Something was wrong. They were living in a graciously aging mansion at the foot of the Hollywood Hills, a seven-bedroom Spanish revival with fan-lit French doors, faded hardwood floors, and a tennis court nobody used. Her husband was at work on a book, his first, while Joan Didion paid the rent by writing articles for widely read magazines. Though the subjects were often prosaic—a profile of John Wayne, a trip to Hawaii, a weekend with the baby at her parents’ house—she brought to them a distinctly literary sensibility, the details so carefully chosen, the sense of place so well developed, the prose so luminous they hardly seemed like magazine pieces at all. Editors had taken notice. There was talk of collecting her best articles into a book, to be published by one of the nation’s most prestigious presses, the unmistakable sign of a career in ascent. Yet she was tumbling down.
It had happened before, in 1963. Didion had been in New York for seven years by then, most of that time on the staff of Vogue. That summer she’d cut herself off from her friends, left her phone unanswered, cried in the back seat of taxis and on the elevator up to her apartment, a twenty-eight-year-old overwhelmed by doubt and failure. Now the darkness was descending again, with one critical difference. This time the breakdown wasn’t hers alone.
She was a fifth-generation Californian, raised on stories of her ancestors’ long, lonely struggles to break the land they had crossed the continent to claim, to transform the arid Central Valley into the golden West. From their struggles came wealth, social standing—one of her earliest memories was of a crystal bottle of Elizabeth Arden perfume, a gift from her grandmother when she was six—and an abiding faith in individual achievement rooted in discipline, sacrifice, and strength of character. “Wagon-train morality,” she’d called it in 1965, the year after she’d voted, passionately, for Barry Goldwater, and the year she began to fear that America was coming undone.1
For a while the feeling floated around the edges of her articles, seeping into her reporting in small, sad ways. She wrote of the pregnant bride too young to sip the cheap champagne the waiter poured to celebrate her Las Vegas wedding; the late-night caller on the LA radio show, talking of pornography; the drunken sailors in Honolulu, chatting up the girls. But it wasn’t sufficient; more and more nothing she wrote seemed sufficient. Then, in the spring of 1967, her editor at the Saturday Evening Post suggested that she write a piece on the hippies who were pouring into San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. It struck her as an assignment she had to accept, a story she had to tell. So she packed her bags and drove up the coast.
She spent several weeks in the Haight, filling her notebooks with snatches of days that drifted away in the company of addicts and dealers, activists and manipulators, teenage deadheads and runaways so young they couldn’t say with any conviction what they were running from. When she had enough she came home to her mansion at the foot of the Hollywood Hills, fought off her mounting desolation with gin and Dexedrine, and set to work, the article’s crucial opening line waiting for her in a poem written half a century before, in another nation sliding into anarchy.
“The center was not holding,” she wrote.2
Twist and Shout
BY THE TIME the Supreme Court handed down its Griswold ruling in June 1965, the contours of private life were already shifting. That year the birth rate fell to its lowest level since 1940, thanks in large part to the widening popularity of the pill. The taboo against premarital sex continued to erode: almost eight percent of the babies born that year had been conceived out of wedlock, the highest percentage ever recorded by the U.S. Census Bureau. The divorce rate rose as well, to a figure unmatched in more than a decade. And another health scare over birth defects, this one driven by a virulent strain of measles, intensified the interest in easing abortion restrictions that had started with Sherri Finkbine’s ordeal with thalidomide three years earlier. Three days before the justices announced Griswold, the editors of Life put another young mother like Finkbine on their cover, one of two the magazine had followed in the same California hospital on the day they had abortions for fear of the measles they’d contracted. Technically they’d broken California law, which didn’t allow for abortions in cases of fetal abnormalities. But according to subsequent polls, 56 percent of Americans thought that such laws ought to be changed.
In its popular culture, though, the United States clung to traditional standards. The nation’s most watched television show was a Western about a widowed father and his three grown sons in 1860s Nevada; the most popular movie a musical about a widowed military man in 1930s Austria, the nanny he hired straight from the convent, and the seven charming children he placed in her care, who had a remarkable ability to harmonize while dressed in the drapes. Even rock and roll kept to the safe side. For a month in mid-1965 a new British band, the Rolling Stones, snarled its way to the top of the charts with a song steeped in the overt sexuality of the Delta blues. But the Stones were no match for the Beatles, who mounted a record-breaking tour that summer in support of their two latest albums, both packed with hits innocent enough to play at the most sheltered teenybopper’s slumber party.
Then again, maybe there was more to the Beatles than catchy choruses and incessant merchandising. That’s what Ken Kesey decided, at least, as he sat up near the rafters of San Francisco’s cavernous concert hall, the Cow Palace, on the last day of August 1965, listening to the teenyboppers scream.
Not that Kesey was a fan. There was a time when he might have liked the Beatles, back in his all-American days in suburban Springfield, Oregon, when he was wrestling for his high school team, starring in the plays, and dating the girl he’d marry a year after graduation. But that was in the early 1950s, when the Fab Four were still in knee socks and Kesey hadn’t yet decided to be a novelist. Only after he’d finished his degree at the University of Oregon in 1957 had the idea taken hold of him. Somehow he’d managed to win a fellowship to the creative writing program at Stanford, a major coup by any standard. They’d arrived in the autumn of 1958, he and his high school sweetheart, into the rarified world of Stanford’s young sophisticates, where everyone despised pop culture’s soul-crushing banality. Had the Beatles been touring in 1958, Kesey’s new friends would have hated them.
The problem was the sophisticates didn’t have a clear sense of how to break free of the mainstream. Allen Ginsberg and his acolytes had established a little colony in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, an easy drive from campus. But full-fledged hipsters were a bit too avant-garde for the university set. Instead they settled for earnest talk of an artist’s responsibility to challenge the status quo, their conviction fueled by artfully prepared dinners in the peasant tradition and bottles of red wine: a tasteful rebellion, suitable for someone who one day might want tenure—until it was interrupted by Kesey’s discovery of LSD.
Lysergic acid diethylamide, the synthetic version of a chemical compound found in a fungus, causes overpowering hallucinations when ingested: “an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense kaleidoscopic plays of colors,” as its creator, Albert Hofmann, put it after his first LSD trip in April 1943. In the 1950s the drug seeped into psychiatry, where it was used to treat the emotionally stunted; into psychology, where clinicians used it to study psychotic states; and into the CIA, whose operatives thought it might be used to enhance interrogation techniques. And it secured a toehold in the literary world, thanks to British writer Aldous Huxley, who took a variant under a psychiatrist’s care in 1953. Huxley decided that he wasn’t simply hallucinating—he was opening his mind to a level of consciousness the modern world had blocked, “a radical self-transcendence and a deeper understanding of the nature of things,” as he put it in his book on the experience, The Doors of Perception.3
In 1960 Kesey walked through the door too, with a little help from his friends at the CIA. The agency was secretly funding a research project on hallucinogenics at the VA hospital near the Stanford campus. The researchers needed observable subjects—needed them so badly they were offering volunteers $75 a day. So Kesey signed up. At first it was all tightly controlled: the subjects lying in hospital beds, watching the colors cascading in front of them and the walls bending around them, while the doctors took notes. But Kesey was feeling an overwhelming sense of freedom. “We were beautiful,” he said of his first LSD trips. “Naked and helpless and sensitive as a snake after skinning, but far more human than the shining knightmare that had stood creaking in previous parade rest. We were alive and life was us.”4 Naturally he wanted to share the wonder. The doctors weren’t offering free samples. Not long after he started the tests, though, he got a part-time job as a night attendant on the psych ward, just for the extra income of course. There the control wasn’t tight at all.
