October 1965
FERMENT swirled the notions of group identity that shape politics. Almost daily, stark new dramas shifted meaning back and forth along the broad range of collective disposition toward people—from dear kinfolk all the way to enemy vermin, with intermediate stations including citizen, stranger, and foreigner. President Johnson’s private chat with Mayor Daley about Chicago school money took place in Arthur Goldberg’s new U.N. apartment at the Waldorf Towers, after ceremonies in New York harbor for the immigration bill. Standing beneath the Statue of Liberty, Johnson looked beyond an era long “twisted and distorted by the harsh injustice of the national quota system.” He said most of the world’s people had been barred from naturalized citizenship in the United States “because they came from southern or eastern Europe, or from one of the developing continents,” while only three countries in Northern Europe received most of the legal entry slots. The law of selective national quotas “violated the basic principle of our democracy,” he declared. It was “un-American in the highest sense…untrue to the faith that brought thousands to these shores even before we were a country.”
“Today, with my signature, this system is abolished,” the President announced on October 3. “We can now believe it will never again shadow the gate to the American nation with the twin barriers of prejudice and privilege.”
Henceforth, aspiring immigrants from all nations would stand in one line for spaces within an overall yearly limit, which inexorably diversified American culture. The number of formerly proscribed Asian families grew sixteen-fold within the next ten years. Asians joined Latin Americans, Africans, and natives of the Middle East to become the vast majority of new immigrants, taking places formerly reserved for the few nations deemed the most Anglo-Saxon. Admissions from the whole of Europe declined to roughly 15 percent of the annual total. A separate stream of illegal aliens helped swell the nonnative population to 31 million people by the end of the century, but the law ensured a qualified influx from every spot on the globe. Mexico supplied a fifth of the 889,000 new citizens at naturalization ceremonies of 2000, according to Yale scholar Peter Schuck, with its leading share followed by successively smaller portions from Vietnam, China, the Philippines, India, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Jamaica, Iran, and on down the list. A school in Falls Church, Virginia, that remained white and Protestant as of 1965—J. E. B. Stuart High, named for the Confederate cavalry general—would draw fully half its 2001 student body of 1,400 from births dispersed among seventy countries.
Johnson embraced this future. “America was built by a nation of strangers,” he said on Liberty Island. Its founding ideals, “fed from so many cultures and traditions and peoples,” shaped an outlook of unique experience. Americans “feel safer and stronger,” he asserted, “in a world as varied as the people who make it up.” By its visionary conception, and immense effect, the Immigration Reform Act of 1965 rightfully joined the two great civil rights laws as a third enduring pillar of the freedom movement. Yet these high stakes went strangely unnoticed from the start. Despite Johnson’s sweeping rhetoric, leading newspapers characterized the measure as a blow aimed at the Fidel Castro regime—“Johnson Offers Haven to Cuban Refugees”—delivered almost incidentally with a bill that “liberalizes immigration policies.” Few outlets went on to describe the law itself, or predict significant change. None detected a purpose akin to civil rights. An inherited belligerence in Cold War politics obscured the welcoming new premise that no foreigner was too foreign to become a fellow citizen.
Plainer news dominated the week. The President stayed in New York to greet Paul VI, the first Pope ever to visit the Western Hemisphere, and Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers refused to pitch the first game of the World Series on Yom Kippur. Months before, the congressional immigration debate had wafted quietly behind the Selma breakthrough. There were no marches or demonstrations to mark a civil rights controversy in black and white. On the House floor, Representative Emanuel Celler denounced the quota system for discriminations within Europe, “because it says, in effect, that an Englishman is better than a Spaniard, that a German is better than a Russian, that an Irishman is better than a Frenchman, that a Swede is better than a Pole.” In the Senate, Sam Ervin of North Carolina fell into thickets of antique science when he tried to explain the minuscule quota for Ethiopia. “Anthropologists, historians, and lexicographers assure us that the Abyssinians belong to the Semitic race, which is a branch of the Caucasian race,” he ventured. Protesting that he meant no “oblique aspersion upon American Negroes,” Ervin bemoaned the charged atmosphere. Comparative discourse on nations and peoples “nowadays arouses great emotions,” he warned, “and such emotions magnify the occupational hazards of senators.” Later, he candidly allowed that his Senate allies—being committed through the summer in desperate opposition to the voting rights bill—avoided combat on a second front by declining the “forlorn fight to preserve the national origins quota system.” Ervin and the once impregnable judiciary chairman, James Eastland of Mississippi, retreated with thanks for the restraint of the opposing floor manager, Edward Kennedy. As a young freshman senator, President Johnson’s handpicked choice lacked the seniority customary for the task, but Kennedy marshaled votes to overwhelm the isolated core of Southerners by a tally almost identical to that of the final passage on the Voting Rights Act, 76–18. “It’s really amazing,” Kennedy told The Wall Street Journal. “A year ago, I doubt the bill would have had a chance. This time it was easy.”
THE IMMIGRATION debate, like the Selma movement, tested the most basic assumptions about humanity. What is race? What are its raw ingredients, if any? What is racial identity, and can boundaries or gradations be defined? These questions long had generated novel theories and unstable alliances across the disciplines of religion, science, and law. In early America, a prominent theorist of liberal faith on race was Rev. Charles Colcock Jones of Georgia, who had agonized from Princeton and Andover Seminary over slavery as “a complete annihilation of justice…fearful in the extreme.” Following the future abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, young Jones made a special trip in the late 1820s to consult the pioneer pamphleteer of emancipation, Benjamin Lundy, a Quaker harness-maker of Baltimore. Unlike Garrison, who first went to jail under Lundy’s spell (“My soul was on fire then”), Jones inherited more than a hundred slaves on three plantations near Savannah. “Could I do more for the ultimate good of the slave population by holding or emancipating what I own?” he asked, and his answer was a lifelong quest to reconcile slavery with the full humanity of Negroes. He baptized and preached among them nearly alone for three decades before the Civil War. Called “Apostle to the Negro Slaves,” renowned as an author and national authority on race, Jones rebuked fellow Southern clergy for their indifference to the souls of slaves. “There has been neglect—shall it be said, a criminal neglect?” he wrote. “I feel it…. The whole country sees it. Can there be no reformation?” He convened planters in Charleston, South Carolina, to resolve that masters could address slaves as brothers or sisters in Christ without endangering the temporal order, but the opposition gentry swiftly imported the eminent Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz, to deliver a withering counterattack. “The brain of the Negro,” Agassiz told the Charleston Literary and Philosophic Society in 1845, “is that of the imperfect brain of a 7 month’s infant in the womb of a White.”
