June 1966
SYMBOLS of liberty began to change hands during the Meredith march. From California, Robert Kennedy’s political counselor Fred Dutton warned that novice candidate Ronald Reagan was discovering a talent to communicate both martial fervor for Vietnam and revolt against the liberal era within a sensibility of freedom. Nationwide application of that compound message “would result in ’66 and ’68 in the worst setback for the Democratic party since 1920,” Dutton wrote prophetically to President Johnson. The Reagan style mixed nostalgia with dogged optimism. At a primary debate before an assembly of California’s Negro Republicans in March, he had bristled when asked how he could oppose the new civil rights laws and still ask for black votes. “I resent the implication that there is any bigotry in my nature,” Reagan exploded, and flung a balled-up piece of paper at the audience as he stalked out. “Don’t let anyone ever imply that I lack integrity!” The incident raised doubts about the candidate’s composure until Reagan pressed reporters to make up their minds whether he was a “square” or a wild-eyed kook. “Fellows,” he said jovially, “you can’t have it both ways.” It became a smaller story when he erupted again on June 1. “I resent that,” he told the Negro Men of Tomorrow Club, dismissing a member who had questioned his breezy claim to be for equal rights and against the Voting Rights Act. “I answered fully. I gave a pretty sincere answer.”
Reagan rose above stigma with tangled but forceful professions. “If I didn’t know personally that Barry Goldwater was not the very opposite of a racist,” he declared, “I could not have supported him.” His display of innocent sensitivity insulated him from discomforts widely shared. Reagan’s rebuttal to civil rights philosophy never called for the repeal of the laws, nor cultivated active resistance, and he generally avoided controversy over enforcement. While disputing Martin Luther King’s prescription for the body politic, he consoled the fearful and guilty with anesthesia potent enough to numb whole decades of adaptation to the broadening thrust of equal rights. Pat Brown, the incumbent Democratic governor, considered Reagan so naive, extremist, and “beatable” that he foolishly hired operatives to smear Reagan’s opponent in the Republican primary. When Reagan won by 800,000 votes on June 7, editors at the New York Times scolded the electorate with barely restrained shock: “The Republicans, against all counsels of common sense and political prudence, insisted upon nominating actor Ronald Reagan for Governor.”
Former Vice President Richard Nixon nurtured the South’s fledgling Republican Party with a more calibrated version of the Reagan formula. He carefully supported the civil rights laws, and explained in private that the national party could not win by fighting them like Goldwater, nor compete with sectional demagogues like George Wallace. Nixon instead promoted two-party government by attacking national Democrats for domestic turmoil and foreign appeasement. In May, he told a full-throated rally of Birmingham Republicans that “thousands of American boys wouldn’t be dead today” if President Johnson had bombed Vietnam more and relied less on ground troops. In South Carolina, he absolved the Deep South’s pioneer Republican and foremost segregationist. “Strom is no racist,” Nixon declared of the manifestly grateful Senator Thurmond. “Strom is a man of courage and integrity.” In Mississippi, Nixon advised Republicans to neutralize civil rights by tucking the burden away as a settled embarrassment. “There is no future in the race issue for the South,” he told a fund-raiser in Jackson. “There is no future in the race issue for the Republican Party. There is no future in the race issue for the Democratic Party. This issue has hurt the South, as it has hurt the nation. And now it is time to go forward to the other great issues.”
Travis Buckley failed to heed Nixon’s counsel for an election that coincided with Reagan’s victory on June 7, when Mississippi joined the last Southern states to organize a Republican primary. The new party was still fighting a century of anti-Lincoln culture across Dixie, not long after Senator John Tower of Texas lamented that “you practically had to hold a gun on somebody to get him to run as a Republican.” Against GOP rivals, who mustered for the debut contest in only one of Mississippi’s five congressional districts, Buckley campaigned on his notoriety as the Klan lawyer for eleven White Knights arrested so far in the firebomb murder of voter registration leader Vernon Dahmer. He lost the nomination to a candidate of more sober demeanor, who would lose in turn to the well-established segregationist Democrat G. V. “Sonny” Montgomery. “We’re not ever going to beat Sonny,” a Republican leader conceded, but he predicted accurately that his party would “get the district when he retires.” Incumbents and courthouse ties stretched out through the next political generation a wholesale partisan realignment of Southern white voters, marked from the Goldwater-Johnson divide of 1964. By 1996, when Charles “Chip” Pickering succeeded Montgomery, Southern Republicans not only supplanted the “solid” Democrats of the segregation era but also supplied most of the leaders for a national party molded after Ronald Reagan.
Buckley handled juries better than voters. He successfully represented Ernest Avants, one of three Klansmen arrested in Natchez, days after the random execution of Ben Chester White on June 10, 1966. In spite of grisly physical evidence from the murder vehicle, and the haunted confession of driver James Jones that two jumpy accomplices had fired nineteen shots into the victim before he could move from the back seat, Buckley won acquittal with white supremacy rhetoric and the brazen claim that White must have been dead already from carbine bullets when Buckley’s client partially decapitated him with a shotgun. Jones and carbine shooter Claude Fuller handily evaded conviction for their lifetimes, but Avants survived long enough in a parallel evolution of the political climate to meet extraordinary justice. On proof from tenacious prosecutors that the killing site at Pretty Creek fell just inside Homochitto National Forest, the courts in 2003 allowed a federal trial for the separate charge of murder on U.S. property, and a Mississippi jury found Avants guilty almost thirty-seven years after his crime.