Some of his Stanford clique weren’t interested in trying the capsules Kesey brought home. But there were takers enough that he soon had his own little turned-on colony, the finely crafted dinners tossed aside for vats of venison chili laced with LSD, the earnest talk replaced by technicolor visions of liberation. He was writing a new novel too, better than anything he’d written before, a riotous book set in a ward modeled on the one where he’d been spending his nights, its narrator and single triumphant character a schizophrenic Native American taken straight from a phantasm he’d seen during one of his now-regular trips. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was published in 1962 to rapturous reviews. It was a “brilliant first novel,” gushed Time, “a roar of protest against middlebrow society’s Rules and the invisible Rulers who enforce them.”5
In Cuckoo’s Nest San Francisco’s rebels saw a kindred spirit. So they started drifting down from North Beach and its even hipper offshoot around Haight and Ashbury Streets, where the art-school kids had traded the beatniks’ beloved jazz for a blast of rock and roll and their somber style for a burst of flamboyant Victoriana—young men in stiff-collared shirts and riding coats, young women in flowing velvet dresses and lace-up boots, and everybody with their hair way too long—a generational shift the older hipsters marked by calling the new kids hippies. One by one they found their way to Kesey’s door: fabled figures like Neal Cassady, the model for the central character in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road; up-and-comers like Jerry Garcia, a wild-haired young guitarist who was trying to get a band together; aspiring writers who wanted a piece of Cuckoo’s Nest magic; and assorted hangers-on whose only goal was to be on the cutting edge of cool. Kesey was happy to have them all. So happy, in fact, that in 1963 he used the book’s royalties to buy a comfortable cabin on a secluded lot in the hills fifteen miles east of Stanford and invited anyone who wanted to come along with him. Off they went, the entire ragged clan, up to the redwoods to write and create and bend their minds whichever way they felt like going.
By then others were picking up on LSD too, so much so that authorities began to fear that they were losing control of the drug. So they tried to rein it in, not by banning it but by insisting that it be administered by professionals. In the summer of 1962 the American Medical Association issued a public warning that recreational use could lead to prolonged psychotic states. Los Angeles County sheriffs raided a church in South Gate whose pastor was supposedly tripping out his congregants. There was even a scandal at Harvard, where a young lecturer in psychology, Timothy Leary, was accused of administering the drug to subjects without a doctor’s supervision, and of using it himself.
In fact he’d done more than that. Since 1960, when he’d first taken an LSD variant, Leary had been proselytizing for the mystical power of hallucinogens, an idea he took straight from his reading of Huxley. Partly he spread the word through lectures and articles in scholarly journals; in one he suggested that public officials spike the nation’s water supply with LSD. But nothing could match the real thing. In private Leary became something of a high-end distributor, using the connections Harvard gave him to quietly offer the hallucinogenic experience to those culture brokers he thought would benefit most from the transformation of consciousness: among his most devout converts was Allen Ginsberg, whose first Leary-induced trip was so enlightening he stripped off his clothes and said that he was going to teach the world how to love. It was one thing to turn on a hipster poet, though, another to turn on the undergrads. When Harvard officials learned in April 1963 that Leary’s closest collaborator had given a student LSD, the university fired them both. But Leary refused to surrender. Within a few months he’d convinced an heir to the Mellon family fortune to underwrite an independent institute where his work could continue unimpeded. “LSD,” Leary told the press, “is more important than Harvard.”6
Kesey couldn’t help but hear about Leary; his firing made all the papers, as did his fancy new institute. Kesey appreciated the effort, but he also had some reservations. The point wasn’t to move LSD from one lab to another but to break it out of the lab altogether, to carry it to freedom, and to let it carry its users to freedom too. That’s what people needed to see: not some pseudoscientific study but the whole freaking, mind-blowing freedom Kesey had slipped out of the psych ward. The AMA didn’t get that. Harvard didn’t get that. Even Leary didn’t get that. But Kesey’s crew did.
The first road show set off in the summer of 1964. Kesey’s second novel was to appear in July, and somebody suggested that they drive to the publisher’s New York office to celebrate. They bought an old school bus fitted out with beds and a stove, wired it for sound, carved a hole in the roof so they could climb outside whenever they wanted, and one afternoon painted the thing wild colors like the ones that flashed before them when they were tripping. In the end it was such a howl, twenty zoned-out hipsters careening across the country on a psychedelic freedom ride, pranking the multitudes as they went: Cassady racing the bus backward through downtown Phoenix; the whole stoned crew taking a dip on the Black side of a segregated beach in Louisiana; Kesey up on the roof playing the flute for the stiffs on the streets of Manhattan; Cassady again, wheeling the bus up to one of New York’s most exclusive restaurants so its tight-assed diners could see what they were missing.
Then they were home, back among the redwoods, and it wasn’t enough to ride in a painted bus anymore. Now they painted the trees too, and sometimes their faces. They bought trunk-loads of costume-shop clothes: not the Haight’s Oscar Wilde imitation but plumes and boas, sashes and epaulets, bright green tights and tricornered hats that no one in his right mind would wear. Kesey stopped writing so he could concentrate on making a movie about their epic bus ride. But nothing happened, because making a movie wasn’t enough either. He wanted something more, something bigger, though he couldn’t say precisely what it was until the Beatles came to town to close out the summer of 1965.
Going to the concert was meant to be another prank: the famous novelist and his ultra-cool friends rolling into San Francisco already stoned, strolling into the Cow Palace in their tights and boas, floating through a sea of teenyboppers. But when the Beatles bounded on stage everything flipped around. The boppers started screaming, a piercing squeal that rose from the floor to where Kesey’s crew was sitting, high above them. Once they got going they couldn’t stop, not even when the boys launched into their set. And then there were the lights. Not the stage lights, which were bright enough, but the flashbulbs of the girls’ Instamatics, thousands of them, bursting at random around the arena. Now some of the boppers down front were passing out and had to be carried off, and a few others were scrambling up out of the audience, security guards scrambling after them, the girls weaving and shrieking across the stage. They were tripping. That’s what he was seeing, Kesey decided: ten thousand orgiastic teenyboppers on a pop-induced trip. If the Beatles could create such a scene—the squeaky-clean Beatles—imagine what he could do.
The Next Step
DREAMS OF A decidedly different sort had floated among Martin Luther King’s advisers in the summer of 1965. Bayard Rustin was still calling for the movement to replace protest with politics, and SNCC was still sniping about SCLC’s tendency to favor dramatic confrontations over the hard work of organizing the grass roots. But King’s inner circle was convinced that the Selma campaign had elevated him to an extraordinary level, turning him into “a leader now not merely of Negroes,” his aide Stanley Levison wrote in April, “but of millions of whites in motion.”7 Surely the moment demanded that he extend nonviolent protest, not back away from it. It was time, they decided, for King to turn his enormous moral power against the racial injustices that ran through the urban North.
