5

The Civil Rights Movement

INTRODUCTION

Nell McCafferty played with her pills. She was in the Guildhall on 4 October 2008, and the men who had already spoken at the commemoration had made her feel ‘like reaching for my pills’. Where they had talked about constitutional nationalism and militant republicanism, McCafferty chose (finally) to talk about illegal, direct action. She got everyone who had broken the law in those months to put up their hands, although John Hume needed some gentle bullying first.1 McCafferty was and remains ‘a disorderly woman’ because ‘I find the social order under which people live globally to be intrinsically out of tune’; the civil rights movement in Derry was about maintaining disorder, about creating a ‘crisis to bargain with’.2 This needs to be understood if the movement and its impact are to be understood.

Research on the effects of repression has produced mixed findings: sometimes it leads to an increase in dissent, sometimes it leads to a decrease in dissent and sometimes it leads to no change in dissent. This is the ‘Punishment Puzzle’.3 A solution to the version of the puzzle set by Derry is that the repression experienced over the weekend of 5–6 October 1968 mobilized thousands of people while also pushing them away from both non-violent confrontation and rioting (at least in the beginning).4 The chapter’s first section describes the early attempts to take over leadership of the new movement and the limits that existed on what leadership could be exercised. In this and most of the other sections, comparisons are briefly made with contemporary American campaigns: not because they are ideal models that should have been followed, but because they help to illuminate what happened in Derry. The next section explores how unionism reacted to the crisis by falling out over what reforms should be conceded and, as a result, by failing to offer the movement a deal. Neither unionism nor the movement were unitary actors; they were composite actors and their different parts interacted with each other to shape strategy.5 The inconsistent responses of the authorities together with divisions inside the movement encouraged some individuals and groups to turn towards confrontational and indeed violent acts.6 The third section sets out how the movement brought such disorder to Derry that the police and business community were forced into asking Stormont to find a political settlement. The final two sections examine how a temporary deal was reached, only to then break down soon afterwards. The civil rights movement had ended, yet the struggle was to continue.

CITIZENS ACT

Three days after the civil rights march, the local organizers met in the City Hotel to discuss their next moves. Eamonn McCann briefed the press that they had decided to call for a token one-hour strike and to try again to march into the walled city to ‘defend the fundamental human rights [of] all our citizens’. This attempt to revive the hit drama of 5 October 1968 – indeed, to also get productions staged in Belfast and other parts of Northern Ireland – was boosted by Bill Craig signing on, as expected, to play the villain once more. Within hours of McCann’s announcement, the Minister of Home Affairs was telling the media that he ‘would not allow the march to go on’. However, this did not ensure that the show would go on: the city’s other public figures were not willing to reprise the cameo roles in which the Derry radicals had previously cast them. In the wake of the long weekend of violence, they not only wanted to prevent further trouble breaking out but to exploit the instability as well – in the best interests of the city and of themselves, too. So, the next day, the moderates held a meeting in the City Hotel to select a more broad-based organizing committee.7 As Fionnbarra Ó Dochartaigh later remembered, the ‘origin’ of the meeting ‘is still shrouded in some mystery’.8 Perhaps the best approach, then, to picking a way through conflicting memories is to recognize that there was no orchestrated plot so much as a network of people edging towards what was for them an obvious solution. The initial efforts to organize the civil rights movement were disorganized.

The second meeting was, according to the Derry Journal, ‘attended by about one hundred people representative of the business, professional, religious and trade union life of the city’. As with the University for Derry Committee, the moderates wanted to portray themselves as leading a non-political movement that was seeking to make things better for the whole community – ‘to achieve a united city where all men are equal’.9 However, just like the radicals, the moderates were not going to be allowed to restage their earlier success. Campbell Austin, a former Unionist alderman and retailer, had backed the university campaign and blasted the corporation for ‘murdering the city’.10 And yet, he was soon backing away from the civil rights movement because he ‘was not prepared … to be connected in any way with civil disobedience or criticism of the forces of order’.11 The contemporary labels, radicals and moderates, thus hinder as well as help efforts to understand what was taking place; these were not parties, but rather loose groupings of individuals who agreed on very little. So, when the radicals and moderates were sizing each other up at the City Hotel, in what appears to have been a tense meeting lasting for several hours, they were also arguing with their comrades. For example, the radicals, inside and outside the main meeting, clashed over how widely they should consult with others, what was the risk of becoming marginalized and whether they were selling out by inviting people who had been watching from the wings to take centre stage.12 The outcome of the meeting was as a result not so much a hostile takeover of the leadership of the movement than a forced merger: the five radicals who had officially organized the civil rights march joined together with the eleven moderates who had been elected from the floor to form the Derry Citizens Action Committee (DCAC). Among those who had been voted onto the committee were three people from the self-help movement: Hume, Michael Canavan and Paddy Doherty. Paul Grace, area organizer for the Post Office Workers’ Union, had come on board as chief steward. The local parties were represented on the committee by Austin (briefly), James Doherty, Claude Wilton and Ivan Cooper – who had been appointed chair (with Hume vice-chair) to advertise that the DCAC was non-sectarian.13 This, though, was not how McCann chose to present the new committee. Explaining to the press his decision not to become part of the DCAC, McCann branded it ‘the old politics of old men’. ‘Only an open appeal to the working class over respectable trade-union bureaucrats, middle-class do-gooders and practiced [sic] band-wagon jumpers gives any hope for the future.’14 These criticisms, which were splashed across the local newspapers, were an acrid first taste of what it meant to have McCann outside the DCAC’s big tent.

The would-be leaders of the movement were divided – and that qualifying adjective is important. While McCann may have boasted to the media that the radicals had ‘given birth’ to the ‘movement’ ‘last Saturday’, his wilful child did not always recognize the parental authority of either its fathers or its step-fathers.15 The DCAC, playing up its continuity with the organizing committee, had cancelled the strike and the march announced by McCann. However, on 11 October 1968, about a hundred female employees at the Brookehaven shirt factory walked out on strike, paraded over to the Guildhall, staged a picket in protest against police brutality and then returned to work. Their spokeswoman used her interviews with journalists to attack trade unionists, in particular, for failing to support the call for a token strike.16 The Northern Ireland Officer of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions had been privately encouraged by Stormont to ‘condemn’ the strike; he afterwards warned the government that ‘he was afraid that there was very little he could do’ about what was occurring ‘down the line’.17 Deference was in decline. Indeed, although men had monopolized the two planning meetings held that week, it was women who had actually acted, defying the DCAC as well as Unionist control by marching within the city walls. Politics in Derry was no longer an elite pursuit, but instead a game open for all to play.