Only a quarter of registered Negroes voted in Mississippi’s June 1966 primary elections. The low turnout disappointed movement leaders, but the legislature nevertheless continued frenzied special sessions through the Meredith march, galvanized by 100,000 black registrations that had raised the total fivefold since 1964, from a paltry 6.7 percent of eligible Negroes to better than a third. The all-white politicians passed thirteen major laws to dilute the potential effect. They redrew boundaries, raised filing fees, attached Negro districts to white ones, and mandated at-large elections where they could submerge local black majorities. They muffled racial terms in floor debate to conceal their purpose, until the coded manipulation of population statistics provoked legislators from white areas to warn plainly of obsession. “We get so concerned because some Negroes are voting in a few counties,” protested Senator Ben Hilbun of Oktibbeha County, “we are going to disrupt our entire institutions of government.”
THE MEREDITH marchers approached Grenada on national Flag Day, June 14, over crude KKK notices painted on the surface of Highway 51: “Red [sic] nigger and run. If you can’t red run anyway.” Through rainstorms, confusion, blisters, and petty harassment, assorted volunteers had covered roughly half the planned 200-mile route to the Mississippi capital in Jackson. Vincent Young, a bus driver from Brooklyn, used his annual vacation to wear out a pair of shoes while he carried a hand-lettered sign: “No Viet Cong Ever Called Me Nigger.” A seventy-one-year-old white sharecropper’s daughter from Georgia wore a quaint sunbonnet as she helped a young black nurse from Belzoni hand out salt tablets, and the morning New York Times chronicled roadside debates over a pistol sighted at the previous campsite. “The movement is no place for guns,” said an “astounded” Methodist minister from New Jersey, but AME Bishop Charles Tucker suggested that anyone who failed to protect himself with arms “ought to take off his pants and wear skirts.” Ernest Thomas defended a compromise that allowed his Deacons to patrol after the march hours reserved for nonviolent discipline, and the Times mischievously quoted a staff marshal pleading for discretion: “If you want to discuss violence and nonviolence, don’t talk around the press.” Rev. Edwin King, the civil rights veteran from Tougaloo College, complained privately that most reporters had turned hostile “even to Martin.” Journalist Paul Good noted that only the Times showed interest in the primitive conditions among sharecroppers encountered along the way, and cited an explicitly jaundiced dispatch from the bellwether UPI newswire: “This march has become part movement, part circus. Among the 350-odd marchers…are about 50 white youths who wear T-shirts and denims, sandals and weird cowboy hats adorned with Freedom buttons…. ‘This is a great assembly of kooks,’ said a Mississippi Highway Patrolman. Most newsmen agreed.”
Marchers broke into a spirited, hand-clapping dance over the Yalobusha River Bridge, singing, “Walk for your children, brother, make them free!” Crowds of Negro residents watched the first living presence of the civil rights movement ever to reach Grenada—“Population 12,000, and Still Growing”—a town tightly segregated from schoolhouses to the library. Many stared or waved. Some made halfhearted promises to join, and more than a few could not resist. “I was just looking,” said Tessie McCain, “and all of a sudden I was marching.” Several dropped out again before local white people could recognize them, but one Highway Patrolman estimated “about a mile of niggers” behind the parade downtown along Pearl Street. Robert Green interrupted his speech at the Confederate Memorial to wedge a small American flag behind the medallion of Jefferson Davis. “We’re tired of Confederate flags,” he shouted to audible gasps. “Give me the flag of the United States, the flag of freedom!” Andrew Young recorded a stab of worry that his friend Green, a Michigan State professor on loan to SCLC, was suffering a fit of suicidal bravado to live down his staid academic persona.
Cheers grew slowly with relief that Highway Patrol officers seemed resigned to prevent rather than lead hothead retribution. Floyd McKissick of CORE tested the meaning of strange new signs that changed the dual public restrooms for both sexes from “white” and “colored” to “No. 1” and “No. 2.” Pointing to the Grenada County courthouse, he cried, “We’re going over to the toilets marked ‘No. 1,’ and see if it ain’t a little better.” Long lines quickly spilled across the lawn unmolested. With festive spontaneity, extra lines made sure the “No. 2” facilities were not reserved for white people, and new lines formed outside the registrar’s office. Nearly two hundred registered to vote before a celebration packed New Hope Missionary Baptist Church that night. “You’ve never had this town before, and now you’ve taken it over in a day,” shouted a warm-up speaker. “That’s freedom. So sing about it.” Fannie Lou Hamer led freedom songs. Martin Luther King returned from negotiations with a stunning announcement that Grenada County officials agreed to deputize six respected Negro teachers as registrars. “This, my friends, is our great opportunity,” he said, and began to preach: “Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.” Overnight, the county’s Negro registration doubled from 697 in a miracle of punctured fear. By contrast, wrote Paul Good, federal registrars in adjacent Carroll County waited “four straight days without a single Negro applicant appearing.”
Euphoria was brief. Leaving staff members in Grenada to help a local movement, the strategy committee turned the march west into the Mississippi Delta, off Meredith’s planned route, hoping to dramatize feudal oppression in the plantation region. King drove to registration rallies at Charleston in Tallahatchie County, and Winona in Montgomery, then broke away on June 15 to tend the Chicago campaign for two days. By the time he left, reports from Grenada soured official Mississippi on the experiment to minimize embarrassing incidents with a show of tolerance. The march was “turning into a voter registration campaign,” Governor Paul Johnson told a hurried news conference. He reduced the Highway Patrol protection detail from twenty cruisers to four, and instructed local jurisdictions to take charge: “We aren’t going to wet-nurse a bunch of showmen all over the country.” That afternoon, Grenada police arrested the first volunteers who tried to integrate a movie theater, and civilians beat movement workers on the street without interference. A Confederate flag replaced Green’s radioactive symbol of the Union. To a catalogue of flagrant exhibits for segregation, Justice Department lawyers in town added shattered windows and four slashed tires on their own rented car.