Experience dictated that protests be focused on a single site. King spent most of July touring possibilities, starting with three promising days in Chicago—fifteen thousand people turned out to hear him speak in downtown’s Grant Park—followed by a swing through Cleveland, Philadelphia, and New York: the last an obvious choice, except that Harlem’s powerful congressman, Adam Clayton Powell, made it clear he didn’t want King invading his turf. He finished with a stop in Washington, DC, on August 6, so he could stand by Lyndon Johnson’s side as the president signed the Voting Rights Act, the final triumph of the Selma campaign. Five days later a California highway patrolman pulled over a ten-year-old Buick he saw weaving down Avalon Boulevard, on the southeastern edge of Los Angeles’ sprawling African American neighborhood, an area called Watts.
It was hard to say when things went wrong. Maybe when the patrolman asked the driver, twenty-one-year-old Marquette Frye, to walk a straight line and he offered to do it backward, playing to the crowd that had gathered round, and they laughed, which got the cop’s back up. Maybe when Frye’s mother appeared, screaming at both her son and the patrolman, and the cop arrested her too, manhandling her into the patrol car, and the laughing stopped. Maybe when Frye refused to get into the car with her and the cop hit him in the head and the jeering started. Maybe when the backups arrived, driving the motorcycles onto the sidewalk to split open the crowd, and someone picked up a rock and hurled it at the officers. Or maybe it had started decades earlier, when the authorities decided to treat the city’s African Americans as if they were a colonized people, the police their occupying army.
After the Fryes were taken away the rage raced along Avalon, where there were buses to stone, cars to assault, and shop windows to shatter. That night the Los Angeles police cordoned off the surrounding eight blocks, in hopes that the unrest would play itself out, as it had in Harlem the year before. But the next day was worse, the night cataclysmic. At dusk the crowds took control of the streets across Watts: sweeping down its business strips, attacking the few whites who happened to be in the area, looting and torching white-owned stores, then driving off the firefighters so the blazes would burn through the night. Around 3:00 a.m. on August 13 the LAPD tried to reclaim the neighborhood with a massive show of force. But the crowds were larger, and more than willing to meet violence with violence. By morning more than a dozen policemen had been injured, and the streets weren’t close to clear.
Shortly thereafter the mayor formally requested that the governor send in the National Guard. The first of 14,000 heavily armed soldiers began arriving in Watts that evening. Immediately the death toll started to rise: at least fourteen African Americans were killed on the troops’ first two nights on the street, more than double the number of Americans killed in Vietnam that week. By August 17 the area had been pacified. But emotions hadn’t. In white neighborhoods people raced to buy guns amid rumors that Black mobs were going to stream across the color line, while Watts burned with talk of the fires next time. King heard the threats himself during a hastily arranged appearance at a Watts social center on August 18. He’d come at the request of a group of LA ministers, who thought his presence might calm the community. It didn’t. “All over America, the Negro must join hands . . . ,” he began. “And burn,” someone shouted from the crowd. King left seriously shaken, and more convinced than ever that his next step had to be out of the South. “If [we] don’t go north,” he told Levison as he headed home to Atlanta, “we’re damned.”8
For the balance of the month King’s advisers worked through their options. Los Angeles was too tense to manage a movement, New York too politicized, Cleveland and Philadelphia not big enough media draws. That left Chicago: three and a half million people, a quarter of them African Americans, spread among a 234-square-mile patchwork of hyper-segregated neighborhoods; another three million whites in the segregated suburbs; one of the country’s most powerful politicians, Richard J. Daley, in the mayor’s office; and a vibrant civil rights campaign already in motion. On September 1—the day after Ken Kesey’s revelation at the Cow Palace—King made the official announcement. “I have faith,” he told reporters, “that Chicago could . . . well become the metropolis where a meaningful nonviolent movement could arouse the conscience of this nation to deal realistically with the northern ghetto.”9
But faith alone wouldn’t do. King and his advisers had built their campaigns in Birmingham and Selma on a single central demand each—desegregating downtown stores, registering to vote—that they knew would trigger official resistance. In Chicago local activists had spent the previous three years locked in a bitter battle with city hall over the discriminatory policies of the public schools. The logical step was to follow their lead. But the autumn’s planning sessions swept right by that possibility. Obviously King would take on the schools, argued the project’s director, James Bevel, along with the segregation of housing, the high rate of unemployment, the concentration of poverty, and the injustices that ran through the welfare system. Precisely how they’d tackle such a tangle of issues wasn’t clear. Bevel was sure of the outcome, though. “We’re going to create a new city,” he told the SCLC staff in October. “Nobody will stop us.”10
The campaign began with a perfectly choreographed move. Around the first of the year Bevel’s staffers surreptitiously rented King a $90 a month apartment in the middle of Chicago’s West Side ghetto. On a frigid day in late January 1966 King brought a scrum of reporters through the urine-stained hallway—a consequence of the lockless front door, which permitted street-corner drunks to come in when they needed to relieve themselves—up three flights of creaking stairs, to his bare-boned new home. His first evening he opened his door to whoever wanted to stop by; for a while he sat with six members of the local gang, the Vice Lords, talking about nonviolence. The following morning he walked the neighborhood in the bitter cold, while the trailing reporters ferreted out the stories he hoped would illustrate the burdens poverty imposed.
The momentum soon faded. Part of the problem was King’s crushing schedule. He was constantly slipping out of Chicago for appearances around the country, and when he was in town he spent much of his time at events that didn’t fuel the movement: a lecture on the Black family at the University of Chicago; dinner with Mahalia Jackson; a courtesy call at Elijah Muhammad’s South Side mansion. Worse, SCLC couldn’t always read the complex dynamics that shaped urban inequality. In his first major move King led a dramatic takeover of a dilapidated apartment building near his, claiming that the tenants’ right to decent living conditions trumped the owner’s right to profit from their rents. But it turned out he wasn’t the slumlord King needed him to be; he was an eighty-one-year-old invalid saddled with a property that didn’t cover his costs. He’d be happy to give King title to the building, he said, as long as SCLC paid the mortgage.
Nothing hurt the campaign more, though, than its breadth. With so many issues to tackle, it couldn’t focus its energies. For his part, Dick Daley wanted to make sure it stayed that way. In private the mayor was livid that King had come to Chicago. But in public he was conciliatory, even supportive. “All of us, like Dr. King, are trying to end slums,” he told the press when King moved in. “We are not perfect but we feel we have done more than any other metropolitan city in the country.”11 To prove his continuing commitment, he unveiled a major initiative he said would eliminate blight citywide by the end of 1967. It was a ridiculous pledge, given that 40 percent of African American housing didn’t meet minimal standards. But the point wasn’t to turn Chicago into a model city; it was to make clear that Daley was no Bull Connor. And without a Bull Connor there’d be no confrontation, no spectacular footage playing on the nightly news, no sympathy marches sweeping the country, no proof that nonviolence offered African Americans a better alternative than the rage that had swept through Watts, no way to begin building the new city Bevel had promised.
King’s advisers weren’t worried. Hadn’t Birmingham been on the brink of collapse right before its transformative moment? Hadn’t the Selma campaign stumbled toward its defining event? What was to say that Chicago wouldn’t work that way too? “We haven’t gotten things under control,” Andrew Young admitted in a late winter staff meeting. “The strategy hasn’t emerged yet, but now we know what we’re dealing with and eventually we’ll come up with the answers.”12
Sweet Home Chicago
ONE OF KING’S aides had suggested the idea in February 1966, less than a month after King’s arrival. But the campaign was considering so many approaches then, it was hard for one particular tactic to gain much traction. Into the mix it went, along with the proposed tenant union and the mass rally at Soldier Field and the march on city hall, until everything started coming undone, and the staffers knew they had to do something dramatic.
