by Imani Perry
Lorraine brought the lessons of others of her teachers to bear, quoting Du Bois and Langston Hughes but also the young organizer and architect of Mississippi Freedom Summer, Bob Moses. In one of the most powerful assertions of the text, she states simply and subversively, “The laws which enforce segregation do not presume the inferiority of a people; they assume an inherent equalness. It is the logic of the lawmakers that if a society does not erect artificial barriers between the people at every point of contact, the people might fraternize and give their attention to the genuine, shared problems of the community.”29
This was almost the exact opposite of the logic presented in the legal case that ushered in the modern civil rights movement. In Brown v. Board of Education, the court spoke of the psychological damage and sense of inferiority created by segregation. Lorraine made clear that inferiority was constructed rather than actually believed. Hers was a subtle yet profound point. If people accepted the idea that racism was merely ignorance or misperception, white innocence could be preserved. If instead it was a system bent on the oppression of Black people, and the deliberate destruction of natural ties among members of the human community, then the whole damn nation was guilty.
Though the acronym SNCC stood for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, its members had varying positions on nonviolent resistance. For some, it was a philosophical or theological commitment. For others, it was a tactic. And many SNCC members had, like Lorraine, an interest in and commitment to international struggles. They were not simply an offshoot of King’s SCLC, though they began under the umbrella of that organization. SNCC’s broader and more complex set of politics allowed Lorraine, when writing on their behalf, to ask pointed questions of a sort that wouldn’t be posed by SCLC or King for several more years. After seeing images of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing she wrote, “Twenty million people began to ask with a new urgency: IS nonviolence the way?” This question is followed with an image of MLK with the words “The responsibility for an answer lies heavy on the hearts and shoulders of the men who lead.”30 What follows in her writing is a challenge to King. There are lyrics from a Revolutionary War–era song sitting above images of Black boys bearing weapons. And then two quotations, one from Boston abolitionist Theodore Parker and the other from Robert Williams, a man who became famous in the Southern freedom movement for advocating Black self-defense. The Parker quotation includes the following sentences:
I was born in the little town where the fight and the bloodshed of the Revolution began. My grandfather fired the first shot in the Revolution. The blood that flowed there was kindred to this which courses in my veins today. . . . With these things before me . . . when a fugitive, pursued by kidnappers, came to my house, what could I do but defend her to the last? . . . I should not dare to violate the eternal law of God!31
Lorraine’s answer to the question about self-defense was only thinly veiled. While she said that she supported and applauded Dr. King, she was clear that she did not believe his approach was enough. Black people must, according to Lorraine, be granted full citizenship and access to political participation. Absent that, Black revolt was not just possible but completely justifiable. In speeches she repeated this formulation in various ways. In one, she said,
I think the daily press lulls the white community falsely in dismissing the rising temper of the ghetto and what will surely come of it. The nation presumes upon the citizenship of the Negro but is oblivious to the fact that it must confer citizenship before it can expect reciprocity. Until twenty million black people are completely interwoven into the fabric of our society, you see, they are under no obligation to behave as if they were. What I am saying is that whether we like the word or not, the condition of our people dictates what can only be called revolutionary attitudes.32
This talk was delivered almost exactly a year before Malcolm X gave his famous “by any means necessary” speech at the opening rally for his new institution, the Organization of African American Unity. Lorraine anticipated his precise sentiment by saying,
I think then that Negroes must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non-violent. That they must harass, debate, petition, give money to court struggles, sit in, lie-down, strike, boycott, sing hymns, pray on steps, and shoot from their windows when the racists come cruising through their communities. The acceptance of our present condition is the only form of extremism which discredits us before our children.33
Both Lorraine and Malcolm had likely read Jean-Paul Sartre’s formulation in his play Dirty Hands that the class struggle should be pursued “by any means necessary.” But in the context of the United States, and with respect to Black people, a nation that has a long history of violent hysteria in response to their self-defense, whether in the context of slave rebellions or Black Muslims or Alabama communists, this assertion had an extraordinary intensity and would be made only by the truly courageous.