From Grenada, John Doar managed to file a U.S. lawsuit charging that officials had repulsed Negro voters illegally on June 7 at the polls in nearby Greenwood. The march columns were headed there, and Carmichael continued to receive favorable scouting reports on the two-day, thirty-mile trek down Highway 7. “They’re going wild for it,” said Willie Ricks, of the calculated message Carmichael used to win over his own central committee. Against strong SNCC sentiment to shun the Meredith march as another celebrity-driven “big show,” he proposed to make Mississippi’s poor black enclaves into a showcase for independent politics on the Lowndes County model, which he called “people relating to the concept of Black Power.” Hoping to borrow rather than fight or deny King’s mass appeal this time, Carmichael had persuaded a June 10 emergency session of the central committee to keep Forman in Atlanta, and he cross-examined colleagues nightly about their field tests of a new SNCC slogan, still doubting he could count on the response Ricks claimed for crowd-building speeches in familiar cotton fields and churches ahead. Greenwood had been a movement foothold since Bob Moses dared to enter the Delta in 1962. Carmichael himself had lived and gone to jail there as regional director for the 1964 Freedom Summer project. He knew the police chief, “Buff” Hammond, as a relative moderate, but their schoolyard encounter swiftly deteriorated on Thursday afternoon, June 16. Carmichael said police must be blocking the advance tent crews by mistake, as weary marchers had to camp at the only public space available to Negroes; Hammond said any assembly on the grounds of Stone Street Negro School required a permit from the all-white school board, which was closed. “We’ll put them up anyway,” Carmichael protested. Officers handcuffed him and two others.
A historical moment teetered for six hours. By supper, King issued a statement from Chicago on the Mississippi crackdown. FBI wiretappers forwarded from New York to Washington Stanley Levison’s judgment that political pressure was hardening Governor Johnson, along with King’s comment that he “had expected something like this” because the “the police were too polite” and the march “just did not feel like Mississippi.” In Greenwood, where the morning Commonwealth warned against King as a hate-monger “who can be compared to Josef Stalin and Mao Tze Tung,” local officials thought better of dispersing his hordes. They reversed themselves to allow the school campsite, which added jolts of vindication to the mass meeting that night. Willie Ricks guided Carmichael to the speaker’s platform when he made bail, saying most of the locals remembered him fondly. “Drop it now!” he urged. “The people are ready.”
Carmichael faced an agitated crowd of six hundred. “This is the 27th time I have been arrested,” he began, “and I ain’t going to jail no more!” He said Negroes should stay home from Vietnam and fight for black power in Greenwood. “We want black power!” he shouted five times, jabbing his forefinger downward in the air. “That’s right. That’s what we want, black power. We don’t have to be ashamed of it. We have stayed here. We have begged the president. We’ve begged the federal government—that’s all we’ve been doing, begging and begging. It’s time we stand up and take over. Every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned down tomorrow to get rid of the dirt and the mess. From now on, when they ask you what you want, you know what to tell ’em. What do you want?”
The crowd shouted, “Black power!” Willie Ricks sprang up to help lead thunderous rounds of call and response: “What do you want?” “Black power!”
KING RETURNED to a movement flickering starkly in its public face. At the mass meeting on Friday, June 17, after a tense march to the Leflore County courthouse, Willie Ricks dueled Hosea Williams in alternate chants of “Black Power!” versus “Freedom!” On Saturday’s march past the tiny hamlet of Itta Bena—James Bevel’s hometown, three years after sharecroppers there had braved their first civil rights ceremony to mourn the assassination of Medgar Evers, only to be hauled from church by way of Greenwood jail to Parchman Penitentiary, where some were suspended by handcuffs from cell bars in the death house—King and Carmichael faced persistent interviews in motion down Highway 7 toward Belzoni. “What do you mean,” asked a broadcast reporter, “when you shout black power to these people back here?”
“I mean,” Carmichael replied, “that the only way that black people in Mississippi will create an attitude where they will not be shot down like pigs, where they will not be shot down like dogs, is when they get the power where they constitute a majority in counties to institute justice.”
“I feel, however,” King interjected, “that while believing firmly that power is necessary, that it would be difficult for me to use the phrase black power because of the connotative meaning that it has for many people.” Carmichael walked alongside, hands clasped behind his back with beguiling pleasantry. Both wore sunglasses.
A small story the same day from southern Mississippi revealed a first hint of Klan conspiracy attached to the corpse fished out of Pretty Creek, quoting the police statement by James Jones that deafening shots had blasted the head of Ben Chester White and left “parts of it all over my new car.” King left to raise funds for the Meredith campaign at a rally of 12,000 on Sunday in Detroit’s Cobo Hall, sponsored by Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers. The FBI received death threats against King from a Klan unit among Reuther’s members at Cadillac Assembly Plant Number 1, which they didn’t disclose, but inquiries about black power generated headlines along his trail back to Mississippi: “Supremacy by Either Race Would Be Evil, He Says.” On Tuesday, June 21, King and Ralph Abernathy detoured by car with twenty volunteers from the main column to commemorate three victims of Klan murder exactly two years earlier, on the first night of Freedom Summer. Several hundred local people joined a rattled walk from Mt. Nebo Baptist Church to the Neshoba County courthouse in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Shocked employers along the sidewalk pointed out their family maids. (“Yes, it’s me,” the matronly Mary Batts called out to acknowledge a stare, “and I’ve kept your children.”) Hostile drivers buzzed the lines at high speed, and one young woman shouted from the back seat of a blue convertible that swerved to a stop: “I wouldn’t dirty my goddamned car with you black bastards!” When a line of officers blocked access to the courthouse lawn, Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, face-to-face with King, granted respite for public prayer among the bystanders closing in from both sides of the narrow street, scores of them armed with pistols, clubs, and at least one garden hoe.
