December 1965–January 1966
THE Watts report posed an alarm starkly in its title, Violence in the City—An End or a Beginning?, and responded with words normally shunned as political suicide. “McCone Commission Urges a ‘Costly and Extreme’ Treatment of Causes,” declared the New York Times on December 7. Newspaper stories highlighted the call for massive improvements in education, transportation, and employment. The commissioners found that nearly all the 114 Los Angeles elementary schools without cafeterias were located in minority areas, which they correlated with “shockingly lower” test scores. They detected an enormous but immeasurable job shortage for Watts residents—quoting the resigned scoff of a teenage witness, “Go to school for what?”—which they associated with a tiny (14 percent) neighborhood ownership of cars to reach jobs elsewhere in the only major American city that did not subsidize public transportation. Their report warned that the August riots would be a mere “curtain-raiser” unless the American public adopted a “revolutionary attitude.”
Bayard Rustin pronounced the McCone report a clever but specious bit of fireworks above the color line, in a detailed analysis that began with the commission’s baseline characterization of the Watts upheaval: “an insensate rage of destruction…not a race riot in the usual sense. What happened was an explosion—a formless, quite senseless, all but hopeless protest—engaged in by a few but bringing great distress to all.” Rustin cited McCone’s own investigators to counter that the violence had been anything but random. Rioters consistently attacked five types of stores, primarily pawnshops and food markets, made no attempt to steal narcotics from pharmacies, and were more likely to destroy than consume the stocks of liquor stores. He quoted acknowledgment in the report’s fine print that “no residences were deliberately burned, that damage to schools, libraries, and public buildings was minimal, and that certain types of business establishments, notably service stations and automobile dealers were for the most part unharmed.” For Rustin, steeped in Gandhian discipline, the Watts violence was wrong, mostly self-damaging, and it excused the commissioners to polarize identification with victims by race. The report lumped together thirty-two Negro riot deaths under “justifiable homicide,” identified three white deaths (obscuring evidence that two were from friendly fire), and broke down white injuries by occupation or branch of service. “To find out that about 85 per cent of the [1,032 people] injured were Negroes,” he observed, “we have to do our own arithmetic.”
Violence in Rustin’s view gave the McCone Commission cover to finesse the central complaint against a Los Angeles police department personified by Chief William Parker. “Many Negroes feel that he carried a deep hatred of the Negro community,” stated the report. “However, Chief Parker’s statements to us and collateral evidence such as his record of fairness to Negro officers are inconsistent with his having such an attitude.” With that, the commissioners dismissed calls for external checks or civilian review in brutality investigations as a risk to police morale, and Rustin ascribed the brusque evasion to a battlefield mentality that dehumanized Negroes while lionizing the aggressive officer. “Every Negro knows this,” he wrote. “There is scarcely any black man, woman or child in the land who at some point or another has not been mistreated by a policeman.”
No Negro ranked above sergeant in the Los Angeles police force of roughly eight thousand, although nearly twenty black officers over the past decade managed to attend law school after hours and pass the bar exam while stymied for promotion. Two who once briefly made lieutenant had departed also for law practice—Earl Broady and Tom Bradley, a future mayor of Los Angeles. Broady served with McCone as one of the eight Watts commissioners. He had been elevated to the California bench since being cajoled by Malcolm X to represent those shot and beaten, then jailed, in the sensational 1962 police altercation around and inside the local Muslim temple, and the McCone report bore signs of a truce. There was no mention of the fusillade storming of the same temple toward the end of the Watts violence in a vain search for weapons or riot plans. Judge Broady withheld experienced readings on raw blackjack solidarity in the precincts, perhaps to dampen Chief Parker’s countervailing charge that “pagan” conspirators had engineered revolt by contented Negro citizens. Parker, sticking mostly to the compromise thesis of mindless violence, reduced Watts to an image of copycat antics by caged animals: “One person threw a rock and then, like monkeys in a zoo, others started throwing rocks.”