Four decades on from the start of the civil rights movement, the Bogside Artists paid tribute to Hume and Martin Luther King, both then Nobel laureates, by painting a mural of the giants standing shoulder to shoulder.18 Before they became icons, though, they were young men working with friends and rivals to co-ordinate movements that other people had begun and that seethed with possibilities and problems. Admittedly, many differences can be found between Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 and Derry in 1968, yet even a cursory comparison is worth making because it puts into perspective the size of the challenge faced by the DCAC. The Montgomery bus boycott lasted for over a year; the community organized a car pool made up of hundreds of volunteers; many people nonetheless still had to walk to their work; police officers harassed the car-pool drivers; white vigilantes also tried to intimidate their black neighbours by bombing their homes and churches; negotiations with the city broke down and the movement was pushed into taking a federal law suit against bus segregation all the way to the Supreme Court; the city successful prosecuted King under an old law banning boycotts; everyone involved in the boycott had to learn about the theory and practice of non-violent direct action; African-American youths came close to rioting; and victory, when it was finally won, was somewhat of an anti-climax, as the Supreme Court’s ruling that bus segregation was unconstitutional took time to implement.19 The month after the boycott ended, with the bombs, backsliding and bickering all weighing down upon him, King showed the strain of the last year or so, and stood silent and still at the pulpit until he was led away.20 Based on this American experience, DCAC moderates could reasonably expect to find themselves having to experiment with the ‘science of non-violence’, build up the machinery needed to maintain the movement, master public relations, stand firm against repression, earn the respect of the people whom they aspired to lead and fight a long struggle that would deliver only ambiguous results. Except, of course, it could not go on for too long: they could not hope to restrain indefinitely those who wanted to use violence. So, to a certain extent, DCAC moderates were fortunate that their knowledge was based on the media narrative of the ‘classical’ phase of the American civil rights movement (1954–65), as they may well have been overwhelmed by thoughts of what lay ahead of them.

UNIONISM REACTS

On 7 October 1968, at a press conference in Leicester, Terence O’Neill explained that the ‘Ulster police’ ‘had no alternative but to ban the march in Londonderry’ because it was ‘an act of pure provocation’ which would have led to a ‘fight’ and to ‘fatalities’. ‘I hope nothing of this kind will happen again’.21 In fact, the Prime Minister privately despaired that surely something much worse was slouching its way closer: ‘If we take the wrong turning now’, he confided to his Cabinet a week later, ‘we may well risk rising disorder’ and ‘a period when we govern Ulster by police power alone’. The Unionist leader acknowledged that ‘the first reaction of our people to the antics of anti-partition agitators … and the abuse of the world’s Press is to retreat into hardline attitudes’; but, he insisted, the government had a ‘duty’ to recognize that ‘Londonderry has drastically altered [the] situation to our great disadvantage’. ‘Whether the … coverage was fair is immaterial’, O’Neill told his ministers – what mattered was that the dominant narrative in the British news had been changed. ‘Ulster Weeks’, such as the one in the English Midlands at which the premier had been spinning while Derry was burning, had been part of a wider strategy to promote a positive image of Northern Ireland. So long as it seemed that the country was ‘calm’ and that ‘slow but steady progress was underway’, the British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, had ‘fobbed off’ calls from the Labour backbenches to deal with accusations of discrimination himself, choosing instead to focus upon his government’s ‘many other headaches’. Now, the old narrative had been usurped by a new one in which Northern Ireland was in disorder and in need of major reform. And this story was not just being told in Britain: ‘We have become a focus of world opinion’, lamented O’Neill. ‘[T]he Embassy and BIS [British Information Service] in America,’ he noted with concern, ‘have been under intense pressure from the American press.’ With its Cold War masters following the story, Westminster would certainly ‘no longer be able to stand aloof’ and this would ‘bring nearer a dreadfully dangerous review our whole constitutional position’. Stormont would not be able to defy the ‘imperial parliament’, especially given that a ‘UDI [unilateral declaration of independence] attitude [was] wholly absurd in view of Ulster’s geographical, military and economic position’. (The reference to Rhodesia is a reminder that one of the wider British narratives at this time was of imperial retreat.) O’Neill thus argued that the Cabinet should turn to ‘fairness’ as well as to ‘firmness’ – ‘can any of us truly say in the confines of this room that the minority has no grievances calling for a remedy?’ This emotional admission gave way to cold political calculation as the Unionist leader sketched out what he was willing to concede and what was ‘essential to maintain our position’. His party’s control over Derry fell into the former category. As it was going to be a ‘very hard job to sell’ such ‘bitter choice[s]’ to ‘our people’, O’Neill needed a united Cabinet, ‘every one of us’, to ‘undertake [this] difficult task’.22 The problem was that he did not have one.

Craig and Brian Faulkner, thinking as usual that one step higher would set them highest, kept the Cabinet discussions deadlocked, questioning each strand of O’Neill’s argument. From the first Cabinet meeting after the Derry riots, the Minister of Home Affairs had been demanding ‘an attitude of considerable firmness’ and the Minister of Commerce had been ‘indicat[ing]’ his ‘support for the … police’.23 Even when the British Government set down a date and agenda for a summit at Downing Street, the pair continued to think it ‘unlikely that Mr. Wilson would proceed to any extreme course which would be wholly unacceptable to majority opinion in Northern Ireland’. Craig believed that the decision about whether or not to grant universal suffrage for local elections should be put off until the restructuring of local government, which was currently under way, had been finished. Faulkner, playing a cagier game, claimed to hold ‘no dogmatic views on the franchise’, but was nonetheless against introducing changes ‘under a threat of duress’.24 Despite all these positions, however, categorizing Craig and Faulkner as ‘right wing’ does not capture the complexity of their responses to the crisis. They were speaking broadly the same ‘language of conflict’ as that which was used by O’Neill, the British Home Secretary, Jim Callaghan, and, indeed, other western politicians; they were telling a story which depicted the upheaval as having its origins in social and economic issues.25 Craig, as early as four days before the DCAC laid out its demands, was criticizing the ‘lack of any sense of urgency in tackling the housing problem on the part of the local authorities’ and proposing to the rest of the Cabinet that ‘a New Town Commission should be established’ to push the ‘Area Plan’ forward.26 The following week, Faulkner singled out ‘jobs and houses’ as being the ‘basic issues’; he agreed with Craig that a development commission would ‘create problems’, but that the government should still ‘hold to it firmly even if it was not acceptable to all local opinion’.27 The civil rights movement, though, was not a rerun of the crisis over the second university. The socio-economic language of conflict was therefore distorting how politicians understood developments, and adversely affecting the shape which their reactions took.28

With the Cabinet deadlocked, critical editorials were soon being published in the unionist press.29 On 23 October 1968, the Belfast Telegraph blasted the ‘divided’ leadership for ‘failing the greatest test of statesmanship on the highest level that Northern Ireland has yet faced’.30 This newspaper had long been pushing for O’Neill to take a more liberal line and had responded to the crisis by calling for the pace of reform to be picked up – ‘Otherwise Northern Ireland will be faced with more disturbance’.31 While the Belfast Telegraph feared that the government’s relative silence was a way of ‘sounding the retreat to the old trenches’, the Orange Order was, by contrast, hearing hints of betrayal.32 A delegation from the Order told the party hierarchy that the Fivemiletown District had passed a resolution attacking Stormont for failing to ‘repudiate in the strongest possible terms the unfounded allegations of discrimination’. The Chief Whip, Roy Bradford, tried to reassure the Orangemen that ‘they were not going to give in on basic principles … but on housing and other social problems’.33 The marching feet of the civil rights movement had encouraged unionists to grope and grovel with their fingers inside their existing wounds.