Agassiz declared as a matter of science that the Negro was an entirely different species, separately created and grossly inferior, which brought enormous relief to slaveholders who denied or feared the implications of common humanity. Horrified, some in the Jones group tried to refute him by arguing that if whites and Negroes were distinct species, mulattoes would be as sterile as mules. The husbandry of mulattoes was an uncomfortable subject for them, however, and many professed with Agassiz that interbreeding was both “abhorrent to our nature” and potentially catastrophic for “the manly population descended from cognate nations.” So Jones thundered that slaveholders must stand first on the book of Genesis to proclaim the truth of a single human family sprung from Adam and Eve. “We cannot cry out against the Papists for withholding the Scriptures from the common people,” he wrote, “if we withhold the Bible from our servants.” Into the ravages of the Civil War and old age, Jones clung steadfastly to his theological truce with slavery, still “certain that the salvation of one soul will more than outweigh all the pain and woe of their capture and transportation, and subsequent residence among us.”
The publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859 eventually finished off Agassiz’s theory of polygenism, or multiple creation of distinct human prototypes. By then Agassiz had captured Boston as the fresh celebrity of globe-trotting science. He drew crowds of five thousand to speeches on biology, paleontology, and his famous discoveries such as the Ice Age, married a Boston Cabot (who became the first president of Radcliffe), and inspired the industrialist Abbott Lawrence to endow for him the Lawrence Scientific School. “His Harvard appointment [in 1848] marked the beginning of the professionalization of American science,” observed intellectual historian Louis Menand, and Agassiz gained lasting stature as a founder of both the National Academy of Sciences and the Harvard Museum of Comparative Biology.
Early associates of Agassiz, both Darwinist and anti-Darwinist, labored for the rest of the nineteenth century to classify people by race. Craniologists Samuel Morton of Philadelphia and Josiah Nott of Mobile collected skulls. Phrenologist Peter Camper of Germany measured facial angles, foreheads, and jaws. Thomas Huxley of England (inventor of the term “agnostic”) and Paul Broca of the Paris Anthropological Society isolated thirty-four distinct shades of skin color. Robert Bean of Johns Hopkins compared brains by weight, John Fiske of Harvard analyzed wrinkles in brain lobes, and Peter Browne studied hair. An explosion of typologies from these among a host of literal racists—who sought to create a science of human variety—obscured the shortcomings of every effort. Scientists seldom agreed even on the number of categories, as Huxley counted four races, Joseph Deniker seventeen, Ernst Haeckel thirty-six. Proposed systems faltered on skillful demand for verification, often by Franz Boas of Columbia University, because the skulls of Lithuanians unaccountably matched those of Ethiopians. “It is possible that Boas did more to combat race prejudice than any other person in history,” race historian Thomas Gossett concluded in 1963.
The failed pretensions of science heaped pressure on judges at the turn of the twentieth century. Always, since the first Naturalization Act of 1790, federal law restricted eligibility for nonnative citizenship to “free white person[s],” and Congress raised the stakes of whiteness in 1907 by mandating that any American woman who married an ineligible alien be stripped of her own citizenship without trial. Courts accepted citizenship applications from some Syrians, Armenians, and Moroccans, but rejected others as nonwhite. A New York judge turned down a decorated U.S. Navy veteran of twenty-five years’ service, born at sea to a British father, because his mother was of mixed Oriental descent. When Palestine native George Dow asserted in 1914 that Jesus “cannot be supposed to have clothed His Divinity in the body of one of a race that an American Congress would not admit to citizenship,” a South Carolina federal judge dismissed the argument as “purely emotional and without logical sequence,” but confessed perplexity over the maze of contending definitions. “What is the white race?” he asked.
The Supreme Court settled the statutory meaning twice within three months, holding first in November of 1922 that “the words ‘white person’ are synonymous with the words ‘a person of the Caucasian race.’” This anthropological standard doomed the citizenship petition of Takao Ozawa, a Japanese immigrant of twenty-eight years’ residence, who had submitted evidence of his own white skin along with scholarly opinions that “in Japan the uncovered parts of the body are also white.” The test of “mere color,” while obvious, had proved “manifestly…impracticable,” declared a unanimous Court, citing expert accord that skin tone “differs greatly among persons of the same race, even among Anglo-Saxons, ranging by imperceptible gradations from the fair blond to the swarthy brunette, the latter being darker than many of the lighter hued persons of the brown or yellow races.”
Only weeks later, the Justices were plainly vexed to hear in arguments for Bhagat Singh Thind that their own experts considered high-caste Punjabi Indians along with certain Polynesians and Hamites to be of Caucasian descent. Even worse, the racial term “Caucasian” appeared to rest on a single specimen in the collection of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach of Göttingen, who in 1795 had conjectured from the resemblance to his German skulls that ancient Europeans may have lived near the specimen’s retrieval site in the Caucasus mountains of Russia.* The Justices reversed the Ozawa test with howls of newfound contempt for “the speculations of the ethnologist,” again unanimously. “What we now hold is that the words ‘free white persons’ are words of common speech,” wrote Justice George Sutherland, “to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word ‘Caucasian’ only as that word is popularly understood.” The Thind decision not only threw up expandable barriers to citizenship but also supported a wave of federal denaturalization actions and state laws against land ownership by Asians. “For the Court, science fell from grace,” concluded legal historian Ian Haney Lopez, “when it contradicted popular prejudice.”
The global rise of nationalism more than offset all embarrassments to the concept of race. Scholars and politicians alike campaigned for decades to refine a particularly “American race” by carefully limited immigration. Three Harvard graduates formed the Immigration Restriction League in 1894, and in 1910 the Carnegie Institution established a Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, where demographers and biologists conducted studies to engineer population quality by eugenics, a term coined by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton. Although eugenics later became stigmatized by association with the Nazis, it “belonged to the political vocabulary of virtually every significant modernizing force between the two world wars,” according to historian Frank Dikotter. With Asians blocked by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, as amended, belief in progress within a hierarchy of peoples was so pervasive that the anti-immigration movement looked to measure genetic stratification within whites. “There are certain parts of Europe from which all medical men and all biologists would agree,” testified Immigration Restriction League founder Prescott Hall, “that it would be better for the American race if no aliens at all were admitted.”
