April–June 1966
TREMORS from the larger world shook the laboratories of new democracy in Alabama. On Sunday afternoon, March 27, five hundred Lowndes County citizens and nearly a hundred SNCC workers gathered “far out in the rurals” to mark a year’s passage since the first stir against terror, with schoolteacher Sarah Logan presiding. She called for the invocation by Rev. R. U. Harrison, whose son had been chased from his pulpit and the county for daring even to mention the vote. She brought on John Hulett to review their birth pains after his caravan flight from the Klan, beginning with the first attempt to register the next day, when Martin Luther King himself had appeared at the courthouse, and the first political meeting in the back of Haralson’s store at night before any church would open to them, when twenty-eight people had dared to form the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights with the strangely miraculous encouragement of white preachers visiting from a pilgrimage trapped behind the “Berlin Wall” in nearby Selma.
“We had to stand for hours in the sun, rain, and the cold” for months after the great march to Montgomery, said Hulett, describing the quest to register. “We had only one attempt to demonstrate. It ended in a tragedy with our losing Jonathan Myrick Daniels of Keene, New Hampshire. We tried to get our people out of jail, but we did not have the money.” After Hulett, and movement songs by youth leaders Timothy Mays and Clara Maul, Logan introduced a small woman billed as the “mother of the civil rights movement” on hand-lettered programs for a “first anniversary” service entitled “No More Chains and Sorrow.” Rosa Parks, having braved the trip from her Detroit home to the backwoods church in Lowndes, praised a political awakening among the most oppressed people of her former state.
Loudspeakers transmitted her words to an overflow crowd outside, where anxious sentries eyeing distant surveillance cars also waited to serve hot food from the back of a station wagon. After Parks came young Julian Bond of Atlanta as living proof that they could aspire not only to vote for the first time but also to be elected. Bond quoted poet Sterling Brown on the passing of the hangman’s era and Frederick Douglass on the need for constant agitation—as in his case pending before the Supreme Court. “I’m not sure of the future,” said Bond, “but the people in Lowndes County realize that the way we’ve done things in the past has been a mistake.” Stokely Carmichael followed with a fiery reprise on his year among them. Declaring the recent repeal of the “White Supremacy” slogan nothing more than a cosmetic change for the Alabama Democratic Party, he strongly urged that new Lowndes voters use the May 3 primary day to select their own slate for local offices. No one yet volunteered to be the first Negro candidate, but many of the crowd returned on Saturday, April 2, to take preliminary steps. They voted to create an “independent structure” called the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, adopting bylaws, a symbol, and other formalities required to begin a county-wide political party under Title 17, Section 337 of the Alabama Code. They elected six officers, including financial secretary Ruthie Mae Jones and vice chairman R. S. Strickland. “Once you get power,” said chairman Hulett, “you don’t have to beg.”
Alabama native John Lewis had been agitating separately toward the black vote—for South Africans—and was arrested with colleagues James Forman, Bill Hall, Cleveland Sellers, and Willie Ricks in South Africa’s imposing consulate on Madison Avenue. Their vanguard sit-in remained obscure, being some twenty years before mass demonstrations stirred popular hope for imprisoned Nelson Mandela against apartheid itself, but Harry Belafonte paid bail for the five SNCC pioneers only days before he toured Europe. French actors Yves Montand and Simone Signoret hosted Belafonte and Martin Luther King on March 28 at a sold-out festival of music and speech in Paris. Swedish scholar Gunnar Myrdal, author of the authoritative 1940s study on race, An American Dilemma, presented them in Stockholm to King Gustav VI, who welcomed their joint program at the Royal Opera House as a national honor. Tickets for March 31 had vanished within a half-hour in February, and they agreed to a repeat performance on April 3. An ad hoc network relayed television broadcasts throughout Northern Europe, including Finland. The post office of Sweden established a unified mailing address for SCLC. The Bank of Sweden publicized an ongoing special account for civil rights contributions, and transferred initial proceeds of at least $100,000.
Spectacular success in Europe muffled tensions across the Atlantic Ocean all the way back into Alabama. King’s original church sponsors in Paris had canceled less than two weeks before the engagement under a cloud of government displeasure, and a last-minute appeal had yielded the emergency rescue led by artists. Actors Peter O’Toole of England and Melina Mercouri of Greece joined the French stars to commandeer a substitute venue ten times larger. Secretary of State Rusk ordered Ambassador Charles “Chip” Bohlen not to attend the reconstituted King-Belafonte event in Paris, and, as a precaution against Vietnam controversy, Ambassador Graham Parsons canceled plans to greet King at the airport in Stockholm. A soothing report from the U.S. embassy later found that the high-profile visit “did not create any difficulties for the American image here,” because King was “quite explicit” to say he opposed Vietnam as a matter of individual conscience rather than as a political priority for the civil rights movement. His conflicted restraint satisfied nervous sponsors of the Swedish gala, diplomats added, at the cost of press criticism that “King wears a muzzle” on the war in Vietnam.
KING RETURNED home April 10 buoyed by the dramatic rally of support overseas and determined to break through hesitancy that had been eating at him since the debates at SCLC’s convention in August. He pressed his SCLC executive board to take an official stance on Vietnam at the semiannual meeting in Miami, and announced the favorable result there on April 13. “It is imperative to end a war that has played havoc with our domestic destinies,” King told reporters. The approved resolution committed SCLC on nonviolent principle. “If we are true to our own ideals,” it stated, “we have no choice but to abandon the military junta under such manifestly vigorous popular opposition. We believe the moment is now opportune, and the need urgent, to reassess our position and seriously examine the wisdom of prompt withdrawal.” The words “abandon” and “withdrawal” vaulted past Robert Kennedy’s explosive call for negotiations, and landed King on the front pages without quite the voltage of a potential contender for the White House. The initial New York Times story noted that Vietnam dissent had nearly bankrupted SNCC, and cited a national poll in which 41 percent of Americans said dissent from that quarter made them feel “less in favor of civil rights for Negroes.” Several of King’s allies dismissed him archly to the Times for making “the greatest of mistakes to mix domestic civil rights and foreign policy.”
