MARGATE: MODS VERSUS ROCKERS
The Battle of Margate began at the railway station on the morning of May 17, 1964. Without provocation, a gang of youths suddenly started breaking the windows of a trackside buffet. “The boy who started it was so good looking and nicely dressed,” the manageress subsequently remarked. “You wouldn’t have thought he was a nasty type.”1
The boy was a Mod, a subculture defined by fashion and violence. The Mods might have been just another passing fad in Britain, if not for the fact that they started strutting in seaside towns like Brighton and Clacton. What originated as an innocent bit of fun turned into a style war and then a bona fide social problem—the sort of molehill Britain’s tabloids eagerly turn into a mountain.
Youthful rebellion is seldom genuinely political. Disagreements between children and parents are usually fought on the battlefield of culture—in particular, over music and clothes. Every child perceives a generation gap; nearly every one rejects parental advice and seeks to learn life’s lessons on his own. “Alienation” is a word few fourteen-year-olds can define and most sixteen-year-olds feel deeply. To establish an independent identity requires doing things differently from the way one’s parents did—reject their authority, spurn their moral outlook, scorn their material trappings. The quickest way to demonstrate independence is, ironically, to join a gang and slavishly copy the latest fashion trend.
Youth culture in Britain can be traced by the evolution of sartorial styles—Spivs, Bohemians, Beatniks, Teds, Punks, Skinheads, Casuals, and so on. In the midst of that continuum lie the Mods and their mortal enemies, the Rockers, who frightened polite English society in the early 1960s. The Mods morphed from the Teds, who were themselves descendents of the prewar Dandies. Teds were narcissistic posers who passed their time in small groups standing on sidewalks, chewing gum, smoking fags, causing outrage, and admiring their own reflection in shopwindows. Aside from the occasional harassment of immigrants, they disdained anything requiring physical effort or political commitment. The shallowness of the ethos meant that it quickly grew stale. Standing around looking pretty grew boring, and was uncomfortably cold in winter. In time, most Teds found girlfriends, got married, had kids, and combed out their quiffs.
Into the vacuum strode the Modernists, or Mods, who first appeared around 1958. The trendsetters were a few young men—the sons of tailors in the East End of London—who were sufficiently confident to start a new style and sufficiently wealthy to create one. Their dads whipped together a customized set of clothes that fused Italian and French designs. “I used to knock around with this Jewish guy,” one former Mod recalled. “He had a couple of other Jewish friends and one of their fathers was in the rag trade. They started getting into clothes very seriously. It was almost like a religion.”2
At first, Mods wore suits, but not what most people would call suits. These were tightly tailored, with narrow lapels and sharp lines. Shirts had pointed collars and were invariably buttoned to the neck, whether a tie was worn or not. Jackets were worn with just the top button fastened. Hands were thrust into jacket pockets, thumbs pointed aggressively outward. Trousers, tapered to a narrow ankle, had creases sharp enough to shave with and were hemmed high in order to show off the winkle-pickers: narrow shoes, often of patent leather, with tassels and pointed toes.
In time, the fashion broadened. Mods took to wearing Fred Perry polo shirts with horizontal stripes. Sweaters were V-necked, lightweight, and close-fitting. If a tie was worn, it was narrow and usually black. Eventually, the Mods started wearing Levis, shrunk-to-fit in the bathtub. The defining feature of Mod wear was its minimalism—nothing was baggy, all lines were straight. Clothes were perfectly ironed and impeccably clean. Hair was short, closely cropped, and neat. “Most of us had terrific hair, French style, and you spent a lot of time on it. You had to use sugar water. What you do was wash your hair, then get a bowl of hot water and put sugar in it. Let the water cool and keep stirring it up and then plaster the water on your head and shape your hair. We used to leave it on all night. The longer you left it on the better it was. . . . It was horrible stuff.” Mods craved attention, but most of the attention they got was from one another. The only reason to go out was to look good, which meant that the slightest blemish could ruin an evening. “I put on my suit and my shoes were a bit dirty so I got the polish out and—disaster—I looked in the mirror and I’d splashed my shirt. So I . . . didn’t go out that evening. . . . I knew guys who’d get on the bus with a sheet of brown paper so they could put it on the seat so they didn’t get any dirt on their suit. And they’d sit bolt upright so they were not touching the back of the seat. . . . You had to be immaculate.” Styles shifted each week, but changes came from within, not at the instigation of clothes designers or fashion outlets. New designs were part of the ethic of improvisation usually inspired by a self-appointed “Face.” Fashion was a stylized ritual of dominance: power expressed through clothes.3
Life imitated art, which in turn imitated life. Mod style was quite similar to the costumes worn in James Bond films and in television programs like The Avengers and The Saint—a cultural stream flowing in both directions. The most popular showcase for Mod style was Ready, Steady, Go!—the Friday night pop extravaganza hosted by Cathy McGowan. Aspiring Mods tuned in faithfully, in order to learn the latest dance moves and to absorb fashion trends. The show’s popularity inevitably meant that Mod style spread far beyond its East End birthplace. Eventually, not all those who dressed like Mods were Mods.
At first, their music was as clean as their clothes. In the early days, they went for modern jazz—cool and uncluttered. They also liked R&B—artists like Booker T, Fats Domino, the Impressions, and James Brown—an affinity which caused detractors to label them “white niggers.” When Mods took up rock after 1960, they went for bands that evoked their image-groups like Herman’s Hermits, the Small Faces, the Yardbirds, and the Who. Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey perfectly embodied the Mod ethos—its fashion, its cynicism, its improvisation, and especially its violence. “My Generation” became a Mod theme song. Their sound filled the room, shook the bones, and rattled the teeth. “The Who are clearly a new form of crime, anti-social and armed against the bourgeoisie,” the Daily Telegraph warned.4
Every Mod lusted after a Jaguar, but few could afford one. They adapted beautifully; in time, sleek scooters like Vespas and Lambrettas became their trademark. These shiny Italian chariots were perfect because, unlike motorbikes, they weren’t greasy; riding one didn’t dirty one’s clothes. Thanks to the liberalization of hire purchase (credit) laws, they could be bought for just £20 down. They could also be personalized in an infinite variety of ways, but always according to a rigid fashion code. An array of lights would be added, as well as ornaments and fancy seat-covers. The most popular accessory was the mirror; sometimes as many as twenty were arrayed in neat lines on either side, like legs on a centipede. These were the perfect accessory for boys obsessed with staring narcissistically at their reflections. Since riding a scooter in the British winter could get chilly, anoraks and army parkas were effortlessly added to the ensemble. Parkas were usually regulation army green, though some Mods dyed them to match their scooters.
Scooters weren’t fast, but that hardly mattered since speed was provided chemically. Mods were amphetamine freaks who lived life on fast forward. “Most of us popped a few pills,” one confessed. “You could get pills nearly anywhere, from people on the street, in the café you’d buy a cup of tea ‘with or without.’ . . . It was easy to get hold of drugs, and being Mods, we took loads of them.” Uppers called Purple Hearts, black bombers, and French blues were perfect for a group that craved sharp corners and clean lines. In contrast, drugs that deadened the senses, like marijuana, did not harmonize with the rhythm of Mod life.5
Amphetamines were essential in order to keep up with a hectic schedule of acting Mod. One former enthusiast described his typical week: “Monday was Tottenham Royal, Tuesday the Lyceum, Wednesday the Scene or maybe stay in and wash your hair, Thursday Tottenham Royal again, then Friday was Ready, Steady, Go! . . . Saturday and Sunday was either a party or the Tottenham Royal. Then the next week, you’d start again.” A huge amount of energy was invested in sustaining fantasy. Every Mod imagined that he lived in a gangster world of fast cars, beautiful women, expensive clothes, and endless posh parties, even if reality consisted of a secondhand Vespa, fish suppers, and groping Madge in the alley behind the Lyceum. Dressing up provided escape from humdrum lives of limited opportunity.6
All those amphetamines deadened the libido. Most Mods were simply too busy admiring themselves to pay much attention to “birds.” “The guys were so preoccupied with clothes,” one female camp follower remembered. “It got to be a big deal to have a conversation with a guy, and we thought we were lucky if one of those gorgeous creatures actually danced with us.” Preening was part of the ritual, but it seldom went further than that. Involvement with a woman implied a tug of loyalties: it wasn’t easy to be part of the group and be somebody’s boyfriend. The emphasis upon looks and style encouraged suspicions of homoeroticism, but in truth the Mods were no more inclined to homosexuality than any other Sixties subculture.7
Mods evoked postwar social mobility, or at least the illusion of such. Actually, Britain was a deeply stratified society and the original Mods, despite their dress, were as working class as pork pies and pigeons. Most important, however, was that they didn’t seem working class, especially since their style was enthusiastically imitated by the well-heeled who shopped at Bazaar. Even though Mods had to work for a living, they did not usually get their hands dirty; most were shop assistants, minor clerks, and office boys. The postwar boom kept them in jobs and gave them more disposable income than their fathers ever imagined. Extra money was spent sharpening the image.
Since parading was an intrinsic part of Mod culture, it was perhaps inevitable that they should eventually decide to take their show on the road. Trips to the seaside started as a bit of a lark, a sardonic reference to the English obsession with spending bank-holiday weekends in Brighton or Blackpool. “It was the first time most of us had done anything like that since we were kids,” Charlie Steele, a former Mod, remembers. “Now we could do what we wanted, go where we wanted, and have it all on our own terms. We ate whelks and ice cream and pissed about on the pier. It was a different buzz to the smoke [London]. To be honest, we downed so many pills and were full on so often that going away was a welcome break. . . . Even getting there was a chuckle.”8
Heading for the seaside was not originally meant to be confrontational. Unfortunately, the coast was Rocker territory. Rockers were drawn to seaside funfairs like bees to candy floss. “Every rocker . . . dreamt of working on the dodgems, with the sound of Del Shannon echoing past the helter-skelter,” recalled Alfredo Marcantonio, a former Mod. “So a lot of us turning up on scooters, it was asking for trouble.” He insists, however, that Mods were not itching for a fight. “Real Mods were far too concerned about their clothing. I mean, we’re talking about possibly losing buttons—you know, creasing or tearing clothing you’d saved for!”9
Rockers were so named for their love of rock and roll. They were Fifties throwbacks, young men frozen in time who still revered Marlon Brando and James Dean, when most of humanity preferred Paul Anka. They listened to Elvis, Eddie Cochrane, and Gene Vincent. Like the Mods, they were descendants of the Teds, but on a different branch of the family tree. They were dirty, loud, vulgar boys for whom motor oil was a fashion accessory. They wore lots of leather, silver studs, and big heavy boots and drove motorcycles—the bigger, louder, and dirtier the better. The Mods, their cultural opposites, they viewed as effeminate dandies. Since violence was an intrinsic part of Rocker culture, they considered it their duty to defend their seaside territory from the Mod invasion. Quiffs met coifs in stylized combat.