Lorraine tried to take this message to a broad public. She confronted the way that a press that claimed itself impartial tended to castigate Black protest when it went beyond the narrow bounds that the white public deemed acceptable. When the New York Times published a piece criticizing the Congress of Racial Equality’s New York “Stall In,” during which they disrupted traffic, Lorraine responded strongly. She described her own realization that such tactics were not only useful but necessary. Unfortunately, the Times rejected the letter. But, thankfully, it has been preserved as a testimony to her courage and power. In it she tells the story of her father’s patriotism, his belief in the American way, and his years of devotion to fighting in what was deemed the respectable way. Of his experience, she said, “The cost, in emotional turmoil, time, and money, which led to my father’s early death as a permanently mad exile in a foreign country when he saw that after such sacrificial efforts the Negroes of Chicago were as ghetto-locked and segregated as ever, does not seem to figure in their calculations.”34 The “right way” hadn’t yielded the necessary change. And so, she said, “we must now lie down in the streets, tie up traffic, do whatever we can—take to the hills with guns if necessary—and fight back. False people remark these days on our ‘bitterness.’ Why, of course, we are bitter.”35
In a different piece that was published, in the Sunday Times, Lorraine situated her political commitments in light of her generation and how she had come of age. It was as though she saw that the moment had thrust upon them an unanticipated urgency and responsibility. One response was the creation of an organization that was called Association of Artists for Freedom (AAF), which was formed in 1963 to “speak to the conscience of the American people,” according to one source announcing its creation. Its founding members were James Baldwin, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and John Oliver Killens. In their first campaign, in the winter of 1963, they called for people to make contributions to civil rights organizations and to make the Christmas season a “time of national shame and mourning” rather than an orgy of Christmas shopping.36
The following summer, on June 15, the AAF held a forum called “The Black Revolution and the White Backlash.” On the program were six Black artist-activist-intellectuals: Paule Marshall, John Oliver Killens, LeRoi Jones, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Lorraine. There were three white writers too: New York Post columnist James Wechsler, producer David Susskind, and journalist Charles Silberman.
There were about 1,500 people in attendance, and the crowd was multiracial though mostly white. The press regarding the event described it as, frankly, something of a mess. The radicalism of the Black speakers agitated the white ones. Susskind was quoted as saying, “I have never heard such carefully couched calls for violence in a long time. I find it dangerous, irresponsible, ineffective talk.”37 Wechsler said that “time and again the thought was advanced that everything that has occurred so far in the freedom struggle has been virtually unimportant, largely because of the corrupt influences of white liberals who stealthily dominate existing Negro groups,
pervert their aims, and dilute their deeds.” He took particular offense at the calls for Black-led or all-Black organizations, saying, “I disagree that the white liberal has the role of water boy in the Freedom Movement.” He argued that “separatism in connection with racial problems would be disastrous,” and added, “I find it embarrassing and weird that I am here tonight to argue that the message of Martin Luther King still has some meaning.”
The white panelists were both shocked and enraged at the militancy of their Black counterparts. The Barbadian American writer Paule Marshall responded by saying, “What has been going on right here proves poignantly how impossible it is to conduct a dialogue with a white man.” She then called for “a nationwide freedom organization far more militant than any that exists today.” The crowd roared their applause. Times were changing.
When it was Lorraine’s turn, she took the audience on a journey. She began with a joke: “How do you talk about 300 years in four minutes?” The crowd laughed. And then she said, “Was it ever so apparent we need this dialogue?”38
Lorraine told the audience about her letter to the Times regarding the CORE Stall In. And then she placed it in a larger context. This radicalism, she made clear, was not new and it was necessary.