WE SHALL OVERCOME

On 19 October 1968, the DCAC held a sit-down rally, which Hume presented as ‘the first step in a campaign of non-violent protest’. The DCAC members had to teach most of the 4,000 to 5,000 people who had come to Guildhall Square on a rainy Saturday afternoon what they actually meant by non-violent protest. Grace instructed the crowd to sit down and Cooper had everyone sing the as-yet-unfamiliar American civil rights anthem ‘We shall overcome’. Paddy Doherty later played the part of an African-American pastor, using call and response to get the ‘people of this city’ to deny Craig’s claims that they were ‘irresponsible’, ‘Communists’ and risking ‘bloodshed’.34 McCafferty remembered sitting in Paddy Doherty’s vast congregation and hearing McCann start to sing ‘Fly me to the moon’ softly to himself.35 McCann, who had tried to keep up to date with the American civil rights movement, found himself watching a loose remake of the ‘classical’ phase. A section of the audience chanted ‘[w]e want McCann’, but he had embraced passive resistance that day – even when Hume claimed that ‘[t]his movement has no political ends’, that, in other words, ‘its purpose is [not] to unite Ireland [nor] to unite the working class’.36 Although the DCAC’s vice-chair may only have wanted Derry to be ‘united as a people in our demands’, the speeches showed that there were still divisions within the committee. Ó Dochartaigh asked ‘the representatives of the international Press’ to let ‘Wilson’ know that ‘the white Negroes of Derry’ ‘demand the same thing here that [he is] demanding for the blacks in Rhodesia’. (The Rhodesia parallel occurred to most parties to the conflict at this time, and is being used here to call for political control.) James Doherty asked for an ‘end [to] the political travesty which was at the root of [the] social and economic evils’. However, these were just personal opinions; Hume made clear that the DCAC’s official demands were merely for a ‘crash programme’ of house building, a ‘fair points system in the allocation of houses’ and the ‘Stormont Government to bring in some form of legal control in the renting of furnished accommodation’. As had often happened in the United States, a civil rights campaign had opened with local concerns, infighting among the organizers, people uncertain about what they were supposed to do, disappointing numbers (the DCAC had briefed the media that they were expecting at least 5,000) and the limited aim of securing change ‘within the existing system’. Yet, it had also opened up greater possibilities. ‘We shall channel the spirit of the people’, said Hume in an echo of King, ‘and we shall overcome’.37

What did not happen that afternoon was more significant than what did: there was no violence. The Londonderry Sentinel afterwards ‘admitted that the arrangements were well made’.38 Hume had warned before the protest that ‘Anyone who causes trouble will be regarded by the committee as an enemy of the civil rights movement’ – and these words had been backed up by actions.39 Stewarding, which had been treated as an afterthought by the Derry radicals, was at the front of the minds of the DCAC moderates, who had recruited and trained up hundreds of volunteers.40 At the conclusion of the sit-down rally, around twenty of the new marshals had surrounded a small group of people singing ‘God save the Queen’, successfully neutralizing a potential flashpoint. Although the organized loyalist counter-demonstration which had been threatened by Ronald Bunting, Ian Paisley’s lieutenant, had not taken place, the RUC had still sealed off the section of the walls overlooking Guildhall Square. The police had otherwise kept their distance and thus earned for themselves the ‘congratulations’ of the Derry Journal.41 As the city was in disorder and yet violence was in abeyance, the DCAC members agreed at the next committee meeting that ‘we do not at this juncture open negotiations with the authorities’.42 Canavan later told the commission of inquiry that the ‘majority thought we would need something stronger in the line of pressure’.43

Sitting was followed by walking; four weeks after 5 October 1968, the fifteen committee members (in an order chosen by lot) set out to walk the route of the first civil rights march.44 While they had put in place plans to hold a sit-down protest if they were attacked by the police, the RUC had informed them on the day of the walk that Bunting’s counter-demonstration had been postponed and that officers had orders to keep the peace.45 At about 2:35 pm, a white Ford Cortina, displaying both the Union Jack and the Northern Irish flag, pulled up opposite the Waterside railway station and Bunting, in a British army battle-dress blouse, flannel trousers and a tweed hat, climbed out on to the pavement. He explained to the District Inspector on duty that he was not going to lead a march at all now but instead hold a ‘Teach-Out’ inside the city walls.46 As 3 pm drew nearer, the crowd swelled to around 1,000 spectators and Hume, who was in the front rank alongside Canavan and Cooper, looked at his watch and said, ‘Thirty seconds to go’.47 The fifteen men strolled down the road, with police officers at their flanks and rear and with stewards making sure that supporters stayed on the pavements and stayed away from the scattered groups of loyalist protesters.48 A token effort was made by Bunting to stop the ‘Rebels’ by blocking off Ferryquay Gate, but the marshals and the police were able to push a way through into the walled city.49 After the walkers reached the Diamond, Eamon Melaugh’s 11-year-old son read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Cooper praised the crowd’s ‘discipline’ and the stewards got the vast majority of people to disperse peacefully. Those who chose to reject the DCAC’s authority remained behind for Bunting’s meeting and the police found themselves having to separate rival crowds of teenagers who were shouting abuse and hurling fireworks at each other.50 Finally, after about an hour, the youths drifted away – although thirty or so Protestant boys and girls retreated back to the Fountain ‘in procession form’ behind a Union Jack.51

The DCAC then announced that they were going to stage a full-scale march from the station to Guildhall Square a fortnight later.52 Craig, in response, opted on 13 November 1968 to ban marches and meetings from taking place within the walls for a period of one month. Senior RUC officers from Derry had advised the Minister that ‘the march should be permitted to proceed along the full route’ and had been ‘somewhat hesitant’ about whether a ban ‘could be enforced’; but, Craig had bullied them into accepting his decision.53 Once again, the organizers of a civil rights march called upon ‘all the people of Derry to resist the Minister’ and, once again, Craig warned that ‘the police will enforce the law’.54 However, this is where the repetition became a farce. The DCAC members agreed to mount just a ‘symbolic confrontation’ and to ‘appoint delegates in case of our arrest’.55 The Inspector-General issued ‘very strict’ instructions that ‘Batons and other forcible methods … will not be used merely to stop marchers’ and that ‘Police will accompany the marchers, even in a banned route, in available strength and endeavour to afford them protection against attack’.56 With the DCAC and RUC in fairly regular contact, they soon became aware that each side wanted a compromise and a pantomime was duly scripted for that Saturday afternoon.57