Rustin warned of the treacherous ambiguity common to the McCone Commission and the Moynihan study of Negro families. Each document opened freelance controversy “on both sides of the Negro question,” he wrote, with a view fixed handily beyond the presumed end of segregated conditions on a ringing but abstract call for wholesale reform. Each mixed encouragement for civil rights with “more sophisticated and compassionate…shibboleths about Negroes.” Well before Rustin’s interpretation reached the small intellectual journal Commentary, Moynihan had become an established national oracle on Watts. “Remember that American slavery was the worst slavery the world has ever known,” he told a CBS News special about the new McCone report. He sketched the historical pressures on families that “break up when they leave the countrysides, rural peasant life, and sort of dump into slums,” where he said Negro women headed a quarter of modern households. The New York Times published a December 12 profile, “Moynihan Hopeful U.S. Will Adopt a Policy of Promoting Family Stability,” citing his figures that 44 percent of births in parts of Harlem were illegitimate. “I grew up in Hell’s Kitchen,” he told the Times. “My father was a drunk. I know what this life is like.”
The same day on NBC’s Meet the Press, moderator Lawrence Spivak asked how new middle-class Negroes climbed above the report’s statistical trend toward family deterioration, and why others could not use the same ladder. “Some people are lucky and some aren’t,” replied Moynihan. “The world is that way. Some people got out of the South in time, some didn’t.” Jet reporter Simeon Booker protested that Moynihan could have focused on growing divorce in white families “to make it appear that they are the threat to the nation’s health.” He suggested that racial redress must fall to whites, whereas panelist Robert Novak wondered if Negroes would escape their own responsibility. Moynihan gamely grasped both thorns. “It is an American problem,” he told NBC viewers, “and any American must commit himself to it.” Lightning gathered from his resonant theories already made Moynihan the rarest of public figures—a sociology professor and former civil servant, specializing in urban race relations, with a bright future in national politics.*
RONALD REAGAN’S public career neared the end of its incubation period. The previous March, on the popularity of his nationally televised speech for the losing presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, the Hollywood actor had begun an active exploration toward a run for governor of California just as students at Berkeley lifted ritual chants of “Fuck” to storm the far ramparts of permitted speech. The wildcat demonstrations, which veered notoriously from a campus movement built to support Mississippi Negroes, gave Reagan cause to join attacks on “filthy” rather than free debate, to disregard the disciplined youth then braving violence at the “Berlin Wall” of Selma, and to sidestep their cresting drive for the whole nation to secure voting rights for the powerless. In an address to California Republicans, Reagan combined spanking disdain for the rowdy Berkeley students with his caustic view of an omnivorous federal government. They were like a newborn baby, he quipped, with “an alimentary canal at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”
Reagan continued to defend the Goldwater positions against Medicare (“socialized medicine”) and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. “I would have voted against it if I had been in Congress,” he said, and denounced the 1965 Voting Rights Act by extension as an encroachment on local control, “humiliating to the South.” Significantly, however, Reagan hired political advisers to make his test speeches palatable to voters beyond the Goldwater base. Political consultants Stuart Spencer and William Roberts, having managed the California primary campaign against Goldwater by liberal Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller, counseled him to advocate decency and restraint rather than outmoded defiance. Reagan said unruly students could be reclaimed with firm discipline. He avoided talk of civil rights with the nimble evasion of Southern moderates then calling the entire race issue “somewhat passé.” He described domestic freedom as a natural possession that was constantly threatened—but never enhanced—by national politics, and therefore he credited no net progress in liberty from the Founding Fathers down through the daunting new commitments to fulfill their national creed. “The original government of this country was set up by conservatives, [and] defined years later by Lincoln,” Reagan declared, “as a preference for the old and tried over the new and untried.”
By overlooking patriotic wonders in stir from the modern civil rights era, which he recognized as liberal and certainly troublesome, Reagan invited listeners to shed defensive anxiety about racial barriers. He lodged timely charges to degrade the movement’s reputation for selfless witness by association with rioters and external enemies, denouncing antiwar demonstrations at Berkeley as “the fruit of appeasement.” Reagan called for “a political decision to achieve victory” in Vietnam, and waved off “silly” fears of protracted war. “Why, with our power,” he said in October, “we could pave the whole country, put parking strips on it, and be home for Christmas.”
Early stories made sport of his film roles and campaign biography—Where’s the Rest of Me?—but Reagan captured audiences through 150 trial speeches. He called himself a “hemophiliac liberal” converted to citizen-politician, innocent of professional experience or government terminology. Even so, the unannounced candidate distanced himself from the John Birch Society with a strategy fixed on the decisive middle voter. Reagan rebuked founder Robert Welch for “utterly reprehensible” statements that former President Dwight Eisenhower himself was a Communist, but carefully spared the organization and its sympathizers, citing assurance from J. Edgar Hoover that “the FBI has not investigated the Birch Society, because it only investigates subversive organizations.” Reagan’s pinpoint attack on Welch signaled his refusal to be lumped with “a bunch of kooks,” according to his staff, and gained him stature to run on mainstream morality. A New York Times Magazine article in November warily recognized his genial appeal: “Tom Sawyer Enters Politics.”