Rockers wore their aggression on their sleeves—rolled up with their packet of fags. Even the gentle ones (and they were the majority) looked threatening. The Mods, in contrast, looked polite, but that was simply camouflage. Underneath the surface lurked arrogant, sneering cynics with a taste for menace. Both groups saw a good fistfight or a bit of petty vandalism as a nice way to pass the time on a slow evening. It also provided an opportunity to demonstrate manhood.
If Mods and Rockers had kept apart, they might now be remembered as simply two fashion-and-music trends. When their orbits intersected, however, confrontation became inevitable and so too did moral panic. Rockers came armed with bike chains and bottles. Mods had flick knives and coshes. The real sadists among the latter sewed fishhooks into the cuffs of their jackets, the better to rip an opponent’s face. Opportunists on both sides took advantage of the weapons the seaside provided—deck chairs, umbrella poles, and rocks.
The trouble started in Clacton on Easter weekend, 1964, which happened to be the coldest for eighty years. Since most of the regular holiday crowd had stayed home, Mods and Rockers had the town to themselves. They kept warm by running amok. Paul Barker, then a reporter for New Society, saw something most observers missed: “What struck me most, as I went up and down the beaches, was the ritual nature of the supposed battle. Mods and Rockers were like flocks of pigeons, clustering, flying up, dispersing. The main point was this: both of them were against the police.”10
Later, the Clacton paper estimated the damage at about £513. Fleet Street took that figure and multiplied it by ten. Headlines in the Daily Mirror shouted: “WILD ONES INVADE SEASIDE TOWN”—an intentional reference to Brando. In contrast, The East Essex Gazette reported: “The troubles . . . were not so horrific as the flood of national press, television and radio publicity suggested. The town was not wrecked, no one, apart from some of the young hooligans themselves, was really hurt and Clacton housewives did not, as one early morning broadcaster said, spend Tuesday ‘sweeping up glass from their broken windows.”’11
Fifty-one people were arrested in Margate. Dr. George Simpson, chairman of the magistrates, jailed four men and imposed fines totaling £1,900 on thirty-six people. He made himself forever famous by condemning the “long-haired, mentally unstable, petty little hoodlums, these sawdust Caesars who can only find courage like rats hunting in packs.” While journalists praised Simpson, most people thought the sentences too lenient. “They all ought to be put in gaol—an old-fashioned gaol,” one woman told The Times. “They are all a nasty dirty lot.”12
The press provided the oxygen of publicity for what otherwise might have been an isolated event. Front-page reports, accompanied by shocking photos, were advertisements for future Mod-versus-Rocker prizefights. When Barker wrote a feature about those arrested at Margate, it was picked up by the Mirror and given a center spread. “As I went down, by train, to Hastings . . . I saw teenagers reading it. They were checking out how they ought to behave when they got there.” “The whole history of Mod was changed after that,” Charlie Steele felt. “The publicity was very much a defining moment. All of a sudden . . . we were surrounded by a lot of prats jumping up and down in tacky clothes shouting out they were Mods, they didn’t know anything about the Mod ethos, they just bought some clothes and got a haircut.” David Cooke, a Mod revivalist and amateur historian of the movement, claims that some famous photographs of the rioting were faked. “The photographer paid the lads a few shillings.” The novelist Howard Baker, once a Mod, agrees: “Reporters and photographers were paying a lot of kids. . . . We’d get pissed on it.” Public, press, and rebellious youths played in three-part harmony.13
After Margate the public expected trouble, as if waiting eagerly for the next episode of Dixon of Dock Green. The violence reached a crescendo at the next bank-holiday weekend, on May 17. Since Mods, Rockers, police, and press all expected a confrontation, they willed it to happen. Afterward, came a predictable competition to condemn. David James, MP for Brighton Kemptown, told Parliament that he found “a sense of horror and outrage” in his constituency. “It was almost as if one had been to a city which, at least emotionally, had been recently hit by an earthquake and as if all the conventions and values of life had been completely flouted.” “It spreads like a disease,” warned W. R. Rees-Davies, MP for Margate. “If we want to stop it, we have to be able to get rid of these children from the school, and quickly. . . . We must immediately get rid of the bad children so that they cannot infect the good.”14
Violence continued for the rest of the summer, with youths automatically interpreting a bank-holiday weekend as opportunity for aggro. In response to rioting in Hastings on August 3, the Times opined:
The first lesson to be learnt from this weekend is that the popular explanation of Mods and Rockers as the only troublemakers should be ended. The fact is that over three-quarters of the youngsters . . . who descended on this town over the weekend . . . were to outward appearances at least perfectly ordinary. They did not come by scooter or motor cycle, they did not wear fancy clothes, nor did they have long hair. . . . The extraordinary thing is that none of them seems to know why they are doing this. They walk in gloomy silence or sit fully-clothed on the beach waiting for something to happen. Boredom is the likeliest explanation. “We just go with the gang,” two young lads said.
Former Rocker Phil Bradley confirms the mindless nature of the violence. “I haven’t the foggiest idea why there was any fighting with the mods. I really don’t know.” In fact, to label it Mods versus Rockers assigns the violence an order and purpose which is misleading. “It really wasn’t mods versus rockers, as the press put it,” Cooke argued. “Mods were fighting each other. The north London mods hated south London mods. South London mods hated north London mods, and east London mods hated everybody, and everybody hated them.”15
Perhaps the most ironic aspect of that summer of violence was that it brought Mods and Rockers national attention at a time when both were in decline. By 1964, Mod style had been hijacked and turned into a mass-market phenomenon. The original ethos had been usurped by the beautiful people who shopped at Bazaar. Real Mods, stuck in their nine-to-five jobs, could hardly afford the style they had invented. During its death throes, Mod began to mirror the class divisions of British society—an ironic development, given that the Mod subculture pretended to be classless. At the top were the people who did not have to work and could afford to wear cashmere. No scooters for them—they had cars or took taxis. They went to the right London parties, places where Mary Quant, David Bailey, or Twiggy appeared. They were called, appropriately, the Aces. Below them were the Tickets or Numbers, descendants of the original Mods, who rode around on scooters and were tied to dull jobs. An Ace never had to wear a green parka, yet for a Ticket it was both necessity and shibboleth.
In the midst of the mayhem, a Sussex vicar confidently proclaimed that young people “are as normal and healthy as ever before but they are in revolt. They are in revolt against a society which has lost its values and found no new ones. I believe their revolt to be the healthiest sign.” Needless to say, most people did not agree. The Times remarked: “Whatever enlightened opinion in the rest of England may think, there is probably not an adult here but would welcome a return to the days when a good thrashing would have discouraged the young people’s sheep-like hysteria and a massive display of childishness. In the hotels, cafés, public houses and shops along the seafront, there is complete agreement that this is the solution.” Everyone seemed to agree that hooliganism was a new phenomenon, and that permissiveness had destroyed the moral stability of the past. “Law and order” was something the older generation fondly remembered but could not figure out how to restore. Yet “hooligan” is an old word invented to describe an old problem—namely, the propensity of youths toward mindless violence. In the 1890s, a music hall song went:
Oh, the Hooligans! Oh, the Hooligans!
Always on the riot,
Cannot keep them quiet,
Oh, the Hooligans! Oh, the Hooligans!
They are the boys
To make a noise
In our backyard.
The Mods have been largely ignored by social historians, perhaps because they espoused no coherent political program. There was no body politic underneath the sharp clothes. Yet they were perhaps the most honest of Sixties subcultures: they were superficial and proud of it. All they wanted was some fun and an occasional bit of aggro. They saw no need to complicate their style with ersatz substance. None of them sought to change the world. As Simpson remarked, they were indeed “Sawdust Caesars”—but in being so, they displayed a characteristic of youth that does not seem unfamiliar.16
“It was something to do,” one young man confessed rather simply and perfectly in 1965.17
WATTS: LONG HOT SUMMER
On Wednesday, August 11, 1965, California highway patrolman Lee Minikus was riding his motorcycle along 122nd Street in south Los Angeles. “It was hotter than hell, maybe 93 or 94 degrees,” Minikus recalled. “When it gets that hot, you can smell the heat.” The temperature is important to this story.18
A passing motorist alerted Minikus to another motorist driving erratically. The officer gave chase and pulled the suspect over at the corner of 116th and Avalon, in a predominantly black neighborhood on the border of Watts. Marquette Frye, age twenty-one, was driving the car, his stepbrother Ronald, twenty-two, was a passenger. The spectacle of a white policeman apprehending a black man was painfully familiar to Watts residents. Given the blistering heat, most of them were already outside and inclined to gape at the developing drama. As Minikus put Frye through the standard sobriety test, a crowd gathered. In the meantime, Ronald ran to get his mother, who lived nearby. By the time she arrived, the crowd had swelled to 250 people. Rena Frye scolded Marquette for being drunk, whereupon he lost his temper and vented his wrath on Minikus. In an instant, a simple arrest turned nasty.
Backup arrived, in the form of more white patrolmen. The crowd was growing restless, hurling abuse at uniformed authority. When the patrolmen tried to subdue Frye, his mother lashed out, jumping on Minikus’ back and tearing his shirt. Eventually, she and her two sons were thrown into a patrol car, rather too roughly for the watching crowd. As the officers prepared to leave, someone spat on one of them. Holding on to one’s temper wasn’t easy in that heat. The officer charged into the crowd, billy club swinging, and grabbed the spitter. She was arrested, as was another man standing nearby who seemed intent on provocation. Forty minutes after Frye had been stopped, the patrolmen left the scene with five prisoners. As they drove away, their cars were pelted with rocks.