Over 15,000 people (for the first time, attendance at a civil rights demonstration had far outstripped the estimates of the organizers) watched as Hume asked the County Inspector, ‘in the name of peace and non-violence’, to ‘let our people through’; as the County Inspector replied to Hume that the ‘order had to be complied with insofar as the police were able to do it’; and as the four nominated members – Canavan, Johnny White, Willie Breslin and Dermie McClenaghan – threw themselves harmlessly into the RUC lines on Carlisle Square.58 There are parallels here with the second Selma, Alabama, march, in which King had ‘disengaged’, ‘having made our point, revealing the continued presence of violence and showing clearly who are the oppressed and who the oppressors’.59 As the press and the people were already there in such large numbers, King and Hume were satisfied with symbolic confrontation. ‘We have broken the ban’, the DCAC vice-chair told the marchers. This did not satisfy some people. While Hume was speaking, the loyalist counter-demonstrators behind the police waved the Union Jack and provoked a surge from the crowd which was checked by the stewards. Although most marchers were content to follow the DCAC away from the walls, the RUC and the counter-demonstrators, a large section chose instead to charge towards Ferryquay Gate (in the banned area but not on the route), passing by loyalist stone-throwers and passing through police tenders. The leaderless movement took the unionist citadel; the DCAC members arrived after the battle was lost and won.60

Thousands of people had spent the night praying for peace in Derry’s two cathedrals and now some started referring to ‘the miracle of Carlisle Square’.61 Decisions taken by the DCAC and the RUC, the discipline shown by stewards and policemen and the wide disparity between the numbers of marchers and loyalists on the streets had all played a part in preventing a serious incident – but so had chance. On 18 November 1968, the Monday after the march, the DCAC moderates found that their luck was beginning to run out. The opening of the first trials arising from the city’s long weekend of violence attracted a crowd of about 100 people outside the courthouse, half of whom tried to force their way past the police into the building. Grace calmed the situation by negotiating a deal with the RUC in which a dozen or so people, relatives of some of the defendants, were allowed inside to watch. After the resident magistrate adjourned the cases until the following month, the crowd, which had roughly trebled in size, carried Cooper and Gerry Fitt to the Guildhall, where panicked policemen shut the gates and swung out with their batons. The crowd, though, listened to Cooper’s calls not to be provoked, but the majority of people in the square still insisted on parading back up to the Diamond before dispersing. This was not the end, however. Rumours of violence outside the Guildhall reached Derry harbour, inspiring 400 or so Catholic dockers to march to their union headquarters in the city centre to send telegrams of protest to both O’Neill and Wilson. Hume congratulated the dockers and urged them to return to work, which they did – through the banned area, singing ‘We shall overcome’ and shouting ‘SS RUC’. This chant was taken up soon afterwards by the hundreds of workers, mainly women, who poured out of six factories, including the one managed by Cooper, to embark upon a short march to the Diamond. McCann met them there (the radicals were encouraging the spontaneous marches, while the moderates were trying to stop them) and praised the ‘factory girls of Derry’ for having ‘walked all over Craig’s ban’.62 They walked over the ban again by parading back to their work by way of the RUC’s Victoria barracks; at this point, the 150 teenagers that had been trailing after the adult marchers broke off to stage a sit-down protest, before then heading off on a mile-long circuit of the walls. Hume, a former teacher, was reduced to pleading with schoolchildren to go home to their mammies.63

That day, the DCAC had not held any of the marches which had taken place; that night, it did not hold back the violence which took place. At 11 pm, outside Cooper’s factory, between thirty and forty teenage boys from the Protestant area of the city lobbed bottles at the female workers coming off their shift.64 The following afternoon, just over 100 factory girls from the Maydown industrial estate marched the five miles into Derry to protest about the attack on their fellow workers, but they were blocked at Ferryquay Gate by the RUC. While four of the women began bargaining with the police, the rest sat down and started chanting ‘SS RUC’. Although DCAC moderates and marshals soon took control of the march, they got there just moments before the dockers and policemen who were also hurrying to the reported flashpoint. In Ferryquay Street, the dockers were almost run over by the water wagon – which had been brought into action against the instructions of the Inspector-General – and a number of them reacted by hurling bottles from a brewers’ lorry. Hume and the marshals intervened and the police withdrew, restoring order and allowing the dockers and the factory girls to march peacefully back through the banned area to the port for a meeting. When news of what was happening reached Cooper’s factory and the neighbouring ones as well, 400 female workers resolved to set off for the harbour, too; yet they only got as far as the walls before being ambushed by stone-throwing teenagers from the Fountain and so cut short their march. Men from James Doherty’s abattoir joined up with the women and escorted them safely back to their factories. In the half-light, the city centre once again belonged wholly to the movement: schoolchildren hammered on the closed gates of Victoria barracks and thousands of workers paraded unhindered through the streets. However, after the light had yielded completely to the mournful gloom, civil rights supporters, who had come to defend the evening-shift workers at Cooper’s factory, and loyalists, who had come to attack the factory girls, clashed in Carlisle Square. (As had happened in the American civil rights movement, popular notions of what it meant to be a man made it too difficult for some males to embrace non-violence.)65 When the DCAC and RUC arrived on the scene, they did not work together to keep the peace, rather the riot squad baton charged the stewards as well as the people fighting in the streets. Twenty-four luckless individuals ended up in hospital, twelve policemen and twelve civilians; another casualty that night was Hume’s claim, made the day before, that ‘We can control our own people’.66

The movement’s ownership of Derry’s city centre, symbolic and physical, was not just contested by loyalist stone-throwers. Paisley, as he had since his movement’s beginnings in Ballymena, County Antrim, also chose to politicize public space.67 On 9 November 1968, Paisley and about 1,000 of his supporters, who had come from as far away as Liverpool and Glasgow, paraded into the walled city behind a man carrying a crown on a Bible (a well-known Orange symbol of a Protestant state). Paisley told the meeting staged afterwards in the Diamond that ‘Londonderry is part of Ulster’. Meanwhile, Melaugh and the revived DUAC were holding a ‘teach-in’ (another American import) that was attended at its peak by around 500 people. After both events had ended, policemen, DCAC stewards and Paisleyite marshals were called upon to keep apart rival crowds of teenagers, one waving the Union flag and the other the Irish Tricolour. Watching this all take place were the poppy sellers near the war memorial; the president of the Londonderry branch of the British Legion had first appealed to Paisley not to come to his city and then had refused to withdraw his men from the Diamond. The following day, Remembrance Sunday, the war memorial, which had been profaned by the Paisleyites as well as the civil rights protesters, was reconsecrated, as the unionist establishment oversaw a ceremony in which flags, uniforms, medals, music, words and, above all, silence linked them across time and space with the rest of the British world and with its virtues.68 Order was (briefly) restored.