A controversy from the Panama Canal project lifted the Restriction League near victory in 1914, when dark-skinned West Indian diggers sought entry to the United States as an earned reward. “You cannot have free institutions grounded on anything in the world except a homogeneous race,” Mississippi Senator John Sharp Williams cried against them, but a comprehensive bill to admit only white people faltered in the mists of science. Williams himself abandoned the legislative term “Caucasian” once a perplexed Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, grandfather of the future U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, read from the dictionary on the Senate floor, complaining that it would exclude “very excellent” Finnish constituents assigned to “a branch of the Mongolian race” along with Magyars, Bulgarians, Permians, and Laplanders. Thereafter, Congress managed to restrict legal immigration with an ingenious series of laws culminating in the 1924 National Origins Act, which, according to historian Desmond King, finessed definitions of race by prescribing immigration quotas for individual foreign nations. Henceforth only three countries—England, Germany, and Ireland—were reserved fully 70 percent of the annual 150,000 immigration slots. The remaining quotas heavily favored what Woodrow Wilson had called “sturdy stocks of the north of Europe,” over Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Hungary, and eastward rim countries deemed problematic for assimilation. Black Africa received a quota of zero per year, and allotments for all the world’s non-European countries added up to 6 percent of the total. Dr. Harry Laughlin of the Cold Spring Harbor laboratory spent eleven years as chief legislative consultant to design and implement the quotas. “National eugenics is the long-term cure for human degeneracy,” he said. The Chicago Tribune pronounced the National Origins Act “a Declaration of Independence, not less significant and epoch-making for America and the world than the Declaration of 1776.”
From 1924, the year J. Edgar Hoover became the first FBI director, immigration policy stayed fixed more than forty years before President Johnson sought to abolish the national quota system in 1965. The restrictive era began about the time the Ivy League heavyweight wrestling champion from Princeton, Charles Colcock Jones Carpenter, battled the professional champion Ed “Strangler” Lewis to a draw in a celebrated exhibition match at the New York Athletic Club. By 1938, when Carpenter was elected Episcopal Bishop of Alabama, the Depression and immigration quotas reduced the American school population by nearly two million children. After 1952, when the McCarran-Walter Act renewed the quota system with minor concessions to the Cold War (token ceilings of one hundred slots for previously excluded Asian and African countries), the national United Church of Christ acquired the dilapidated Old Midway Church property, where Carpenter’s great-grandfather C. C. Jones had preached alone among slaves before the Civil War. Church officials restored the site as a rustic retreat center called Dorchester, which Andrew Young rented for Martin Luther King to plan the decisive 1963 Birmingham campaign against segregation. In an abandoned mansion nearby on the Georgia coast, English professor Robert Manson Myers discovered a trunk of musty letters that once maintained communication among the scattered Jones family plantations. Published in 1972 as The Children of Pride, the collection would win a National Book Award for the intimate display of far-ranging literary sensibility from the antebellum South. Into the sweet-tempered letters of the patriarch Jones crept bitterness over the collapse of his historic mission to redeem slavery by faith. Denouncing abolitionists as “fanatics of the worst sort, setting at defiance all laws human and divine,” Jones hailed Jefferson Davis as the first North American President who “openly professed the orthodox faith of the Gospel,” and embraced the Confederate battle cause in his last public sermon.
Like his storied ancestor, the modern Bishop C. C. J. Carpenter soured against events that overtook his lifelong view of progressive race relations. The Episcopal Diocese of Alabama had already named its Gothic stone headquarters in Birmingham permanently for him, but Jonathan Daniels among others had picketed Carpenter House as a “whited sepulchre” of false Christian teaching. Carpenter would be forgotten or forgiven as the principal author of a white clergymen’s manifesto against the freedom demonstrations in 1963, which made him the first-named addressee for King’s responding “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
The fundamentals of race still were volatile. Equality held sway in public profession, but reputation or actual behavior could skitter for cover beneath popular notions of authority. The geneticists at Cold Spring Harbor regained immense prestige with the discovery of DNA in 1953. The word “Caucasian” still conveyed an air of neutral science. Race kept its childish role as a handy badge to organize conflict, and social scientists rushed into the public clamor for an explanation of Watts.
THE IMMIGRATION Reform Act of 1965 further established the legal blueprint for a model democracy of citizens drawn from the entire world. Its transforming impact lay dormant, destined to accrue slowly on the far horizons of the twentieth century, and many who celebrated the principle were preoccupied with lingering hatreds very close at home. In Hayneville, an abbreviated trial for the August 20 killing of Jonathan Daniels ended on the morning Congress sent the finished immigration bill to the White House. Alabama Attorney General Richmond Flowers, “shocked and amazed” that a local grand jury indicted Tom Coleman only for manslaughter instead of murder, had assumed control of the prosecution himself, but he failed successively to upgrade the charges, shift the venue from Lowndes County, or postpone the trial until the state’s surviving vital witness, Richard Morrisroe, was released from the hospital. Death threats led Flowers to send an aide to court with a last flurry of motions. (“I was afraid,” he told reporters.) Judge Werth Thagard briskly denied the motions, reinstated the county prosecutors, and commenced trial all on the same day, before a confident crowd of Klansmen that included Imperial Wizard Robert Shelton, Alabama Grand Dragon Robert Creel, and the three Birmingham defendants due for retrial in the Viola Liuzzo case.
The large national and international press corps scarcely had time to convey the flavor of the proceedings over a trunk of rented phone lines. Reporters noted the old triangular prisoners’ cage and the bailiff’s quaint method of raising a window to holler down to the yard for witnesses. Young Ruby Sales endured a scathing cross-examination about the nature of her association with the white victim—“a personal friend of yours?” Lifelong friends of Tom Coleman testified brazenly that Daniels had seemed to be carrying “something shiny” like a switchblade, and that the wounded Morrisroe had begged not only for water but had cried out, “Where’s my gun?” Most telling, according to case historian Charles Eagles the prosecutors incorporated fantastic defense suppositions into their own arguments. The Lowndes County solicitor doubted that a smelly seminarian deserved to be killed for “trying to force his way” into the Cash store, and his assistant suggested a lack of evidence “that Jonathan Daniels was making any attempt to actually cut him [Coleman] with that knife.” A defense lawyer in summation, citing chivalric custom that “a man has a right to defend himself and his lady,” praised Coleman to the jury as their neighbor and champion: “God give us such men! Men with great hearts, strong minds, pure souls, and ready hands! Tall men…”
A verdict of acquittal on all charges required ninety-one minutes in deliberation, after which all twelve white men stepped impulsively from the jury box to shake Coleman’s hand, one reminding him that they could keep a dove hunting date without further worry. Reactions elsewhere ran toward disbelief and nausea. Commentator Eric Sevareid charged on that night’s CBS Evening News that Lowndes County “lives by quite different concepts from the justice that took a thousand years of suffering and martyrdom to establish.” Cartoonists lampooned Alabama’s Lady Justice variously as sleeping, weeping, stabbed in the back, and a Klansman in disguise. Columnist Max Friedman, who had blistered King as an “intruder” and “self-appointed apostle of peace” for his statements about Vietnam,* predicted that “this contemptible trial” would shame the nation enough to make sure “that equal justice shall never again be so easily mocked.” The Birmingham News referred to the trial as “an obscene caricature of justice,” quoting the National Council of Churches with rare notice and unprecedented approval. “All across the land have come reverberations of shock, even horror, over the outcome,” observed the Atlanta Constitution. Columnist William S. White confessed on October 4 that the Hayneville courtroom “has broken the heart of Dixie,” and raised a native son’s conflicted lamentation: “What is left, then, for Southerners who love the South and do not apologize for it and never will?”