The first crisis no one saw coming. Since the debacle at the 1964 Democratic convention, SNCC’s factions had been arguing over the organization’s direction. Still, most of the activists who came to its annual election of officers in mid-May 1966 assumed they’d be reelecting the current chairman, John Lewis. In the first round of voting they did just that. But someone demanded another vote, and in the chaos that followed differences turned into wrenching divisions. Well into the night the factions fought it out, Lewis clinging to the group’s founding principles, his opponents insisting that the time had come to abandon dreams of the Beloved Community for the hard work of empowering Black America. In the end Lewis came toppling down, replaced by a relentlessly charismatic twenty-four-year-old named Stokely Carmichael.
Carmichael couldn’t quite match Lewis’s extraordinary commitment to the cause. But he came close. Born in Trinidad, raised largely in Harlem, he’d first come into contact with the civil rights movement through New York’s radical circles. He’d joined SNCC as a Freedom Rider in 1961, then spent portions of three years organizing in the Mississippi Delta, the most dangerous work the movement had to offer, before becoming director of a new grassroots campaign in rural Lowndes County, Alabama, in 1965. There his signal achievement was the creation of an all-Black political party designed to give the county’s African American majority control of public affairs, its fearlessness represented by the sinewy black panther Carmichael chose at its symbol. Eleven days before the SNCC elections the Lowndes County Freedom Organization put together its first slate of candidates, a milestone Carmichael marked with a blistering declaration of independence. “We’re going to take power in Lowndes County and rule,” he declared. “We don’t even want to integrate. . . . Integration is a subterfuge for white supremacy.”13
Then he was just another activist, drawing on the Black nationalist tradition to imagine a dramatic reworking of the deep South’s political order. Two weeks later he was the public face of SNCC’s militant turn. The press’s take was almost universally hostile. Here was the new Malcolm X, the reports ran, the latest manifestation of the hate that hate produced. Carmichael countered with a spectacular display of defiance. He was in the middle of a highly publicized march across Mississippi in mid-June—for several days King had walked alongside him—when the local sheriff arrested him for lack of a permit. He spent the afternoon in jail, made bail, and was back with the march in time for its evening rally. About 600 people were waiting for him. “This is the twenty-seventh time I’ve been arrested, and I ain’t going to jail no more!” he shouted from the makeshift stage. “What we gonna start saying now is ‘Black Power.’ ”
“Black Power!” the crowd roared back.
“That’s right,” he replied. “That’s what we want, Black Power. We don’t have to be ashamed of it. . . . 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?”
“Black Power!” they shouted again and again and again.14
The firestorm started the following morning. Sparked by the New York Times’s front-page story on the previous evening’s rally, it leaped from paper to paper, magazine to magazine, onto the nightly news, and into national politics; the outrage intensifying with each repetition of Carmichael’s incendiary phrase. This was more than militancy, opinion makers insisted. It was the poisonous politics of extremists “inching dangerously toward a philosophy of black separatism . . . almost indistinguishable from the wild-eyed doctrines of the Black Muslims and heavy with intimations of racial hatred,” as Time magazine put it in its blistering story. “In this context the Gandhian concept of nonviolence espoused by Martin Luther King is in danger of crumbling.”15
At first King’s advisers weren’t sure how to respond. They tried quiet diplomacy, hoping that Carmichael might be reined in by a well-placed word. They tried carefully constructed public statements meant to reassure whites that Black Power was an aberration, a reflection of frustration rather than a wholesale rejection of integration. They even tried moral condemnation, the most powerful rhetorical weapon King could wield. None of it worked. By the end of June, Black Power had swept from SNCC to CORE, whose chairman dismissed nonviolence as “a dying philosophy,” a striking turn for an organization founded by radical pacifists. The NAACP’s director, Roy Wilkins, replied with the flat of his hand. Black Power is “a reverse Mississippi,” he said, “a reverse Hitler, a reverse Ku Klux Klan. . . . We of the NAACP will have none of this.”16
That’s when King’s analysis sharpened, just as the movement seemed to be breaking apart. Sharp words weren’t enough, he told the Times on July 9. Black Power’s militancy had to be met with “militant nonviolence,” acts of civil disobedience “extreme enough to stop the flow of a city.” Precisely what those acts might be he couldn’t yet say. But whatever the tactic, the campaign wouldn’t stop until local, state, and federal authorities had taken vigorous action against the structures that sustained the ghettos. Anything less wouldn’t do, not if the nation wanted to defuse the anger on which Black Power rested. “Now people have to understand the choice is no longer between nice little meetings or nonviolence,” he insisted. “It is between militant nonviolence and riots.”17
Two days later the violence came home. It started with a tussle over a fire hydrant in a poor Black neighborhood a mile or so west of downtown Chicago: cops on one side, kids on another, both sides’ emotions frayed by the heat. By the time King stumbled onto the conflict while driving to the evening’s mass meeting, there were six kids in jail and angry crowds in the street. He spent the rest of the night trying to defuse the situation with talk of meaningful reform peacefully secured, mostly from the sweltering sanctuary of the local Baptist church. But a portion of the people he’d drawn to his impromptu rally walked out on him, while others laughed at his naivete. And when the reporters left to file their stories around midnight, they had to be escorted out of the church under armed guard.
The crowds came out again the next night, ripping through the neighborhood shopping strip, smashing windows, looting stores, pelting the cops with bricks and stones when they tried to intervene. On the third night the police brought out the heavy weapons—shotguns, machine guns, and thousands of rounds of ammunition—so they could reclaim the streets. Instead the violence surged along the ghetto’s sinews: north to the projects, where the cops engaged in an hour-long battle with snipers, and three miles west into the area where SCLC had rooted itself six months before. King spent the evening driving the neighborhood with Andrew Young, pleading for peace. But no one was listening. In the course of the night dozens of people were injured, two killed. One was a twenty-eight-year-old man gunned down while looting, the other a fourteen-year-old girl hit by a random shot while walking with friends three blocks from King’s apartment.
King came home to an early morning strategy session, a first attempt to shape the response he had to make. Through the next day the discussions ran, as the governor flooded the West Side with a hundred truckloads of National Guardsmen whose presence reduced the night’s troubles to a sprinkling of incidents. The planning continued through the tense weekend that followed, when everyone feared that the violence would flare again, and into the following week, when there was more and more talk of the Chicago campaign’s failures. Gradually the focus tightened on to a single dramatic tactic. At the end of July, King said, SCLC would launch a series of marches into white neighborhoods on the city’s far West Side. The demonstrations would target realtors who refused to serve African Americans looking for homes, the front line in a series of barriers sustaining the urban color line. But confronting realtors wasn’t really the point. By marching into the bungalow belt the movement would seize up the city, just as King had said it would.
King was in Atlanta when 250 protesters headed into the Gage Park neighborhood, due west of Chicago’s sprawling South Side ghetto, on Saturday morning, July 30. They marched almost three miles—along a business strip and through a large public park—without any trouble. From there it was only four blocks to the realty office they planned to picket. But the way was mobbed with some 400 whites. At first they settled for booing and jeering and the occasional chant of “white power” from behind the thin line the police had established in the middle of the street. Then the protesters reached the realtor’s shuttered storefront, and the whites started throwing rocks and bottles. Both of the march’s leaders were hit, one of them knocked to the ground. With the march broken by the violence, the protesters rushed out of Gage Park under police protection.