SHORTLY BEFORE Reagan’s formal entry into the California governor’s race for 1966, Director Hoover confronted a potential scandal from the FBI’s unilateral use of spy methods in nearby Las Vegas. A December story in the Los Angeles Times disclosed the first public hints of intrigue stewing since the owner of the Fremont Casino Hotel had discovered a microphone bug at his office in 1963. Security technicians traced intercept signals to a dummy business called the Henderson Novelty Company, and officials from the Sands and the Desert Inn soon joined in a lawsuit against eleven FBI employees found monitoring numerous bugs from the Henderson storefront. Publicity spread novel allegations of criminal trespass by law enforcement officers—“FBI Red-Faced on Use of ‘Bugs’”—with growing pressure on FBI headquarters either to disown the agents as renegades or show proof of legal authorization for the surveillance. Hoover swiftly dispatched Assistant Director DeLoach to see the Attorney General. “I told Katzenbach that obviously this was no time for feuding in the family,” DeLoach reported to FBI headquarters, “and that I wanted to make certain that he fully understood the approval that former Attorney General Kennedy had given with respect to microphones.”
Katzenbach tried to calm DeLoach. He predicted that the well-known Washington lawyer Edward Bennett Williams would settle the Las Vegas lawsuit before it generated publicity that his clients were conspiring with organized crime partners to skim profits from their casinos. The greater lesson for Katzenbach was a reminder that surreptitious eavesdropping allowed a shrewd defense attorney like Williams to thwart prosecution by ferreting out government misconduct. (For his track record of stinging discovery motions, Hoover already disparaged Williams as a “shyster.”) DeLoach refused to be mollified, and described the threat as more political than legal. Unlike Katzenbach, he knew that Williams was likely to obtain records in a separate criminal appeal that another client, Washington lobbyist Fred Black, had been overheard by coincidence in the bugged executive suite at the Desert Inn. Worse, Black was a business partner of former Senate aide Bobby Baker, the most visible corruption name of the Johnson era, and had been the Johnson family’s next-door neighbor until the new President moved into the White House. Still worse, collateral discovery could reveal to Williams that the FBI had bugged Black deliberately in his Washington hotel suite, which was far too political to be excused as a well-intended crusade against gangster influence in Las Vegas casinos.
Undaunted, DeLoach insisted that the real motive behind the bugging story was Senator Robert Kennedy’s ambition to ruin President Johnson and the FBI. Williams was a Kennedy friend, he noted darkly, and Kennedy’s former press secretary, Ed Guthman, worked for the Los Angeles Times. Katzenbach “seemed rather stunned” by the charge, DeLoach later reported. While he tried to assure DeLoach that he did not disclaim involvement with microphone surveillance himself, despite his recent efforts to forbid it, the Attorney General said he did believe private statements from Kennedy himself that he had authorized no bugs during his tenure at Justice. DeLoach warned Katzenbach not to provoke Hoover on this point, then made ready for battle by summoning Kennedy’s FBI liaison officer, Courtney Evans. Hoover had fired him after Dallas, exercising sudden freedom to demonstrate disdain for the lame-duck Attorney General, but Evans felt obliged to appear at headquarters for a prolonged inquisition on Christmas Eve.
DeLoach and colleagues knew from the FBI files that they could not confront Evans with Robert Kennedy’s signature on a bugging document, or even with evidence that Kennedy ever showed awareness of a bug as opposed to a formally approved telephone wiretap. They coaxed him merely to agree that Kennedy should have perceived the peculiar source of some reports by their nature, without being told, and a miserably conflicted Evans—“upon having his recollection refreshed”—gave ground toward the FBI position. From memos about one lurid intelligence report from Chicago, DeLoach recorded, “he admitted that Kennedy stated that he did not desire to know the location or the source.” Evans conceded murkiness in the most sensitive files until DeLoach counted him a vital witness for shared complicity: “He did admit that Kennedy must have known that our information came from microphones.” FBI officials seized upon the inference as bedrock. They claimed a general acquiescence from Kennedy in place of verifiable permissions for specific bugs, which they substituted in turn for a gaping void of authority or procedure in law. Without a blush, they transformed the wisp of retrospective accountability into armor for aggressive defense. Katzenbach and Kennedy would “‘leave us to the wolves’ if allowed to do so,” DeLoach advised Hoover, which made it prudent for the Bureau to put them on notice that “we clearly know the facts and will not hesitate to use them if necessary.”