The DUAC’s 9 November 1968 teach-in was one of a series of protests that the radicals had been mounting. At Londonderry Corporation’s October 1968 meeting, the DHAC had taken their usual places in the public gallery and taken up the new chant of ‘civil rights’. When the Unionist councillors refused to receive a Labour delegation and adjourned for a short break, Melaugh led an occupation of the chamber, ensconcing himself in the empty mayoral chair. He was at the heart of the action again later that week, inspiring twenty young men to burn their signing-on cards at a teach-in he was chairing outside the city’s employment exchange.69 From these flames rose the re-born DUAC, which raged to the press that ‘[o]ther committees have failed in their attempts to find a solution to Derry’s unemployment problem because they have tried to work within the rotten system. We are out to destroy it’.70 McCann, playing the king across the water, was not so oblique when he criticized the moderates and, indeed, his own comrades: ‘From the radical socialist point of view’, he informed students at the new university, ‘civil rights has inherent disadvantages as … it can, in Northern Ireland, serve as cloak for objectively reactionary groupings, [and] this is disastrous’.71 As Canavan explained to the commission of inquiry, although the DCAC was repeatedly urged to co-opt McCann, the moderates did not want him to become a member because he ‘would split the unity that existed among the different groupings’.72 They could keep him out of the committee, but they could not keep him off the stage. When the DCAC held a mass meeting at the Guildhall on 19 November 1968 to renew its mandate, the audience demanded a speech from McCann – and, after thanking the committee, he went on to outline his ‘many sharp disagreements’ with the moderates.73

The DCAC moderates were still not masters of the movement; in fact, no-one was. At the Guildhall meeting, Cooper, who had been forced out of his home by a stream of threatening telephone calls and letters, had appealed for an end to the spontaneous marches, especially as Hume was ‘dead on his feet’.74 Even before the clashes that night in Carlisle Square, the moderates had decided to try to take politics off the streets, to take the pressure of Stormont. It was the movement – not the DCAC or anyone else for that matter – that therefore went on to create a situation so crisis-packed it pushed opened the door to negotiations. And, the threat of increasing violence was not the only weapon which was wielded by the movement against the wishes of the DCAC: an unofficial boycott of the city’s Protestant-owned shops was also in place. By early November 1968, it was already starting to bite, with shopkeepers inside the walls complaining to the Londonderry Sentinel that their trade was down by as much as half.75 Hume was ‘totally and completely against this sort of action because it was unjust’ and the DCAC instructed the stewards to ‘help to undo the boycott’ – but a boycott of segregated stores had been at the centre of King’s Birmingham, Alabama, campaign.76 Money mattered more than morality. In both of these cities, it was people from the private sector rather than public officials who first looked to cut a deal.77 On 20 November 1968, the Londonderry Sentinel reported that the newspaper had ‘learned’ that the ‘top flights of industry and business’ were ‘discussing the problem with a view to making approaches to the Government for a discussion on the working out of a solution as quickly as possible’.78 The movement had overcome.

CONCESSIONS

At the Downing Street summit, on 4 November 1968, Wilson warned O’Neill, Craig and Faulkner that ‘my government cannot tolerate a situation in which the liberalizing trend was being retarded rather than accelerated and if this were to arise they would feel compelled to propose a radical course involving the complete liquidation of all financial agreements with Northern Ireland’. The Labour leader also muttered darkly about ‘weakened … standing abroad’, the ‘role’ the ‘Ulster Members … play in British affairs’ and how Belfast’s Short and Harland aircraft factory ‘had become a kind of ‘soup-kitchen’. However, both what was at issue and what was at risk were of less consequence than Wilson’s performance suggested. The two sides were speaking the same language of conflict: the Junior Minister present felt that ‘jobs and social improvement were the things dominating most people’s thoughts’ and Faulkner concurred that ‘jobs and houses were generally accepted as the really important matters on which progress was required’. Wilson even had some sympathy for the claim that leftists had set out to exploit genuine material grievances, as ‘[r]iots could be regarded as a major industry these days’ and ‘the Grosvenor Square affair had also been premeditated’. But, while the British and, to a certain extent, O’Neill believed that ground had to be given, too, on the Special Powers Act, independent scrutiny and the local government franchise, Craig and Faulkner, as they explained to colleagues afterwards, would only ‘support changes they believed to be justifiable in themselves’.79 The pair, furthermore, remained unconvinced that Westminster would freely wander into the Irish bog. So, at the next Cabinet meeting, when O’Neill insisted that it ‘could be discounted’ that the ‘United Kingdom government was bluffing’, Craig and Faulkner countered that they were still ‘unwilling to accept dictation’.80 They were gambling that Stormont was in control of the crisis.

The ‘principal dilemma’, James Chichester-Clark, the Minister of Agriculture, stressed to his colleagues on 14 November 1968, ‘lay in the fact that Mr Wilson … placed [the] main emphasis upon the local-government franchise, while it was precisely in this area that it was most difficult to move’. Bradford noted that the ‘Government accepted universal adult suffrage in principle’; however, in practice, they had to take into account their previous commitments and the opposition of many within their party. They needed ‘farther time to educate the people in the realities of the situation’. Bradford suggested that they should try to buy time from the British by putting together a ‘package deal’, ‘not a grudging instalment of reform but the maximum possible concessions compatible with their vital political interests’. According to Chichester-Clark, these were the establishment of a ‘Commission to investigate and report upon grievances’; the ‘Abolition of the company vote … at an early date’; a commitment to reach a settlement with the Catholic Church’s Mater hospital; ‘[m]easures to ensure fair allocation of public housing’; the ‘[a]ppointment of an Ombudsman’; and a ‘democratic decision’ (a referendum or a general election) on the local-government franchise. Some were accepted, others were rejected and most were the starting points for more debate.81 As had so often happened in American civil rights struggles, the details that were in dispute ahead of doing the deal were relatively trivial, yet they were enough to drag out discussions.