FBI wiretaps picked up Stanley Levison’s pragmatic assessment of infighting between and within civil rights groups. He observed that King’s peers were delighted to see him “sticking his neck out” on Vietnam. “Roy [Wilkins] and Whitney [Young] have snuggled up to Johnson,” he told Clarence Jones. “Martin is now in a different relationship to the White House than he used to be. They are on the inside, and I think they love it.” To Levison, this much was normal politics. He aimed for a long-range view of movement progress, and indeed wanted King to compliment the FBI for arresting thirteen Mississippi Klansmen recently to break open the Vernon Dahmer firebomb murder case. (“J. Edgar Hoover may dislike Martin intensely,” Levison said on the tapped line, “but his men are now doing the job in the field.”) What disturbed Levison was an internal breach with Bayard Rustin, who was “sore” at King for pushing the Vietnam resolution. The friction exceeded prior jockeying among advisers who shared bruises and miracles alike from service close to King. Rustin had grounded his idealism and tactical genius in nonviolence for more than thirty years, choosing prison over service in World War II, and it seemed inexplicable that he of all people would change his compass during an epochal surge of vindication and promise. Levison thought Rustin accommodated the war to protect his new stature in mainstream politics. Rustin said mature democracy demanded compromise at home and abroad.
King primed a new movement campaign while laboring to harvest practical results from the one just behind. Several trips after a perfunctory introduction to Mayor Daley, he left Chicago again on April 28 for what turned out to be his final meeting at the White House—a pep talk from President Johnson on the formal civil rights message to Congress, which received there a tepid response—then scurried south to give four speeches late into the same night on a get-out-the-vote push for the May 3 Alabama primary. From Montgomery at breakneck speed, he covered 825 miles to give nine speeches in scattered rural churches on Friday, April 29. At the second stop, in Wilcox County, 1,500 newly registered voters waited under a scorching sun outside Antioch Baptist Church, where movement supporter David Colson had been shot dead in January. “If they aren’t afraid to come to hear Dr. King,” SCLC organizer Dan Harrell told reporters, “they won’t be afraid to vote.” An afternoon rainstorm caught King far behind schedule as always, trotting across a field toward a Marengo County church between his two oldest children, Yolanda and Marty, flanked by Fred Shuttlesworth and Hosea Williams.
Opposing forces scrambled to master a new electorate. No fewer than nine white men ran for governor against George Wallace’s “stand-in” wife, Lurleen, with black registration already doubled to 240,000 under the Voting Rights Act. Attorney General Richmond Flowers, publicly recognized as “the first major white candidate in modern times to campaign directly among the Negro people in a Deep South state,” pledged to haul down the Confederate Battle Flag as a symbol of defiance rather than progress. SCLC ran workshops on rudimentary politics for the first fifty-four Negroes to qualify as candidates in a Democratic primary. A movement journal published a signal photograph of one kissing a baby. A grizzled out-of-state incumbent advised them to expect no quarter and accept only cash contributions. Church women taught new voters how to mark ballots. Newspapers erratically scolded Negroes as foolish rookies when two of them ran for the same office, as craven supplicants when a Tuskegee group endorsed the white sheriff over a Negro, and as sinister robots when reporters detected a potential “Negro voting bloc.”
Hosea Williams had assumed the role of slate-maker. “We must let the Negro vote hang there like a ripe fruit,” he told one crowd, his arms raised to mime the caress of a vineyard inspector, “and whoever is willing to give the Negro the most freedom can pluck it.” As King’s deputy for Alabama, he asserted primacy over traditional Negro leaders in deciding whether to broker deals with white moderates or push selected Negro candidates. “We’ve got the Black Belt sewed up,” he said, declaring unabashedly that whoever registered voters should control them. Editors at The Southern Courier, a small newspaper formed by Freedom Summer volunteers, chided his overbearing ways in an editorial: “Have a Seat, Hosea…but give him a hand as he goes, folks.” They reminded readers that each voter was “the anvil” of democratic trust and responsibility. “Remember that the choice in the end is yours,” they wrote, “and you do not have to vote the way you have said you were going to vote. No one can control your vote if you make up your own mind.” King echoed their advice with pleas above all for a large turnout. He avoided Lowndes County, and did not join the vituperation by Williams and others against its resolve to work outside the Democratic primary.
Sadly, the New York Times out-bossed even Hosea Williams. Fixed upon the “exciting, precedent-breaking” opportunity to defeat “old-line segregationists” behind Lurleen Wallace, the paper called late in April for Negroes to “fuse their strength with liberal white voters” in the Democratic primary race for governor, and aimed a laser of rebuke at Negroes who adopted a different political strategy. A lead editorial branded the Lowndes County plan to run an independent slate of local candidates a pointless “boycott,” as though the sharecroppers and canvassers risking their lives to vote for the first time, under conditions scarcely imaginable in New York, were madly possessed to throw away the ballot itself. The article, “Sabotage in Alabama,” perceived in SNCC workers only “destructive mischief-making…a rule-or-ruin attitude…extremism for the sake of extremism…a revolutionary posture toward all of society and Government.” The editors might well have paid tribute to a year of miraculous new citizenship in the county that killed Viola Liuzzo and Jonathan Daniels. Instead, America’s best newspaper—long a voice of authority sympathetic to civil rights—recognized no competing priorities or capacity for basic self-government. To portray the Lowndes County movement as frivolous vandals against the right to vote, the Times blotted out yearnings and exertions toward freedom seldom matched since Valley Forge. Such dismissal helped provoke black power conflict and rebellion soon to grip the whole country.
THE MAY 3 primary races showcased colorful politics at the historic divide. Lurleen Wallace, Alabama’s first female candidate for governor, sought to become only the third woman to hold that office in the United States. Her husband, George, pledged daily to “tote the wood and draw the water at the governor’s mansion,” quoting Governor Edward “Pa” Ferguson’s successful 1924 campaign for Miriam “Ma” Ferguson in Texas. Wallace had picked up Ferguson yarns from President Johnson at a governors’ briefing on Vietnam. He now omitted the word “segregation” from stump speeches, reporters noted, but pointedly renounced an agreement to integrate mental hospitals. Wallace said Washington’s “dictatorial” conditions for federal support insulted all Alabama, and so did Richard Nixon’s barb that the state was running “a dime-store girl for governor.” (The former Vice President demeaned the candidate’s only former employment in the hope that a Wallace family failure would forestall a third-party presidential bid for 1968, which third-party failure would help Republicans retain the Deep South Goldwater states.) Other public voices complained that federal “occupation” under the Voting Rights Act treated Alabama like “some kind of banana republic.” Attorney General Katzenbach did his best to hide civil servants being trained to safeguard new Negro voters at the polls—“I am attempting to do the least that I can safely do without upsetting the civil rights groups,” he assured President Johnson—and he quietly concentrated observers in Selma for the high-visibility showdown between challenger Wilson Baker and incumbent Sheriff Jim Clark.
