
ON THAT Wednesday afternoon of Young’s speech, Ronald Frye celebrated his discharge from the Air Force by drinking vodka and orange juice with two young ladies and his older brother, Marquette. A California Highway Patrol motorcycle officer followed their weaving 1955 Buick northward on Avalon Boulevard and pulled them over at the corner of 116th, just inside the Los Angeles city limit. Onlookers gathered to watch driver Marquette Frye tightrope-walk a sobriety test in the street, then grandly offer to repeat his performance backward. Raucous laughter prompted a Highway Patrol backup officer to pull out a shotgun, adding taunts and tension to entertainment that built the crowd to some five hundred before a tow truck arrived twelve minutes later, simultaneously with Rena Frye on foot from her home two blocks away. She berated her sons for drinking, then defended them from the officers in caroming rounds of disputed blame and wound up handcuffed herself, thrown into the back of a cruiser. When Marquette Frye refused to follow, shouting, “Go ahead, kill me,” police drew revolvers. One officer would testify that he missed Frye’s shoulder and inadvertently struck him in the forehead with a nightstick. A witness said Highway Patrol officers drove motorcycles onto sidewalks to push back crowds that saw them as intruders and resented being called “black” instead of “Negro.” Officers waded in to arrest two bystanders for insults, delaying their departure. All three arrested Fryes left the scene with bruises twenty-six minutes after the traffic stop, as crowds now swelled to 1,500 greeted regular Los Angeles police units with jeers and rocks.
A retired man nine blocks from the scene remarked to his wife that such a din of sirens must mean “the King of Siam” was in town. Rushing to find out, he heard feverish rumors that police had manhandled a pregnant Negro woman, and he saw chunks of concrete hurled through car windows. Police commanders, unable to subdue swirling bands by conventional tactics designed for a stationary mass of rioters, evacuated an area east into the section named for Pasadena Realtor and liveryman C. H. Watts. Some Negroes “milled around inside the blocked-off area, protesting police ‘brutality’ by the officers,” reported the Los Angeles Times, while others attacked unfamiliar cars, especially if occupied by white people. They burned a television van when reporters fled their approach on foot.
Mayor Sam Yorty first blamed the Highway Patrol for dawdling in city territory. LAPD Chief William Parker appeared on television to defend withdrawal from the riot zone. “What do you want the policemen to do?” he asked brusquely. “Do you want to mass them in there? For what purpose?” His lieutenants had a huge city to protect, said Parker, “and they can’t send all the men into Watts and allow…open season to every petty criminal and burglar in town.” He dodged further scrutiny when violence subsided in the night. The Thursday morning New York Times carried a two-inch story on a back page—“Arrest Causes Near Riot in Negro Area of Coast”—next to items about the jailing of fifty SCOPE workers who picketed a segregated gasoline station in Dublin, Georgia, and about the slow progress through the Alabama legislature of a bill “to regulate the sale of dynamite in the wake of recent racial incidents.”
In south Los Angeles, crowds returned to Avalon Boulevard as though to work from a night’s sleep, and looted a supermarket.
AT THE Jefferson Hotel in Birmingham, Bayard Rustin opened Thursday’s central panel entitled “Visions of Things to Come.” Now that President Johnson was fully engaged, “and Congress is turning out decisions like sausages to help us,” he prescribed a shift to national economic issues such as jobs and poor schools. Activists must become more pragmatic and yet no less committed to nonviolence, Rustin argued, especially if Vietnam renewed the jingoist climate of the Korean War, “because morally, nothing can move in this country at this moment unless the civil rights movement is moving, and to that extent we have a terrifying responsibility for all of the citizens.”
James Bevel shocked the panel audience with a blunt pronouncement: “This year the civil rights movements are out of business.” Those who believed otherwise would shrivel into “civil rights shells, making noise,” he declared, but Rustin was wrong to suggest that they become lobbyists and administrators. There were dazzling vistas of nonviolence ahead that “Bayard doesn’t quite understand,” claimed Bevel, beginning to preach. “One day Jesus was talking to some fellows who were in the same dilemma that the American people are in today,” he said. “He got them together and said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you what you do about the whole question of freedom and slavery: know the truth.’” Not truth as dogma from tricky Baptists or bishops, but the healing truth of nonviolence, he quipped, then veered abruptly into his own private life. “I had a girlfriend, I had two,” said Bevel. “I used to go see one at seven and the other one at eight. The one I would see at seven…she got angry and went outside and tore the windshield wipers off the car…in an effort to keep me back.” In a flash, he transformed her alleged misconception about how to stop a car into a lesson about where to apply nonviolence. “You’ve got to know where the pulpit is!” cried Bevel. “Don’t preach in the basement!” He said the whole world “disrespects the peasant in Vietnam,” just as it disrespected Alabama Negroes until the movement “accepted the role of a peasant in Selma.” He wanted to take an international peace army into Vietnam, and also seek the truth of the economy from Harlem to Appalachia. “We must be a nonviolent movement for the world,” said Bevel. “The times are pushing us to this.”