King turned to raise his voice above the lines kneeling back along the pavement. “In this county, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner were brutally murdered,” he cried. “I believe in my heart that the murderers are somewhere around me at this moment.” Reporters heard “right behind you” and “you’re damn right” among grunts and chuckles in response. One wrote, “King appeared to be shaken.” King knew Deputy Price himself was among eighteen defendants in the pending federal conspiracy indictment, which had been filed in the absence of a state response to the murders and remained stalled in pretrial legal maneuvers.
“They ought to search their hearts,” he continued out loud. “I want them to know that we are not afraid. If they kill three of us, they will have to kill all of us. I am not afraid of any man, whether he is in Michigan or Mississippi, whether he is in Birmingham or Boston.” Jeers soon drowned out the closing chorus of “We Shall Overcome.” Only darting blows struck the return march until someone toppled newsmen carrying heavy network cameras. “Some 25 white men surged over the television men, swinging, and then flailed into the line of march, their eyes wide with anger,” observed New York Times correspondent Roy Reed. “The Negroes screamed.” Attackers “hurled stones, bottles, clubs, firecrackers and shouts of obscenity,” he added, and police did not intervene “until half a dozen Negroes began to fight back.” That night, careening automobile posses sprayed Philadelphia’s black neighborhood with gunfire. Riders in the fourth wave narrowly missed a startled FBI agent posted near the mass meeting at Mt. Nebo. Return shots from one targeted house wounded a passing vigilante, and this noisy postlude attracted a misleading headline for Reed’s dramatic front-page account of the courthouse standoff: “Whites and Negroes Trade Shots.”
The Philadelphia trauma intensified conflict within the movement over strategy. King, lamenting “a complete breakdown of law and order,” requested federal protection in a telegram to President Johnson, and rejoined the main march in Yazoo City during a fierce debate that erupted during the Tuesday night mass meeting. Ernest Thomas of the Louisiana Deacons for Defense and Justice ridiculed hope for safety in the hands of federal agents he said were always “smiling, writing a lot of papers, sending it back to Washington, D.C.” He advocated vigilante committees to meet lawless repression. “If I must die, then I have to die the way that I feel,” Thomas shouted to a chorus of cheers.
King came on late with an impassioned rebuttal. “Somebody said tonight that we are in a majority,” he said. “Don’t fool yourself. We are not a majority in a single state…. We are ten percent of the population of this nation, and it would be foolish of me to stand up and tell you we are going to get our freedom by ourselves.” He challenged boasts of armed promise in the isolated black-majority counties: “Who runs the National Guard of Mississippi? How many Negroes do you have in it? Who runs the State Patrol of Mississippi?” Any vigilante campaign would backfire “the minute we started,” he argued, not only in military result but also in public opinion—“And I tell you, nothing would please our oppressors more”—so that “it is impractical even to think about it.” King won back the crowd with a sermon against violence. “I am not going to allow anybody to pull me so low as to use the very methods that perpetuated evil throughout our civilization,” he said. “I’m sick and tired of violence. I’m tired of the war in Vietnam. I’m tired of war and conflict in the world. I’m tired of shooting. I’m tired of hatred. I’m tired of selfishness. I’m tired of evil. I’m not going to use violence no matter who says it!” Then he retired to internal debates through the night and most of Wednesday. Carmichael rejected “black equality” as an alternative to black power, insisting there was nothing inherently violent in the word “power.” King vowed to leave the march if the inflammatory rhetoric continued. The leaders compromised on a pledge to avoid the overtly competitive sloganeering, which advertised divisions at the core of a small movement based within an impoverished racial minority.
President Johnson deflected King’s request for federal protection by relaying assurances from Governor Paul Johnson “that all necessary protection can and will be provided.” Additional units of the Mississippi Highway Patrol “were promptly dispatched,” he advised from Washington, urging King to “maintain the closest liaison with Assistant Attorney General John Doar, who will remain in Mississippi until the end of the march.” Johnson’s reply telegram reached King late June 23 on a long day’s walk through rainstorms into Canton. Latecomers were building numbers toward the finale set for Jackson, twenty miles ahead, and local supporters swelled the crowd above two thousand for a night rally on the grounds of McNeal Elementary School for Negroes, where Hosea Williams was arrested in a new dispute over permits. As tent workers rushed to put up shelter, a Highway Patrol commander announced over a megaphone: “You will not be allowed to erect the tents. If you do, you will be removed.”
Hushed disbelief spread with the realization that the Highway Patrol phalanx was turning inward. “I don’t know what they plan for us,” King called out from the back of a flatbed truck, “but we aren’t going to fight any state troopers.” Giving the microphone to Carmichael, he ran his right hand nervously over his head as armed officers spread along the perimeter. Carmichael chopped the air again with his finger. “The time for running has come to an end!” he shouted, soaked in perspiration, his eyes and teeth gleaming against the dark night. “You tell them white folks in Mississippi that all the scared niggers are dead!” Cheers covered an interlude just long enough for newsmen to count sixty-one helmeted officers fastening gas masks in unison. John Doar helplessly parried a cry for intervention: “What can I do? Neither side will give an inch.”