John Doar diverted Justice Department lawyer Charles Nesson into last-minute negotiations over the Lowndes County nominating convention. “If we do not hear from you, or if the US Government does not find itself able to protect the participants,” Stokely Carmichael petitioned Doar, “we shall be forced to look to such resources as we can muster on our own.” On April 26, Sheriff Frank Ryals had forbidden access to the Hayneville courthouse, but Carmichael, citing Alabama law that founders of a local party must convene “in or around a public polling place on the day of the primary,” pressed a right to use the county’s only qualifying site. Ryals bluntly informed Nesson that it would be more than dangerous enough in Lowndes County for the first ordinary black voters, and any convention of Negroes on the courthouse lawn would become a “turkey shoot.” John Hulett insisted they had no choice. Rattled, Nesson dashed between Selma and Montgomery for ideas to avert a disaster.
The freedom organization meanwhile continued nightly mass meetings, and SNCC research director Jack Minnis finished local workshops on practical government. He used illustrated booklets to explore simple questions—“How does voting work?” “What is politics?”—plus primers and statute books for leadership seminars. New rivals for a “freedom nomination” addressed the packed candidates’ forum at Mr. Moriah Church. “Vote for me and I’ll stand up for fair treatment,” declared Jesse “Note” Favors, whose opponent, Sidney Logan, vowed to wipe out the ingrained fear of the sheriff’s uniform. The children of bricklayer John Hinson, who was running for a seat on the board of education, handed out paper cutouts of a schoolhouse marked “Vote for Hinson.” Some speakers wrestled regrets about missing their first vote for governor to nominate local candidates instead. Others jumped up to testify when Hulett relayed official warnings that a party convention meant suicide. “We been walkin’ with dropped down heads, a scrunched up heart, and a timid body in the bushes, but we ain’t scared anymore!” cried an old farmer who urged the crowd not to meddle or pick a fight, but to stand. “If you have to die, die for something,” he said, “and take somebody before you.”
Nesson returned on Sunday, May 1 with a proposal to relocate from the courthouse to a black church near Hayneville, where the convention, though still unguarded, would be less inflammatory to white voters on primary day. An emergency movement caucus rejected his verbal assurance that the change would be legal. Any judge who disagreed could strike their slate from the November ballot, Hulett replied, and his people would take their chances at the courthouse unless Alabama authorities specified in writing that the church met the statutory requirement to be “in or around a public polling place.” The renewed standoff obliged Nesson and cohorts to chase down Attorney General Richmond Flowers in the final sprint of his own campaign. To sign the proposed legal finding would encourage withdrawal from the Democratic primary, which would cost him votes for governor, and any accommodation to Negroes would further alienate white voters. On the other hand, Flowers knew from the Liuzzo and Daniels trials that he may not have a single white supporter in Lowndes County anyway, and his own fearful experience had kindled nagging admiration for the besieged movement. Flowers signed, and Nesson rushed the legal opinion back for posting at the Hayneville courthouse by three o’clock on Monday afternoon, May 2. Joyful news for Hulett reverted instantly to pressure. Less than a day remained to spread notice of the site switch across seven hundred square miles of plantations with few cars and virtually no telephones.
ON THE climactic primary morning, John Doar supervised five hundred federal observers in Dallas County. From Selma, where lines stretched back from the courthouse to Brown Chapel before the polls opened, he drove eighteen miles to find the tiny hamlet of Orville flooded with rural Negroes waiting to cast their first votes. The turnout jumped above 17,000, nearly triple the county norm, and voters across the state surmounted hardships in combustible crowds. Parents carried “Stand Up for Alabama” pamphlets that Governor Wallace had distributed through the students at every white school. An election official blamed the Negroes for delays, charging that one confused voter lingered in a booth for twenty-eight minutes. Negroes in Wilcox County complained that false information about a polling place ended only when voting equipment was spotted at Harvey’s Fish Camp, a bait shop decidedly unfriendly to them, but local women soon passed out fried chicken to boost morale along the line. In Birmingham, an old man who fainted in the hot sun refused an ambulance until he could “pull that lever” on what might be his last chance, and others waiting late into the night built fires to keep warm. A woman with a “Vote Wallace” sign stood hours behind a man wearing a “Grow with Flowers” button.
Nerves started tight at First Baptist Church in Hayneville, half a mile from the courthouse. A farmer fidgeted with three shotgun shells in his overalls. FBI agents took photographs, and reporters interviewed SNCC leaders from Atlanta and Mississipi. At three o’clock, having received final instructions, supporters of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization spilled outside the church into a roped-off area where movement clerks verified names against the county’s list of registered voters with poll taxes paid to date. “We wanted to make it all legal,” Carmichael announced. Those approved filed past seven stations to vote separately for each local office. For voters who wanted to match names with faces, the competing candidates themselves smiled from designated spots nearby. Voices on a bullhorn kept repeating the most important legal notice: no one should vote who intended to participate also in the Democratic primary, as overlaps could invalidate the entire freedom ticket. Groans answered reports that more than a hundred Negroes were voting at the courthouse. Volunteers collected the completed ballots—each one headed with the official black panther emblem and creed, “One Man, One Vote”—and placed them into cardboard boxes on the seven wooden tables. Worry turned slowly to relief among voters milling in the churchyard to await the count, mostly sharecropper men in Sunday hats and women in earrings and print dresses. Scattered SNCC workers sang freedom songs. “We’re making history, that’s right,” an old woman repeated to herself. Jumping to the church steps, Willie Ricks praised the “bad niggers” of Lowndes County in a comically triumphant speech before Hulett called everyone back inside to announce the nominees. John Hinson defeated Mrs. Virginia White for the school board 511–327. Mrs. Alice Moore received 852 votes running unopposed for tax assessor (“Tax the rich to feed the poor, that’s my slogan”). Sidney Logan, having defeated Note Favors 492–381, accepted the nomination with brief remarks that he had wanted to run for sheriff since Deputy Lux Jackson and his gun had shooed them away from their first attempt to register.