Ella Baker, the revered senior mentor for SNCC, addressed titters in the audience. “What Bevel has had to say today will be interpreted many ways by many people,” she said gently, chiding him for glib provocation. “Some will claim that he, for instance, is a radical. I hope he is, because the word means getting to the root of things. I hope also he is ready to pay the price of being radical.” Baker and nonviolent strategist James Lawson closed the panel with pleas for a more thoughtful movement, and for recognition that a minority of demonstrators—and only a tiny fraction of oppressed people—were yet committed to nonviolence (“as exemplified,” said Baker, “by the reports coming out of Los Angeles”).
At a plenary session in the newly desegregated Civic Auditorium, King presented the SCLC Freedom Medal to James and Diane Nash Bevel for conceiving what became the 1965 Alabama voting rights campaign. The new landmark law had risen from their anguished response to the Birmingham church bombing, said King, praising them for citizens’ initiative unmatched in history. The young couple, still largely unknown, had surmounted the abridgement of their own rights to catalyze a national movement from Selma, where only six months ago Nash had found her husband a comatose prisoner handcuffed to a gurney. There were nods in varying degrees of appreciation and regret among the few who knew that the honorees nevertheless were painfully estranged, and that the wild Bevel who spoke in public about hourly girlfriends was trying only sporadically to reunite with his wife and two young children. Shortly, however, King eclipsed gossip and convention business alike. “Few events in my lifetime have stirred my conscience and pained my heart as the present conflict which is raging in Vietnam,” he said from the podium. “The true enemy is war itself.” King announced that he intended to appeal for peace negotiations in personal letters to world leaders, including Ho Chi Minh, and reporters bolted for telephones.
A buzz of controversy lingered in an auditorium crowd of 3,500 people by FBI estimate. Some in the party of mortician A. A. “Sam” Rayner felt unsettled or deprived by talk of war politics, and not a few looked forward to an unadulterated dose of movement salvation in the closing programs on Friday, August 13, whispering that Daddy King was the real preacher in the King family. Father Richard Morrisroe, on the other hand, searched out Ivanhoe Donaldson and John Lewis among SNCC workers now dressed uniformly in bib overalls and rural work shirts, many of whom considered the convention a showy distraction. Tales of isolated danger and deprivation had made the distinctive SNCC outfit a newly potent image for movement followers, as it was truthfully said that the mere appearance of telltale dungarees in a Southern vestibule could halt a Negro church service, inspiring the worshippers or putting them to flight. Morrisroe asked Lewis to meet Silas Norman and was introduced instead to Stokely Carmichael, who handed him off during SNCC caucuses to the seminarian Jonathan Daniels. Within hours, Morrisroe decided to retrieve his bag and stay on for a second week of annual vacation. His parishioner Sam Rayner drove back to Chicago an emerging figure in South Side reform politics—destined to be the next alderman elected for the ward around St. Columbanus Parish on 71st Street—but his wife “nearly choked him” for leaving their young white priest alone in rural Alabama.
Morrisroe absorbed constant wonder. From a convention lecture by economist Leon Keyserling, he drove to Selma and on Friday into Lowndes County for the first time at speeds sometimes above a hundred miles an hour in a Plymouth Fury rented for Daniels by his Episcopal sponsor, ESCRU, after pursuers recently chased him to the Montgomery city limit. At Trickem, Morrisroe separated from Daniels to attend a nonpolitical revival service with the elderly farm couple, Will and Mary Jane Jackson, near the spot where they had been photographed when the great march entered Lowndes. The choir invited him to sing among them on a rough bench, then delivered him to bunk on the porch floor of the SNCC Freedom House. Morrisroe scarcely noticed hardship there because he was smitten by Gloria Larry, whom he pressed for details of her academic work on French literary antecedents in the Four Quartets of T. S. Eliot.