“THREE DAYS after Christmas,” began a SNCC memorandum of record, “Gloria Larry was in the Atlanta SNCC office at 360 Nelson Street looking for help.” The document registered shock in two respects. First, the Atlanta office was an unlikely rescue stop because SNCC faced $100,000 in debt, suffered terminations of phone service, and had missed several of its meager subsistence payrolls for staff workers. Jailgoing energy and the treasury were drained so low—“John Robert Lewis is TIRED (me too),” warned an internal notice—that Chairman Lewis issued a melancholy year-end statement pronouncing the miracle achievements of 1965 dimmed “when we have laws that are not being enforced…. The scars of racism are so deep that they will take many years to remove.” Second, Larry was a surprise choice to speak for Lowndes County on any desperate mission, being a staff newcomer known more for elegance than grit. Larry was already gaunt, however, which reinforced her hammering alarm about the plight of sharecroppers newly registered to vote. Of twenty evicted families that lacked the wherewithal to move, or relatives to pile in with, at least eight wandered helpless outdoors. Larry commandeered $2,000 from SNCC’s secret emergency fund and rushed back to Alabama in a loaded caravan. “It has been raining for three weeks in Lowndes County,” the office memorandum noted in her wake. “The following supplies have been purchased to protect the evicted families from the elements”: ten Army surplus tents, sixty cots, and twelve potbellied stoves.
Carmichael stayed behind to fire a staff worker he caught soliciting and stealing crisis donations from distant white supporters. “Please make sure that they do not send another penny to Eugene,” he urged fund-raisers, noting painfully that the scam targets discovered so far included Rev. Francis Walter, Rabbi Harold Saperstein the summer volunteer, and even the mother of Jonathan Daniels. (“I guess you realize this is a very touchy area,” Carmichael confided.) He managed also to secure squatter’s space for the evicted farmers on land owned by Rosie Steele, who had donated the second night’s campsite for the great march toward Montgomery, then rounded up help to dig a latrine, lay plank floors, and pitch the tents. Sammy Younge was a surprise among workers who showed up on Thursday, December 30. “I just can’t kick it, man,” he told Carmichael sheepishly. Having tried hard to stick with his studies, he decided that the movement was “in me,” and disclosed his hope to organize an independent “black panther” party for his home county around Tuskegee.
The primitive shelter attracted scattered notice from the outside world. “‘Tent City’ Rising In Alabama Field,” announced the New York Times on New Year’s Day. The Negro weekly Jet emphasized hardship: “Evicted Farmers Wallow in Beds of Mud at Lowndes.” These accounts noted large cauldrons for water to be hauled from a neighboring well, and ascribed escalating tension to local awareness that some 1,900 new Lowndes County registrants approached parity for Negroes in local voting strength. Jack Crawford had been evicted after his photograph appeared in a magazine article about the federal registrars. Amanda Glover, arriving from the plantation where she had lived since January 20, 1931, said her husband had been too scared of voting “but could have went on and registered for all the good it did him.” Annabelle Scott came with her husband, four children, and several grandchildren, one of whom soon contracted hepatitis. Elderly movement stalwarts Will and Mary Jane Jackson occupied cots in the field of tents facing Highway 80, not far from the spot where they had waited all of March 22 to see the distant speck of Martin Luther King approach with flags and soldiers like a biblical mirage. Carmichael said people who registered under such conditions were forever changed, and local leader John Hulett agreed. “People in Lowndes County, whether they live or die, will put up our own candidates,” he told reporters. “That’s a sure thing.”