A bigger story obliterated the Lowndes County initiative before the polls closed. “It’s a Lurleen Landslide!” declared an early edition of the Montgomery Advertiser dotted with cutlines of shock: “Exuberant Wallace…Ecstatic…Smiles, Hugs…No Runoff.” From the Jefferson Davis ballroom, Governor Wallace hailed a mandate “to return constitutional government to this country.” By contrast, Martin Luther King glumly observed from Birmingham’s Thomas Jefferson Hotel that “white Alabamians are desperately grasping for a way to return to the old days of white supremacy.” The editor of the Advertiser expressed amazement that “literally, most all white Alabamians voted for [Lurleen] Wallace.” Her vote far exceeded that of the nine male contenders combined, and nearly tripled that of second-place Richmond Flowers. With his heavy black support, the Attorney General had calculated that he could become governor with only 21 percent of the white vote, but so crushing was his loss that the New York Times said “it may be many years…before any serious Alabama politician will risk a close political identification with the Negro.” Stung by the results, Times editors wisely took solace in the huge biracial turnout: “The fact of overwhelming importance about Alabama’s primary was its peacefulness.”
Only a student newspaper and one small socialist journal reported a tiny gush of black optimism for November’s general election. “We’re going to take power in Lowndes County and rule,” an ebullient Stokely Carmichael predicted on primary night. “We don’t even want to integrate…. Integration is a subterfuge for white supremacy.” Farmers intent cities were pulling off a miracle of civic organization to put their candidates on the ballot, argued Courtland Cox, and the Times “has a hell of a lot of nerve” to excoriate them for sacrificing a handful of anti-Wallace votes in the Democratic primary. “It’s not our job to get Wallace out of the party,” added Carmichael. “Did they ask the Jews to reform the Nazi Party?” He said the four-to-one black majority in Lowndes opened a new political phase of the movement. “Nonviolence is irrelevant,” he declared. “What King has working for him is a moral force, but we’re building a force to take power. We’re not a protest movement.”
Alabama’s primary day raised three distinct waves of euphoria. The broad civil rights coalition celebrated one cliffhanger victory only after Justice Department lawyers beat back weeks of courthouse attempts to steal, impound, and disqualify ballot boxes from six minority precincts in the Dallas County sheriff’s race. To John Doar, the final, supervised count was the culmination of a career struggle in public service to establish voting rights and law in mutual support above the long, hard disillusionment of race—in this case by securing for Wilson Baker his fair margin of victory over the virulent segregationist Jim Clark. Separately, on the center stage of Alabama politics, Governor Wallace asserted his full hegemony by summoning both U.S. senators and all eight representatives to stand mute while he read a proclamation pledged to defy freedom-of-choice desegregation guidelines for the 1966–67 school year as a “totalitarian” blueprint “devised by socialists” in Washington, “which has as its objectives the capture and regimentation of our children and the destruction of our public education system.” Almost simultaneously, SNCC staff members rolled from Hayneville into Tennessee with a notion to treat all of America like Lowndes County.
Jack Minnis lobbied quietly for Stokely Carmichael to unseat John Lewis as national chairman during SNCC’s annual meeting at a wooded church camp in Kingston Springs, near Nashville. Carmichael agreed to run, furious that Lewis had campaigned for Richmond Flowers without once coming to support the unique Lowndes gamble sanctioned by his own organization, but a powerful ethos of shared risk and camaraderie discouraged personal ambition. Leadership in SNCC was considered an accident or distraction never to be sought, and no one spoke openly of the contest. Instead, all through the second week in May, young movement veterans buried internal politics within their marathon strategy debates. They labored to remember and revise the founding assumptions of college students caught up in six years of upheaval since the 1960 sit-ins. “We assumed that we could forget history,” one confessed, “because we were different.” Charlie Cobb recalled a shared sense of responsibility to bring injustice into the healing light of government attention. As late as 1963, a mission “to free men’s minds” for equality had been accepted across the SNCC’s broad spectrum of personality, from skeptical power analyst Courtland Cox to Christian mystic Charles Sherrod. “We assumed that this country is really a democracy, which just isn’t working,” said Carmichael. “We had no concept of how brutal it could be if we started messing it up.”
Ivanhoe Donaldson argued that “interracial democracy” had become too vague a purpose now that the whole country gave it lip service, and pushed for organizing targeted “pockets of power” like the Bond campaign in Atlanta. James Forman advocated a world perspective on colonialism. Ardent racialists objected that SNCC had nothing to learn from white men like Karl Marx. Shrewd dialecticians explored worlds of meaning inside the word “vote,” from the structure and process of raw politics to bonds of “consciousness” between citizens. Attacks on the forthcoming White House Conference indirectly struck at Lewis, who had attended the planning sessions, but Lewis had proved himself no stooge of President Johnson by his vehement opposition to the war in Vietnam. Conflict tore at Bob Mants among many others. He could not reconcile the Carmichael who “talked black” in Lowndes County with the loyalist who defended some forty white staff members from proposals to make SNCC an all-black vanguard. Mants pleaded with Carmichael not to abandon him for the tinsel glory of a national office. While angry with Lewis for ignoring their work in Lowndes, Mants still took comfort behind Lewis’s steadfast courage on Pettus Bridge. With talks exhausted toward midnight on May 13, Carmichael supporters made perfunctory, half-joking nomination speeches in the face of the chair’s heartfelt desire to stay on, and Lewis won reelection to a fourth term 60–22. Carmichael himself voted for the incumbent with a shrug.
Worth Long of Arkansas, having arrived late from Mississippi with Julius Lester, a quick-witted SNCC worker from Fisk University, gained the floor to ask what just happened, and his awed response silenced the hall. “John Lewis?” Long frowned. “How’d y’all do that? You can’t do that.” Jack Minnis, who seldom spoke in meetings, vented his frustration that the candid objection came too late to do any good. “Sorry ’bout that, white boss,” retorted Long, who jumped from exposed personal ground to a procedural outburst: “I challenge this election!” He accused Forman of allowing the vote to proceed on sentimental regard for Lewis once half the staff members had slipped off to bed. In pandemonium, while some rushed to summon absentees and others fumbled for the bylaws, Minnis quickly devised a plan to revive Carmichael by turning SNCC culture in his favor. Accordingly, Cleveland Sellers resigned as national program secretary to make way for a clarifying revote, and Ruby Doris Robinson likewise relinquished her fresh mandate to replace Forman as executive secretary. When Lewis adamantly rejected pressure to follow suit, he broke the spell of deference. Previously sheepish voices said he hungered too much for office. Some confessed a tacit consensus that he had not represented SNCC’s evolving independence for at least two years. Wounded, Lewis soon lashed out at unjust conspirators, then pleaded that Carmichael was not a Southerner. Several articulate Northerners retorted that Lewis was a copy of his hero Martin Luther King, and wincing admirers wished he did not invite the comparison. Worth Long later asserted that Lewis “was finished” when he fell back on his commitment to nonviolence.