On Sunday afternoon they returned. This time they came prepared for trouble: instead of walking into the neighborhood they drove in a seventy-car caravan to the public park, so they’d only have four blocks to march. But there were even more whites waiting for them than there had been the day before: upwards of 3,000, the police said later, though the streets were so packed no one could know for sure. Into the thick of them the marchers moved, surrounded by cops in riot gear, as the chants grew louder—“Burn them like Jews!” some shouted—and the rocks and bottles came raining down again, now with beer cans and cherry bombs scattered in.18 Down went a twenty-two-year-old patrolman, his hand cut open by shattering glass; a fifty-seven-year-old minister struck in the face with a brick; a middle-aged nun, blood soaking through her habit. Still the line kept moving. Twice the cops had to break blockades the mob set up in the protesters’ path. But they couldn’t—or wouldn’t—stop the whites who swarmed into the park as soon as the marchers had cleared it, surged around the cars they’d left behind, and set two dozen of them on fire. In the end forty-five protesters were rushed to the local emergency room. Most of the rest had to slog back to the ghetto on foot. When they reached the color line a knot of supporters was waiting for them, singing “We Shall Overcome.”
Suddenly SCLC had the confrontation the Chicago campaign had been missing: peaceful protesters on one side, rabid racists on the other, with the resulting bloodshed splashed across the nation’s front pages. But a weekend wasn’t enough. On Tuesday and Wednesday, August 2 and 3, organizers sent marchers into the north West Side, less than three miles south of the Cahills’ house on Eddy Street. Again massive white mobs filled the streets, shouting the same vicious taunts and slogans, but they stopped short of the South Side’s violence. So the movement swung the protests back to Gage Park. The next march would be on Friday, August 5, King announced. It would follow the same route as the previous Sunday, with one critical addition. He would lead it.
There were already thousands of whites in the park when King arrived late that afternoon. As soon as they saw him getting out of his car they started chanting, “Kill the niggers! Kill the niggers!” and “We Want Martin Luther Coon!” Then the debris arced over the police lines—more rocks and bottles and cherry bombs—and something hit him above the base of his neck, a blow hard enough he stumbled a step and fell to one knee. There he stayed for a moment or two, the nation’s Nobel laureate with his head bowed down and his hand splayed out on the trampled grass, until he felt strong enough to get back on his feet and march into the mob he’d come to save from itself. “I have never in my life seen such hatred,” he declared at the protest’s end. “Not in Mississippi or Alabama. This is a terrible thing.”19
There were more marches over the weekend, more mobs, more violence, North Side and South Side both, the ugliness now set against the news of King’s stoning, which rocketed around the world. In the chaos at least one of his aides could see the spirit of Selma descending. So he took that campaign’s pivotal decision and brought it up to Chicago. “I have counted up the costs,” Jesse Jackson proclaimed at a Monday night rally. “My life. Bevel’s life. Even Dr. King’s life. Over and against the generation and the continuation of a kind of sin that’s going to internally disrupt this country and possibly the world. I have counted the cost! I’m going to Cicero!”20
In form and function it was pure imitation, a mimicking of the recklessly brilliant move Bevel had made after the first burst of violence in Selma, when he announced that the movement would march to Montgomery, a fifty-mile trek across Klan country. Now Jackson had announced that protesters would march into Chicago’s most notoriously racist suburb while the cops who’d surrounded them in Gage Park stood on the other side of the city line, prevented by law and reason from following along. There’d be massive mobs waiting, just as there had been in 1951, when the Clark family’s arrival at their newly rented apartment had triggered rioting so severe the governor had had to call out the National Guard. In the years since, the hatred had shown no signs of abating: only three months earlier four white teenagers had bludgeoned a Black seventeen-year-old to death with a baseball bat simply because he’d been walking down the street alone. The Cook County sheriff matched Jackson’s counting with his own calculation. If the movement marched into Cicero, he told reporters, someone was going to be killed.
That possibility city hall couldn’t abide. Since the marches had started, Dick Daley had offered the movement nothing beyond police protection. Less than a day after Jackson’s announcement he called in the press to say that while he fully supported the right to protest, it would be far better to negotiate a solution to the movement’s demands. He’d already arranged for some of Chicago’s most influential men to meet the following week. He sincerely hoped that King and his aides would come too, along with representatives of the city’s realtors, so that they could all sit and reason together. In the meantime SCLC ought to hold off on its Cicero march, so as not to put lives at risk when discussions would do. Surely Dr. King could see the logic of that.
He could. In every campaign he’d waged, there had come a point when the pressure became too great for the authorities to bear. The Montgomery buses running empty. Kids in the streets of Birmingham. A line of marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. That’s when the breakthroughs came: when the powerful couldn’t withstand the powerless anymore. For the balance of the week the movement staged some of its largest protests yet around Chicago, though none near Cicero, in a final push before the negotiations began, while King’s closest advisers hammered out a list of demands meant to open up the city’s housing market. On Wednesday morning, August 17—eighteen days after the first cataclysmic march into Gage Park—they walked into the suitably neutral ground of the Episcopal diocese’s elegant cathedral house and took their seats among the bankers, industrialists, labor leaders, and clergymen the mayor had handpicked to attend.
There were some preliminaries, the predictable posturing of powerful men in each other’s company. Then one of King’s aides presented the movement’s demands. Would the marches end if these demands were met? Daley asked.
Yes, King replied. Was the mayor ready to do so?
Daley picked up the sheet the aide handed to him, read it aloud so everyone in the room could hear the terms again, and said that he was.
It took only a moment for King’s circle to realize what had happened. Daley had given them everything—and nothing at all: no guarantees, no timetables, not a single assurance beyond his word that he would fulfill the promises he’d just made. As they started to press him on implementation, though, the realtors’ representatives cut in to say that they couldn’t go along with the mayor’s appeasement of the protesters. Immediately the conversation swung around to the realtors’ intransigence. Through the rest of the morning session the pressure built, not only from Daley but also from the clergymen and businessmen he’d brought in to back him, the weight of consensus crushing down until the realtors finally buckled. The meeting’s chair, the president of a major railroad line, gave them some time to caucus. When they returned they put on the table two concessions that dovetailed with Daley’s: they’d publicly support the principle of neighborhood integration, they said, and they’d urge their members not to discriminate against African American customers. “This is nothing,” King hissed to a colleague.21 But the chair pointed out that both the mayor and the realtors had now accepted the demands King had presented, so there were no grounds for continued demonstrations. And the trap Daley had set snapped shut.
They staved off defeat for a week, first by insisting that a subcommittee draw up the details of a settlement, then by reviving the threat of Cicero. But the threat had been hollowed out: SCLC couldn’t possibly mount the march, not when any one of fifty prominent Chicagoans could say to the press that SCLC was inviting horrific violence in pursuit of goals it had already won. On Thursday, August 25, the subcommittee finalized a ten-point accord that codified the pledges made at the previous week’s meeting. On Friday King signed it.
At the subsequent news conference he gave the deal a furious spin. “The total eradication of housing discrimination has been made possible,” he said. “Never before has such a far-reaching move been made.”22 But anyone who read the accord knew better. After six months of organizing and a month of marches, after the bricks and bottles and howling mobs, the movement had come away with a set of paper promises. That evening King led the campaign’s final, tepid rally. In the morning he flew home to Atlanta, leaving behind a color line he hadn’t been able to break, a system of segregation and domination he couldn’t destroy, a city he couldn’t transform, and festering wounds he had failed to salve.