Frye and Minikus remained friendly for the rest of their lives, able to isolate a petty crime from the conflagration it inspired. Neither thought the arrest worthy of a riot. But that is what occurred. The heat was obviously significant, since rioting is predominantly a summer activity. So too was the spitting incident; had the officers been able to ignore it, there might never have been a Watts riot. And then there was the fact that the woman arrested was wearing a barber’s smock that made her look pregnant. Impression turned to fact when relayed along the curbside telegraph. The spectacle of white policemen beating up an innocent, pregnant black woman was reason enough to riot.
After Minikus and his colleagues left, the crowd steadily grew and anger swelled exponentially. An irate mob vented wrath by throwing stones, breaking windows, and overturning cars. White motorists passing through were pulled from their cars and beaten up. Units from the LA Police Department flooded into the area, hoping to restore calm but instead fanning the flames of resentment.
By 1:00 A.M., the crowd had grown tired of mayhem. The neighborhood was a mess of battered cars, broken glass, scattered bricks and stones. Twenty-nine people had been arrested. Few called it a riot, as if not mentioning the word might avert the calamity. The next morning, agents of calm mobilized more quickly than advocates of violence. The Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission was on the streets early, urging everyone to attend a meeting that afternoon. Community leaders, city officials, police representatives, journalists, and ordinary citizens gathered in an auditorium eleven blocks from where Frye had been arrested.
Among those who spoke was Rena Frye, by then feeling a bit sheepish. She implored the crowd to “help me and others calm the situation down so that we will not have a riot tonight.” Momentum was moving in the direction of good sense when suddenly a high school boy seized the microphone and shouted that the people of Watts would attack and burn adjacent white neighborhoods that night. TV journalists had the perfect soundbite for the Five O’clock News. An otherwise calm meeting suddenly became a call to arms.19
While those who craved peace far outnumbered those who hungered for violence, there came a point on that Thursday afternoon when passion smothered reason. Even so, the ensuing riot need not have been as bad as it was, but for the fact that around midnight the situation overwhelmed the police. Unfortunately, police commanders, desperate to maintain the pretense of control, failed to admit their own incapacity. The National Guard might at this stage have been mobilized, but approval had to come from the state capital, Sacramento, and governor Edmund Brown was away at a conference in Athens. The lieutenant governor, Glenn Anderson, dithered while Watts burned.
All hell broke loose on Friday the 13th. “It was unbelievable,” Betty Pleasant, a journalist, recalled. “There was nothing to restrain anybody. No attempts to quell anything. Nobody to put the fires out.” In the absence of an effective countervailing force, rioters and looters did as they pleased. Policeman Jeff Rouzan felt completely helpless when he arrived. “It was total chaos. It was just indiscriminate grabbing people and beating them up. People would see some people doing something and they would all join in. The Fire Department would come in and they’d have to leave because they’d be attacked.”20
The mayhem seemed random, but in fact was not. Schools, libraries, and civic buildings were not generally attacked, nor were houses. Rioters instead targeted businesses owned by whites—in particular, furniture, clothing, and food stores. First they looted, then they torched. “I asked one of the guys who was throwing the Molotov cocktails why he was doing it, and he said it was to get back at whitey,” Pleasant recalled. Pawnshops were attacked because they were a convenient source of weapons and because pawnbrokers made their income from black misfortune. Wrath was directed especially at white-owned grocery stores because they preyed on black residents’ lack of mobility by selling substandard food at exorbitant prices. “The food was rotten,” Victoria Brown Davis confirmed. “To get better prices and better food, we had to travel to other parts of LA.”21
“In the war zone called Watts, whole blocks lay in rubble and ashes,” Newsweek reported.
Black men and women—the human debris of war—queued up in bread lines at makeshift relief stations. Jeeploads of heavily armed soldiers prowled the streets, an American army occupying part of America’s third largest city. And outside a pillaged store, a Negro teenager—himself a ruin before he ever reached manhood—surveyed the wreckage without a wisp of remorse. “You jus’ take an’ run,” he said, “an’ you burn when they ain’t nothin’ to take. You burn whitey, man. You burn his tail so he knows what it’s all about.”
The National Guard, finally mobilized, hit the streets at 10:00 P.M. Their effect was immediate. Protected by troops, firefighters could begin to do their work. Bringing calm to the streets came at great cost, however, since armed confrontations caused the death toll to mount. The police and National Guard, convinced that there were snipers in the streets, responded with maximum force. Subsequent investigations revealed that what seemed like snipers were in fact police and Guardsmen unknowingly shooting at each other.22
Not until Tuesday was quiet restored, by which time the death toll had reached 34, with another 1,032 injured. Arrests totaled 3,952. More than 600 buildings were damaged, with over 200 destroyed completely. Property damage eventually exceeded $35 million. Television coverage provided wind for the fire, provoking copycat rioting in San Diego, San Pedro, Long Beach, Pasadena, Monrovia, and other locales.
Watts was not the first such disturbance in the United States during the decade. The previous summer had witnessed seven significant riots, in cities such as New York, Chicago, Rochester, and Philadelphia, resulting in five deaths and nearly a thousand injured. In an attempt to awaken complacent suburbia to the problem of the ghetto, Mayor Robert Wagner of New York had warned: “There are lions in the streets, angry lions, lions who have been caged until the cages crumbled. We had better do something about those lions, and when I speak of lions, I do not mean individuals. I mean the spirit of the people. Those who have been neglected and oppressed and discriminated against and misunderstood and forgotten.” Inner-city riots highlighted a dramatic shift in the politics of race. The rhetoric of black protest had changed, partly because of new actors in the drama but more importantly because the definition of oppression had widened. Instead of focusing on issues of liberty, freedom, and franchise, a new generation of activists drew attention to poverty, a problem more complicated and pervasive. Northern blacks might have been able to vote, but that did not make them free or equal. Prejudice and destitution, two sides of the same coin, inhibited freedom. Activists argued that the ability to sit at a lunch counter was immaterial if lunch was unaffordable.23
The politics of liberty had given way to the politics of class. The problems highlighted by inner-city riots could not be solved by the passage of a few laws—by the “stroke of a pen,” as Kennedy had once boasted. A new word entered the American lexicon: the “ghetto,” an iniquity not exclusive to the South. Blacks were confined in relatively small areas of the inner city, where they were prey to unscrupulous landlords and profiteering merchants. Those who could afford to move out found that they were denied access to white neighborhoods. “I own an apartment building in Memphis,” the blues singer B. B. King once confessed. “Wouldn’t mind moving in, but whites live there, and if I moved in, they’d move out and my property wouldn’t be worth a thing.”24
Fully two-thirds of the 650,000 blacks who lived in Los Angeles in 1965 resided in Watts, which was 90 percent black. The fact that urban black poverty could not be confined to the area below the Mason-Dixon line, and could not be blamed on Southern racism, made it all the more troubling. White America was forced to confront its own prejudices in a way that King’s protests had not so far demanded. The McCone Commission investigating the Watts riot remarked: “Caught up in almost a decade of struggle with civil rights and its related problems, most of America focused its attention upon the problems of the South—and only a few turned their attention and thought to the explosive situation of our cities.”25
Watts was frightening precisely because it seemed an unlikely place for a race riot. A study by the Urban League in 1964 measured ten criteria of city life—including housing, employment, and income—and judged Los Angeles the best place in America for blacks to live. “There is no question about it, this is the best city in the world,” one black leader told the McCone Commission. Watts, in other words, was not a slum. There were no filthy tenements or crowded, dirty streets. Most residents lived in detached houses on tree-lined avenues with playgrounds and parks nearby. A third of the houses were owner-occupied. Blacks had access to public facilities—such as schools, shops, restaurants, and cinemas—without restriction on racial grounds. All this meant that if blacks in Los Angeles were angry enough to engage in six days of unrestrained violence, the race problem was much more serious than most Americans appreciated.26
Los Angeles reflected a betrayal of expectation. The city’s black population had increased nearly tenfold from 1940 to 1965. The vast majority of the residents had come from the South in search of a brighter future. Los Angeles was their Canaan. They assessed their life not against the deprivation left behind, but against the white middle-class standards to which they aspired. High hopes fed deep disappointment. Lacking the skills and education to secure jobs in the highly competitive economy, blacks encountered what the McCone Commission called a “dull, devastating spiral of failure.” Many dropped out of school before the age of fifteen; of those who entered high school, only one-third graduated. Unemployment in Watts was three times the county average. “Equality of opportunity, a privilege [blacks] sought and expected, proved more of an illusion than a fact,” the McCone Commission admitted. More than 60 percent of the adults arrested for rioting had been born in the South.27
The riots were “a symptom of a sickness in the center of our cities,” the report continued. Writing of Harlem, Claude Brown expressed the problem more eloquently. Blacks in the South, he said,
were told that unlimited opportunities for prosperity existed in New York and that there was no “color problem” there. They were told that Negroes lived in houses with bathrooms, electricity, running water, and indoor toilets. To them, this was the “promised land” that Mammy had been singing about in the cotton fields for many years. . . . It seems that cousin Willie, in his lying haste, had neglected to tell the folks down home about one of the most important aspects of the promised land: it was a slum ghetto. There was a tremendous difference in the way life was lived up North. There were too many people full of hate and bitterness crowded into a dirty, stinky, uncared-for closet-sized section of a great city.