On Sunday, January 2, Rev. Francis Walter sat on the stage among hometown hosts in Mobile for a historic address by the sitting Attorney General of the United States. Before an overwhelmingly Negro crowd of 4,500, Nicholas Katzenbach marked the 102nd anniversary of slavery’s official demise by predicting “a new emancipation” under the Voting Rights Act. Backstage, Walter took his chance to consult briefly about reprisals against new registrants in several counties. Katzenbach renewed a public promise for the Justice Department to initiate lawsuits against voter intimidation, and suggested that affidavits would make stronger evidence if the sharecroppers could brace themselves through formal eviction by sheriffs rather than vacate the plantations on demand. Guardedly, he advised Walter to consider his words mere legal speculation and not a commitment on behalf of the United States. Jet magazine noted another nuance of volatile racial politics: Mobile’s white newspapers declined to show Katzenbach at the Emancipation Day ceremonies, indicating that racially mixed photographs of a kind once prized to attack white officials might be losing favor because of the offsetting honor implied for Negroes also in the picture, especially now if they had to be identified.
With many Alabama courthouses filled for first Monday registration on January 3, FBI agents arrived in Tuskegee by late afternoon to investigate two complaints relayed from the Atlanta SNCC office. Jimmy Rogers reported first that a registrar had threatened to “spill your guts on the floor” after refusing more than a hundred Negro applicants, evidently nettled beyond endurance that a continued stall would only push the Justice Department to deploy superseding federal registrars to Macon County. Sammy Younge, ducking from his escort post along the line of rattled applicants, added at four o’clock that the local registrar displayed a knife when repeating the same words.
Toward midnight at the local Freedom House, agitated calls about a familiar car sighted near a police commotion at the Tuskegee bus station jolted into panic a vague awareness that Younge had not returned from an errand to buy cigarettes, and Rogers was among those who identified his body. Younge lay face-up next to wide rivulets of blood spreading from his head past his feet, with an arm draped over a golf club. Witnesses said Younge had engaged in what sounded like a running quarrel over the refusal of an elderly attendant to let him use a gasoline station’s restroom reserved for whites. He drove off, stopped abruptly, and walked back to renew the argument, but ran across the street into a half filled Greyhound bus once the attendant, Marvin Segrest, waved a pistol. Seizing a golf club from luggage bound for Atlanta, Younge darted in and out of the bus to exchange more shouts. When Segrest fired a shot, the Greyhound sped away and Younge fled exposed on foot until a second bullet struck him in the back of the head. Segrest said he meant “to bluff him.” Alarms rousted much of the campus before dawn and collected nearly all the scattered Alabama SNCC staff except Stokely Carmichael, who declared himself immobile. “I just got me three bottles of wine,” he told James Forman, “and drank one for me and one for Sammy and one for Jonathan Daniels.” More than two thousand students marched Tuesday in small-town Tuskegee. Many returned the next day with a list of eight demands, including prosecution of Segrest and a chance for “more Negroes to be able to work in the downtown area.” They rallied around the statue of Robert E. Lee on the courthouse lawn.
In Atlanta, the southwide SNCC staff conducted a marathon debate to frame a response. New marches for more laws were rejected as lame. A proposal to denounce the Younge murder jointly with the Vietnam War met the objection that the connection was strained and that the two issues best be kept separate. A volley of counterarguments recalled Bob Moses on the tendency of race to corrupt democratic values with self-deluded conquest both at home and abroad, which shifted qualms about the statement toward naked practicality. With SNCC nearly bankrupt, leaders warned, an attack on the government’s war policy would trigger ferocious opposition, choke off donations from white liberals, and blot out attention to the death of Sammy Younge. Some fretted that they had voted already for SNCC to take a public stand against the war, but had failed timidly to follow through. Others foresaw widespread indifference to any statement about Younge’s death without the Vietnam linkage, and a majority welcomed Gloria Larry’s volunteer effort to distill the prevailing thought into a draft by Thursday, January 6. “We believe the United States government has been deceptive in its claims of concern for the freedom of the Vietnamese people,” she began. “The murder of Samuel Younge in Tuskegee, Ala. is no different than the murder of peasants in Vietnam…. We ask: where is the draft for the freedom fight in the United States? We, therefore, encourage those Americans who prefer to use their energy in building democratic forms within this country…knowing full well that it may cost them their lives—as painfully as in Vietnam.”