Developments in Derry did away with the deadlock. Relations between the RUC and the Minister of Home Affairs broke down over how to address the escalating disorder. During the second day of spontaneous marches, Craig told the Cabinet that ‘the rank-and-file police had been deterred by their officers from dealing effectively with militants’.82 The Inspector-General, in contrast, was days away from sending his political master a letter – to which he had given ‘considerable thought’ – that attacked almost everything Craig was saying and doing: ‘people holding important public positions should carefully refrain from making public statements which are … calculated to inflame passions’; ‘the loyalist side are confused and are not making any distinction between the IRA and Civil Rights marchers’; ‘the constitution is not in danger from those who are protesting’; ‘many professing Unionists support the protesters’; ‘the unrest … seems likely to continue until electoral reform is introduced’; and ‘the small police force we have in Ulster … may find [it] quite impossible to cope’.83 On 20 November 1968, the Cabinet as a whole became involved in this on-going disagreement. Ministers listened to the Inspector-General and two other senior officers argue that the ban was ‘logistically impossible’ to uphold, that it would be ‘prudent’ to lift it and that ‘further really firm police action could lead to the most serious and prolonged disorder in Londonderry and elsewhere’. The ‘police view’ was the ‘heat’ needed to be ‘taken out of events by political means’. Although Craig ‘expressed great concern’, the ‘general view of Ministers’ was that the ‘police advice … could not be ignored’.84 And, nor could the government dismiss the ‘anxieties’ that had been expressed to O’Neill and Faulkner the following morning by ‘an influential group of Londonderry businessmen’, who wanted not only ‘the ban [to] be lifted’ but also the corporation ‘to be replaced’. With the city fathers pushing Stormont to ‘take the political decisions which would restore normal conditions’, the Cabinet finally agreed the package deal that day. Local authorities were to adopt a points system for public housing allocations, a British-style Ombudsman was be appointed, the emergency powers that offended against the European Convention on Human Rights were to be withdrawn ‘as soon as the security conditions permitted’, a commission was to replace the Londonderry council and to put the area plan speedily into effect, and the company vote was to be abolished ‘at an early date’.85 These modest reforms were more than the Unionists had ever before conceded.

O’Neill ‘congratulated his colleagues’, yet he ‘wondered whether the package … would be sufficient in the absence of a commitment to alter the local government franchise, to satisfy the United Kingdom Government or to restrain the Civil Rights marchers’.86 That said, two days earlier, Wilson had sent a letter to O’Neill that, while using ‘plain language’, had actually shifted Westminster’s position from expecting that ‘by next Spring … the franchise [would be] in the process of being changed’ to instead requiring, within six months, a public pledge to pass universal adult suffrage into law.87 Now, after news of the reforms was released, the British released even more of the pressure. ‘A split in the Unionist Party and the downfall of [the O’Neill] government would be very serious at the present moment’, reasoned a Home Office memorandum, ‘and renewed pressure in public on the local government franchise at this point in time carries the risk of provoking this’. So, while sticking with the six-month deadline, the officials advised that ‘more [of] the initiative on timing … be left to Captain O’Neill’.88 When Wilson composed his next letter, which was dispatched on 23 December 1968, he therefore limited himself to expressing his ‘disappoint[ment] that you have not so far felt able to announce a policy of early introduction’.89 Westminster was not going to intervene in the short term. In fact, the contingency planning that was taking place in Whitehall departments at the end of the year was geared much more towards keeping British troops off Northern Irish streets than about keeping the Northern Irish Government on track to deliver British rights.90

The DCAC’s reaction followed the same basic pattern as the British one: say it was not enough, but take some of the pressure off. The committee, meeting exactly a month before Wilson’s letter was sent, ‘welcome[d]’ four of the five reforms (Craig’s public comments about how the Special Powers Act would be required for the foreseeable future had made ‘it difficult to place confidence in the Government’s intentions’). Nonetheless, the DCAC still ‘Resent[ed] the total failure of the Government to face up to what is the central & crucial issue – democra[tic] rule in this city, because this is the root cause of the present unrest’. The ‘struggle’ therefore had to ‘continue … until this was achieved’; yet, the moderates also decided that the break from street protests had to continue and ‘the people of Derry’ had to be asked ‘to continue to exercise restraint’.91 At the subsequent press conference, journalists asked: ‘Are you considering a fresh campaign?’, ‘Have you a plan of campaign?’ and ‘Will you call a meeting of the people of Derry?’ – the DCAC had no answers.92

While the moderates may have hoped to restrain the civil rights marchers, the DCAC were not in control of the Derry movement let alone the other local movements that it had inspired. The Armagh civil-rights committee decided to go ahead with their planned march on 30 November 1968; Paisley went ahead with what he considered ‘appropriate’ action to prevent Armagh becoming ‘another Londonderry’. The two sides, the lawful march and the illegal counter-demonstration, were kept apart by the RUC throughout a tense day, until the evening when a small riot had to be cleared by a baton charge.93 After what the Belfast Telegraph called ‘one of the blackest days in the history of Northern Ireland’, O’Neill slowly spotted that ‘decent and moderate people’ felt that the country was ‘on the brink of chaos’ and that this supposed majority, who had so far been ‘silent’, could now be persuaded to ‘make [their] voice heard’.94 These phrases featured in his televised address on 9 December 1968: the Prime Minister told the viewing publics a story where the protests of ‘noisy minorities’ (he bundled civil rights activists and loyalists together) were producing violence and risking ‘bloodshed’, yet ‘moderates on both sides’ could still choose to ‘come with us into a new era of co-operation, and leave the extremists to the law’.95 Within a week, close to 150,000 people had let O’Neill know that they had made that choice.96 Their voices silenced his opponents: Craig was sacked, not one of O’Neill’s critics on the backbenches dared vote against a motion backing his leadership, civil rights groups everywhere suspended their marches and the Derry shopping boycott ended.97 ‘The superior hero wins again,’ trumpeted the Sunday Times.98 But, this was not the end of the story. As Time recorded after the Birmingham campaign, this was ‘a fragile truce based on pallid promises’.99 Mary Holland, writing in the Observer, put the praise in perspective: ‘Captain O’Neill has not saved Ulster, he has merely given her a breathing space’.100

FREEDOM OF THE CITY

‘One night as we all sat in the City Hotel’, remembered McCafferty, ‘Mary silenced the older men who sat round her in a circle … by asking one of them to shift slightly as he was obscuring her view of Eamonn.’101 Holland, through her relationships with the Derry radicals, had a clearer view than most foreign journalists of McCann – she knew that he would not let O’Neill rest. Looking back on 1968, McCann mocked how ‘the end result of the Civil Rights campaign has been to install … O’Neill as [our] unchallenged father-figure’. ‘He has not given us anything,’ argued McCann. ‘What we have got so far we have had to tear from his hands.’102 So, the radicals chose to lend their support to the spontaneous marches which took place on the day McCann’s court case resumed, to the Creggan mothers who picketed the corporation’s housing manager, to the homeless families who were occupying part of the Guildhall and to the hunger strike undertaken by some of these squatters.103 They also chose to support the Belfast-based People’s Democracy, who were going to begin 1969 by marching from the capital to the second city. As for the moderates, they had no choice except to promise to ‘gladly receive and refresh’ their uninvited guests – they were not masters in their own house.104 And this left the back door open for the local Nationalist party, which was secretly working with the Unionist Government ‘towards a lowering of the temperature’.105 A former Nationalist alderman, claiming he was only ‘say[ing] publicly what many civil-rights supporters are saying in private’, wrote to the Derry Journal that the march was ‘ill advised’ and that the ‘truce … should be extended’.106 The response to the letter was sufficiently encouraging for McAteer to tell the press a few days later that ‘it was not good marching weather in more senses than one’. McCann, though, was marching against ‘Tories of Green and Orange variety’ and to make the political weather. ‘We are conscious of the class nature of the issues that we are attempting to dramatize,’ he spat back.107 McCann had helped start the movement and now he wanted to help restart it; the Christmas break was over.