King had dispatched aides to shore up two of many hard-pressed movements outside Alabama. In Natchez, Mississippi, site of picturesque antebellum mansions along the famous Natchez Trace, Andrew Young found a powder-keg boycott sustained by nightly mass rallies since the August 27 bombing of George Metcalfe, yet besieged by an all-white detachment of 650 National Guard troops under orders to prevent demonstrations. Local people complained to an SCLC survey team of segregated conditions in blatant violation of civil rights laws, including primitive treatment at federally subsidized Jefferson Davis Hospital: “All Negro patients, irrespective of diagnosis, are packed into one isolated ward in the hospital basement.” After Governor Johnson replaced the Guard with Highway Patrol units, and another Negro church burned, long protest lines filed into downtown Natchez over the first weekend of October. Choosing arrest over orders to disperse, five hundred marchers steadily overflowed both the jail and city auditorium until authorities transferred those above twelve years of age to the notorious Parchman prison farm two hundred miles north in the Delta. Prisoners smuggled out word that guards were beating the known leaders, including SCLC’s Rev. Al Sampson, and that the 409 Natchez inmates were stripped, force-fed laxatives, and chilled by night fans. “Several people were unable to [bear] the intense cold,” wrote Phil Lapansky, a holdover SNCC volunteer from Seattle, “and broke down into intense fits of screaming and crying.”
A seesaw crisis also made October 1 headlines from a tiny hamlet known as the home of the Confederate Vice President, Alexander Stephens: “Crawfordville, Ga., Again Denies Buses to Negro Students.” Since the school board abruptly had transferred all 165 local white students to schools in surrounding counties, in a unique rebuff to seventy-two freedom-of-choice applications, groups of the Negro applicants tried to board special buses along with the transfer students, only to be repulsed daily by police and Georgia state troopers. Nonviolent vigils supported the young applicants at the bus stops, led by one of the few schoolteachers who pioneered voter registration, Calvin Turner, and opposing crowds of Klansmen cheered the officers. “Kill him!” shouted Herman Jones, a KKK “security squad” lieutenant on October 4, as seventeen-year-old Frank Bates tried to dash around troopers into the bus. Georgia Grand Dragon Calvin Craig gathered waves of out-of-town followers, vowing to force Governor Carl Sanders to suppress the Negroes. SCLC’s Hosea Williams exhorted Sanders from the other side while encouraging protests with mixed success. A swim-in succeeded at Stephens State Park, but the town’s one restaurant became a private club rather than integrate, and an effort to use the white-only coin laundry merely earned twelve trips to jail.
King himself, back from the planning workshops in Chicago, drove with Coretta a hundred miles east from Atlanta to Crawfordville. “The hardship of the rural South has made it virtually impossible for men and women such as yourselves to engage in the freedom struggle,” he told a night rally on October 11. Reviewing the local initiatives—lawsuits over the closed white school, failed petitions for federal registrars, the dismissal of Turner and five colleagues from the Negro school, the shutdown of an early-learning center in the new Head Start program “to kill even this limited opportunity”—King saluted the movement for perseverance. “So you were left with no choice but to demonstrate,” he concluded, “and we were left with no choice but to support you.”
The next day, as SCLC’s Willie Bolden led two hundred marchers back from the courthouse to a church outside Crawfordville, Howard Sims and Cecil Myers broke from a crowd of Klan hecklers past restraints to pummel stragglers. Sims said their “Black Knights” splinter group favored “a little more action” than rival Klans, and papers from the Augusta, Georgia, Chronicle to the New York Times featured the graphic picture of Myers chasing down SCLC photographer Brig Cabe with a fist raised to strike. The attack made extra news because Sims and Myers were accused in the July 1964 night bushwhacking of Lieutenant Colonel Lemuel Penn on a highway near Athens, Georgia. A local jury had needed only eighty-one minutes to acquit them of murder, despite two confessions from Athens Klan Klavern 244, and the Justice Department was trying to convince the Supreme Court on a separate appeal that Sims and Myers at least should face lesser federal charges for willful violation of protected civil rights. (Hoping so, President Johnson privately opined that Penn had been targeted with two other visibly Negro officers on their drive home from U.S. Army Reserve summer duty: “I think a soldier in uniform ought to have something to do with it, doesn’t it?”)
In Natchez, 1,200 movement supporters marched downtown on the night of October 6, shortly after a federal judge lifted curfews with an order upholding the right to peaceful protest. Grand Dragon E. L. McDaniel mobilized a counterdemonstration of paramilitary Klan units along the route, and his deputy roamed nearby streets in a sound truck that blared the local theme song, “Move Them Niggers North.” Face-offs primed for disaster brought a negotiated settlement within forty-eight hours, but overnight reaction to its most basic concession made city authorities renege. “Never,” Mayor John Nosser announced on October 9, could a deal go forward that would “ask city employees to address anyone as Mr., Mrs., or Miss.” The mayor’s statement, which quieted charges that white leaders had “knuckled under” to the NAACP on courtesy titles, renewed a standoff of marches, boycott, and cross burnings that lasted for weeks, with constant sparks of violence and grim pressure on everyone, including the mayor himself. Born in Lebanon, Nosser had two sons in the Klan. While the boycott of segregated businesses already had forced him to lay off nearly half the 147 employees at his four food stores, renegade Klan units also had bombed his home and two of his Jitney Jungles to underscore warnings against suspected compromise. The vise squeezed Nosser into a wishful escapism, and soon he would claim that Natchez could have prevented the entire racial crisis by offering a police escort at Negro funerals.