ON FRIDAY in Chicago, at what the New York Times called “a crowded news conference in the garish red-and-gold Gigi Room of the plush Sahara Motel,” Martin Luther King released a thirteen-page launch blueprint for “the first significant Northern freedom movement.” For the betterment of greater Chicago, whose Negroes had come to outnumber those in all Mississippi, he announced a new campaign aimed at conditions broader than de facto school segregation or the harsh legacy of the rural South. “This economic exploitation is crystallized in the SLUM,” said King, which he defined as “an area where free trade and exchange of culture and resources is not allowed to exist…a system of internal colonialism not unlike the exploitation of the Congo by Belgium.” His Chicago blueprint identified trade unions and welfare boards among twelve institutions that perpetuated slums in an interlocking pattern difficult to understand, he acknowledged, let alone to change. (Five unions shut down final construction on the monumental Gateway Arch project that same day in St. Louis, when a contractor hired the first Negro plumber under sustained pressure from the new U.S. Office of Federal Contract Compliance.) King announced an escalating series of community rallies, organizing drives, and test demonstrations to culminate in May, but he hedged predictions by analogy with the voting rights campaign launched a year earlier. “Just as no one knew on January 2, 1965, that there would be a march from Selma to Montgomery,” he announced, “so now we are in no position to know what form massive action might take in Chicago.” The uncertainty of future confrontation muted news coverage, but King gained banner headlines in the Defender with a promise to move his own family into a freezing local tenement before the end of January: “Dr. King Will Occupy Chicago Slum Flat in New Rights Drive/ He’s Out to Close Ghetto.”
A series of urgent surprises eclipsed King’s announcement inside the White House, conveyed first by four memos about Tuskegee that reached the Oval Office with crisis notations timed to the minute. “The white city officials are frightened,” advised one at 10:45 A.M. on Friday, “and some have mentioned that they would like Federal troops or Federal marshals.” President Luther Foster of Tuskegee Institute relayed reciprocal fear among Negroes that angry student demonstrations for the first time could endanger Booker T. Washington’s fabled Atlanta Compromise of 1895, by which Negroes ceded political control to whites in spite of a local numerical advantage of five to one. A sociology professor hoped to “get by Saturday without bloodshed.” John Doar promised to file a Justice Department lawsuit before sundown to address the valid complaints by Foster that segregated Tuskegee restaurants had “turned themselves into sham private clubs in order to avoid Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” President Johnson returned three of the memos with handwritten instructions for aides to call Sammy Younge’s father and President Foster on his behalf, and to “support any action we need to take here.” Only a minute after he scrawled “4:55 P.M.” on his third reply, another inbound memo shifted alarm to the “distressing” new uproar over a “policy statement of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee” about the Younge murder, in which, wrote White House aide Clifford Alexander, “SNCC urged all Americans to seek work in the civil rights movement as a ‘valid alternative to the draft.’” Alexander assured President Johnson that White House officials already were mobilizing Negro leaders to “negate the impact of this story” with countervailing expressions of “wholehearted support” for U.S. war policy in Vietnam. “The most difficult part of the equation is what Martin Luther King will do next,” he added.
Three words transformed the furor again before it reached King. Asked if he supported his organization’s public statement, longtime SNCC communications director Julian Bond told a reporter, “Yes, I do,” which ignited a bonfire around him as one of the first eight Negroes elected to the Georgia House since Reconstruction. Both the Younge murder and war issue receded beneath the sudden glare of headlines suggesting treason. “REP. BOND’S LOYALTY FACES CHALLENGES,” screamed a Southern newspaper. “Georgians Score a Vietnam Critic/ Negro Elected to Georgia Legislature Faces Expulsion Move,” echoed the New York Times. In Los Angeles, where he had flown from Chicago, King deflected the first inquiries—“We are in a dangerous period when we seek to silence dissent”—but later on Saturday was obliged to clear a further statement by telephone for distribution at a full-fledged Atlanta press conference, protesting that segregationists still misread democracy: “It is ironic that some of the prominent persons who now question Mr. Bond’s willingness to uphold the Constitution of the U.S. have failed miserably in this regard.”
Julian Bond himself withdrew into disbelieving seclusion through the whirling drama over his fate. The lieutenant governor of Georgia announced that Bond’s war stance “exactly suits the Kremlin.” A veteran legislator delivered what passed for friendly appraisal of his slim chance to be seated when the House convened Monday: “This boy has got to come before us humbly, recant, and just plain beg a little.” From the Sammy Younge funeral, James Forman barged into all-night Atlanta conclaves to denounce as Uncle Toms all those negotiating a compromise by which Bond might “clarify” his statement more favorably to the war. Intimidating, in his trademark SNCC coveralls and wild spiky hair, Forman angrily dismissed explanations by overwrought elders that practical Georgia politics was different from civil rights, shouting, “I’ve been hearing that shit from white folks all my life!” Bond scarcely spoke even in private—while sharing the spotlight of weekend news with the formal debut in California of gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan*—except that he did beseech the counsel of Ralph Abernathy at a chance encounter near Paschal’s restaurant. “Well,” Abernathy replied with a pastoral sigh, “just do something you can live with.”