When the first loud pops sounded, King called out above the squeals that it was tear gas. “Nobody leave,” he shouted. “Nobody fight back. We’re going to stand our ground.” The speakers’ truck disappeared beneath thick white clouds, however, as guttural screams drowned out his attempt to sing “We Shall Overcome.” Choking, vomiting people ran blindly or dived to the muddy ground where fumes were thinner, but charging officers kicked and clubbed them to flight with the stocks of the tear gas guns. Within half an hour, the Highway Patrol units impounded the tents and dragged from the cleared field a dozen unconscious stragglers. They revived a three-year-old boy from Toronto, Canada. Hysteria lingered in the haze. Observers called the violence “worse than Selma,” and Episcopal priest Robert Castle of New Jersey wondered out loud “if democracy in Mississippi and perhaps in the United States was dead.” Two friends held up Carmichael, who had collapsed and kept repeating incoherently, “They’re gonna shoot again!” Andrew Young, having leapt from the speakers’ truck in panic, bent at the waist to stagger through the streets, shouting hoarsely: “We’re going to the church! We gotta worry about the people now!” Reporters followed King as he retreated, wiping his eyes. “In light of this, Dr. King” asked CBS News correspondent John Hart, “have you rethought any of the philosophy of nonviolence?”
“Oh, not at all,” King replied. “I still feel that we’ve got to be nonviolent. How could we be violent in the midst of a police force like that?” To the battered remnant that night in a rendezvous church, his remarks brushed with bitterness over the “ironic” assurances received only hours before from President Johnson. “And the very same men that tear gassed us tonight,” said King, “are the men that we are told will be our protectors.” Catching himself, he veered into a strangely subdued reverie: “You know, the one thing I have learned…on this march is that it is a shame before almighty God that people earn as little money as the Negro people of Mississippi. You know the story.” He spoke of the humbling, bonding effect of seeing faces in desperation so closely.
REFUGEES SCATTERED for the night, many to sleep on the floor of a Catholic school gym. While the marchers regrouped in Canton on Friday, June 24, some two thousand white Mississippians converged on Philadelphia to see if any Negroes dared to reappear as promised at the courthouse scene of Tuesday’s mayhem. “We were brutalized here the other day,” King declared over a megaphone in their midst, “and I guess someone felt that this would stop us and that we wouldn’t come back. But we are right here today standing firm, saying we are gonna have our freedom.” Catcalls and shouts of “nigger” drowned out most of his remarks. A few bottles and eggs landed among the three hundred exposed volunteers who pushed with King back to Mt. Nebo Baptist Church, none too trusting of their Highway Patrol escort.
The glum but dutiful line of officers was a visible result of the latest private tussle between Washington and Governor Johnson along the razor’s edge of Mississippi politics. (John Doar was filing a new federal lawsuit against Neshoba County authorities for failure to provide basic law enforcement.) On the movement side, relations were equally charged but more fraternal than supposed. In Philadelphia, Carmichael, Floyd McKissick, and Willie Ricks stood with King once again to face the quivering hostility of armed civilians and officers alike. Ricks had pulled King to safety through the tear gas in Canton, and King knew Carmichael and Ricks had endured many of the toughest movement projects for years, each suffering the death of more than one young friend. In private, King conceded to his advisers that the Meredith march had been a “terrible mistake,” but he insisted that its troubles lay beyond the publicized internal squabbles. While he tolerated the loyal exuberance of subalterns like Hosea Williams, who contested SNCC rivals in everything from card games and water pistol ambushes to shoving matches, King respected SNCC’s earned right to an independent voice. “Listen, Andy,” he told Young, “if Stokely is saying the same thing I am saying, he becomes like my assistant.” He teased Ricks over his new nickname, “Black Power,” in a way that Ricks prized as collegial recognition from a lifelong master of striking fire in an audience. When King said he lacked only clothes to make a fine minister, Ricks boldly asked to borrow some, and King surprised him with an invitation to take freely from his closet in Atlanta. When Carmichael confessed that he had used King’s fame as a platform to test the black power slogan, King shrugged, “I have been used before.” For all their strategic arguments, which outsiders fanned into a presumption of deep enmity, King and Carmichael discovered a common sense of fun to relieve tedium and tension on the exposed hike through Mississippi. On the last night, King bolted from interminable disputes about overdue bills and the rally program. “I’m sorry, y’all,” he told the collected leadership. “James Brown is on. I’m gone.”
Carmichael hurried with King from a dean’s house to musical bedlam on the Tougaloo College football field, where the soul star Brown writhed in French cuffs and a pompadour through a freedom concert arranged by Harry Belafonte. For want of a piano, Sammy Davis, Jr., performed scat songs a cappella. At the microphone, actor Marlon Brando playfully slapped to his sweaty forehead one of the bumper stickers Willie Ricks had been plastering surreptitiously on police cars: a black panther emblem with words adapted from Muhammad Ali, “We’re the Greatest.” Brando said he felt “wholly inappropriate,” and fumbled for words: “You can’t imagine how I feel, because I haven’t really participated in this movement, not in the way my conscience gnaws at me that I should.” He paid tribute to the estimated ten thousand Mississippians who had walked part of the way from Memphis, and to the array of visiting marchers. Ann Barth, granddaughter of Swiss theologian Karl Barth, joined Allard Lowenstein and numerous veterans of Selma, including one-legged Jim Leatherer and Henry Smith of Mississippi, who wore the orange vest given those who had made the whole trip to Montgomery on foot. Unable to push through the crowd, the thirty-year pacifist Jim Peck sent King a note about an early staff purge against white people: “I wanted to assure you that, despite the dirty deal I have received from CORE, I am still with The Movement and shall be as long as I live.”