Bulletins on gunshot fatalities were spreading nationwide from Los Angeles. After seventy-five people were injured on Thursday, a second lull had convinced authorities again that the riot was spent. Police units withdrew from the emergency perimeter at dawn Friday. Mayor Yorty and Lieutenant Governor Glenn Anderson flew to San Francisco for separate engagements even as angry crowds reconvened near Wednesday’s arrest site on Avalon, and an ominous entry appeared in the log at police headquarters: “10:00 A.M. Major looting became general.” Marauding bands leapfrogged from the twenty blocks previously sealed toward a peak riot area of 46.5 square miles. Arsonists torched emptied stores. Poet and columnist Langston Hughes reported the sight of a woman stopping obediently at red lights as she rolled a looted sofa down the street. Most of the press retreated because of assaults on white journalists, including a KABC-TV correspondent who was dragged off and was missing for two hours. For information that rioters had invented hand signals to identify and protect residents by neighorhood, office messenger Robert Richardson gained a kind of battlefield promotion as the first Negro reporter ever hired by the Los Angeles Times. By midday, California authorities summoned Governor Pat Brown from vacation in Greece, and mobilized 14,000 National Guard troops. Police units, amid rumors that commanders felt slighted by the call for help, moved ahead of them into the riot zone. At 6:30 P.M., LAPD officers shot Leon Posey standing unarmed outside a barber shop, in what would be ruled an accidental homicide. Half a dozen Negro deaths quickly followed this first official casualty—one shot in the back, one firing a gun, one carrying liquor and another shoes. Rioters harassed firefighters called in from a hundred different engine companies.
Shortly before midnight in New York, FBI wiretap monitors came alive to an incoming call from King’s secretary, Dora McDonald. “The Negroes have broken into some gun stores,” she told Stanley Levison. “They have guns and those big Army knives, and are covering about a 140-block-square area.” She said King wanted Levison to draft a telephone statement for him to deliver over Los Angeles radio stations. “Also,” said McDonald, “a man from the New York Times called and has given me twelve questions that he would like Dr. King to answer.” She dictated them to Levison—“what is the text of the letter,” the mode of transmission to Ho Chi Minh, the names of intermediaries, the apportionment of blame for the war, and the specifics of King’s peace plan? Two questions asked how Bevel’s “more militant” stance could be reconciled with nonviolence, and whether King approved.
Levison dictated suggested replies well after midnight to McDonald in Atlanta, for relay to King at his Miami stopover en route to address the Disciples of Christ convention in Puerto Rico. The Vietnam letter was still merely an idea. “Most reporters will try to draw him into going further, until they have a real story,” Levison told McDonald. “He hasn’t formulated specific proposals for ending the war, and hasn’t said he has.” The New York FBI office rushed a transcript by encoded Teletype to headquarters at 3:41 A.M. Saturday, and supervisors added to an edited text the sinister preface that a “long-time Communist” was influencing King on Vietnam. The classified report to the White House and Justice Department omitted entirely the intercepted remarks that Levison offered King for broadcast to the rioters in Watts: “I know you have grievances that are hard to live with. I know that any Negro can reach the end of his patience…but it is not courage nor militancy to strike out blindly…. Tonight the whole world is watching you. If you want all America to respect you, if you want the world to know that you are men, put down your weapons and your rocks…. Negroes in the South were not less oppressed than you, and we have run Jim Crow from thousands of places without using a rock or a bullet…. Come back to our ranks…where real and permanent victories have been won and will be won in the right way.”
FIVE JOURNALISTS found more than twenty teenagers seated around Jimmy Rogers in the shaded area of a church lawn on Pollard Street, taking shelter from heat that already was thick by the appointed hour. The reporters were following a story tip from the SNCC office in Selma, where Silas Norman had supervised advance notice also to federal and state officials: “This Sat. Aug. 14 at 9 A.M. there will be a demonstration in Ft. Deposit, Lowndes Co. Ala. Klan is very active in area. We demand protection of demonstrators.” Ominous attention gathered as the young people hand-lettered picket signs such as “No More Back Doors,” debating which stores most deserved challenge for cruel habits of segregation aimed at them and their sharecropper parents. A sedan pulled up with two FBI agents to warn of hostile men milling nearby with clubs and shotguns. Cars cruised by slowly with “Open Season” bumper stickers, after a Klan slogan said to be popular locally since the hung jury in the Liuzzo trial. The rented Plymouth Fury arrived bearing Jonathan Daniels, Gloria Larry, Richard Morrisroe, and project director Stokely Carmichael, who conferred while scouts reconnoitered the grim scene only blocks away over the pine hill: a hundred Negroes waiting outside the tiny post office that housed the federal registrars, frozen under the glare of vigilantes who mingled in the street with uniformed officers and deputies. A ninety-three-year-old woman in line allowed that she had not ventured into town for fifty years. Several of the reporters were both shaken and puzzled to be threatened as “Freedom Riders,” an anachronism from 1961, by local men apparently enraged at the sight of white people speaking civilly with Negroes.