On Monday morning, January 10, Bond’s face and arms were blotched with bumps when a clerk in the packed House prefaced the swearing-in ceremony with a solemn announcement: “I will ask Representative Bond to step aside.” To movement colleagues, chronic hives had been a sign of delicate nerves in Bond since his skin broke out on the picket line and on his one trip to jail in 1960. He had confined himself afterward to full-time publicist’s duty behind self-deprecating admissions of acute fear traceable to boyhood relocation in the fearsomely strange white South. “Mother’d ask me to go down to Rich’s to get some clothes, and I’d say, ‘No, no, I got enough clothes now, don’t need any more,’” Bond drolly told friends. “I thought that down here people stopped you on the street and lynched you just for fun.” His father, Atlanta University dean Dr. Horace Mann Bond—formerly the first black president of Lincoln University, the oldest institution of higher learning for black males in the Western world—was nearly as mortified that his son had dropped out of college to join SNCC. “My God, I didn’t raise my boy to be a Georgia legislator,” he moaned in a fretful lapse of reserve during Monday’s hasty political trial on whether to seat his son. “I’d hoped he would go into a more academic occupation.”
To seal the charges thrown together over a compressed weekend, legislators played a telephone interview surreptitiously recorded and submitted by a reporter:
Reporter: Would you say that again, please?
Bond: I said, “Yes, I do.”
Reporter: …In other words, you are willing to stand by this as long as it doesn’t cost you anything, but if it’s going to cost you—you are going to be held in treason—then you can’t stand by it?
Bond: Well, I have to think about it again…. I’m not taking a stand against stopping World Communism, and I’m not taking a stand in favor of the Viet Cong. What I’m saying is that, first, that I don’t believe in that war. That particular war. I’m against all war. I’m against that war in particular, and I don’t think people ought to participate in it. Because I’m against war, I’m against the draft. I think that other countries in the world get along without a draft—England is one—and I don’t see why we couldn’t, too.
Bond’s unsuspecting mild voice echoed Monday night in a cavernous House chamber beneath the gold-plated capitol dome, where he reaffirmed his words under oath despite insistent demands to renounce them. Charles Morgan, one of his lawyers, argued that democratic principles should inform an extraordinary moment to “demonstrate to yourselves, demonstrate to the world abroad that there is freedom here in Georgia…that we can really exercise those rights here,” but a retired legislator thundered back in righteous disbelief: “Is a man qualified to sit in this House who has to think about whether he would commit treason under a given circumstance?” The House voted exclusion by a tidal-wave count that rolled toward front pages nationwide, 187–12. Bond fought back tears, and photographers aimed flashbulbs at his empty seat. James Forman issued a SNCC bulletin after midnight: “Everyone, including Julian, is in a state of shock.”
KING CUT short his Los Angeles trip and flew home to an all-too-familiar overload of trauma. President Johnson sent a telegram of condolence to the family of Vernon Dahmer, whose house in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, was firebombed late Sunday night after Dahmer nnounced on radio that the sheriff agreed to let him collect voter registration forms and supply poll tax loans for fellow Negroes unable to pay. When Dahmer died of seared lungs on the Monday that Bond faced the Georgia House—having held off the gunfire of Klansmen long enough for his wife and daughter to escape the flames—Attorney General Katzenbach released an unusually personal statement from Washington that many Justice Department attorneys had admired Dahmer for exercising “the highest kind of citizenship.” Four Dahmer sons converged from active military duty to mourn in uniform over the burned-out hole of their home. Though he had been unknown at large, and was to be obscured on the list of martyrs, Dahmer was revered among civil rights workers as the stalwart host and surrogate father to endangered pioneers since Bob Moses. Especially for veterans of projects in Mississippi, his murder pounded hard upon the Younge and Bond cases to open a public crack in movement philosophy. “I have simply stopped telling people that they should remain nonviolent,” Stokely Carmichael told Gene Roberts of the New York Times. “This would be tantamount to suicide in Black Belt counties where whites are shooting at Negroes, and it would cost me the respect of the people.”