On Sunday, June 26—three weeks after Meredith left Memphis—the marchers swelled to 15,000 over the final eight miles from Tougaloo into Jackson. Newcomers included Walter Reuther of the autoworkers and Al Raby with ten busloads from Chicago, plus both King’s “twin” white lawyers from New York, Harry Wachtel and Stanley Levison. Film crews from the television networks gathered reactions from the bystanders along the way. “I don’t like the niggers,” said a typically blunt man. “They stink.” A reporter quoted seventy-eight-year-old Monroe Williams as he hobbled on a cane in his first demonstration: “If my daddy had done this, it would have been a lot better for me.” Investigators recorded feverish anxiety over social norms in flux. A waitress on North Mill Street, confronting integrated customers from Texas, summoned a Negro cook to take the order while she telephoned a gang of segregationists to intervene. The latter arrived almost simultaneously with the Deacons for Defense and agents from the new Jackson FBI office, both called by the Texans, and the FBI agents in turn called local police officers, who resolved the standoff by shutting down the restaurant.
The closing rally gathered at the “rear” plaza of the state capitol, because Highway Patrol officers in gas masks, backed by National Guard with bayoneted M-1 rifles, sternly blocked the southern front where Mississippi governors traditionally took office near a goddess statue to Confederate womanhood. Disjointed speeches wilted in the heat. King preached from Luke on the parable of Lazarus and Dives, then improvised on his dream oratory “that one day the empty stomachs of Mississippi will be filled, that the idle industries of Appalachia will be revitalized.” James Meredith, healed enough to make cantankerous public comments about the reshaped march (“The whole damn thing smells to me”), mis-introduced “Michael” Carmichael, who called upon black soldiers to resist “mercenary” service in Vietnam and declared, “Number one, we have to stop being ashamed of being black.” Short prayers between speeches provided respites of inspiration. “We thank Thee, O God, that Thou hast given us the courage to march these past days,” said Robert Green. Reverend Allen Johnson of Jackson prayed from the thirteenth chapter of Hebrews: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unaware. Remember them that are in bonds as though bound with them, and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in body.”
Gnomish Harold DeWolf, King’s theology professor from Boston University, had collapsed of heatstroke near Tougaloo. Negro rescuers urged him to disregard occasional taunts of “We don’t need whitey” from black power advocates along roads to the hospital. Finally released, DeWolf heard Andrew Young call his name on the public address system as he approached the capitol, and soon was drafted to give the last prayer captured for the hour-long CBS television special that night. “O God, father of all mankind,” he said, “we see spread out before Thee the red and black soil of Mississippi, an altar on which a great burnt offering has been laid.”
A New York Times retrospective said the Meredith march “made it clear that a new philosophy is sweeping the civil rights movement…. It had Mr. Carmichael as its leader and the late Malcolm X as its prophet. It also had a battle cry, ‘Black Power,’ and a slogan directed at whites, ‘Move on Over, or We’ll Move on Over YOU.’…Reporters and cameramen drawn to a demonstration by the magic of Dr. King’s name stay to write about and photograph Mr. Carmichael.” Primal signals compelled action in distant quarters. Within a month, religious thinkers bought space in the Times to interpret “the crisis brought upon our country by historic distortions of important human realities.” Their joint composition—“BLACK POWER: Statement by National Committee of Negro Churchmen”—rode the conceptual mix of theology and blackness like a fresh rodeo bull, using the noun “power” fifty-five times. “We are faced now with a situation where conscience-less power meets powerless conscience,” declared the consortium of bishops and pastors, “threatening the very foundation of our nation.”
Stanley Levison downgraded the contagion with a jeweler’s eye for politics. To him, the cry of black power disguised a lack of broad support for SNCC and CORE with cultural fireworks that amounted to an extravagant death rattle. “They’re just going to die of attrition,” he predicted when King called after midnight on July 1, “and as they die they’re going to be noisier and more militant in their expression…. Because they’re weak, they’re making a lot of noise, and we don’t want to fall into that trap.” Levison, perceiving a larger obstacle than the demise of two civil rights groups, worried that the movement’s historic achievements were not consolidated enough to resist or reverse what King called a “mood of violence” throughout the country. He deflected King’s instinctive response to formulate a warning about the spillover dangers of “defensive violence,” an understandable and prevalent doctrine. When King pressed to “clarify many misconceptions” and to refine nonviolence as “a social strategy for change” in the democratic tradition, Levison gently but firmly said he and literary agent Joan Daves had unearthed no interest. New York publishers and magazine editors considered King’s position “well-known and obvious.” They wanted something novel and strong. Black power was hot, whether or not it would last. King was too Sunday School, and he no longer commanded attention at the White House.
“I’ve heard nothing from President Johnson,” King admitted to reporters in Mississippi. “It’s terribly frustrating and disappointing. I don’t know what I’m going to do.” Attorney General Katzenbach had delivered the administration’s only public comment on the egregious persecutions inflicted along the march, saying he regretted the Canton attack because tear gas “always makes the situation more difficult.” A deputy White House press secretary said the President himself had “no specific reaction.” King had learned from sit-in students six years earlier that the most eloquent sermons alone could not move entrenched habits of subjugation, and that oratory must be amplified by disciplined nonviolent witness. That lesson helped ignite since Birmingham and Selma a chain reaction locked within many meanings of the word “movement,” from small personal inspiration to historic national change. “In the past, he had been able to deliver the power of response in Washington,” wrote Paul Good. “Not now…. The silent rebuff made the Nobel Prize winner just one more put-down Negro.”