By dawn on Saturday, May 14, Lewis stood painfully isolated among those who stripped him of reelection. Julian Bond, who avoided the endless staff sessions whenever possible, publicly announced the result from Atlanta as “just a normal organizational change,” and the shift in student leadership attracted modest press notice. One story found Lewis to be “obviously shaken by his defeat” at the hands of those who favored “third-party politics for Southern Negroes.” The National Guardian disclosed that Stokely Carmichael had acquired the nickname “Delta Devil” for his fast-driving getaways in Mississippi. A New York Times profile identified the new chairman as a twenty-four-year-old “organizer of Alabama’s all-Negro ‘Black Panther’ political party,” and characterized his philosophy on a spectrum reserved for civil rights figures: “Mr. Carmichael does not advocate violence, but neither does he believe in turning the other cheek.”
MARTIN LUTHER King contained troubles through the week of the SNCC elections. Rivals from the Blackstone Rangers and East Side Disciples exchanged gunfire inside a Chicago YMCA just before he arrived for a speech on May 13. King defended as a setback what critics took as definitive proof of lunacy in James Bevel’s effort to convert the notorious street gangs into nonviolent brigades. Stanley Levison, visiting from New York, privately admired “the instinctive drama” of SCLC staff members who ran the gang workshops, and predicted that James Orange, the fearsome-looking teenager recruited from the 1963 Birmingham demonstrations, would become “a living legend” for his work in Chicago. Orange had taken nine beatings to prove his nonviolent discipline to gang members who respected his hulking three-hundred-pound frame and convincing street wisdom. “The people in the North are more beaten down,” Orange observed.
Levison huddled in King’s Hamlin Avenue tenement rooms over launch delays for the Chicago demonstrations. King had abandoned the slum “trusteeship” under legal pressure, in part because his Chicago lawyer, Chauncey Eskridge, turned out to own substandard ghetto property himself. Levison pushed for consolidation of SCLC to avert a deficit he projected at $450,000 for 1966 in spite of the windfall from Europe. This was five times his most recent estimate and nearly half SCLC’s annual budget. Levison detected a sudden adverse shift in the country. “The Vietnamese War is increasingly seizing the emotions of people,” he advised. “The impression that people gained [is] that the civil rights struggle is over…. Finally, the recent stock market decline has an effect.” (The Dow Jones Industrial Average would not recover its April 1966 peak of 995.15 for sixteen years, until 1982.) His warning of massive layoffs or swift bankruptcy was firm—“Dear Martin…. The publicity that would ensue would be a disaster for both the organization and you personally”—and King resolved to take drastic action by the end of the month. King said other groups fared even worse, confiding that CORE had just begged him for a $28,000 loan to forestall government seizure of its office furniture for delinquent payroll taxes. Publicly, King renewed his commitment to begin a new march soon. “If anywhere,” he declared, “it is in Chicago that the grapes of wrath are stored.”
The new SNCC chairman, Stokely Carmichael, presented a novel guest speaker in Berkeley on May 21, then again in Los Angeles the next day. John Hulett, on his first trip west, took it as a calming sign that the sun poked through dark clouds the moment he faced a giant rally of the Vietnam Day Committee. “There was something in Alabama a few months ago they called fear,” he said. He introduced Lowndes County in simple sentences, ending with a detailed story of the May 3 primary. To answer curiosity about the local party emblem, he described the black panther as a creature who retreats “backwards, backwards, and backwards into his corner, and then he comes out to destroy everything that’s before him. Negroes in Lowndes County have been pushed back through the years,” said Hulett. “We have been deprived of our rights to speak, to move, and to do whatever we want to do at all times. And now we are going to start moving.”
Hulett’s panther speeches created a stir within California movement circles, but Ruby Doris Robinson made national news from Atlanta by rejecting President Johnson’s invitation to Washington for June 1. Her press statement on May 23 called the grand White House Conference on civil rights a “useless endeavor” and pronounced the federal government “not serious about insuring constitutional rights to black Americans,” then stated that SNCC invitees “cannot in good conscience meet with the chief policy maker of the Vietnam War to discuss human rights in this country when he flagrantly violates the human rights of colored people in Vietnam.” Asked whether the snub of Johnson meant desegregation was no longer a goal, Robinson replied that white people must initiate integration from now on. “We been head-lifted and upstarted into white societies all our lives, and we’re tired of that,” she said. “And what we need is black power.” She presented Lowndes County as the model of an independent black movement. (In her crossfire with scandalized reporters, the unfamiliar name came out variously as “Loudon” and “Lawson.”) Columnists Evans and Novak cut through press interpretations with a May 25 attack on “the extreme black racists” led by Carmichael.
Questions about SNCC’s attitude chased King to Chicago, overwhelming his formal announcement on May 27 that a protest coalition of some 163 organizations had agreed to begin the “action phase” of the movement against slums, “which we hope will dramatize the problems and call forth a solution.” He tried to buffer any threatened turn from integration as the inevitable sign of “discontent and even despair,” and patiently explained that separatist strategies never had attracted more than token support among the mass of American Negroes. King outlined the schedule for a “mammoth” first march down State Street on June 26 to present goals and demands whether Mayor Daley accepted them or not, “if I have to tack them on the door.”
King shuttled between Chicago and Washington. “I always hate to talk about violence,” he said on the May 29 broadcast of Face the Nation as reporters pressed him exclusively on that subject. Did he accept predictions of summer riots worse than Watts, “and what do you intend to do about it?” Did he agree with “the most militant of the civil rights organizations” that “integration is irrelevant,” or feel eclipsed by SNCC’s intention to “take the battle for civil rights into the streets” and “be a lot more militant than leaders like you wish to be?” Did he still believe in the face of widespread criticism “that your position on our getting out of Vietnam is necessary for you to take?” King resisted on all fronts the implication that “militancy” carried stronger conviction or a more powerful effect than nonviolence: “Well, I hate to put it like that…. We must be militantly nonviolent.” He repeated his opposition to war as an engine of hatred: “I know that where your heart is there your money will go, and the heart of many people in the Administration and others happens to be in Vietnam.”
King rushed back to Chicago for two days of movement sessions interrupted by an audience that consumed much of May 31. Pacifist leader A. J. Muste had arranged for him to meet the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who had written King a year earlier about the Buddhist concept of nonviolent self-immolation. They conferred privately on religion and the latest crises in South Vietnam. (Five more monks burned themselves in protest of lethal raids on Buddhist pagodas by the military government, and angry students were destroying the American consulate in Hue.) Afterward, they held an impromptu press conference at the Sheraton-Chicago Hotel that attracted perplexed notice in the Tribune: “King Equates Rights Fight with Monks.” The two men flew to Washington on separate missions—King for the White House Conference and Thich Nhat Hanh for a tour of witness against war.