The teenagers lettered another picket sign: “Wake Up! This Is Not Primitive Time.” None flinched when the FBI agents returned to urge cancellation in the face of mob violence or arrest. They grumbled instead against the agents’ standard disclaimer—that Bureau personnel were strictly observers, lacking enforcement powers to intervene—and lumped FBI intimidation with others they were itchy to confront. “I don’t want to scare the older people away from voter registration,” said one, “but we need this.” Negroes still had to slink around to back doors, said others, and only something drastic would plant the idea in both races that Fort Deposit was part of America. A spirited local girl added that she “sure would like to get one good whack at the Man,” which dissolved peers in howling approval but prompted another huddle among the SNCC staff.
They agreed the demonstration was not their idea—most of them privately opposed it—and first asked Rogers to propose cancellation. When the teenagers demanded to go forward, some veterans favored deferring to local initiative even at the risk of an “open graveyard,” while others said they could not dodge responsibility behind a modest ideological pose. They reopened leadership issues that ranged, SNCC-style, as far as Carmichael’s reflections on the 1938 humanist novel Bread and Wine, by Ignazio Silone, in which he said an educated radical, disguised as a priest, wrestles with the subtle morality of inspiring damaged poor people to risk revolt against Mussolini. The standard for Carmichael was transparently shared risk. He argued that they could and should oppose any demonstration without a pledge of nonviolence, and told the teenagers that smacking the Man gained nothing but cheap regret. Daniels mimicked his extroverted pose of assurance for people in the grip of fear, until young John McMeans insisted that his friends give up commando notions or go home. “If that’s what you want to do,” said Carmichael, “don’t take anything they can call a weapon. Not even a pencil.” The teenagers reluctantly surrendered nail files and pocketknives. Daniels, Larry, Morrisroe, and Ruby Sales stepped forward to round out the escorts called veterans, although only Morrisroe among them had been arrested even once (with Al Raby in Chicago), and kept to himself among strangers. In soothing small talk, Carmichael learned that poet Gwendolyn Brooks was a member of Morrisroe’s Chicago parish, and remarked that a good friend at Howard had served as a Carmelite priest in Bolivia. SNCC staff members Jean Wiley and Martha Prescod compiled a family notification roster for bail.
They moved out in three groups of ten at 11:30, more than two hours late, but demonstrations scarcely lasted a minute. Fifty armed men closed on the first signs raised outside McGough’s Grocery, and a deputy among them said the pickets were going to jail. “For what?” asked Jimmy Rogers, who briefly considered the halting reply—“for resisting arrest, and picketing to cause blood”—while enveloped in a posse quivering to be a mob, then numbly replied, “All right.” As the pickets were marched toward the other groups, clumps of local men fell upon the reporters in two cars nearby, banging, yanking at locked doors while impeding their getaway, and from Golson Motors ran Jack Golson, the county coroner with a shotgun and his brother Carl, the registrar, who smashed a passenger-side window and the windshield with a baseball bat before the car lurched away. A truckload of men chased another car whose driver, panicking when hemmed in, tried a U-turn and bumped into the pursuing truck. Stokely Carmichael, regretting that he had allowed SNCC staff member Chris Wylie to drive, stepped out proposing that gentlemen should let the authorities settle the incident, but both he and Wylie were in handcuffs by the time they reached the miniature Fort Deposit jail.
The car with the shattered windshield drove up like a ghost, the reporters having doubled back in their own variations on the debate they had witnessed all morning—telling one another they could not abandon the story, or were crazy, or must distract the crowd from the young prisoners who bulged from a jail building no more than ten by fifteen feet. On the passenger’s side, blood ran from head cuts down the arm of Life correspondent Sanford Ungar, who had stared transfixed by the attack and wound up with shards of glass in his mouth. One bystander looking amazed into the car erupted in a convulsive rant about body paint, shaved heads, and “nigger wigs,” as ideas occurred to him for completing the reporters’ defection from the white race. Shortly afterward, driver David Gordon would record in an interview that he sat frozen with Ungar until the demonstrators were herded onto the rear of a flatbed truck used to collect the city’s garbage, and that amid menacing shouts about trash disposal, “I looked directly at Stokely and he had the most serene expression on his face I’ve ever seen.” Prisoners waved to stunned friends in the post office line before the truck pulled away. The reporters, blocked from following, managed to identify one of them as a Bessie Lee Caldwell, holding her new registration slip.
That night SNCC worker Scott B. Smith slipped into the home of a Hayneville contact, and verified from the sound of freedom songs that the prisoners were held in the new county jail there, next door to the old one with the gallows. He crept across Highway 97, through an alley to a hidden observation spot behind the Lowndes County courthouse, drawn by revolving arrivals to a late conference in the sheriff’s office. Sporadic gunfire punctuated the night. Fearing that a lynch mob was being gathered, Smith kept watch until forced to retreat before dawn on Sunday. “Because of the dogs in the area [who] were barking,” he wrote in his report, “I went back to Mrs. Robinson’s house.”