Charles Evers mastered his own internecine strife from the day of the George Metcalfe bombing, when he arrived in Natchez to supersede the wounded NAACP leader with a declaration of war. “We’re armed, every last one of us!” he shouted at the emergency mass meeting. “And we are not going to take it!” By his startling audacity, Evers once again baited the fury of NAACP superiors in New York. Roy Wilkins had seethed against his maverick presumption since the 1963 funeral of Medgar Evers, when Charles took an unassailable public moment to inform Wilkins that he would assume his martyred brother’s job in Mississippi, notwithstanding the lack of an offer or his dubious qualification as a self-described Chicago bootlegger and petty criminal. Wilkins publicized his latest maneuvers to fire Evers in September, only to be checked when Evers invited King’s SCLC and other civil rights groups into Natchez with open hints that a hidebound NAACP might fail the challenge of a united movement. A month later, having consolidated a central position in the high-visibility boycott, Evers jettisoned the allied groups. On October 19, his aide privately demanded that King withdraw Rev. Al Sampson “and those individuals who are here with him,” charging that criticism of Evers by the SCLC team betrayed an “unwillingness to cooperate.” Evers himself disparaged the Natchez SNCC staff as “outside agitators.” On December 3, with Metcalfe still in the hospital, he alone would join a dyspeptic Mayor Nosser with news that commanded the front page of the New York Times: “Natchez Boycott Ends as Negroes Gain Objectives.” The thousand-word agreement called for a biracial commission, the opening of some city jobs to Negroes, integration of public facilities including the library and hospital, and the required use of courtesy titles by city officials and signatory merchants alike, specifically banning the diminutives “boy,” “uncle,” “auntie,” “hoss”—“or any other offensive name.” Success made Charles Evers indispensable to Roy Wilkins.
EVERS ECLIPSED a worn, fragmented Natchez SNCC project. A bomb meant for its first Freedom House had destroyed the building next door in August of 1964, after which local sentries posted themselves nightly at the few Negro homes that offered shelter. The acceptance of armed protection, except in avowedly nonviolent demonstrations, was a common adjustment of movement standards to Mississippi gun culture, but the Natchez project gained whispered notoriety when young staff members themselves stockpiled firearms in a shack bought with Freedom Summer donations. Sending notice to the powerful Klan units of Adams County, they deliberately left shotguns and rifles on display for white service workers who installed the telephone. Annie Pearl Avery, a strong-voiced former dishwasher and disciple of Fred Shuttlesworth, who had strained to keep herself nonviolent into jails from Albany to Danville, left Natchez for Alabama with a pistol strapped to the inside of her thigh.
For project director Dorie Ladner, the guns closed off one line of SNCC’s competitive distinction from Charles Evers, and compounded divisions that already plagued the interracial cadres thrown together in Mississippi. Bill Ware, a black Mississippian educated in Minnesota, advocated clarifying pan-African doctrines he had encountered in Ghana as a Peace Corps volunteer. Mary King, a white minister’s daughter from Virginia, escaped Natchez jointly with Dennis Sweeney into a short-lived marriage in California. Sweeney, a charismatic aspiring political theorist from Stanford, for two years had chosen to test a “naked affirmation of democracy” in the most violently persecuted projects of Natchez and McComb, which freighted him with a brooding edge. Brooding herself, Mary King joined Sandra (Casey) Hayden to circulate that November an influential manifesto aimed in part to heal one rift festering inside the civil rights movement—between its black and white women—with a solidarity based in gender. “There seem to be many parallels that can be drawn between treatment of Negroes and treatment of women in our society,” they wrote, proposing to analyze a “caste system” they found pervasive and personal because the sexes, unlike the races, could not find practical respite in isolated communities. “Women can’t withdraw from the situation (a la nationalism),” they observed, but the Natchez staff of fifteen dwindled away in separate colors. By October, three of them—Bill Ware, Janet Jemmott of Chicago, and George Greene of Greenwood—migrated to Lowndes County in Alabama.
In the absence of Silas Norman, now conscripted into the Army, the Alabama SNCC staff gathered to confront emergencies such as a cutoff notice for the utility bill of $11.66 at one Freedom House. Martha Prescod, badgering the Atlanta SNCC headquarters for support funds, received mostly evasive requests for cutbacks. Direst scarcity mandated Stokely Carmichael’s rule that no county project could spend more than $40 per month, restricted to gasoline, leaflets, and rent. The two stick-shift Plymouths for drop-off and rescue were reserved for Carmichael and George Greene, who enjoyed an admiring debate over their relative skills as chase drivers. Scott B. Smith worked Barbour County mostly alone. Cleophus Hobbs and Annie Pearl Avery covered Hale County on foot. Donald Hughes and Cynthia Washington divided Wilcox. Jimmy Rogers elicited a pledge that fellow fieldworkers, resolving never to pay for food, should canvas long and well enough to gain donated meals at farmhouses.
Throughout the Black Belt, fear since the Jonathan Daniels murder and Coleman trial had dropped the pace of voter registration to a third of the early rush to federal registrars, but cumulative totals for Negroes began to approach white registration: 1,328 to 1,900 in Lowndes. As pressures rose, including threats of eviction against potential voters, SNCC workers joined other civil rights groups on October 9 at the Tuskegee Boy Scout camp to exchange organizing ideas for subsistence, such as food cooperatives and primitive health clinics. Alabama investigators patrolled the camp to take file photographs, refusing to leave. Preachers from Mobile brought a troubled boy disowned by his family for taking part in the movement, and the delicate task of arranging foster care for reenrollment in a school somewhere fell to Rev. Francis Walter, who succeeded Daniels in an ecumenical ministry* sponsored by church groups and the Synagogue Council of America. SCLC representatives, including Albert Turner and Harold Middlebrook, reached agreement with the SNCC project directors to reinforce each other’s registration drives in key counties. They mobilized together a trial run for Negroes to vote first in a low-stakes November election of farm councils, administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. After lengthy exploration, however, SCLC staff members were undecided about SNCC’s proposal to form separate political parties by county.
A lone SCLC emissary turned up to report on October 18 that King’s staff in Atlanta found the idea of independent parties legally and politically troublesome, requiring an enormous diversion of energy. Gloria Larry was among observers who heard the SNCC staff members resolve to go forward by themselves. Since the Daniels funeral, she had tried to resume her graduate studies at Berkeley, but soon withdrew with apologies to the department chair for a persistent emptiness toward literature, and made her way back to Selma by bus. Only the day before, Larry had slipped again into St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, which precipitated a hushed suspension of worship. An usher had appeared in the painful silence, taking messages quietly back and forth about a woman member’s wish not to have a Negro seated in the same pew, then stood exasperated behind Larry to notify the congregation: “She won’t move.” The three sudden words jolted Larry up and out of the sanctuary. She yearned to join the SNCC staff, but movement friends wondered why Larry still hazarded white churches at all. Almost penniless, she scrounged to the point of coveting the irregular $10 staff stipend, but she found herself slightly apart from a SNCC ethos she called “relational.” Young black veterans were turning inward. Emotional exposure at St. Paul’s no longer made sense to them, any more than SCLC’s worry that independent county parties would alienate the national Democrats.