The new Vietnamese exile fasted with Rabbi Abraham Heschel and Father Daniel Berrigan. He meditated with the Trappist author Thomas Merton, who became convinced that the Buddhist was “more my brother than many who are nearer to me by race and nationality, because he and I see things exactly the same way.” He met privately with Secretary McNamara for thirty-three minutes, generating a small Washington Post story that began as follows: “The purple-robed Buddhist monk, a small, delicate Vietnamese poet, faced a group of American reporters dressed in gray and brown business suits at the Mayflower yesterday.” Thich Nhat Hanh identified himself as an anti-Communist who mourned destruction by 300,000 “dollar-making people” at war in his country of peasants, 80 percent of them Buddhist. “Now the U.S. has become too afraid of the communists to allow a peaceful confrontation with them to take place,” he wrote, “and when you are afraid, you cannot win.”
THE WHITE House Conference, “To Fulfill These Rights,” was born a living anachronism on the first two days in June. A year’s gestation made it too awkward to celebrate and too big to hide, full of new burdens turned heavy while ancient ones retained stubborn vigor. Many of the 2,400 delegates arrived at Washington’s Sheraton-Park Hotel touched by the apt parable of a Vietnam casualty just refused burial in his home state. “My son was not a shoeshine boy like his father,” nurse Annie Mae Williams had complained. “He was a soldier, a paratrooper in the Green Berets.” Neither the Justice Department nor the Third Army’s funeral assistance unit could secure a plot in the hometown cemetery of Wetumpka, Alabama, where Mayor Demp Thrash said the Negro section was full, and the flag-draped coffin sat for a week in limbo until federal authorities made space for Private First Class Jimmy Williams far across the Georgia line on May 30, among Union graves at the notorious Confederate prison in Andersonville. “Negro G.I.’s Burial Placates Mother,” noted the Times. Elsewhere, the Mississippi Senate narrowly defeated a bill to disperse Negroes into other states, and Virginia’s Supreme Court unanimously upheld the criminal sentence of Mildred and Richard Loving for marital “corruption of the blood.” The latter decision opened to federal appeal the statutes in sixteen states that flatly outlawed interracial marriage, along with subtler “family purity” laws in several others.*
Outside the Sheraton-Park, SNCC supporters and New York activists carried protest signs—“Save Us from Our Negro Leaders,” “Uncle Toms!” Derisive cries of “Black Jesus!” singled out King in the throng of entering delegates, and several white students who tried to join the all-black picket line told reporters they were not offended to be turned away. White House aides exchanged calls and messages about the dangers of revolt, updating Harry McPherson’s memo of worry that “the conference might be demoralized by dissent, by angry radical factions, or by a sense of futility on the part of the Negro participants.” On calmer soundings, a motorcade ventured from the White House at 9:40 P.M. on the night of June 1. First sight of the unscheduled entrance brought the guests to their feet in a continuous shout of “LBJ! LBJ!” as the President shook hands in the great banquet hall, lingering briefly with King, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and conference chairman Ben Heineman, a railroad executive from Chicago.
The President’s short speech set a tone of humble realism. He said the struggle for full equality “does not require that righteous anger be silenced.” He said no one should “expect us, even together, to put right in one year or four all that took centuries to make wrong.” Then he declared himself in one sentence: “I do pledge this—to give my days, and such talents as I have been given, to the pursuit of justice and opportunity for those so long denied them.” A standing tribute began a barrage of seventeen ovations that punctuated his recital of enduring goals since Selma. To close, Johnson deliberately broke status protocol that made it taboo for any speaker to follow a sitting President. He honored the pioneers of civil rights by introducing to the podium one of their own, his new Solicitor General of the United States, Thurgood Marshall, and the motorcade returned from thundering acclaim to the White House by 10:32 P.M. “In the light of his car, his eyes were large and his face almost incandescent with the pleasure of an unexpected and flawless triumph,” wrote McPherson. “It was about the last one he would have.”
Johnson had engineered a wondrous truce. Louis Martin, the shrewd minority aide he inherited from Truman and Kennedy, packed the conference rooms with security monitors and sprinkled the corridors with attractive female college students who dispensed goodwill Hawaiian leis. A loose debate structure fostered short, disconnected statements about race from the massive array of delegates. There were Rockefellers from three states alongside hundreds of jail veterans and movement workers. James Meredith shared the floor with the segregationist Governor Paul Johnson, who had barred him from Ole Miss. Jet magazine marveled to see “towering” Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics sitting beside Rev. J. H. Jackson, King’s pulpit nemesis in Chicago. (“Why don’t you picket him?” Chauncey Eskridge quipped to students of Jackson.) One delegate proposed a racism inquest on “America’s number one untouchable sacred cow,” J. Edgar Hoover. Another disavowed hope so long as the cost of war was headed up from $14 billion in Vietnam and down from $1.4 billion on poverty. The conference staff steered the action agenda away from tripwire controversy over budgets or the Negro family, which left Daniel Moynihan “a silent, unnoticed delegate” in the Times account. Delegates sustained Deputy U.N. Ambassador James Nabrit by a ten-to-one margin when he declared a rump motion on Vietnam to be out of order, which provided the closing banner headline atop the June 3 Washington Post: “Rights Session Rejects a Viet Pullout.”
Reporters noticed that King was “conspicuously missing” from photograph sessions to begin the second day. He remained in his hotel room, hurt by Thurgood Marshall’s victory speech that championed law to the exclusion of nonviolent movements past or future: “I submit that the history of the Negro demonstrates the importance of getting rid of hostile laws, and seeking the security of new, friendly laws.” Though accustomed to much saltier private criticism from Marshall, who once called him “a boy on a man’s errand,” and who still disparaged his “missionary” marches as a nuisance, King sagged under the cumulative evidence that he was being smothered to safeguard an official definition of freedom. He resisted staff entreaties to leave Washington early, fearing that segregationists would seize upon any whisper of disaffection, and regained composure to be “totally ignored” among the delegates. “Indeed,” wrote biographer David L. Lewis, “his wife came nearer to making a contribution to the proceedings when she was asked to sing.”