The Acid Test
KESEY IMAGINED A happening. There’d be rock and roll to bring in the kids, and a light show so wild it would blow their minds, and surreal images flashing up on the walls—snatches of his half-made movie, maybe—and loops of prerecorded sound when the bands weren’t playing, and lots of LSD, and everyone would be dancing and tripping in a psychedelic bacchanal. But organization wasn’t Kesey’s forte, so the first attempts were little more than house parties. Then he connected with a couple of conceptual artists from Haight-Ashbury who knew this young promoter looking for his big break. Together they actually did the things you had to do, like renting a performance space and putting out advertising. And in one insane weekend in January 1966, at a hulking old union hall down near San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, the whole damn thing came together.
The artists gave the weekend its name—the Trips Festival, they called it—the promoter its headliners: the Grateful Dead, fronted by that Garcia kid who used to hang around Kesey’s house; and Big Brother and the Holding Company, who could have used a better vocalist, if only one were available. Kesey’s crew delivered the hallucinogenic light show, the dizzying images on the vaulted ceiling, the synthesized soundtrack, and the fistfuls of acid they passed around in a shopping bag. The final touch was brought by the thousands of people who crushed into the hall every night, a mass of sweat-soaked flesh out on the dance floor, who made the scene everything Kesey had hoped it would be.
After that the trips took on a life of their own. Almost every weekend the promoters put on another festival as frenzied as the first: Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore, Great Society at the Avalon Ballroom, Country Joe and the Fish at the Winterland, the Dead everywhere. From the concert halls the crowds poured into Haight-Ashbury’s little hippie colony, the dabblers to wander through the thrift stores and head shops, the true believers to join the countercultural revolution the festivals had put on display. By the summer of 1966 the neighborhood was teeming with self-proclaimed poets, would-be musicians, radical actors and militant mimes, printmakers, shopkeepers, dope dealers, and a lot of kids from the ’burbs, come to the Haight to smash out the windows of mainstream America and climb through the gaping frame to freedom.
But even shattered windows can be barred. There was no saying what triggered the great acid panic of 1966. It wasn’t Kesey, who two nights before the trip festival got arrested on a North Beach roof with three and half grams of marijuana in his possession, and rather than risk five years in prison fled down the coast to Mexico, leaving behind a blitzed-out suicide note no one believed. It wasn’t the Haight either, since almost nobody beyond the hip noticed what was happening there. Somehow the panic just hit, fueled by breathless news reports of an LSD epidemic among the sons and daughters of the comfortable classes, complete with a Life photo spread featuring a pretty LA teenager writhing on the floor in the middle of a bad trip, and the lurid story of a New York City medical student too high to remember killing his mother. Not one but three congressional committees held highly publicized hearings, with the nation’s leading acidhead, Timothy Leary, telling the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency that one in three undergrads had dropped acid. It was a ridiculously inflated estimate—the actual figure was around one percent—but the New York Times duly put it on its front page. In the end Congress decided not to take any action, for fear of criminalizing all those college kids. California’s legislators didn’t have the same compunction. At the height of the panic, in April 1966, they pushed through a law making the manufacturing and distribution of LSD a felony, its possession a misdemeanor, the prohibitions to take effect on October 6.
The obvious response was to pry apart the bars. In late September two of the Haight’s more prominent figures sent around the neighborhood a declaration of independence. “We hold these experiences to be self-evident,” the flyer read, “that all is equal, that the creation endows us with certain inalienable rights, that among these are: the freedom of the body, the pursuit of joy, and the expansion of consciousness, and that to secure these rights, we the citizens of the earth declare our love and compassion for all conflicting hate-carrying men and women of the world.”23 To celebrate their liberation, they were going to hold “a love pageant” in the neighborhood park on the day LSD became illegal. They gave it a few political touches, the best the bouquets they brought to give to the cops who’d been assigned to crowd control. For the most part, though, they simply carried the trips festivals out of the clubs and into public view. The Dead and Big Brother each played a set, while seven or eight hundred of the Haight’s devotees danced in the grass to prove they weren’t afraid.
That was such an encouraging result that the Haight’s activists decided to stage a bolder version. So they lined up the hipsters’ great guru Allen Ginsberg, who said he’d do some ritual chanting; Timothy Leary, who wanted to lecture on acid’s transcendence; a radical activist from Berkeley named Jerry Rubin, who’d recently discovered acid’s revolutionary potential; and an assortment of hipster poets. To balance the talking heads they signed twice as many bands as they had for the love pageant, and to make it a full-fledged trip they convinced the Haight’s leading LSD maker to contribute thousands of tabs for free distribution. Then they announced that on January 14, 1967, not just the Haight but the entire counterculture would be gathering at the Polo Fields in Golden Gate Park for the world’s first Human Be-In. “For ten years a new nation has grown inside the robot flesh of the old,” read their press release. “Before your eyes a new vital soul is reconnecting the living centers of the American body. . . . Hang your fear at the door and join the future.”24 Twenty-five thousand people showed up.
There was a peculiar little lag before the news hit the national press. The Boston Globe picked it up first, maybe because Boston had so many college kids. From there it flashed to Los Angeles’ media market, and from there to just about everywhere. The be-in was only the hook. The real story was the alternative world the rush of reporters found in the Haight, the startling discovery of a strange new tribe that turned American values inside out, in defiance of law and reason. “The Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco is not so much a neighborhood as a state of mindlessness,” read Time’s version, which went out to the magazine’s three and a half million subscribers in the middle of March. “The Erewhon of America’s ‘pot left’ has over the past year become the center of a new utopianism, compounded of drugs and dreams, free love and LSD. It is a far cry from the original Utopia . . . whose denizens demanded six hours of work each day; the 7,000 mind-blown residents of San Francisco’s ‘Psychedelphia’ demand a zero-hour day and free freak-outs for all.”25
The effect wasn’t precisely what the mainstream media had in mind. In late February Los Angeles’ furiously expanding counterculture held its first be-in at Griffith Park, headlined by the Doors, a local band that had taken its name from Aldous Huxley’s 1954 paean to psychedelic self-enlightenment. New York’s waited until the end of March, when 10,000 people filled a corner of Central Park for a psychedelic Easter parade. But no place could match the Haight. On weekends the streets were so packed with gawkers, tourists, and hippie wannabes that the city had to reroute traffic. The Avalon and the Fillmore could barely keep up with the crowds, even with shows five nights a week. The major labels couldn’t help but notice: by spring most of the Haight’s favorite groups had record deals, the Airplane a single already getting a lot of airplay, courtesy of RCA. And every day, it seemed, there were more kids wandering in from the Greyhound station, refugees from small-town Ohio or suburban LA, come to settle into the utopia they’d read about in a magazine. How many had come no one could say. But by the end of March the neighborhood’s most prominent spokesmen were telling reporters that as soon as school was out the numbers would shoot up, peaking at somewhere around 100,000, enough to create in the Haight a Summer of Love.