THE PSYCHOLOGY of war consumed President Johnson throughout June, when perplexity and frustration over the Vietnam death toll registered in public support numbers declining steadily from 46 percent to 40. The Joint Chiefs long had proposed to bomb petroleum storage facilities near the principal North Vietnamese cities, but Johnson withheld approval, weighing the risks of hitting Soviet ships in Haiphong harbor or diplomats in the capital of Hanoi. Military and intelligence analysts, who doubted that success would reduce supplies significantly to the battlefields in South Vietnam, gave way in policy debates to the charged image of any gallon of fuel spared for the transport of foe or matériel to kill an American soldier. Not to bomb “is to pay a higher price in U.S. casualties,” Johnson told the National Security Council on June 17. “The choice is one of military lives versus escalation.” By June 28, wrestling with final approval for bombers poised to strike, he looked again for positive assurance that “we get enough out of this for the price we pay,” but McNamara confirmed instead the relentlessly circular claims of force. “I don’t see how you can go on fighting out there, Mr. President, without doing it, to be frank with you,” he said. “I don’t see how you can keep the morale of your troops up. I don’t see how you can keep the morale of the people in the country who support you up, without doing it.”
“Okay, Bob, go ahead,” ordered the President. That night, he violated a security pact with McNamara not to divulge the imminent attacks to his lone dinner guest. Richard Russell of Georgia threatened “a lot of trouble to us,” Johnson had warned, because the Senate’s champion of military strength still grumbled against the war as folly. Russell once proposed covert schemes to install a South Vietnamese government that would invite American defenders to leave, for instance, and had startled television viewers with his pronouncement that free elections would unify Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh. He made headlines that spring by denying the strategic value in Southeast Asia, scoffing at the fabled “domino theory,” and calling for withdrawal unless a Vietnamese survey or plebiscite legitimized an invitation to foreign troops. All Russell’s peace flares vanished quickly for lack of interest. War critics showed no inclination to make common cause with the venerable segregationist, even to follow his political lead out of Vietnam, but President Johnson courted him ardently to go in deeper—flattered him, patted his head like a country granddad, assured him yet again that their bosom intimacy from the Senate survived what Russell called “the vast chasm between our views on the misnamed civil rights issue.” At dinner, Johnson described the Meredith march as a kind of penance for his domestic break with Russell. He praised Mississippi authorities for preventing greater violence and claimed to have dispatched Martin Luther King to counteract firebrands such as Stokely Carmichael, for whom the President predicted death by assassination within ninety days.
“He was obviously in high good humor,” Russell wrote that night in a diary memo, “and from my acquaintance with him, I decided that some policy had suddenly resolved itself favorably or that he had finally arrived at a decision on something that had been troubling him. It was the latter.” Russell realized the stakes when Johnson rolled out target maps and confided that bombers were about to take off. As the senator left, resolved to endorse a decisive commitment to arms, the President asked his converted daughter, Luci, whether any Catholic sanctuary would receive him that night. “The monks live in the church,” she replied of a parish order she knew, and called ahead to have St. Dominic’s opened to receive a stealthy prayer motorcade. Returning to the White House, Johnson stayed awake to receive ten flash relays before dawn on June 29. Walt Rostow, who had replaced McGeorge Bundy as National Security Adviser, reported black clouds spread over fifty square miles at twenty thousand feet above Haiphong. “So it looks like we burned up quite a bit of oil,” he said. From the Pentagon, Cyrus Vance advised skepticism toward the preliminary estimate of 80 percent damage to Hanoi targets. The President, braced to hear otherwise, cross-examined him about the safe return of all pilots and the strange absence of antiaircraft fire. “Thank you,” he said finally. “Let’s go to bed.”
Four of five Americans consulted in polls believed the drastic new bombing campaign would end the war soon, and majority approval rebounded for the balance of the year. Meanwhile, military analysts confirmed secret projections that the actual flow of war matériel would recover in spite of the bombing, as the North Vietnamese dispersed not only oil supplies and transportation lines but urban families into the countryside. (The population of Hanoi dropped by December from 800,000 to 200,000.) Knowing that the Vietnamese could replace their losses indefinitely, and were doing so, American war planners counted on the psychological wear of modern airpower upon a land-bound adversary. McNamara pictured enemy soldiers under combined assault in the South, utterly devoid of flying machines for mobility or retaliation in the sky. “They also know that nobody is protecting North Vietnam,” he told Johnson, “and we have a free rein.” The mismatched punishment lured McNamara to defy his own numbers that pointed stubbornly to a savage stalemate. “The only thing that will prevent it, Mr. President, is their morale breaking,” he said. More than faith in the cause, or the steely will to marshal sacrifice, a strange identification across the line of slaughter consoled American leaders through their own dire apprehensions. “And if we hurt them enough, it isn’t so much that they don’t have more men as it is that they can’t get the men to fight,” McNamara anticipated. “I myself believe that’s the only chance we have of winning this thing…because we’re just not killing enough of them to make it impossible for the North to continue to fight. But we are killing enough to destroy the morale of those people down there, if they think this is gonna have to go on forever.”
Ho Chi Minh responded with a national appeal on July 17, warning that “the Johnson ‘clique’” may send a million men into a war that could last twenty more years. “Hanoi, Haiphong and other cities and enterprises may be destroyed,” he said, “but the Vietnamese people will not be intimidated.” Ho advised Washington by indirect channels that much of his population had never known anything but war. Weakened by lung disease at age seventy-six, he called for mobilization of reserves in words that soon would be carved on his mausoleum: “Nothing is more important than independence and freedom.”