Ghetto youths inherited disappointment from their migrant parents. “To add to their misery,” wrote Brown, “they had little hope of deliverance. For where does one run to when he’s already in the promised land?” No wonder, then, that a sense of fatalism characterized the ghetto mood. “The cops think we are scared of them because they got guns,” a young rioter told the McCone Commission. “But you can only die once: if I get a few of them I don’t mind dying.”28
“People keep calling it a riot,” Tommy Jacquette remarked on the fortieth anniversary of Watts. He’d thrown rocks at the police in 1965 and has since devoted himself to the rejuvenation of his neighborhood. “We call it a revolt because it had a legitimate purpose. It was a response to police brutality and social exploitation of a community and of a people. . . .We had a revolt in our community against those people who were in here trying to exploit us. . . . Some people want to know if I think it was really worth it. I think anytime people stand up for their rights, it’s worth it.” Previously, standing up for rights hadn’t involved tearing down a neighborhood. Watts was a dramatic manifestation of the new phenomenon of Black Power. Throwing a Molotov cocktail provided a visceral thrill, a momentary feeling of empowerment within a person who had previously felt inconsequential. Rioting implied a new moral code which did not include pleasing whites. One young rioter in Boston told an investigator why the older generation’s values were no longer relevant: “All the time my aunt used to say . . . be good, be real good. You know what she meant? She meant to do whatever they tell you, the white teachers and the white police and the white store people. Black people live here, but it’s the whites who own us. They’ll always own us until we stop them—and that means it’ll come to a fight.” Black Power was an assertion of sovereignty over the civil rights movement and, as such, a profound statement that blacks no longer needed, or wanted, white help. “We don’t need white liberals,” argued Stokely Carmichael. Given the slow pace of change and the often vicious white reaction, quite a few blacks were inclined to agree.29
For many blacks, the easiest assertion of independence came through throwing stones. “I regret it,” twenty-year-old Winston Slaughter said of his participation in the Watts riot. “But deep down inside I know I was feeling some joy while it was going on, simply because I am a Negro.” Moderates in the civil rights movement deeply regretted this turn to violence, not just for the grief it caused but for the lack of control it implied. When King visited Watts shortly after quiet was restored, he was heckled by young black men still on a high from the destruction they had caused. As Newsweek reported: “Inside a faded, second-story meeting hall, King was quickly ringed by 300 angry Negroes. ‘The people don’t feel bad about what happened,’ one soliloquized. ‘They had nothing to lose. They don’t have jobs, decent homes. What else could they do?’ ‘Burn, baby, burn,’ someone whooped, to a chorus of laughing applause.”
“We won,” they boasted, and King cringed. He politely asked how they considered it a victory if their homes were destroyed and their neighbors were dead. “We won,” came the reply, “because we made the whole world pay attention to us.” King was so shaken by the meeting that he canceled other stops on the tour, “for security reasons.” He later decided that the rioting was the forlorn cry of one who was “so fed up with the powerlessness of his cave existence that he asserts that he would rather be dead than ignored.”30
King always insisted that real equality had to be built on the foundation of law. He was correct, but not in a way downtrodden blacks could appreciate. The law could not right every injustice, especially since so many of those injustices were economic. “They want recognition,” Efelka Brown, a Watts community worker, said of the rioters. “The only way they goin’ get it is to riot. We don’t want to overthrow the country—we just want what we ain’t got.” It is difficult to call the race riots a success, given the destruction they caused and the hatred they sowed. But they did focus white attention in a way that King’s dignified protests never could. When exhortations to seek justice failed to inspire action, appeals to fear sometimes did. Anger and hatred were sometimes more impressive than reason.31
On August 18, 1965, President Johnson had a private conversation with John McCone, shortly after the latter had agreed to head the commission to investigate the riots. Johnson made no attempt to hide his frustration. “We are on powder kegs in a dozen places,” he said.
You just have no idea of the depth of feeling of these people. You see . . . these groups, they got absolutely nothing to live for. Forty percent of them are unemployed. These youngsters, they live with rats, and they’ve got no place to sleep. . . . They [are] all from broken homes and illegitimate families and all the . . . narcotics are circulating around them. And we have isolated them, and they are all in one area, and when they move in, why we move out. . . . We just got to find some way to wipe out these ghettoes . . . and find some . . . housing . . . and put them to work.32
The McCone Commission concluded that comprehensive change was essential. “Improving the conditions of Negro life will demand adjustments on a scale unknown to any great society,” the report warned. “We are convinced that the Negro can no longer exist, as he has, with the disadvantages which separate him from the rest of society, deprive him of employment, and cause him to drift aimlessly through life.”33 The recommendations were well meant, but, in truth, the ghetto was a fire raging out of control. Solving the problem required not just massive expenditure and commitment, but also time. Blacks, however, were tired of waiting. For the moment, rioting seemed an appropriate response to years of oppression. In the years 1964 to 1968 nearly every major city in the United States, and a good many minor ones, experienced devastating riots.
Like little republics, cities entered an arms race. Police forces underwent intensive riot training. An increasing proportion of tax revenues went toward the purchase of heavy riot gear. The Detroit police bought five armored vehicles and a half-track—the closest thing to a tank without actually being one. Chicago put its money in helicopters, at the same time that it was training 11,500 of its personnel in the use of heavy weapons. By the end of 1968, all that firepower had resulted in 250 dead, 10,000 injured, and 60,000 arrested—the worst violence occurring in Newark and Detroit in the summer of 1967. The devastation caused businesses and factories to hasten their exodus from the inner cities, quickening their decline and making the ghettoes even worse places to live.
Johnson asked governor Otto Kerner of Illinois to investigate. His conclusions were not altogether different from those of McCone three years earlier. Americans were warned that their country was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” Comprehensive reforms were urgently needed. “To pursue the present course will involve the continuing polarization of the American community and, ultimately, the destruction of basic democratic values,” Kerner emphasized. “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” The report was an impressive expression of white liberal guilt, a meticulously prepared and neatly bound mea culpa. The great problem with the riots of 1964–1967, however, was that issues of race distorted their interpretation. Most analysts interpreted them as expressions of black anger, when in fact they were symptoms of a much wider problem —namely, the decline of the American city. Class was at least as important as race.34
The black migration to Northern and Western cities had reached its peak during the Second World War, when manufacturing jobs were plentiful. In the same period, and especially after the war, whites who could afford it moved out, partly to distance themselves from blacks, but mainly because the “good life” was located in the “little boxes” in pastures yonder. In that quintessentially American way, whites equated progress with movement. Moving outward was facilitated by the American love affair with the car and the belief that land was limitless. Lewis Mumford decried what he called the “anti-city”: “an incoherent and purposeless urbanoid non-entity, which dribbles over the devastated landscape.” This was “the form that every modern city approaches when it forgets the functions and purposes of the city itself and uses modern technology only to sink to a primitive social level.” Elaine Brown said the same thing more poetically in her song “Until We’re Free,” which tells what it’s like to live in a Third World neighborhood contained within a First World country:
Yes I remember the yesterdays,
the poverty that you and me survived.
We tried living, on streets that weren’t giving.
We laughed and cried; in youth we died.
We didn’t know . . .
The times we saw, we didn’t deserve.
Hostility, we couldn’t see, it was absurd.
Those who stayed in the cities were those who could not afford to leave. They were blacks, yes, but also Hispanics, Asians, and undereducated whites. Their existence was made all the more precarious by advanced technology which eliminated so many unskilled and semiskilled jobs. At the same time, industrialists moved their factories to the suburbs, where land was cheap and the workforce better trained. Some moved operations to underdeveloped countries where labor was plentiful, docile, and inexpensive.35
In other words, the ghetto was a symptom of neglect, not of overt prejudice. Americans had given up on the cities. Radicals like Tom Hayden liked to compare the ghetto to a colony—a source of cheap and exploitable labor. Out of that assumption grew the ridiculous hope that ghetto dwellers might liberate themselves the way the Cubans and Vietnamese had. But what Hayden failed to understand was that colonies exist because they are economically viable, while ghettos represent the failure of viability. America’s inner cities were in freefall: the exodus to the suburbs deprived them of their lifeblood, and as they declined they also fueled their degeneration by becoming ever more dangerous and rundown. The Puerto Rican author Piri Thomas, a resident of Spanish Harlem, asked the Kerner Commission: “Did you ever stand on street corners and look the other way, at the world of muchos ricos, and think, I ain’t got a damn? Did you ever count the garbage that flowed down dirty streets, or dig in the back yards who in their glory were a garbage dump’s dream? Did you ever stand on rooftops and watch night time cover the bad below? Did you ever put your hand around your throat and feel your pulse beat and say, ‘I do belong, and there’s not gonna be nobody can tell me I’m wrong’?” The Kerner recommendations were undoubtedly well meant. Some positive reform, such as the integration of urban police forces, did result. But the cities required much more. Americans needed to take on board some painful truths about the way they wanted to live their lives. That did not happen. Liberals praised the report and conservatives attacked it, but both groups agreed that its recommendations were unaffordable. A nation preoccupied with an interminable war and a fantasy in space could not remotely afford to resuscitate its cities.36
BERKELEY: FREE SPEECH
Bancroft Avenue borders one edge of the Berkeley campus of the University of California. On one side is the ivory tower; on the other, the real world. Or so it seems. In fact, reality remains elusive in Berkeley. Fantasy and fact tangle like ivy on the walls of stone.
The intersection of Bancroft and Telegraph Avenues is the magnetic center of the Sixties, a place where some of the greatest dramas of that decade were acted out and a place where time has stood still. Forty years later, at that intersection, it’s still possible to score some hash, buy a tie-dyed shirt, or plot the overthrow of the capitalist system. Carried on the wind of memory come the sounds of Dylan and the smell of tear gas. “There is no place in the world where uncomfortable people can feel so comfortable,” a visiting academic once remarked.37
On October 1, 1964, at that intersection, Mario Savio encountered his epiphany. He had recently returned from the South after a spell on a voter education project. As with so many other white volunteers, Freedom Summer had had a greater effect on Savio than on the disenfranchised blacks he’d gone to help. The life of a student, preparing for a well-paid job and secure adulthood, suddenly seemed trivial in comparison to events in Mississippi. Determined to keep the momentum going, Savio joined the local chapter of SNCC. He was planning on a day of politicizing when he crashed head-on into his own destiny.
While Savio was away, the university had decided to ban political activities on the small parcel of land at Bancroft and Telegraph. For Berkeley politicos, that was like desecrating the Golden Temple. Left-wingers were not alone in expressing indignation; the local chapter of Young Americans for Freedom also revolted at the removal of the right to pontificate. When Savio arrived, he found that Jack Weinberg, a fellow activist, had been arrested and was sitting in a police car in the middle of Sproul Plaza. What the university failed to realize was that it had taken on the television generation. Those like Savio and Weinberg who had been to Mississippi were relatively few, but those who had witnessed protests on television were many. They knew precisely what to do when confronted by authoritarian power: they sat down, immobilizing the squad car for thirty-two hours.