The more radical activists tried to warn them. The neighborhood couldn’t absorb that many people, they said, not when it was already dangerously overcrowded. Once the word was out, though, there was no pulling it back. Through April and May the press gave the story prominent play—Hunter S. Thompson upped the number to 200,000 in his long article on the Haight in the Times’s Sunday magazine—while the music execs fed it into their spring marketing campaigns. Columbia had a huge hit with a Summer of Love song so insipid it had taken its composer twenty minutes to write. The Airplane’s single tracked Columbia’s single up the pop charts. And on June 1 EMI released the year’s most shocking album, the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, with its eye-popping packaging, vertiginous swirl of sound, and LSD-laced lyrics, as sure a sign as anyone could want that the psychedelic moment had arrived. Word was the boys might even appear at the pop festival to be held in Monterey, down the coast from the Haight, the weekend before the Summer of Love was to begin. Little wonder the kids kept coming, with so many forces pulling them in.
The Beatles didn’t show. But the crowds did: more than 55,000 of them on the festival’s final night, when the Dead came out to play. Three days later the Haight took its turn, officially opening the summer with a free-form be-in celebrating the solstice in Golden Gate Park. The attendance was much smaller than it had been in Monterey, smaller than it had been at the January be-in, but the day had all the right touches, from paper flowers on the shrubs to a conch shell concert by a group of Tibetan monks. When it was over, those who were left wandered down to the beach at the end of the park to watch the sun set over the sea.
Then things started to unravel. It was the number of kids, who quickly overwhelmed the Haight’s meager preparations. It was the predators—the hustlers, the hoods, the con men, and the psychopaths—who followed the kids in. It was the dealers, not just the familiar faces with the two-dollar tabs of LSD but the newcomers selling STP, PCP, and a pharmacopeia of amphetamines. It was the money that coursed through the drug trade, the competition for market share, and the inevitable violence: the threats; the muggings; the acid dealer everyone in the Haight claimed to know, found dead in his apartment on August 3, stabbed twelve times, his right arm severed. It was the spiraling risk: by late summer half the Haight’s hippies were shooting meth, officials estimated, and 20 percent had tried heroin. It was the sixteen-year-old huddled in a doorway, staring into space. It was the fifteen-year-old crashing on the floor of someone she didn’t know. It was the repeated rumors of rape. It was the freedom Kesey had dreamed of bringing out of the psych ward. But it wasn’t liberation.
He wasn’t there to see it. He’d come back from Mexico in time for the October 1966 love pageant. Shortly thereafter the FBI caught him while he was driving down the freeway. After two trials on the possession charges, and two hung juries, he reached a plea deal in April 1967 and was sentenced to six months in the San Mateo County jail, his term to begin on June 24, three days after the summer solstice. Most of those months he spent on a work crew, clearing brush near his Day-Glo cabin in the woods. When he was released he gathered up his wife and kids, shuttered the cabin, and moved back to Oregon, to a dairy farm outside of his hometown, where he thought he might start writing again.
The Unheard
IN THE AUTUMN of 1966 Stokely Carmichael seemed to be everywhere. He appeared in the rarified pages of the New York Review of Books to explain Black Power to the intelligentsia, on NBC’s Meet the Press to reach the nation’s power brokers, and in front of Harlem’s P.S. 201 to support local demands for community control of the city’s schools. He lectured to ten thousand students at Berkeley, though the Republican candidate for governor, Ronald Reagan, asked to him to stay away, and to an overflow crowd at Yale. He crisscrossed the country—from Washington, DC, to San Francisco, Oakland to Detroit—to meet with Black activists; packed church halls in Columbus and Dayton, a lyceum in Boston, and a public park in Watts for a rally the city refused to sanction. In almost every venue he delivered a message of uncompromising militancy. “We are tired of trying to explain to white people that we’re not going to hurt them,” he told the crowd at Berkeley. “We are concerned with getting the things we want, the things that we have to have to be able to function. . . . The question is, will white people overcome their racism and allow for that to happen in this country? If that does not happen, brothers and sisters, we have no choice but to say very clearly, ‘Move over, or we’re going to move over you.’”26 Twice he was arrested for inciting riots.
Most African Americans weren’t impressed. Only 18 percent of those polled in December 1966 thought Carmichael was helping to advance civil rights, a figure that placed him at the bottom of a long list of Black activists, barely above Elijah Muhammad. For a portion of the African American Left, though, Carmichael’s politics were electrifying. By the end of the year cadres of young radicals in New York, Newark, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles had created political parties inspired by his Lowndes County campaign, as had two San Francisco–area militants, twenty-four-year-old Huey Newton and thirty-year-old Bobby Seale, who in October launched the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, across the bay from the Haight.
Beyond a few friends and colleagues, the party had no members. So Newton and Seale set to organizing, drawing not on the SNCC style of grassroots mobilization that had inspired Carmichael but on the power of self-presentation. They pieced together a uniform that combined an urban look of black pants, a crisp blue shirt, and a black leather jacket with the black beret favored by Latin American revolutionaries. Then they assembled a cache of weapons, loaded them into their cars, and established neighborhood patrols meant to protect Oakland’s African Americans from the city’s overwhelmingly white police force, an act of bravado made possible by a loophole in California law that allowed citizens to carry loaded guns as long as they weren’t concealed. The inevitable confrontations with rattled cops brought in a fistful of recruits and a good deal of admiration. But the Panthers didn’t have their breakthrough until the state assemblyman from Oakland’s white suburbs introduced a bill to close the loophole. On May 2, 1967, Seale led twenty-nine of his heavily armed comrades—three-quarters of the Panthers’ membership—into the state capitol to express their opposition to the move. As a lobbying tactic it left something to be desired. As guerrilla theater it was superb. The next day, news of the Panthers’ “invasion” ran in newspapers across the country, usually alongside a photo of young Black Che Guevaras standing in Sacramento’s marble halls with rifles slung over their shoulders, Black Power’s revolutionary vanguard revealed.27
A month later urban America’s racial wounds split open. On June 2, a police assault on a peaceful demonstration at a Boston welfare office sparked three nights of looting and burning in Roxbury. Tampa’s Black neighborhood erupted on June 11, when a policeman shot and killed a nineteen-year-old he said had robbed a camera store; Cincinnati’s on the twelfth, following a street-corner arrest gone wrong; and Buffalo’s at the end of the month with another three nights of rioting, this time triggered by the police wading into a fight at a public housing project. After Buffalo there was a two-week lull. Then, on the evening of July 12, 1967, two white patrolmen stopped an African American cabbie for a routine traffic violation in Newark’s Central Ward. Words were exchanged, the cabbie arrested. On the way to the precinct house the cops beat him up. As the news spread, people said the cabbie was dead.
Newark’s agony began exactly as Harlem’s had in the summer of 1964—with an impromptu rally in front of the local police station that the police decided to break up by wading into the crowd with nightsticks raised—but it spun out with the fury of Watts. The first night the rioting was localized. On the second night the mobs grew so large the police couldn’t contain them. From the Central Ward the looting spread to downtown. Almost a hundred stripped stores were set ablaze, the fire crews pelted with bricks and bottles. And the cops on the street were reporting sporadic sniper fire coming from tenement rooftops. Early in the morning the mayor asked the governor to send in the National Guard, civil order having broken down.
The governor responded with 3,000 troops and a swaggering promise that “the line between the jungle and the law might as well be drawn here as well as any place in America.” But the guardsmen weren’t law-enforcement officers. They were weekend soldiers thrust into what city officials thought was an “open rebellion.”28 The first firefight came around 6:00 p.m. on the third day, a fierce exchange that began when a policeman was hit by a shot fired from the top floors of a housing project. For the next forty-eight hours the troopers turned central Newark into a war zone, suppressing the looting with mass arrests and increasingly undisciplined violence and the rooftop attacks with their own raking fire. Resistance finally collapsed on July 17. By then 1,500 people had been arrested, 725 injured, and twenty-six killed, the youngest just ten years old.