No movement worker attended the retrial of Klansman Collie Wilkins for murdering Viola Liuzzo, and the only Negro at the Lowndes County courthouse stayed just long enough to testify on October 20 about surviving the night ambush while helping Liuzzo ferry marchers out of Montgomery. “Leroy,” a lawyer called out wryly to Leroy Moton on cross-examination, “was it part of your duties as transportation officer to make love to Mrs. Liuzzo?” Judge Thagard blocked the gratuitous suggestion by defense counsel Arthur Hanes, who had replaced Klan Klonsel Matt Murphy after serving as a pallbearer at his funeral. A hard-line former mayor of Birmingham, who had closed city parks rather than integrate, and refused audiences with Negroes (“I’m not going to meet with ’em,” he told the press late in 1961. “I’m not a summertime soldier, I don’t give up when the enemy shows up”), Hanes nevertheless was known as a gentleman segregationist of sober deportment befitting a former FBI agent. He presented the case to the jury as a “Parable of the Two Goats,” describing his accused client as a Scape Goat for the nation’s sins, and the state’s chief witness, FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe, as the Judas Goat who had betrayed his Klan oaths and Southern heritage to a revamped empire of pagan Romans in Washington. “Maybe the murderer is from the Watts area of Los Angeles,” Hanes proposed. For the prosecution, Richmond Flowers offered a folksy, derisive rebuttal that the unsupported defense theory—of murder committed by Liuzzo’s own civil rights friends—required jurors to believe that phantoms had borrowed, used, and returned a murder weapon owned by the Birmingham Klansmen. “It is absolutely undisputed that this is the gun that killed that woman,” he declared, holding the pistol. In a fiery summation on the honor of his Confederate grandfather, and on the dangers of corrupting fact with hatred, Flowers ripped from Black’s Law Dictionary the page that defined “true verdict,” shredding it before the jurors. “If you do not convict this man,” he argued, “you might as well lock up the courthouse, open up the jail, and throw away the keys!” Tempering any hope that his skill or prestige as attorney general might seal victory in the case, which had split 10–2 for conviction in May, Flowers posted a well-known marksman conspicuously in the Hayneville courtroom to cover his back. The jury took ninety-five minutes to acquit the indicted triggerman of all charges on Friday, October 22. By Monday, national reaction spurred the Justice Department to announce formal support for the ACLU lawsuit against all-white juries in Alabama, and President Johnson received strategy memos on the intractable “chamber of horrors” in racial crimes: an “unbroken chain” of jury verdicts that were unanimous and binding, yet perceived almost everywhere to be grossly unjust.
KING WAS in Europe for a brief speaking tour. He addressed the Free University in Amsterdam, visited the expatriate blues pianist Memphis Slim as well as Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, and was treated with Coretta at the Haynes soul food restaurant in the Montmartre district of Paris. Learning there of the Hayneville verdict, he canceled his British engagements to rush home for protests. The alternative, he told French reporters, was to accept “the beginning of vigilante justice” that could nullify the civil rights laws. New “OPEN SEASON” bumper stickers already proclaimed that integrationists could be killed with impunity in Alabama, and advance news of his return prompted a detailed threat relayed from Lowndes County to the FBI, that attackers waited to kill King “and anyone who is there to protect him.”
Andrew Young told Stanley Levison that it was hard to cut short the visit to Europe, where people lined the streets and pressed King for autographs. On his last day, King preached to an interfaith service that overflowed the American Church of Paris, then addressed the topic “The Church in a World in Revolution” before a packed audience of five thousand in the Maison de la Mutualité auditorium, with an estimated ten thousand more listening to loudspeakers outside. Both crowds responded fervently to King’s discussion of international crises, such as the holdover colonial secession in Northern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), which proved to Young that King did have an audience to speak on Vietnam. An ecumenical spirit waxed through Europe partly because the fourth and last annual plenary of the twentieth century’s only Vatican Council was gathered from around the world, with civil rights clergy active in the final struggles to reform Christian doctrines on Judaism.
Unremitting intrigue seeped from the walls of Rome even after a committee of cardinals approved another draft of the Nostra Aetate (“In Our Time”) declaration on October 15. Rumors predicted that its statement on Jews would be modified or postponed again. Critics took heart from the hesitancy of Pope Paul VI to implement the mandate of his predecessor, John XXIII, for penitent recognition that two millennia of Christian teaching had contributed to the Nazi Holocaust. At a critical moment, the Pope himself had repeated a liturgical broadside about crimes against Jesus by “the Jewish people,” who “not only did not recognize Him, but fought Him, slandered and injured Him, and, in the end, killed Him.” Reportedly at the Pope’s behest, Vatican deputies removed from Nostra Aetate a clause that explicitly revoked church portrayals of Jews as a “deicide people” cursed by God. An observer of the warring caucuses wrote that key cardinals “realized fairly late that there were some Catholics, more pious than instructed, whose contempt for Jews was inseparable from their love for Christ.” Against them, American cardinals led unsuccessful fights to restore the exculpation clause as the purest antidote to poison within the church. Others objected that the very word “deicide” raised thorny heresies from yesteryear about the dual nature of Jesus, and whether God could be killed; some warned that any positive statement about Judaism risked riots against Christians in Muslim countries. Meanwhile, Rabbi Abraham Heschel had dared to plead secretly in person with Paul VI against a separate new clause seeking final reconciliation with Jews by their mass conversion to Catholicism, saying he would rather “die at Auschwitz” and that what he understood of Christian grace should not countenance a prayer for him to annihilate his faith. Last-minute scandalmongers charged that Vatican reformers were paid agents of a Jewish conspiracy, and a pamphlet proudly claimed that “Christ and the Apostles John and Paul were the first anti-Semites.”
On October 28, porters lifted the papal sedan through a sea of spectators into the Basilica of St. Peter, which was decked in full sacred pomp of bishops with miters in long ranks of white and scarlet robes. Votes against Nostra Aetate collapsed from the roiling dissent on both sides, leaving an advisory show of consensus—2,221–88—and Paul VI officially promulgated the epochal new teaching on “Non-Christian Relations.” In place of “deicide repeal,” proponents of reform accepted the qualified statement that treatment of Jesus by Temple authorities “cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today,” along with an edict that “the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews…decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.” The declaration commended Paul’s scriptural advice to the earliest generation of Jewish and Christian rivals: “So do not become proud, but stand in awe.”