Leadership did not come naturally to Savio. He was not personally ambitious, nor did he crave the spotlight, like so many student leaders who would follow in his footsteps. He was instead driven purely by a belief in justice. Having spent a summer campaigning for freedom in the South, he could not stand aside when University of California authorities trampled freedom in Berkeley. “The same rights are at stake in both places,” he argued, “the right to participate as citizens in democratic society and the right to due process of law.” He therefore climbed on the police car. But, being a polite young man (unlike later campus rebels), he removed his shoes before doing so.38
By climbing onto that police car, Savio became the leader of a movement which had not existed until that moment. Rather like SDS, the Free Speech Movement (FSM) was earnest, liberal, and very American. It wanted not wholesale revolution, but rather a restoration of the traditional political values that had been destroyed by bureaucracy, consumerism, and conformity. “The things we are asking for,” Savio proclaimed, “have a deceptively quaint ring. We are asking for the due process of law. We are asking for our actions to be judged by committees of our peers. We are asking that regulations ought to be considered as arrived at legitimately only from the consensus of the governed. These phrases are all pretty old, but they are not being taken seriously in America today, nor are they being taken seriously on the Berkeley campus.” Technically speaking, FSM was not supposed to have leaders, being obsessed with democracy to the point of anarchy. “This is not a cult of one personality,” Savio told a reporter. “It is a broadly based movement. . . . FSM is not any single individual.” He did not want to be its leader. But that is what he became.39
Savio had discovered what he yearned for: a righteous cause that he could pursue with relentless energy while still going through the motions of being a student. The university, obsessed with its duties in loco parentis, remained convinced that it was doing the right thing in denying free speech. It was, however, fighting a losing battle. The climactic event occurred two months later. Led by Savio, students seized Sproul Hall, determined to occupy it until their demands were met. Prior to the action, Savio fired up the crowd with the best speech delivered by a student in the 1960s: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even tacitly take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies on the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you are free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.” Marcuse and Mills had said the same thing, but never with such eloquence. Ironically, Savio was a stutterer; but he never stuttered when speaking to a crowd, or at least no one noticed him doing so. He had the ability to mesmerize a crowd through gut-wrenching sincerity. Suzanne Goldberg, later Savio’s wife, remarked that he could “make things ordinary and understandable without using rhetoric. He believed that if people knew all the facts, they couldn’t help but do the right thing—which most of us know is not true. He had a naive faith in pea pie.”40
The Sproul Hall occupation ended shortly after governor Edmund G. Brown ordered the arrest of 800 demonstrators on December 3, 1964. By that point, however, the unrest had spread to other California campuses. Brown could arrest hundreds, but he could not arrest thousands. The university eventually realized that unless student demands were satisfied, the ivory tower would come tumbling down. The concession finally granted was ridiculously simple: restrictions on political expression were removed. That concession was, however, less important than the time taken to grant it. The heavy-handed approach fostered a deep distrust among students, not just toward the university, but toward the “Establishment” in general. The university became a microcosm of the real world.
The trouble in Berkeley sent ripples through academia. Savio and his friends became heroes other students enthusiastically emulated. Unfortunately, those who imitate produce imitations: second-rate, often exaggerated versions of the real thing. That is why the student movement produced only one Savio and why the golden moment of revolt came at its very beginning. It also needs to be emphasized that while FSM seems a beginning, it was also an end. It was an outgrowth of the civil rights movement and, as such, an assertion of liberal freedoms that the “system” had quashed. The essentially liberal nature of the movement would seem old-fashioned in just a few short years. Before long, students would direct their anger at liberalism itself. Instead of seeking to improve the system, they would try to demolish it.
With free speech won, students across the country yearned to stretch the limits of their new freedoms. There were causes aplenty and no shortage of emotional fuel to keep the fires of revolt stoked. The curricula seemed irrelevant, professors remote, classes crowded, dormitories shabby, meals inedible, and administrators arbitrarily authoritarian. Mark Rudd, one of the leaders of the Columbia University protests of 1968, later remarked: “I entered the university expecting the Ivory Tower on the Hill—a place where committed scholars would search for truth in a world that desperately needed help. Instead, I found a huge corporation that made money from real estate, government research contracts, and student fees; teachers who cared only for advancement in their narrow areas of study; worst of all, an institution hopelessly mired in the society’s racism and militarism.” At first, protests were directed inward, toward changing the university environment. Indeed, throughout the 1960s, the most popular issues were not Vietnam or civil rights, but curfews, coed living, cafeteria food, and the structure of classes. Perhaps inevitably, immaturity occasionally overflowed: shortly after the FSM victory, Berkeley’s Filthy Speech Movement revolted over the right to shout “FUCK!” on campus.41
At the very moment students won the right to protest, Lyndon Johnson gave them an issue: Vietnam. The first major response to Johnson’s escalation came at the University of Michigan in March 1965, when students organized a teach-in designed to educate the ignorant about the war. Within weeks, similar events were organized at dozens of universities across the country. Students were protesting not the human cost of the war (American deaths still numbered under 500), but rather the immorality of American action.
The biggest teach-in occurred on May 21,1965, when more than 10,000 people gathered on the Berkeley campus for Vietnam Day, a twenty-four-hour carnival of protest. The event was the brainchild of Jerry Rubin, later the star of so many Sixties dramas. The self-styled P. T. Barnum of student revolution had an uncanny ability to make things happen—usually by sheer force of personality—and was never so happy as when he was causing annoyance. Though few people liked him, many were in his thrall. A far cry from Savio, he is perhaps the best example of how easily and quickly egotists hijacked the “movement.” Whereas Savio was genuinely interested in issues, Rubin wanted mainly to strut on stage.
In late April 1965, Rubin approached mathematics professor Stephen Smale with the idea of a massive teach-in. The latter, a veteran activist, was outraged by the bombing of North Vietnam and therefore agreed to join Rubin. A cadre quickly congregated around the genius and the cockerel. “We didn’t spend much time on analysis and theory,” Smale recalled. “Our mode was one of continually doing things, all kinds of things, which would make Vietnam Day into a bigger and sharper anti-war protest. . . . It was more like an exciting creative challenge . . . to make Johnson cringe.” Having grown up on television, Vietnam Day activists understood the need to manipulate images. Rubin wanted Berkeley to become “a media symbol for the country.”42
Activists competed with one another in proposing “the biggest, most provocative names” to invite. Bertrand Russell, Fidel Castro, Norman Mailer, and Jean-Paul Sartre were all suggested. “Sometimes it worked and the invitations were accepted,” Smale recalled. Morris Hirsch, Smale’s friend and colleague, admitted that objectivity was never a concern. This unashamed bias was reason enough for the Johnson administration to turn down an invitation to send a representative. The White House thought a refusal would deprive the event of credibility.43
The organizers provided thirty-six hours of nonstop indignation. Speakers included Mailer, Benjamin Spock, the leftist journalist I. F. Stone, the comedian Dick Gregory, Yale history professor Staughton Lynd, and Norman Thomas, perennial socialist candidate for president. Bertrand Russell sent a recorded message. Despite the seriousness, a festive atmosphere prevailed. Comedians, folksingers, and mime artists provided light but relevant relief. The big names drew crowds in excess of 12,000, with perhaps 30,000 attending in all. Police made no arrests and the mood was consistently jolly. The San Francisco Chronicle—no friend of the left—praised the “pleasant Chautauqua-like atmosphere.”44
Over subsequent weeks, the organizers tried to transform the spirit of a single day into a sustained antiwar campaign. “We all had this incredible energy,” Rubin recalled. “We believed we could stop the war if we just made enough noise. . . . We were telephoning across the country—two thousand dollars a month in phone bills. We had fifteen different committees-committees to talk to soldiers, committees to plan civil disobedience. Fantastic!” Two conclusions about American politics shaped Vietnam Day policy: first, that “respectable” protest would be ignored by the media; second, that the traditional party system could not accommodate an antiwar movement, since, on the left, liberal Democrats supported Johnson. The organizers consciously shunned liberal America. “We didn’t mind alienating liberals,” Smale recalled. “We didn’t need them.”45
Over the summer, membership grew to around 400, with perhaps two dozen real activists and ten salaried staff members. Participatory democracy was sacrosanct. Political choices were made in public, rather than imposed from above. This, however, meant that the Vietnam Day Committee was prey to cynics and spies who manipulated the leaderless system. As Morris Hirsch admitted, “We trusted people too much.” Often the most enthusiastic campaigners were FBI agents provocateurs. “It remained surprising to me,” wrote Life reporter Sam Angeloff (who easily infiltrated the group), “that a man could wander off the street and join any VDC decision-making body.”46
The Vietnam Day Committee, like so many Sixties radical groups, toyed with “expressive politics” in which protest combined with street theater. The danger of this approach, however, was that style frequently overwhelmed substance. Participation often achieved nothing beyond mere spectacle. The most controversial action began in July 1965, when the escalation of the war brought trainloads of draftees to the Oakland Army Terminal—via nearby Berkeley. The Vietnam Day Committee launched a campaign to stop the trains by blocking the tracks. On only one occasion was a train briefly stopped, but that was not the point. The aim was to attract attention, which the group managed rather well. With no consistent ideology, however, and little centralized direction, the committee behaved like a headless chicken. Members were allowed to pursue idiosyncratic, sometimes contradictory goals. For example, during preparations for a march in November 1965, one faction drew up plans for a nonviolent parade while another advised supporters to bring sticks and other potential weapons.
Actions were designed to “increase the number of people who are opposed to the structure and value system of American society.” In other words, an antiwar campaign easily morphed into one that sought to bring down the American system. Since, according to Marcuse, the system depended upon apathy, arousing the consciousness of ordinary people became a rebellious act. Toward this end, the committee sought, “to create controversy where there is apathy.” “It was an important policy of the Vietnam Day Committee to make no concessions to respectability,” wrote Smale. Or, as Rubin explained more graphically: “We were fucking obnoxious, and we dug every moment of it.”47
A second teach-in was scheduled for October 15, 1965. The Vietnam Day Committee, burdened by its early success, had to improve upon the May 21 extravaganza in order to show that it was thriving. Aware of this need, the group decided to combine the teach-in with a march on the Oakland Army Terminal. By this stage, however, the committee was no longer unobtrusive: the Establishment took it seriously—perhaps too seriously. Detectives followed Smale and Rubin constantly, while informants worked closely with the FBI and campus police. On October 1, Alameda County district attorney J. F. Coakley warned Governor Brown that the march could cause a “calamity.” He demanded that the National Guard and the California Highway Patrol be readied. Coakley, in common with other ambitious Republicans like Ronald Reagan and Senator George Murphy, delighted in using Berkeley unrest to embarrass Brown.48
Right-wing vigilantes were also watching with interest. The Minutemen and Hell’s Angels looked forward to the opportunity to give the peace protesters a lesson in civil disobedience. Their threats of violence delighted Oakland city officials, who welcomed any reason to ban the march. They waited until the eve of the protest to deny a parade permit, thus leaving insufficient time for a legal challenge. Berkeley officials, however, granted a permit. The marchers were thus confronted with the prospect of having to assert their civil rights on the Oakland city line.