Beyond males of every age, some 1.5 million North Vietnamese women formed combat and support brigades that included air defense units. By 1967, seven thousand antiaircraft batteries, two hundred missile sites, and a meager hundred airplanes would oppose U.S. bombers overhead. The government already celebrated as a patriotic heroine twenty-year-old Ngo Thi Tuyen, who would defend and repair the Dragon’s Jaw Bridge under perpetual bombardment until laser-guided American bombs wiped out the vulnerable link of Highway 1 in 1972. Nhan Dan, the Communist newspaper, acknowledged “feudal” resistance to the policy of equal advancement: “Many Party members do not wish to admit women because although they think that they are courageous and diligent, they also believe that ‘women cannot lead but must be led.’”
Ho Chi Minh’s call generated 170,000 emergency youth troops, nearly all girls, who marched south with knapsacks, cooking pots, and shovels to maintain the heavily bombed Ho Chi Minh Trail. Vu Thi Vinh said she defied her parents, lied about her age to join at fifteen, and wrote competitive essays to be selected for “dare to die” teams that defused unexploded ordnance. A cohort volunteered even though she loathed socialism and the “peasants” running the government. “Many of us temporarily lost our hair from malaria,” recalled Nguyen Thi Kim, “and living in the jungle for so many years made us look terrible.” By 1975, the emergency troops had shepherded war matériel south and an estimated 700,000 wounded soldiers back to North Vietnam, while helping air defenders bring down some of the 8,558 U.S. aircraft lost in Southeast Asia. Women survivors, who often would be left sterile, disfigured, and bitterly alone in a society that treasured the extended family, adapted to unspeakable carnage in war. “It was terrible,” said volunteer Le Minh Khue, “but we were young and we made jokes.” They arranged work choruses according to a proverb that songs are louder than bombs, and made up nicknames for dreaded jets such as the “genie of thunder” F-105. “When the helicopters dropped soldiers,” a female veteran observed of American deployments, “they looked like dragonflies laying eggs.”
AMERICAN WOMEN stirred politically on the day U.S. bombers first struck Hanoi and Haiphong. A small caucus convened over a seminal speech that accused the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of trivializing the legal rights accorded women two years earlier by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Rep. Martha Griffiths of Michigan said the EEOC had reduced thousands of sex discrimination complaints to amusing asides, wondering in its newsletter whether punishment could reach employers who refused to hire “a woman as a dog warden or a man as a ‘house mother’ for a college sorority house.” She cited two exceptions to prove the rule of heedless condescension. First, the EEOC had just allowed “Help Wanted Male” and “Help Wanted Female” advertising sections to continue in newspapers nationwide, with a declaration that the separation rested on a lawful intent to “obtain a maximum reader response and not on a desire to exclude applicants of a particular sex.” Griffiths called this precedent a capitulation to the newspaper lobby as well as a transparent contradiction of the EEOC’s moves to abolish separate job listings by race, and she denounced no less sharply a second sex discrimination case in which the EEOC reserved BFOQ (bona fide occupational qualification) status for the airline industry’s policy of firing any stewardess who married or reached the age of thirty-three. “Is it because the Commission does not want to recognize that women’s rights are human rights?” she asked on the House floor. “Or is it an unconscious desire to alienate women from the Negroes’ civil rights movement? Human rights cannot be divided into competitive pieces.”
Tempers flared in the June 29 caucus at the Washington Hilton Hotel. Legal strategist Pauli Murray among others proposed a new organization modeled on the NAACP to push for gender equity in the enforcement of Title VII, but some dissenters felt the parallel would diminish women. Several women with influential positions believed they could seek parity more effectively within regular channels, and others argued that a self-proclaimed women’s lobby would be perceived as arrogant and unprofessional. The last point was too much for Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, who had been recruited as an independent voice. “Get out! Get out!” Friedan cried. “This is my room and my liquor!” The quarreling confederates fell back on plans to petition the state and federal agencies represented at the Third National Conference of Commissions on the Status of Women, but overtures were rebuffed the next morning as improper for advisory bodies and government employees.
By noon on June 30, Dr. Kay Clarenbach of Wisconsin led a handful of well-tailored but chagrinned moderates to concede that the activists may have been correct, and Friedan made up for shortcomings in collaborative tact with her facile pen, sketching on a lunch napkin the consensus brief for an ad hoc civil rights group “…to take the actions needed to bring women into the mainstream of American society, now, full equality for women, in fully equal partnership with men. NOW. The National Organization for Women.” Twenty-eight charter members contributed $5 toward the initial expenses. The founding announcement in October drew no major press notice until November 22, when the New York Times covered a repeat performance by Friedan on the fashion page beneath Thanksgiving recipes: “Speaking in a gravelly alto from the depths of the large fur collar that trimmed her neat black suit, the ebullient author suggested that women today were ‘in relatively little position to influence or control major decisions. But,’ she added, leaning forward in the lilac velvet Victorian chair and punching the air as if it were something palpable, ‘what women do have is the vote.’”
To protest government inaction, NOW members first carried giant balls of red tape on thin picket lines. Martha Griffiths, their forerunner and inspiration, spoke sometimes as brashly as Diane Nash or Stokely Carmichael on the Freedom Rides. “If you are trying to run a whorehouse in the sky,” she told airline executives at a congressional hearing, “then get a license.” Too slowly for participants, but swiftly relative to the antecedent momentum in race relations, a new women’s movement coalesced to transform daily life through politics.