Five days later, in the early morning of July 23, the Detroit police raided an after-hours bar in a poor Black section of the city’s West Side. In their rush to finish the operation the cops got rough with some of their prisoners, pushing and shoving and wielding their batons. A few onlookers started tossing insults at the officers, followed by bottles and stones. On the edge of the crowd a teenager launched a trash can through the window of Hardy’s Drug Store, while someone else set a shoe shop ablaze. And it all started again.
This time the unrest moved with startling speed. Within half a day the looting had spread to the West Side’s two major arteries, dozens of storefronts were burning, and sniper fire had begun. On Sunday afternoon the governor sent in the National Guard. But Detroit was a sprawling city, six times the size of Newark, and by evening there were outbreaks in neighborhoods so far apart they couldn’t conceivably be contained, even by troops with the training the guardsmen didn’t have. The night was horrific, the next day no better. By late Monday nineteen people had been killed, 800 injured, and hundreds more made homeless by the fires that were raging out of control. With reports pouring in of disturbances flaring in half a dozen smaller cities across the region, everyone knew there was worse to come.
Lyndon Johnson hated the thought of federal intervention. He could see the terrible image of combat troops fighting on the streets of Detroit, the horrifying possibility of a Black child killed by a white soldier he’d deployed, his administration’s commitment to racial change and the eradication of poverty destroyed by his unleashing of state-sanctioned violence. When the governor’s request arrived midday Monday, LBJ agreed only to send the soldiers to bases outside Detroit. There they sat through the evening, one brigade from the 82nd Airborne, another from the 101st—5,000 men in total—as the mayor and governor pleaded with the White House to use them. Johnson waited until 11:00 p.m. to issue the order. Even then he seemed desperate to distance himself from what he had done. “I am sure that the American people will realize that I take this action with the greatest regret,” he said in an anguished midnight television address. “Pillage, looting, murder and arson have nothing to do with civil rights. They are criminal conduct. And the federal government in the circumstances here presented has no alternative but to respond. . . .”29 Shortly thereafter armored personnel carriers rumbled into the East Side, the first time in a quarter century federal troops had been dispatched to crush an uprising in an American city.
Crush it they did. But it took three bloody days. When the city was finally brought under control, on July 28, the death toll had reached forty-three, and the number of injured had climbed to 1,200. Three-quarters of those killed were African American, among them three men executed by a contingent of cops during a raid on a seedy hotel on the upheaval’s fourth night. In the five days of the rebellion 7,200 people had been arrested, 2,500 stores looted, 412 buildings burned, $50 million in property lost. Not since an anti-Black pogrom ripped through Tulsa in 1921 had an American city suffered such devastation.
Stokely Carmichael promised more. He was in Havana when Detroit exploded, attending an international conference of revolutionary movements. “We are moving to guerrilla warfare within the United States, since there is no other way to obtain our homes, our land, our rights,” he told a packed news conference. “They have taught us to kill. Now the struggle is in the streets of the United States.”30 The vast majority of African Americans who lived in Detroit’s riot-torn neighborhoods didn’t agree. Only three percent thought that people had taken to the streets in pursuit of self-determination, according to surveys conducted shortly after the uprising ended, whereas 60 percent thought they’d come out to protest the police brutality, poor housing, unemployment, and poverty that afflicted their communities. Violence wasn’t the answer, said 81 percent of those surveyed.
Yet violence there had been, just as Martin Luther King had feared there would be if the urban poor couldn’t secure meaningful reform any other way. He’d tried: the evenings he’d spent in his ghetto apartment talking with gang members; the day his advisers had claimed control of a tenement on behalf of the people who lived there; the nights he’d driven through West Side Chicago pleading for peace; the afternoon he’d marched through the mobs in Gage Park. Now it had come to this. Not guerrilla warfare, though there were flashes of that. Not Black Power, though it had its adherents. But the enraged voice of the dispossessed, demanding to be heard.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
THE EDITORS OF the Saturday Evening Post put a hippie on the cover of their late September issue, a close-up of a grinning young man with a garishly painted face, wearing a top hat he’d labeled LSD. But they opened the issue with a plea from Detroit’s chief of police. A grizzled crime reporter turned reformer, he knew the city’s troubles better than almost anyone. He’d seen the toxic mix of fear and aggression that had gripped its white neighborhoods since the summer’s unrest: the surge of families moving to the suburbs, the angry talk of self-defense, the frightening spike in gun sales. And he must have read the national polls, which made clear that the same emotions were racing across the country. Forty-five percent of whites thought the riots had been caused by radical agitators trying to foment revolution. Thirty-four percent believed their neighborhoods might be threatened by a Black revolt, a ludicrously high figure given the extent to which residential segregation separated Blacks and whites. An overwhelming majority said looters ought to be shot. Thirty percent said they’d pull the trigger themselves if rioters came anywhere near them. The thought appalled him. “Does the public expect a policeman to be a public executioner who can inflict capital punishment for misdemeanors?” asked the chief. “It is one thing to shoot back at snipers and it is another thing to shoot down a child who is looting a pair of shoes or even a television set. Property can be restored, but not a life.”31
Three pages later the Post’s aristocratic columnist, Stewart Alsop, scion of Groton and Yale, offered a stinging rebuttal. He opened his essay with the story of Juanita, “a cheerful, rather charming sixteen-year-old Negro girl” he met while reporting on the looting of Watts in 1965. For Juanita the riot had been a carnival, said Alsop, “rather like a white middle-class child’s Christmas Day, a day of excitement, of shared joy, and of all sorts of wonderful things for free,” which was why the cops should do exactly what the majority of whites wanted them to do. “In the years to come,” he said, “many sins of omission and commission by the white majority must be expiated and much money spent. But for the short run there is only one way to make sure that next summer and the summer after that will not be repetitions of the ghastly summer now ending. Force must be used immediately and selectively, as soon as trouble starts. . . . Juanita and her contemporaries must be persuaded right at the beginning, before the carnival atmosphere has time to spread, that this riot will not be fun.”32
After Alsop’s essay the editors ran a torturous little poem about snails, followed by the article Joan Didion had written when she came back from the Haight. It was a stunningly elegant piece of precisely observed vignettes—the teenage girls trailing the Dead, the teenage boy with needle tracks up his arm, the mime troupe’s racial provocation in the park, the five-year-old whose mother had given her acid—bound together by Didion’s re-creation of the desolation she’d felt before she’d accepted the assignment. “It was not a country in revolution,” she wrote. “It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the GNP high . . . and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not. All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job, and because nothing seemed so relevant I decided to go to San Francisco . . . where the social hemorrhaging was showing up.”33
The nation wasn’t hemorrhaging in the Haight alone, of course. It was also bleeding in the suburbs that fed kids into the Summer of Love; in Watts and West Side Chicago; in rabid Gage Park and along the Cicero line; in Newark’s Central Ward, Detroit’s center city, and the white neighborhoods that ringed them; in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post, where in the bitter aftermath of the summer’s riots sober men could debate whether the police would be right to kill a cheerful, charming sixteen-year-old because she’d stolen a pair of shoes; and in Didion’s rented mansion at the foot of the Hollywood Hills, where she’d sat with her gin and Dexedrine in the last days of spring and tried to warn her readers of the darkness descending.