The demonstration did not begin well. An impressive list of speakers failed to excite a community now bored with teach-ins. The entire event seemed headed for disaster when a larger-than-expected crowd of 10,000 gathered for the march on Oakland. This suggests that many were attracted by the opportunity for mayhem.
A crowd stretching thirteen blocks marched down Telegraph Avenue. Waiting at the city line were 650 Oakland police, 400 highway patrolmen, and 250 Alameda County sheriffs—all in a nasty mood. Behind them were 100 Hell’s Angels and other right-wing thugs shouting, “America for the Americans!” In an attempt to outflank the police, the marchers turned right and traveled parallel to the city line. A few blocks on, march monitors ordered a halt. They were confronted by a choice laden with symbolism: to the left lay Oakland and martyrdom; to the right, Berkeley and ignominy. “LEFT, LEFT, LEFT!!!” cried the crowd. For the first time in the committee’s short life, the organizers abandoned participatory democracy. Nine members of the executive council debated how to proceed. Smale and Rubin preferred an immediate sitdown—rather like Savio and FSM. They were in the minority. The council voted five to four to turn right.49
The Vietnam Day Committee subsequently split along the fissures evident on the Oakland city line. Those who had preferred caution turned to conventional politics. Rubin took his circus act on the road, in search of adoring crowds. Smale, dismayed at the way participatory democracy had been trampled on the Oakland city line, entered what he called “a mathematical phase.” What remained of the committee was hijacked by members of the extreme left, who took it down a steep slope to violence, futility, and farce. On the first anniversary of Vietnam Day, a teach-in attracted no-name speakers and a tiny crowd. By October 1966, the group had “shrunken to a dozen Trotskyists with half a dozen letterheads and a mimeograph machine.” The university eventually banned the group, on the grounds that none of its officers were students. Meanwhile, the Republican right reaped enormous dividends from the committee’s stunts. In its death throes, the group caused more damage to the peace movement than it ever caused, during its heyday, to Johnson’s war.50
The Vietnam Day Committee was just one example of a campus antiwar movement. Its importance lies not in its influence but in its typicality. Its weaknesses—immaturity, sensationalism, insensitivity, naïveté, lack of leadership—plagued the entire movement. Within Berkeley, the committee was influential in combating ignorance and apathy about the Vietnam War. But this was a limited success. When Sartre declined his invitation to the May 1965 teach-in, he provided a clue to the group’s ultimate failure:
The problem is not whether or not I would have helped such Americans more or less by going there. The fact is that I cannot help them at all. Because their political weight, unhappily, is nil. . . . These people are totally impotent. One of them wrote me: “If you do not come to us, if you break off all communication with us, it must be that you regard us as the accursed of the earth!” I do think, in fact, that a man of the American left who has a clear view of the situation, and who sees himself isolated in a land entirely conditioned by the myths of imperialism and anticommunism, such a man, I say, and with all respect, is indeed one of the accursed of the earth. He totally disapproves of the politics carried out in his name and his action is totally ineffective.
The Vietnam Day Committee imagined itself an antidote to radical impotence. But since the moral angst of Berkeley radicals was not widely felt across America, this antidote was not in great demand outside the university community. From 1965 to 1967, the vast majority of Americans, including students, supported the war and condemned the “campus kooks.” If a nascent mass movement against the war existed in 1965, it could not be brought to life by shocking media stunts. Triumphant in Berkeley, the committee became the accursed in wider America.51
In the middle of his Vietnam Day speech, Paul Krassner, editor of The Realist, cautioned the crowd not to get carried away by the energy generated by the teach-in: “Don’t let your perspective be disjointed here, because when I speak at a college and then I go away, I fly, and I look out. There’s a lot of them. You know, who really like Ed Sullivan. It’s very frightening. I mean they aren’t the extremists.” The Vietnam Day activists were the extremists, and they reveled in extremism. They had little time for the Ed Sullivan watchers. It might be argued that it was never their intention to break out of Berkeley—though their rhetoric suggests otherwise. But a mass movement confined to Sproul Plaza is a contradiction in terms. No matter how vocal the protest in the university community might have been, so long as it remained quarantined on campus, it could be used by the right as a symbol of moral degradation and extremist excess. The Vietnam Day Committee demonstrated a hugely important Sixties lesson-namely, the futility of trying to build a mass movement by thumbing one’s nose at the masses.52
AMSTERDAM: PROVO P IONEERS
In the mid-1960s, along the canals of Amsterdam, a movement materialized that aimed to make people laugh. Humor, it was thought, was the best weapon against authority. The movement, called Provo, would eventually inspire a host of imitators, including the Merry Pranksters, the Diggers, and the Yippies. None, however, were quite as funny as the Dutch.
Sixties Holland had its version of Mods and Rockers, called Nozems. These reasonably affluent urban youths rode around on scooters, constantly on the lookout for mischief. A favorite pastime was to throw things into canals—rubbish bins, prams, bicycles, anything would do. Since the Dutch have long looked indulgently on youthful excess, the Nozems were studied more than punished. Sociologists decided that the behavior arose from boredom and alienation; the Nozems seemed lost souls in search of fulfillment. Discontent was expressed in a desire to provoke, a predilection that caused the sociologist Wouter Buikhuisen to call them “Provos.”
Roel Van Duyn, a philosophy student at the University of Amsterdam, saw these directionless rebels as a potential revolutionary mass. His personal belief system was an eclectic mix of Dadaism, anarchism, and nihilism seasoned with sprinklings of Marcuse, Marx, and the Marquis de Sade. While Van Duyn never quite succeeded in organizing the Nozems (his anarchism proved an obstacle), he did manage to annex the name Provo.
Van Duyn was Provo’s theoretician, the thinker in the background. Much more noticeable was Robert Jasper Grootveld, an irreverent performance artist already famous for his “happenings.” The concept, central to the Sixties counterculture, was originally conceived by the New York artist Allan Kaprow, and taken to Holland by the Beat poet Simon Vinkenoog. Grootveld, however, gave happenings their peculiarly Sixties character. The masses, he felt, had been brainwashed into a bland, consumerist way of life that stifled imagination and encouraged the worship of authority. His method of breaking the tyranny of conformity was to awaken people’s consciousness by involving them in bizarre demonstrations that combined social protest with street theater. Massive crowds attended his happenings on the certainty of being surprised. To them, Grootveld seemed a cross between a shaman and a magician. “If he is talking you can’t do anything but listen,” the journalist Wim Zaal confessed. “You . . . wait out of respect till Jasper has finished talking. In one sense . . . he is giving away a show, . . . a revelation of his intense lifestyle. This is his magic.”53
Grootveld’s favorite cause was the promotion of marijuana consumption. In 1962 he single-handedly began a crusade to change Dutch drug laws by exposing their absurdity. In his “Marihuettegames,” players got stoned and then competed with one another to get arrested for possessing entirely legal substances. A tip would be called in to the police, who would then raid an address and arrest the occupants. After further investigation, the police would find that the substance seized was something harmless like tea, whereupon the culprits would be released. On one occasion, the police were told that a large hash shipment would be entering Holland from Belgium. Journalists were also alerted. Police and customs officers detained Grootveld and his friends, only to find that the contraband in question was dried dog food. Headlines subsequently read: “Marijuana Is Dog Food.” Eventually, the police grew tired of the humiliation and decided to leave Grootveld alone. He responded by opening his Afrikaanse Druk Stoor, where he openly sold marijuana.54
A short hospital stay had a profound effect upon Grootveld’s political consciousness, turning him into an obsessive campaigner against the tobacco industry. As he saw it, manufacturers and advertisers were amassing huge fortunes by conspiring to encourage a fatal addiction. Grootveld responded by defacing cigarette ads around Amsterdam, daubing them with a single black “K”—for kancer. Cigarette machines were broken into, the contents replaced by Day-Glo packs of fake marijuana cigarettes. Grootveld occasionally sprayed chloroform in tobacco shops, the idea being that the hospital smell would remind smokers of their ultimate fate.