From the first morning, as NICRA’s Frank Gogarty witnessed, the marchers were ‘surrounded’ by ‘howling hostile’ loyalists, usually led by the ‘brazen lout’ Bunting.108 The young people’s unearned suffering changed things. On the night before the final leg of the march, Paisley held a prayer meeting in the Guildhall, bringing his supporters into the city and bringing out his opponents in the city. A crowd of about 800 Derrymen and women gathered in the square, and idled away the time until the end of the service by throwing stones and burning Bunting’s car. Cooper, Hume and even McCann exhorted them to disperse, without success – causing the District Inspector in charge to conclude that the would-be leaders had ‘lost control of the crowd’. The RUC cleared people away from the entrance to the Guildhall, but many of the Paisleyites did not want to be escorted to safety and burst out of the building brandishing broken chair legs. The two sides clashed for a couple of minutes and then broke off, allowing police officers to drive them out of the city centre. Nonetheless, the District Inspector still reported that ‘this was the most explosive situation I had yet to contend with’.109 The next day would be even more explosive.

On the road between Claudy and Derry, at Burntollet Bridge, local loyalists, including off-duty B-Specials, ambushed the People’s Democracy march, now numbering several hundred people – and its leaders hesitated.110 They had been pushed through the ‘danger area’ and the police ‘endeavoured to keep them moving’, but some ‘showed an inclination to come back and assist those following’, who were being ‘sharply attacked by the loyalists with sticks and stones’. The police report suggests that the RUC then restored order: the ‘loyalists were attacked and baton charged’, and ‘with the aid of some cover provided by police tenders the remainder of the marchers got past this point’.111 Accounts given by the marchers, in contrast, describe chaos, cruelty and collusion. Gogarty, who had made the choice to take part rather than watch, was ‘bludgeoned’ until he let go of the civil rights banner, and the primary-school teacher who had been trying to help him was ‘hustl[ed]’ away by a constable ‘with the aid of a shield against my chest’.112 ‘The police did not lack the power to prevent the Burntollet ambush,’ concluded Derry Labour, ‘they lacked the will.’113 Judging by the three further assaults on the march before it reached Guildhall Square, the reverse is a more appropriate verdict; riot police on each of these occasions drew batons and tried to disperse the loyalist stone-throwers, yet they always found themselves outnumbered. Although Burntollet has attracted much more memory work (probably because of the later collusion between the security forces and loyalist paramilitaries), many more working-class Catholics and Protestants were involved in these incidents on the edge of the city. Indeed, the small People’s Democracy march that had traipsed across the country had been transformed into one of the Derry movement’s biggest marches, as over 2,000 local men and women traversed the familiar route over Craigavon Bridge and into Guildhall Square, where thousands more were waiting to welcome them.114 Holland was there, too, and she ‘listened to civil-rights leaders begging the people to go home, to refrain from violence and to think of world opinion. The crowd said what they thought of world opinion in no uncertain terms, asked what it had ever done for the poor of Derry and told their leaders that they were too late’.115 The DCAC moderates could not control their ‘own people’. There had been a succession of flashpoints that day; the riot that developed after the meeting was predictable.

Once again, the RUC and working-class Catholic youths battled over space. During the initial stages of the fighting, Hume ‘approached the police who were carrying batons and shields and asked them to withdraw the water canon which, in our opinion, had been the major cause of the incitement to the people’. The peacemaker, though, was cursed, not blessed. ‘One of the policemen replied: “If you take a step closer I’ll beat your – head in.”’116 Six weeks before, the Inspector-General had given ‘instructions’ that officers should employ the ‘minimum degree of force … to prevent or quell rioting’ and ‘must be well disciplined and restrained in their actions no matter how great the provocation may be’.117 That night, they did not and they were not. Over half the officers who had set out from Belfast with the People’s Democracy march had been injured on the road to Derry and seventy-four policemen were also hurt in the disturbances after it reached the city; many members of the mobile units wanted a revenge that went much further than their orders permitted. After the clock had struck midnight, a sizeable number even turned into rioters themselves – smashing windows, battering at doors and using sectarian insults. In an editorial on the ‘weekend that brought matters to a head’, the Derry Journal ‘spel[t] out publicly what is being said over and over again in homes and wherever people gather’ about the ‘relations between the RUC and the vast Catholic majority’. The police were not ‘a peace-keeping organization’, but rather ‘the chief ingredient of violence in the city streets’.118

When a Derry Journal reporter toured the Bogside on the morning of 5 January 1969, he found that an ‘ugly mood had developed ‘among the men’: ‘Many of them had armed themselves with cudgels and iron bars’.119 DCAC moderates had previously had to talk teenagers out of violence; now, they had to address their older brothers and fathers. Hume had persuaded a reluctant Fitt to speak to the people, too, as he was ‘terribly worried’ that they ‘are are going to march on the police station and there is going to be bloodshed’.120 The West Belfast MP added his voice to those who were calling for ‘caution’ at a meeting in the Bogside, and the crowd was convinced that the women from the area should march in silent protest to Victoria barracks instead. Amid the faintly falling snow, with the truce now dead, the ‘mammies’ staged their ‘funeral march’ and then delivered a sermon to the city’s top policemen, warning them that ‘Our men have made up their minds to defend us if you can’t’.121 This was not yet the decisive break with non-violence, even though it may appear to be: throughout the ‘classical’ phase of the American civil rights movement, local defence bodies protected organizers, provided armed escorts and patrolled black neighbourhoods at night. For example, the Deacons for Defense and Justice, equipped with rifles and walkie-talkies, frightened the Ku Klux Klan out of the black districts of Bogalusa, Louisiana – and frightened the state’s Governor into enforcing the 1964 Civil Rights Act.122 Nonetheless, Hume was reluctant to move still further away from constitutional politics and closer towards the politics of the gun. ‘Let us show that we are capable of policing our own area,’ he told a meeting held after the women’s march; but he did not feel able to become a vigilante himself. Other DCAC moderates, some stewards and a few veteran Republicans were prepared to put themselves forward to lead the self-defence groups that were starting to form. Seán Keenan, who had been interned during each of the IRA’s last two campaigns, announced at the day’s first meeting that ‘we have only two cheeks and we have turned the other for the last time’.123 As an American civil rights activist had observed two years earlier, most people mistakenly believed that non-violence stood for ‘turning the other cheek, submitting instead of resisting’.124 Many men in both Bogalusa and the Bogside regarded this as degrading and wanted to defend their women and children, to meet violence with violence.