King spoke to the press after a private conference with Julian Bond. “I have a personal concern about the lack of representation in the 136th District because I live there,” he said, announcing that he would join Bond as co-plaintiff in a federal lawsuit to overturn the exclusion. (The New York Times already reported skepticism among legal experts: “Little Chance Seen for Bond in Court.”) On January 14—Bond’s twenty-sixth birthday, the day before his own thirty-seventh—King led a protest march through downtown Atlanta to the Georgia capitol. Bond stayed home on the instruction of counsel, but his father walked from Ebenezer among the crowd of 1,500 who heard King speak from the back of a flatbed truck in blustery cold rain. He denounced legislators for blatant hypocrisy in their claim to uphold the Constitution. To support Bond’s pacifism, beyond his right to speak, King cited a letter unearthed by historian Arthur Schlesinger among the personal papers of a bitterly war-weary young sailor and future President John F. Kennedy: “War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.”
King declared a collective purpose “to make it clear that we love America…so much that we are going to stand up with all of our might to remind her when she is wrong. We are not newcomers here. We do not have to give our credentials of loyalty. For you see, we worked here and labored for two centuries without wages.” He gained preaching rhythm on his themes of black heritage—“Before the pilgrim fathers landed at Plymouth, we were here…”—accelerated through perorations to go forward “with this faith…” and “let freedom ring…” until Isaiah’s mountains were laid low and “the wrinkled stomachs of Mississippi will be filled” and “Julian Bond will be back in that state legislature.” King closed with the mass chant of a political rally—“We want Julian Bond! We want Julian Bond!”—and left a remnant of marchers to circle the capitol with songs recalling Joshua’s trumpet campaign around ancient Jericho.
On the third circuit, Willie Ricks of SNCC exhorted fifty followers to break open a pathway through the guarded capitol doorways, leading a skirmish that drew gleeful publicity about a woman who struck a trooper with her handbag and unruly Negroes eager to fight everywhere but Vietnam. King issued a pained statement against the breach of nonviolence, but did not swerve from public endorsement of SNCC. “I want it heard loud and clear that I believe in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,” he said, “and I cannot join the chorus of those who are so ready to condemn.” The chorus jeered broadly without him. The Wall Street Journal branded Bond’s position “puerile and repugnant.” Time magazine pronounced the Vietnam statement “typically intemperate.” More sympathetic outlets condemned both Bond and the Georgia House for falling into SNCC’s “trap.” Prominent Atlanta Negroes called for SNCC members to be jailed or drafted to front lines in Vietnam. Even the author Lillian Smith scolded her SNCC friends famously in print for succumbing to “a mixed up mess of 19th century anarchism and 1930s communism…. I’ve warned them; but they don’t listen.”* Roy Wilkins rebuked SNCC on behalf of the NAACP, and Jack Greenberg of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund blocked participation in Bond’s lawsuit behind a defensive claim that Georgia “would have refused to seat a white person for the same reason.”
King knew better—that race powerfully affected standing to criticize war—from the accepted frankness of Senator Richard Russell and others. (Tom Watson, the Populist-turned-Klan-revivalist, had resisted a formally declared World War I as the curse of “our Blood-gorged Capitalists,” and yet stood venerated in heroic bronze on Georgia’s capitol grounds.) King wrestled with Vietnam’s immense gravitational pull on national politics in fitful departures from Sunday’s prepared sermon. “Whether people like it or not, some voices must cry out,” he told Ebenezer, sketching history at a trot—“Vietnam declared itself independent…then came the Geneva Accord…”—apologizing for the capsule detours as he warned against following France into “a war that is at bottom perpetuating white colonialism,” suddenly decrying violence with Isaiah once more: “Get out of my face—don’t pray your long prayers to me—don’t come to me with your eloquent speeches—don’t talk to me about your patriotism—your hands are full of blood.” King begged for citizen education, wisdom, and courage. “Be assured that we will not stop communism with bombs and guns and bullets and napalm,” he declared. “We will stop communism by letting the world know that democracy is a better government than any other government, and by making justice a reality for all of God’s children.” Then he snapped back to his text with a quiet apology. “I didn’t mean to get off on this,” King said, “but every now and then people must hear the truth.”