Most significantly, Nostra Aetate discarded the substitute clause that prescribed ultimate peace only by the conversion of Jews to triumphant Catholicism. In its place, the final version looked to an age when “all peoples will address the Lord in a single voice and ‘serve him shoulder to shoulder.’” The three small words—“shoulder to shoulder”—conveyed a breakthrough image of separate identity and common stature. There was equal footing, with no hint of dominant authority. For the Roman Church, which remained vertical in every respect—claiming one truth and superior faith sustained by its steadfastly monarchical organization—a horizontal bond with Jews was revolutionary. It suggested new church governance and belief, comparable in religion to the political shift from a vertical world of rulers and subjects toward horizontal experiments in structured self-government. It introduced a hint of democracy to religion built on hierarchy. In the single month of October, the United States opened citizenship to legal immigrants from the whole world, and the Vatican opened fraternal faith to the remnant people of Jesus.
Among many others, President Morris Abram of the American Jewish Committee hailed Nostra Aetate as “a turning point in 1,900 years of Jewish-Christian history.” Adherents of both traditions were slow to plumb its meaning, however, in a postwar era marked by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and enduring stupefaction over the Holocaust. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik and other Jewish authorities continued to forbid dialogue with Christians on religious questions as improper, impossible, and impolitic—a proven noose for persecution of Jews. Only gradually, sustained by an explosion of scholarship on the parallel historical development of Christianity and rabbinic Judaism, interfaith pioneers gained confidence that textual exchange and interpretation could enrich understanding without surrendering vital points of difference. In September of 2000, American rabbis and Jewish scholars issued Dabru Emet (“Speak Truth”), the first formal response to Nostra Aetate. They offered a series of eight elaborated propositions, beginning, “Jews and Christians worship the same God.”
JUST WHEN Rome’s ecumenical machinery clasped its rough mandate to tame ancient enmities, the psychology of war triggered fresh ones. Among some hundred thousand protesters at scattered Vietnam demonstrations over the weekend of October 16, David Miller, a young Catholic pacifist, lacked confidence in his oratorical ability to communicate urgent shortcomings of “just war theory” to crowds outside an Army induction center in New York. Nervously, he tried instead to burn his draft card in a gusting wind that blew out his matches. He succeeded with a cigarette lighter. As a registered conscientious objector, legally exempt from military duty in all wars, Miller told reporters that he hoped to commit “a significant political act” by inviting punishment needlessly upon himself, and the October protests exposed raw political nerves long before Miller went to prison for two years.
Overnight, James Reston of the New York Times scolded the campus intellectual and “dreaming pacifist” alike for paradoxical stupidity: “They are not promoting peace but postponing it.” By Monday, Mike Mansfield told the Senate that he was “shocked at pictures showing some of the demonstrators,” and a chorus from both parties seconded his stern reminder that Congress had outlawed the willful defacement of draft cards “within the past month.” Senator Russell of Georgia, while confessing his own prior opposition to the war, declared that “the time has passed now to discuss the wisdom of our entrance into Vietnam”—with troop commitments made, the battle flag planted, and American heritage in jeopardy “if we tuck tail and run.” Senator Dirksen joined Russell with a call for swift punishment of “the wailing, quailing, protesting young men themselves.” From Chicago, Attorney General Katzenbach pledged to investigate peace groups for actions “in the direction of treason.” Former Vice President Nixon said that to tolerate comfort for enemies in wartime threatened free speech worldwide. President Johnson, recovering from gall bladder surgery, issued a statement of surprise that anyone “would feel toward his country in a way that is not consistent with the national interest.” Life magazine disdained the “annoying clamor” of “chronic show-offs” it dubbed “Vietniks.” Republican Senator Thomas Kuchel of California branded them “vicious, venomous, and vile.” Public animus surged so broadly that defiant SDS leaders Paul Booth and Carl Oglesby called for a modified strategy of “build not burn.”
A hundred New York religious leaders signed an emergency appeal for open debate. “It concerns us that the President should be amazed by dissent,” explained Lutheran minister Richard J. Neuhaus to an October 25 press conference at the United Nations Church Center. With Rev. William A. Jones of Brooklyn’s Bethany Baptist, Neuhaus warned that recent efforts to squelch protest, emanating from “the highest levels of Government,” threatened “to subvert the very democracy which loyal Americans seek to protect.” Asked whether additional statements could be expected, Rabbi Heschel spontaneously assured reporters that a coalition would organize and function for the duration of the Vietnam War, and afterward defended his promise to startled fellow spokesmen. (“Are we then finished?” he asked. “Do we go home content, and the war goes on?”) Heschel spurred new colleagues to prophetic witness against the “evil of indifference,” in language reminiscent of his tribute to King before Selma.* “Required is a breakthrough, a leap of action,” he said. To accommodate rabbis and women, the ad hoc New York “churchmen” became Clergy Concerned About Vietnam. When superiors promptly ordered two priests to withdraw, and banished the Jesuit co-founder Daniel Berrigan to South America, Heschel joined Neuhaus to protest the Catholic hierarchy’s “injury” to ecumenical conscience.
On October 28, a planned anti-conscription ceremony outside New York’s Foley Square courthouse degenerated beforehand into an imploded mix of hecklers, reporters, brawlers, angry police officers, and lapsed pacifists—“the most miserable mob scene ever,” said Dorothy Day, who had seen plenty of them since founding the Catholic Worker movement in 1934. With A. J. Muste, she called off the demonstration for lack of pacifist discipline, and assorted violence from elsewhere filled the front pages. A Pennsylvania Klan leader committed suicide hours after a Sunday New York Times story exposed his concealed Jewish ancestry. Murky reports from Indonesia suggested purge deaths running into the hundreds of thousands after an army coup, with victims concentrated among Chinese immigrants. U.S. Marines at the Da Nang airbase killed fifty-six Vietnamese guerrillas who mounted a “human wave” attack, including a thirteen-year-old scout they recognized as a Coca-Cola peddler, and captured an eighty-year-old woman with drawings of military installations in her banana basket. Also in Vietnam that Sunday, October 31, transposed numerals on grid coordinates led A1-E Skyraider pilots to drop white phosphorus erroneously on the hamlet of Deduc, killing forty-eight civilians.