King returned home to preach from Isaiah 61 about religion’s core mission “to heal the broken-hearted.” (“You see, broken-heartedness is not a physical condition,” he told the Ebenezer congregation. “It’s the condition of spiritual exhaustion.”) He ordered all but a remnant of the Alabama SCLC staff to be dismantled by Tuesday, one week after the runoff primary confirmed only a seed of promise within the Wallace landslide. Lucius Amerson of Tuskegee won the Democratic nomination and presumptive election in November to become Alabama’s first Negro sheriff since Reconstruction—and vowed exuberantly to integrate his deputies “if I can find qualified white people who are willing to serve”—but other Negro candidates fell to fear and inexperience. A rarely subdued Hosea Williams, loath to be consolidated into Chicago under a cloud of failure, improvised a bittersweet parting hymn with seventy paid workers: “No more Alabama, over me…”
On Saturday, June 4, King and Coretta visited the prestigious Cathedral of St. Philip in Atlanta, center of protest since an affiliated Episcopal school rejected young Marty King’s application to third grade in 1963, citing his race. No one yet knew that the segregation policy would give way for September of 1967. The Kings comforted two priests finishing a week-long protest vigil inside the doorway.
ROBERT KENNEDY landed that Saturday night in Johannesburg with a traveling party reduced to two aides. To quiet his anticipated “publicity stunt” against apartheid, South Africa had revoked entry visas for forty American journalists who booked the flight, and a government spokesman announced that no officials would meet the senator at the airport or anywhere else in the country. Still, 1,500 people broke through glass doors to surround the airplane. Hecklers shouting “Chuck him out!” engaged in sporadic fistfights with surging admirers whose handshakes tore away Kennedy’s cuff links. He climbed on a car roof to make a rattled arrival statement about the common heritage of frontier settlers in the Transvaal and in his state of New York, including “those of Dutch descent like my wife.”
When swirling, destitute people shouted “master, master” in the Bantu areas, an embarrassed Kennedy pleaded with them not to use the word. An explosion of defensive public comment about his tour forced the government to let him see Chief Albert Luthuli, who had lived since 1959 under a formal ban that sealed him away without movement or communication. Apartheid law mandated a long prison term for anyone who quoted him. At a barren farm near Durban, Kennedy presented Luthuli with a battery-operated tape recorder and a cassette of President Kennedy’s June 11, 1963, address calling segregation a moral issue “as old as the Scriptures and…as clear as the Constitution.” Both the visit and the gift were suggested by Allard Lowenstein, the Democratic activist who had sought out Bob Moses with ideas from his own formative travels in southern Africa, and had recruited hundreds of student volunteers to Mississippi for the 1964 Freedom Summer.
Lowenstein knew what the recording would mean to Luthuli in his forced vacuum of news, and reciprocal exposure to South Africa proved captivating in part through the stubborn grace of the only black Nobel Peace Prize winner before Martin Luther King. Kennedy had begun the trip largely on an impulsive dare, like carrying a flag to the summit of a mountain named for his late brother, but he wrote more personally in his journal that Luthuli’s eyes could turn “intense and hard and hurt, all at once,” and came to treasure indelible faces that emerged from the starkest confinements of race. At Natal University, Kennedy absorbed questions from twenty thousand white students about the biblical authority for apartheid, then blurted out, “What if God is black?” Challenged to name the U.S. President who had proclaimed an everlasting gulf between the races in 1885, he shrugged with a combative grin, “the one who was beaten in 1888.”
On Monday, June 6, Kennedy flew over the political prison at Robben Island to Cape Town. An empty chair on a university stage there marked a place for the national student leader who had invited him to South Africa and had since been banned for five years. “We stand here in the name of freedom,” Kennedy told a crowd of 15,000 white people on their annual Day of Affirmation. His address placed “the racial inequality of apartheid” on a broad footing with hatred and suffering from New York to India—“These are differing evils, but they are the common works of man”—then confronted above all the “danger of futility, the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills.” He invoked nonviolent witness against the stronghold of South Africa. “It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped,” said Kennedy. “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and…those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
The Cape Town speech stirred imagination worldwide. “This little snip thinks he can tell us what to do,” protested a South African minister. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr cabled “enthusiastic appreciation” from New York. The Washington Post likened his “political safari” to Attila the Hun’s descent upon Rome. Hostile American journals chastised Kennedy for sharpening racial divisions, and for “attempting to shake hands with every black African he could reach.” From his car roof, above a sea of outstretched hands, he joined spontaneous renditions of “We Shall Overcome.”
JAMES MEREDITH’S maverick announcement had made no news from the White House Conference, where a wag hung a sign in the Sheraton-Park press room that the “March Against Fear” would be sponsored by an imaginary “World Committee for the Preservation of James Meredith.” A friend worried that Meredith was obsessed by the negligible response to his published memoir; others thought he resented gossip about poor spring grades in Columbia Law School. When he did proceed to Memphis, and set out as promised from the Peabody Hotel, reports noted eccentricities in keeping with his determination to walk 220 miles back into his home state without the marshals or U.S. Army brigades that guarded him at Ole Miss, proving that Negroes could exercise freedom now even in Mississippi. Meredith wore a yellow pith helmet, carried an ivory-tipped walking stick, and displayed a white horse’s tail among gifts from a Sudanese chief. He covered the twelve miles to the Tennessee line on Sunday, June 5, and another fourteen miles on Monday before a voice called his name from the wooded shoulder near Hernando, Mississippi. “I only want James Meredith!” shouted Aubrey Norvell, scattering reporters and a small entourage that included a white Episcopal priest and a volunteer publicist from New York. Norvell, a forty-year-old hardware contractor, fired his 16-gauge automatic shotgun three times and surrendered, still smoking his pipe, to a dozen assorted escort officers who jumped from their cars. The sheriff of DeSoto County said the suspect appeared to be intoxicated. An Associated Press bulletin flashed news of Meredith’s death at 6:33 P.M., in time for many evening broadcasts. A correction at 7:08 P.M. said he was in surgery.
President Johnson denounced “an awful act of violence” within the hour from his ranch in Texas. Attorney General Katzenbach, acknowledging the presence of FBI agents at the scene, convened an evening press conference to address the chances for federal prosecution under the Voting Rights Act. “James Meredith is not only a friend,” he said, “but also a brave man.” Robert Kennedy reacted from Stellenbosch, South Africa, wishing Meredith a full recovery, and CORE that night became the first civil rights organization vowing publicly to take up the “March Against Fear” at the spot of his ambush on Highway 51. In Atlanta, debating whether to join, Andrew Young argued that King’s staff was stretched far too thin already, “running back and forth to Chicago.” Hosea William said Young was scared of Mississippi. “He was furious with me because he thought I wasn’t angry enough over the shooting of Meredith,” Young recalled. “We almost came to blows right then and there.”