At his “Antismoking Temple,” Grootveld performed weekly Black Masses with his poet friend, Johnny the Selfkicker. Crowds would gather in anticipation of something outrageous. The ceremony would build to a crescendo, whereupon the crowd would sing the “Ugge, Ugge” song, the official antismoking anthem. Eventually, the masses were moved to Spui Square, where a small statue of a child called “Het Lievertje” (“The Little Rascal”) had been donated by the Hunter Tobacco Company. As the novelist Harry Mulisch noted, the Dutch version of the generation gap was acted out every Saturday night: “While their parents, sitting on their refrigerators and dishwashers, were watching with their left eye the TV, with their right eye the auto in front of the house, in one hand the kitchen mixer, in the other Die Telegraaf, their kids went . . . to Spui Square. . . . And when the clock struck twelve, the high priest appeared, all dressed up, . . . and started to walk Magic Circles around the nicotinistic demon, while his disciples cheered, applauded, and sang the ‘Ugge Ugge’ song.” Grootveld had managed, quite inadvertently, to give Nozems a focus. The antismoking issue was not particularly important to them, but participating in a spectacle was. Incidentally, throughout his campaign, Grootveld remained a chain-smoker.55
At one happening, Van Duyn began handing out leaflets announcing the formation of Provo. The choice, he argued, was “between desperate resistance or apathetic perishing. Provo realizes eventually it will be the loser, but [we] won’t let slip away that last chance to annoy and provoke this society to its depths.” While Grootveld normally had little patience with movements, he found Van Duyn’s anarchism deeply attractive. An alliance was struck. For them, anarchism was never really a political philosophy, but rather a romantic approach to life that allowed independence and self-consciousness to flourish.56
In contrast to so many Sixties revolutionary groups, Provo had no grandiose ambitions about politicizing the masses. The vast majority of the Dutch people were dismissed as klootjesvolk, or “people with little balls,” who lived out humdrum lives and hadn’t the guts to be different. Provo lumped the proletariat and the bourgeoisie into “one big, gray klootjesvolk of enslaved consumers,” opposed by a proud, liberated, and determined provotariat. “We cannot persuade the masses,” one document proclaimed. “We hardly want to. How anybody can have any trust in these apathetic, dependent, spiritless bunch of cockroaches, beetles, and ladybugs is incomprehensible.” The klootjesvolk were useful only as a focus of ridicule. Holland, Van Duyn maintained, was “so easy to provoke, so stupid, so engaged in its old-fashioned moral tradition.”57
Grootveld was a delightful attention-seeker who needed to be out among the people and grew stronger from their interest in him. The participation of the police was essential to the Provo equation—they were “co-happeners.” Everything depended on the police acting like police. “It is obvious that the cops are our best pals,” wrote Van Duyn. “The greater their number, the more rude and fascist their performance, the better for us. The police, just like we do, are provoking the masses. . . . They are causing resentment. We are trying to turn that resentment into revolt.”58
With immense creativity, Provo continually devised new campaigns, usually under the general rubric of “White.” The most famous was the White Bike Plan, the inspiration of the industrial designer Luud Schimmelpen-ninck. Worried that there were too many cars in Amsterdam, he called upon the city to provide free bicycles, which were to be painted white and left permanently unlocked. An individual could then simply pick one up at Point A and leave it at Point B, whereupon another person might ride it to Point C, and so on. In order to kick off the campaign, Provo provided the first fifty bicycles. The idea suited a progressive city like Amsterdam, but was far too logical for the police, who immediately confiscated the bikes on the grounds that they constituted an invitation to theft. Provo responded by stealing some police bikes.
White ideas proliferated like tulips at the Keukenhof. The White Housing campaign attempted to make derelict flats available to low-income families while pointing out the iniquities of real estate speculation. White Chimneys attempted to establish smokeless zones within cities and identified polluters by painting their smokestacks white. The White Wife initiative aimed at increasing access to contraceptives and abortion; the White Kids plan called for free nurseries. The White Chickens Plan was the brainchild of a Provo faction called Friends of the Police. Law enforcement officers, previously known as “blue chickens,” would be given a new, gentler image. White chickens would ride around on bicycles, be unarmed, dispense first aid, provide directions, distribute free contraceptives, and, best of all, provide free fried chicken. Unenthusiastic about the idea, the police raided one demonstration and confiscated a dozen white chickens Provo had brought to publicize the scheme.
The first issue of Provo magazine came out in July 1965. It contained recipes for making bombs and booby-traps, but no guidance as to what was to be done with them, since Provo was strictly opposed to violence. The aim, as always, was simply to provoke. On this occasion they were successful-police arrested Van Duyn and three others for inciting violence. The magazine worried authorities not just because of the bomb recipes, but also because it suggested that Provo was a great deal more organized than had previously been assumed. “It was very shocking to the establishment,” Grootveld recalled. “They realized that we were not mere dopey scum but were quite capable of some sort of organization.” The police responded with ever more heavy-handed tactics, playing into Provo’s hands. When Provo was banned from distributing literature in Spui Square, campaigners responded with blank banners and blank leaflets. The police arrested them and confiscated empty pieces of paper.59
In September 1965, Provo turned its attention to the Vietnam War. Unlike many other antiwar movements (particularly those in Europe), opposition did not inspire them to idolize Ho Chi Minh. They hated war in general, and accepted the fact that thoroughly nasty characters fought on both sides. “Our protests . . . were from a humanistic point of view,” Rob Stolk recalled. “We criticized the cruel massacres, but didn’t identify with the Viet Cong, like Jane Fonda. That’s why later on we didn’t end up on aerobics videos.” Some Provo sympathizers offered safe houses to American soldiers who deserted their units in Germany.60
The sheer fun of Provo helped it to spread across the Netherlands, a country where irony is an industry. Eventually, every town and city had its branch, producing leaflets, staging happenings, and dreaming up White plans. As it spread, Provo tested the tolerance of pluralistic Dutch society. A national poll in 1966 discovered that 71 percent of those surveyed thought the Provos work-shy; while 85 percent saw them as “hooligans.” They were summarily dismissed as snotneuzen (“snotnoses”), or a more noxious form of Nozems. Die Telegraaf called the Provos “an unworthy plague of fleas.”61
A small but significant minority of Dutch were, however, embarrassed by the image of boring, bourgeois Holland. For them, admiring Provo became symbolic of liberal credibility. “Clergymen, municipal officials, and politicians of every persuasion came to talk and often went away . . . whole-hearted sympathizers,” the journalist Aad Nuis reported in 1967. The group’s environmental message proved particularly appealing to those worried about traffic congestion and smog. The supermarket tycoon Albert Heijn declared himself a Provo after hearing about the White Bicycle Plan, and Queen Juliana confessed that she was sympathetic to some of Provo’s ideas. “The Provos protest against dehumanization, as the socialists once did,” wrote Cees Egas, state secretary for culture, recreation, and social work. “The young protest a dehumanized world. They demand re-humanization. They challenge Christians and socialists to shake off their klootjesvolk mentality and . . . to be truly human together.”62
As time passed, the Dutch grew increasingly fond of the Provos, who provided proof of the nation’s capacity for whimsy. Their appeal can be explained in part because their campaign to embarrass the police tapped into the public’s deeply embedded suspicion of uniformed authority. The reputation of the police plummeted with each desperate attempt to impose order. Increasingly harsh measures succeeded only in provoking ever more imaginative anarchy. The more the police embarrassed themselves, the more the public sided with Provo.
One of the most popular campaigns focused on the Dutch royal family. The Nazi connections of certain members was just the sort of irony Provo liked to exploit. Agitation came to a head in March 1966 over the marriage of Princess Beatrix to the German Claus von Armsberg, a former member of the Hider Youth. Provo action tapped into a rich vein of anti-German feeling within Amsterdam, a city that had lost 80,000 Jews to the Holocaust. The group launched the White Rumor Plan, designed primarily to encourage an expectation of massive disruption on the wedding day. There was talk of building a giant paint gun to be fired at the royal procession, and of putting LSD in the city water supply. Activists also suggested putting laughing gas in the church organ and drowning out the service with amplified recordings of machine-gun fire. Another rumor held that lion manure would be spread along the intended path of the royal coach. The smell of lions would frighten the horses, causing them to bolt, taking the newlyweds on a wild ride. Finally, Provo promised a concert by a band called “SS and the Gasmaskers.”
These plans were never meant to be implemented. The point was instead to poke fun at the monarchy and to alarm the police. Provo was enormously successful at the latter goal, as demonstrated when 25,000 extra troops were brought in to guard the parade route. This necessitated commandeering the Anne Frank House as a temporary police station—precisely the sort of irony Provo enjoyed. On the day of the wedding, Provo was conspicuous by its absence. Thousands of underoccupied police provided the best evidence of the movement’s success. Desperately seeking purpose, the police manhandled journalists and roughed up innocent bystanders. The paradox of jackbooted Dutch police protecting the wedding of a former Nazi was not lost on the people of Amsterdam.
Since the Dutch—those in Amsterdam especially—felt profound unease about the wedding, Provo’s popularity rose. Likewise, each act of brutality diminished citizens’ patience with the police. By the summer, both the mayor and the police chief of Amsterdam were forced to resign, and the Provos had become folk heroes. An admiring public did not, however, suit a group whose raison d”être was to provoke. Since the group had been founded on the idea of resistance to authority, it could not survive a situation in which authority had become tolerant and even respectful. Radical purists saw this accommodation of Provo as an annoying example of Marcusian repressive tolerance. “Fake progressiveness and fake hipness are appearing everywhere,” the young comedian Wim de Bie, complained. “We should distrust this like the plague.” Some Provotarians on the other hand, rather enjoyed being popular, especially when they were invited on speaking engagements around the country and treated lavishly. While the leadership attended a conference outside Amsterdam, Stolk announced an internal coup by the Revolutionary Terrorist Council. Van Duyn reacted angrily, unaware that he had fallen victim to yet another White Rumor, since the council did not in fact exist.63
On May 15, 1967, Provo shocked Amsterdam by announcing that it no longer existed. The end came because the group feared respectability. Like a feral cat, it was in danger of being domesticated. Evidence had come the previous June, when Provo secured 13,000 votes (2.5 percent of the total) in the Amsterdam city council elections—enough for one seat. The Dutch tourist agency had even begun selling tickets to visitors who wanted to be insulted by Provos. “I was totally estranged by all the publicity,” Stolk reflected; “it seemed that Provo had become a public relations machine.” The breakup, in the end, was remarkably amicable, since most members agreed that their work was done. Those who did not go into politics returned to their studies, while others perfected the art of hedonism.64
Grootveld had always been in it solely for the fun, which he found in abundance. As for Van Duyn, he was enough of a pragmatist to realize that his idea of revolution had no hope of success. He came to accept that politicizing the Nozems was a thankless task, since they were only interested in short-term mayhem. He turned his attention instead to the formation of the Kabouters (Gnomes), an anarchist group which by 1970 was the fourth-largest party on the Amsterdam city council. Its greatest success came in pressuring the larger parties to co-opt its environmental and social policies.
For a brief period, Provo gave Holland’s disaffected young people a rather harmless focus for their energies—certainly a better one than vandalizing phone booths or terrorizing old ladies. “It was a nice revolution,” Kees Hoekert reflected in 1972. “It was not a coup d”état. It was an open revolution which everyone could take part in. . . . Before Provo, Amsterdam was boring. . . . It was as boring as Copenhagen, as boring as Stockholm, as boring as Brussels, as boring as East Berlin, as boring as Moscow. Now it is not so boring.” Liberal drug laws, relaxed attitudes toward sexuality, and a general tolerance of diversity transformed Amsterdam into a Mecca for rebellious youth.65
Provo was one of the few protest groups of the Sixties to enjoy a steady increase in popularity over time. While that did not harmonize with the group’s plans, it did influence its long-term effect. The healthy disrespect for authority which the group encouraged remains a notable characteristic of Dutch politics. Thanks in part to Provo, the Dutch adopted a pragmatic attitude to soft drugs, without giving themselves a serious drug problem. Likewise, versions of the White plans are still evident throughout the country. Even the once-despised Beatrix and Claus eventually mirrored trends set in motion by Provo. She became known as the Bicycling Queen, and both developed an enlightened consciousness of environmental issues.