Norman Morrison saw a television report about Deduc at home in Baltimore, where he absorbed converging news on his last day, November 2. A story in I. F. Stone’s Weekly quoted a French priest from the Catholic refugee village of Duc Co, who said he had watched seven Vietnamese parishioners die of napalm—“always before my eyes were those burned up women and children”—and a letter in the Baltimore Sun scolded silent Americans for letting officials believe that “nobody opposes the war in Vietnam except draft-dodgers and addlepates.” Morrison chafed gently at his wife’s praise for the activist tone of the letter, saying he had already done everything the writer recommended to no avail. Newspapers had published his appeals, and he had petitioned the White House on as many as three consecutive days, sending thoughtful notes to his “fellow” seminarian Bill Moyers (with whom he had overlapped briefly in Edinburgh, Scotland, before switching his ministry from Presbyterian to Quaker), and pleas for peace to Johnson himself (“Every day we sin more against the yellow people of the world!”), closing one “a conscience stricken citizen.” When his wife left to pick up Christina, five, and Ben, six, from the Stony Run Friends School, Morrison drove to Washington with their one-year-old daughter, Emily, and mailed a short letter back to “Dearest Anne: For weeks even months I have been praying only that I be shown what I must do. This morning with no warning I was shown as clearly as I was shown that Friday night in August, 1955, that you would be my wife. Know that I love thee but must act for the children of the priest’s village.”
A traffic policeman recalled a man with a baby walking along the low parapet of a walled garden outside the Potomac River entrance to the Pentagon, then flames shooting fifteen feet high. “He was a torch,” said an Army major who was among those who rushed from the parking lot. Near Morrison’s corpse they found a Harris tweed coat, a gallon can of kerosene, and a placid, unharmed Emily, whom Jet reporters photographed in the arms of rescue nurse Cloretta Jones. Giant headlines spread everywhere—“Baltimore Quaker with Baby Sets Self Afire”—and the New York Times devoted two subsequent profiles to the late salaried leader of the venerable Stony Run Meeting of Friends (founded 1782), finding stunned admirers but no background instability and only one prior newsworthy deed, an arrest among nationally prominent clergy at a segregated Baltimore amusement park in 1963. A Times editorial recoiled from suicide witness as “alien to the American temper…confused and misdirected.” Newsweek charged that the “macabre act of protest almost included the sacrificial murder of his own baby daughter.” The editors of The Christian Century preferred “to avert our eyes.” In the face of what she called “raspingly discordant” evasions from “many who talk and agitate constantly about religion, politics, race, and peace,” a lone Detroit correspondent asserted that Morrison “simply converted his life into a word which would carry…. I believe the message, loud and clear, reached the ends of the earth. Who is prepared to say this act was futile?”
Within five days, a composition by North Vietnamese poet laureate To Huu circulated by combat radio among Communist soldiers, mingling shrill propaganda against American leaders—“Johnson! Your crimes multiply…McNamara/ Where will you hide?”—with intimate verse imagining Morrison’s last thoughts:
Emily, my child, it’s almost dark—
I can’t carry you home
Once I have turned into a lamp
Your mother will come looking for you
You must hold your mother and kiss her for me
And you must tell your mother
He died happy. Please don’t be sad.
Washington
At twilight
Oh Souls
Are you hovering or missing?
I have reached the moment when my heart is brightest!
More than thirty years later, at her first visit to a Peace Park created by war veterans from both sides, retired soldiers in Hanoi would recall for the married and pregnant Emily Morrison their indelible memories of hearing “Emily, My Child” in a particular jungle bunker or tunnel, and Vietnamese half her age recited the poem from school lessons. Her mother, having braced herself for acute discomfort in a strange land, lost protective artifice daily as “many, many Vietnamese men cried in front of us” over a healing image of Americans that survived prolonged slaughter. Robert McNamara, in his eighties, called Anne Morrison Welsh about the disclosure in his troubled memoir that sporadic antiwar protest never “compelled attention” until Norman Morrison “burned himself to death within forty feet of my Pentagon window.”* McNamara said he bottled up emotions about Vietnam from that day forward out of “a grave weakness,” and she replied that the suicide likewise had been unmentionable in her home. The two discovered in family paralysis a peculiar bonded leeway within the larger trauma of a war then scarcely begun.
The aborted New York draft protest reconvened on Saturday, November 6, this time in Union Square behind police barricades and a cordon of 1,500 supporters wearing “Practice Nonviolence” buttons. Hecklers strained against the perimeter with assorted signs such as “THANKS, PINKOS” and “COWARDS.” They shouted down Dorothy Day, quieted through some of A. J. Muste’s prayer for illumination of the haunting deed four days earlier at the Pentagon—“Do not weep for Norman Morrison or his family. Let us weep instead for the lethargy of this nation”—then raised a countervailing rhythmic cry of “Give us joy! Bomb Hanoi!” Five pacifists in coats and ties, pelted by missiles and doused by water, managed to ignite their draft cards and sing the “We Shall Overcome” benediction in the midst of another hostile, contagious chant: “Burn yourselves! Not your cards!” Police units escorted the pacifist leaders away for their own protection, but roving bands attacked button-wearing supporters as they dispersed.
Roger LaPorte, clean-cut son of an upstate New York lumberjack, sent off a letter renouncing his divinity school draft deferment. Obsessed by the intensity of the hatred he witnessed at Union Square, he wandered the streets for three nights until the predawn hours of Tuesday, November 9, when he knelt before the United Nations building soaked in gasoline. A Ghanian U.N. guard who tried to beat out the blue flames soon toppled retching, overcome by fumes. “I’m a Catholic Worker,” LaPorte gasped to paramedics. “I’m against war, all wars. I did this as a religious action.” Horrified, U.N. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg called the immolation “terribly unfortunate and terribly unnecessary,” reiterating his government’s “complete commitment to the idea that peace is the only way.” Friends of LaPorte said he meant to absorb evil from the world by personal sacrifice, like Jesus, but many pacifists including Muste feared that suicide protest would alienate most Americans instead, and make war seem comparatively normal. The Trappist writer Thomas Merton sensed “something radically wrong somewhere, something that is un-Christian…the whole thing gives off a different smell from the Gandhian movement.” That afternoon, LaPorte hovered near death at Bellevue Hospital as a massive electric failure paralyzed cities from New York to Boston. He lingered with 25 million people mesmerized through the Great Blackout night of flashlights and candles, then expired after power was restored.
“The people of New York City have never experienced such fellowship, such awareness of being one, as they did last night in the midst of darkness,” Rabbi Heschel told his class at Union Seminary. “Indeed, there is a light in the midst of the darkness of this hour. But, alas, most of us have no eyes.”