Young refused to join the early-morning flight to Memphis on Tuesday, June 7. Rev. James Lawson, the Gandhian mentor to the early Nashville student movement, escorted his SCLC colleagues through crowds of reporters and converging pilgrims into the hospital, past police cordons and anxious medical personnel into Meredith’s room. Surgeons by then had removed some seventy shotgun pellets from his back to his scalp. King, combining pastoral and political roles delicately, emerged with permission from the groggy but still temperamental Meredith to begin a march of tribute in his name, and Lawson’s station wagon, stocked with fried chicken for lunch in transit, led a caravan down into Mississippi. Twenty-one marchers, observed by at least that many reporters, resumed the walk from the point of the previous day’s bloodstains in the quiet afternoon heat. King locked arms with Floyd McKissick and Stokely Carmichael, the two new leaders of CORE and SNCC respectively, before a line of Mississippi state troopers confronted them at the top of the first gentle hill with orders to get off the pavement. King blinked with surprise, and called for protection instead, but the troopers resolutely shoved him aside with the others. “We walked from Selma to Montgomery in the middle of the road,” he protested to no avail, stumbling backward. Troopers knocked Cleveland Sellers to the ground. Carmichael lunged toward the most aggressive one, but King kept his arm crooked tightly with an elbow and called out for help.
The swirling scuffle would highlight the next day’s front pages, but the marchers quickly recovered and walked six miles on the dirt shoulder under the frowning gaze of the troopers. Lawson and Hosea Williams led closing prayers in a pasture before banter resumed over the incident. Carmichael said it was hard to fight while square-dancing with King, who mimicked his own profound sermon tones with a smile, “I restrained Stokely, nonviolently.” Carmichael apologized for his breach of discipline, reminding King that in six years “on the front lines” he had been beaten unconscious and arrested many times without a hint of retaliation. While mindful of demonstration protocol, and acutely conscious that King had congratulated him for the SNCC leadership with a friendly reminder of magnified danger in every public gesture, Carmichael insisted that the purpose for any joint march was not yet defined. This much became clear that night at a rally of a thousand people in Lawson’s Centenary Methodist Church back in Memphis. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Whitney Young of the Urban League proposed to unite behind President Johnson’s civil rights bill of 1966, but McKissick swept away the crowd by scoffing at new laws, Johnson’s White House conference—“I still say it was rigged”—and even the Statue of Liberty: “They ought to break that young lady’s legs and throw her into the Mississippi!” Carmichael said he refused to beg for undelivered rights and protections, to great applause, and Charles Evers brought down the house with a pledge to avenge Meredith with an armed black host “like Buck Jones and Tim McCoy,” two Hollywood cowboys famous for gunplay. King managed to recapture movement themes with a closing reminiscence about Birmingham, saying Bull Connor was always happy to see a few Negroes throw rocks: “He was an expert in that. He had maps of the heart of violence.”
Raw leadership debate shifted to the Lorraine Motel. By midnight, Roy Wilkins lost any small inclination to march himself, in part because he could not bear to hear the President scorned as “that cat Johnson” in youth jive. “Dr. King, I’m really sorry for you,” he said on departing for the airport, and Whitney Young soon followed. All night, stripped down to an old-fashioned strap undershirt, King presided over a room jammed with movement veterans from Fannie Lou Hamer to the lawyer Charles Morgan. Hosea Williams and Ernest Thomas, founder of the Deacons for Defense, set a daunting tone with their loud argument—“Shut up, chubby,” said Thomas—about whether nonviolence took more guts or brains than armed protection.
By Wednesday morning, when King took a compromise agenda to Bowld Hospital in Memphis, Meredith remained too weak to sit but was feisty enough to reject the chain of command. He believed in only one general, and it was still his march. Roles crazily reversed when an administrator interrupted their long remonstrations with an agitated demand for Meredith to vacate the hospital within five minutes because of Klan threats. King objected loudly to the cowardly nonmedical “eviction,” but Meredith called for a wheelchair and rolled out to face a bank of television lights. Incoherently, he said he was embarrassed to have been bushwhacked by an amateur marksman, and would have dispatched Norvell himself if he had brought his gun as planned instead of his Bible, which for some reason he had given to a photographer during a rainstorm. Then Meredith fainted. Reporters saw tears running down his cheeks while doctors tried feverishly to revive him, and “three friends rolled him away from the tumultuous scene” for a flight home to New York.
The march resumed on a tenuous mandate, covering only three miles that afternoon. “It’ll build up,” said Stanley Levison, predicting a “junior Selma” in spite of crippling handicaps: no logistical preparation, federal protection, or compelling reason for volunteers to walk four times the Selma distance. The lines grew to 208 people on Thursday, and finished nine miles. King paused on the road to announce the death by heart attack of a local sharecropper who had joined them. He flew away to Chicago meetings and returned in time to preach the funeral of Armistead Phipps in Enid, Mississippi, apologizing that he had never before stood in a pulpit without “proper ministerial attire,” telling mourners they had identified Phipps’s body by his poll tax receipt and his membership card in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. “This was a man who was not afraid,” he said.
King, Carmichael, and the other SNCC workers enjoyed their first prolonged company on the road. They detoured past country courthouses to register bystanders who gathered, and celebrated a 104-year-old farmer named Ed Fondren who came out on the shoulders of neighbors with his first voter’s card. King complained of private frictions only with Charles Evers, over his popular roadside speeches professing eagerness to shoot it out with the Klan. Such bravado had built a political base for Evers in Natchez, but King finally boiled over about hypocrisy rather than the politics. “If you really believed that sort of thing,” he said sharply, “you’d start by shooting ‘Delay’ Beckwith.” He reminded Evers that the Klansman who had killed his brother Medgar “is walking around Mississippi today,” not far from the line of march.
One of several opportunistic Klan plots to assassinate King played out in Natchez on Friday, June 10. Claude Fuller, James Jones, and Ernest Avants of the Cottonmouth Moccasin Gang picked up at random a sixty-five-year-old farm caretaker named Ben Chester White on the pretext of hiring him to do some chores. They nicknamed him “Pop” as a kind of sedative on their drive to a creek bridge out of town, where they pulled out a pistol, a carbine, and a shotgun. The plan was to lure King from his march in northern Mississippi down to Natchez with a spectacular lynching. “Oh, Lord,” pleaded White. “What have I done to deserve this?”