‘Keenan, who is in charge of the St Columb’s Wells area, … said that disciplinary action would take the form of taking those responsible for offenses home and asking them to stay off the streets.’ McCann’s show on ‘Radio Free Derry’, a pirate station broadcasting from Rossville flats, was made up of news reports like this one – as well as music from Elvis Presley, The Beatles and local show bands; interviews with People’s Democracy marchers and Bogsiders; satire, including a skit about Paisley, ‘the Mao Tse Tung’ flu’ and ‘Protestant vaccine’; and propaganda demanding ‘Tories Out, North and South’. The radicals were revelling in ‘the liberated area’.125 What pleased McCann most was that O’Neill’s ‘“liberal” views’ had been exposed as ‘lies’: ‘The attackers of innocent people in Northern Ireland are not the police or the Paisleyites, but … their political master’ – and ‘The mask has [finally] slipped’.126 Once again, McCann was speaking the language of global revolt (for example, the American New Left aimed at ‘unmasking corporate liberalism’ and West Berlin’s student activists set out to ‘unmask our state as a police state’).127 A year after he had come home convinced that he could sweep up the old parochial politics by introducing a new international dimension, McCann now hoped that it was becoming obvious that the struggle was between the working class and capitalism. ‘Come and help us,’ he asked ‘the Protestants and policemen who are listening’, ‘we are fighting for jobs and houses and a decent standard of living for all, we are fighting … the system’.128 He also delivered this message in person. ‘With some trepidation,’ as he remembered half a year later, McCann left behind the barricades and went right into the front rooms of the Fountain. ‘I gave out the usual CR line about wanting justice for all sections of the community … A middle-aged woman told me immediately: “But if you Catholics were in control there would be no life for us here. We would have to leave our homes and get out.” It was clear that every one of them actually believed that.’ McCann was starting to fear that his hosts were not ‘brainwashed’, that unionism was ‘the political philosophy which happens to be accepted by the overwhelming majority of Protestants’.129 As another Irishman wrote of another revolution, ‘Every fear, every hope will forward it’ – and they were carrying the Derry revolution away from what its father had expected.130

On 6 January 1969, senior RUC officers outlined to the Cabinet ‘the circumstances in which the police had temporarily withdrawn from an area of Londonderry, which was being controlled by an organized and armed force’. Their assessment was that ‘considerable force’, ‘possibly … even firearms’, would be required to ‘re-enter the area’, and so they instead recommended holding back and holding talks with the moderates. The Minister of Home Affairs therefore arranged to meet Hume. A crackdown, though, also came with these concessions, as the government agreed that the ‘regular force would have to be further supplemented … by mobilization of Special Constables’.131 Derry Labour warned that ‘this could lead directly to civil war’; but, the radicals were not the only leftists in the city issuing statements, something which allowed the immediate crisis to be brought to a peaceful resolution.132 The Socialist Labour League, two or three Trotskyists who had joined this British sect in the mid-1960s, distributed a leaflet calling for ‘Armed workers defence guards’ and a ‘ONE DAY STRIKE’.133 With the backing of bishops and trade-union bureaucrats, the whole of the DCAC stepped in to stop the proposed strike taking place.134 Most people in ‘Free Derry’ may not have wanted the RUC, yet they still wanted law and order – and they were worried about where things were heading. Indeed, the Bogside was awash with rumours, including one about Keenan presiding over ‘secret courts’, which suggested that fears of social breakdown were widespread.135 So, after five days, the moderates were able to bring the barricades down and the patrols off the streets; the Derry Journal thundered that ‘Only those inimical to, or lacking any understanding of, the true objectives of the civil rights movement in Derry will quarrel with the Citizens Action Committee’s decision’.136 This was a contested claim.

CONCLUSION

Hume still believed ‘beyond a shadow of a doubt that non-violent protest is the only effective protest’. ‘[C]ivil rights,’ he continued, ‘can only be obtained by attracting publicity to the injustices and by getting more public sympathy on our side. This sympathy is the more easily won to our cause if we are seen to be … accepting provocation, injury and damage to our homes … If, however, we are seen to burn, loot and attack, we lose all sympathy.’137 McCann agreed with his rival that non-violence worked, while disagreeing with him over how it worked. ‘In so far as the Government has moved,’ he reminded the Belfast Young Socialists at the end of 1968, ‘it has moved in the face of direct action.’138 Pressure was applied to the authorities through publicity and from the streets, but it was also applied by the threat and the fact of violence – violence inflicted by supporters of the movement as well as by its opponents. Although O’Neill felt that ‘some extremely sinister elements’ had been behind the People’s Democracy march and ‘Free Derry’, he nonetheless advised his Cabinet colleagues that ‘political as well as law-and-order solutions’ were needed. For the Prime Minister, the ‘concept of an inquiry’ offered ‘a very late, if not last chance to deal with events before they dispose of us’.139 The success of non-violence in Northern Ireland was thus in some ways parasitic on violence. Again, this is not an attempt to blacken the Derry movement’s name by contrasting it with the ‘pure’ non-violent campaigns conducted on the other side of the Atlantic: violence gave the black struggle leverage, too. Birmingham inspired more than 700 sit-ins, mass meetings and marches in almost 200 cities, and President John F. Kennedy was ‘concerned about those demonstrations’. ‘I think they go beyond … protest,’ he said at a press conference in July 1963, ‘and they get into a very bad situation where you get violence’. He therefore told ‘those people who have responsible positions in Government and in business and in labor [to] do something about the problem which leads to the demonstration[s]’.140

Derry was not Birmingham; Northern Ireland was not the United States. Birmingham’s local civil rights groups had been organizing for years before King turned up to reinforce them with his international profile, a million-dollar budget, hundreds of full-time staff members and a plan of campaign. The Birmingham movement had discipline and strategy. The Derry movement, however, was less a hierarchy and more a network, one in which everyone was equal (though some were more equal than others), so leaving it much weaker on discipline and strategy. From early January 1969 onwards, with all the would-be leaders fumbling towards new strategies, such discipline as there was went into deep decline. (This is not to ignore Westminster’s failure to intervene, Stormont’s limited concessions, police brutality and loyalist violence; but, it should also be noted that Washington DC had to be forced to act, reform came slowly, law enforcement defended injustice and racists maimed and murdered.) Rival gangs roamed Derry at night seemingly targeting individuals who had taken part in marches or counter-demonstrations.141 While some of the motives behind these acts will, of course, remain unknown, the violence was clearly driven by politics and sectarianism. Politics, in particular, matters here. The American civil rights movement can be seen, among other things, as part of a long struggle to deliver the promises of the American Revolution to all Americans. The Northern Irish civil rights movement, in contrast, can be seen, among other things, as another phase in the long struggle within Ireland over who ruled and by what right. The Irish revolution was not over.