Grootveld was later in the news for building a raft entirely out of rubbish found floating on Amsterdam’s canals. In addition to making an ecological statement, he intended to use the craft to bring marijuana to boring Sweden.
SELMA: BLACK POWER
As time passed, the civil rights struggle grew harder for Martin Luther King. He had to contend not only with angry Southerners, but also with a growing band of black militants who rejected nonviolence. The harmony carefully engineered during the March on Washington was clearly a facade. Though the acknowledged leader of the civil rights movement, he had little control over the direction in which members marched.
King had gambled on the ability of the Democratic party to deliver the comprehensive legislation that would address the manifold problems of blacks in America. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a huge step forward, but was also notable for what it did not address—namely, voting rights. Lyndon Johnson openly admitted that electoral reform had been bargained away by cynical deals within Congress. Militant blacks concluded that whites would never willingly surrender power.
Evidence to support that conclusion was provided by Johnson’s handling of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The MFDP had arisen out of SNCC’s prolonged efforts to enfranchise black people in the state. These had culminated in Freedom Summer, when students from around the country—black and white—had joined activists already on the ground in Mississippi in a concerted effort to extend voter registration. While the campaign yielded a paltry number of registered black voters, it did inspire solidarity among blacks, as expressed through the MFDP.
The MFDP offered itself as an alternative to the all-white, and therefore illegitimate, Mississippi Democratic Party. Its aims were moderate in that it supported the official platform of the national Democratic party, which the all-white group did not. The MFDP sent sixty-eight delegates (four of them white) to the Democratic Convention in Atlantic City in August 1964. While not expecting to be officially recognized, they did hope to make a point about the inequalities of political representation in the South.
For Johnson, the MFDP was an embarrassment he could do without. He deeply resented being placed in an uncomfortable situation from which he could not gracefully extricate himself. Since becoming president, he had managed to engineer the Civil Rights Act, improvements in urban mass-transit, a food stamp program, new education and health initiatives, and the establishment of the Office of Economic Opportunity. He had more ambitious plans, but insisted that he needed a massive mandate at the election in order to implement them. The actions of the MFDP jeopardized further reform: five Southern delegations threatened to walk out if the MFDP was seated. Johnson feared a mass exodus of white Southern voters to his Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater. He therefore offered the MFDP a compromise of two at-large delegates—the most he felt he could afford.
King recognized Johnson’s predicament and was willing to be patient. SNCC, however, attacked Johnson for what seemed a “back of the bus” agreement. Aaron Henry of the MFDP thought the president made “the typical white man’s mistake: not only did he say, ‘You’ve got two votes,’ which was too little, but he told us to whom the two votes would go. . . . This is typical white man picking black folks’ leaders, and that day is just gone.” After three days of agonized deliberation, the MFDP decided to reject the offer. For militants, the whole affair demonstrated the futility of King’s faith in the Democratic party.66
Under enormous pressure from within his own movement, King agreed to another high-profile campaign, this time in Selma, Alabama. The town was chosen in part as a direct challenge to the racist governor of the state, George Wallace, but also because the local sheriff, Jim Clark, seemed a clone of Bull Connor. Since blacks constituted a majority of the population in Selma, but accounted for only 3 percent of registered voters, the town seemed just the right place to pressure the government over voting rights.
The campaign, which began in January 1965, started slowly. Daily marches to the courthouse did not produce the spectacle SCLC needed to attract national attention. Clark, it seems, had been instructed to control his temper. Yet by the end of January, 2,000 protesters had been arrested. A giant demonstration on February 1 resulted in the arrest of another 770, including King. Pressure was maintained over the next two weeks, with arrests mounting and Clark steadily losing his cool. Black activists were nevertheless growing frustrated. Sensitive to their dismay, Malcolm X visited Selma and openly suggested that there were “other ways” to achieve progress.
A turning point came when Jimmy Lee Jackson was killed by police during a nighttime march in neighboring Marion on February 18. Responding to Jackson’s death, SCLC scheduled a march from Selma to Montgomery, but Wallace banned it. King urged postponement until the federal government could intervene to quash the ban, but SNCC was intent upon defiance. On March 7, police viciously attacked protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge leading into Montgomery. Scenes of police horses stampeding into the crowd provided the images necessary to arouse national attention. It being a Sunday, journalists called it bloody. A flood of volunteers poured into Selma, and scores of sympathy marches took place around the nation. King, already under pressure because of his opposition to the march, was further embarrassed by the failure of the White House to intervene.
Emboldened by the flood of support, protesters decided two days later to make a second attempt to enter Montgomery. In defiance of a federal injunction, they again converged on the bridge. As they approached, they sang “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around” in order to steel their nerves for confrontation. Fearing another bloodbath, King ignored the lyrics and turned the march around. Bloody Sunday gave way to Turnaround Tuesday.
Many marchers felt betrayed. Turnaround Tuesday might so easily have brought an ignominious end to the Selma campaign, but, not for the first time, the course of events was radically altered by a timely murder. On March 9, J. J. Reeb, a white minister from Boston, was viciously beaten by racist vigilantes in Selma. He died two days later. A renewed sense of outrage gripped the nation, breathing life into the Selma campaign. Sympathizers flocked to the town, the White House was flooded with angry letters, and demonstrations took place around the country. Outside the South, the press was virtually unanimous in its support, thus increasing the pressure upon the White House. On March 15, Johnson announced to the nation that he would be submitting a Voting Rights Bill to Congress. “Every American citizen must have an equal right to vote,” he said. “This time, on this issue, there must be no delay, or no hesitation, or no compromise with our purpose. We cannot, we must not, refuse to protect the right of every American to vote.”67
Johnson followed up that speech with an order lifting the injunction against the march to Montgomery. It took place without serious violence. At its conclusion, King spoke in front of the Alabama State Capitol. “The confrontation of good and evil compressed in the tiny community of Selma,” he maintained, “generated the massive power to turn the whole nation to a new course. A president born in the South had the sensitivity to feel the will of the country, and in an address that will live in history as one of the most passionate pleas for human rights . . . he pledged the might of the federal government to cast off the centuries-old blight.”68
King was desperately in need of a victory, so it is entirely understandable that he tried to make Selma into one. The Voting Rights Act, passed on August 3, seems fitting tribute to his skillful balancing of antagonistic forces—proof that his pragmatism and caution were appropriate. But sequence should not be confused with consequence; the fact that the Voting Rights Act followed closely on the heels of the Selma campaign does not mean that the former was the product of the latter. Johnson had recognized the need for such an act in the summer of 1964, during negotiations to secure passage of the Civil Rights Bill. Selma might have quickened his hand, but it is difficult to believe that a president so dedicated to reform introduced a voting-rights bill only because his hand was forced.
Selma could easily have been a humiliation for King. His remarkable dexterity, so evident earlier in the civil rights struggle, had deserted him. This was not because King had changed, but rather because “his people” had. Nonviolence no longer inspired them; stirring words no longer brought them into line. To make matters worse, the passage of the Voting Rights Act comprehensively changed the nature of the black struggle in a way that exacerbated King’s marginalization.
Arguments over freedom, which had focused on the South, were giving way to campaigns for economic justice pertinent to all parts of the United States. “The more we grapple with the civil rights problem,” Johnson told Congress, “the more we realize that the position of minorities in American society is defined not merely by law, but by social, educational, and economic conditions.” The new tenor of the struggle rendered it even more difficult for King to hold the movement together, as his attempt to launch a Northern campaign painfully revealed. Blacks in the North were not as tightly knit as those who had endured generations of discrimination in the South, where culture and religion provided powerful social glue. Northern blacks were, therefore, much more difficult to organize, especially since blacks everywhere were growing impatient with the slow rate of change and contemptuous of King’s religious adherence to nonviolence. The issues that plagued the ghetto were also much more complicated than simple matters of freedom and segregation. In addition, Northern whites, who had been so sympathetic when the problem was a Southern one, grew less tolerant when it arrived on their doorstep.69
On June 5, 1966, almost three years after the March on Washington, James Meredith began his “walk against fear” from Memphis to Jackson. In 1962, he had walked through angry crowds in order to become the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi. Aware of the symbolic power of singular protest, on this occasion he walked alone. He did not reach his destination—though he did perhaps make his point, in a manner unintended. On the second day of his march, he was gunned down. Within the civil rights movement, the reaction was one part sadness and nine parts anger. It seemed unbelievable that, after a decade of demonstration, a prominent campaigner could not carry out a peaceful act of protest in safety. As a gesture of defiance, 400 activists from SNCC, CORE, and the SCLC completed Meredith’s march. They were harassed along the way by Byron De La Beckwith, the killer of Medgar Evers, who drove menacingly up and down the column. Significant by their absence were representatives of the NAACP and the Urban League, who found it increasingly difficult to share a platform with the firebrands from SNCC.
During the march, Stokely Carmichael was arrested after trying to set up a campground in a black school. After his release, he told his followers: “This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested. I ain’t going to jail no more. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power.” Martin Luther King, who hated the term, found Carmichael’s utterance deeply disappointing. He did not, however, blame Carmichael, at least not publicly. If blacks were turning to Black Power, he suggested, it was because the white establishment had made it clear that moderate tactics had little hope of success. “The government has got to give me some victories if I’m going to keep people nonviolent.”70
Violence was the modern way. When H. Rap Brown replaced Carmichael at the head of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1967, the qualifier “nonviolent” was retained, even though it no longer remotely described the group’s preferred strategy. At a press conference, Brown advised his followers: “You better get a gun. Violence is necessary—it is as American as cherry pie.” King sensed that he had lost the argument. “I’ll still preach nonviolence with all my might,” he said, “but I’m afraid it will fall on deaf ears.”71