It isn’t as if we got up today and said, you know, “what can we do to irritate America?” . . . It’s because that since 1619, Negroes have tried every method of communication, of transformation of their situation from petition to the vote, everything. We’ve tried it all. There isn’t anything that hasn’t been exhausted. Isn’t it rather remarkable that we can talk about a people who were publishing newspapers while they were still in slavery in 1827, you see? We’ve been doing everything, writing editorials, Mr. Wechsler, for a long time, you know.39
And then she repeated the charge Nina Simone made in her 1963 song “Mississippi Goddam”: “You keep saying go slow, go slow, but that’s just the trouble.”40 Not only did Lorraine find the idea that Black people were impatient both unbearable and absurd, she essentially said that the people who on the one hand said they supported equality yet cawed at Black people’s insistence on the other hand were unbearable and absurd. They were the problem. The solution, Lorraine said, was “to find some way with these dialogues to show and to encourage the white liberal to stop being a liberal and become an American radical.”45 The radical could understand that the basic organization of American society had to be transformed in order for racial justice to ever become a possibility.
Lorraine’s criticism of liberals was not mere chafing at their condescension or bias. She made very clear that she saw the structure of empire: exploitation and stratification at home and abroad made racism inextricable from the American project as it stood. Fighting a war against the sovereignty of the Vietnamese people and having an FBI that refused to protect Southern organizers were connected pieces of what America actually was. As far as Lorraine was concerned, liberals who claimed to believe in racial justice and yet also embraced American exceptionalism and empire held irreconcilable commitments.
Lorraine rejected the American project but not America. She saw her embrace of radical politics as a commitment to it, to what it could be. She said, “It isn’t a question of patriotism and loyalty. My brother fought for this country, my grandfather before that and so on and that’s all a lot of nonsense when we criticize. The point is that we have a different viewpoint because, you know, we’ve been kicked in the face so often and the vantage point of Negroes is entirely different and these are some of the things we’re trying to say.”46
The New York Times and New York Post reported on the tension-filled program, drawing out two representative quotations: Charles Silberman’s “The black radical seems to be long on talks and short on specifics” and Lorraine’s “We have to find some way to persuade the white liberal to stop being a liberal and become an American radical.”47
Six days later, on June 21, 1964, the station wagon that CORE bought with the proceeds from Lorraine’s Croton rally sat by the side of a Mississippi road. The three young men who had been driving it the night before were going from town to town, working on voter registration in the Delta. They had been pulled over in Nashoba County. They were abducted, taken into the darkness, and each one was shot in the head at close range. Their bodies, those of two Jewish New Yorkers, Andrew Goodman and Michael “Mickey” Schwerner, and James Chaney, a Black man from Meridian, were thrown into an earthen dam and left to decay. It was a tragedy that would shake the nation.
Three and a half weeks later, on July 16, a white police lieutenant killed another James—James Powell, a Black teenager in Harlem. He died in front of his friends. Three hundred Harlem schoolchildren marched to the police station to demand answers. Harlemites and cops battled for six days. At the end, there was another dead Harlemite, 118 who were injured, and 465 arrests. Lorraine and her peers had seen what was around the corner, because they knew what their people were tired of enduring, what they too were tired of enduring. The powder keg exploded while the government and polite society were busy repeating, “Go slow.”
The story of the civil rights movement is usually told in the shape of a mountain. The apex is 1965, with a steep decline caused by the turn to radicalism and Black Power. That chronology is too neat. So are the politics. The question of Black independence and autonomy coursed through the entirety of the movement. It was a recurring theme. Tensions between liberal reform politics and more radical ones recurred too. By 1964, Lorraine had spent five years being scolded for her criticisms of self-proclaimed allies in the cause of racial justice. But it was as though in 1964 everything she had been saying became blindingly clear. A radical vision was necessary.
CHAPTER TEN
The View from Chitterling Heights
What if age and ill health don’t produce serenity at all?1
—Edward Said
ALTON AND WALLY, two of Sidney Brustein’s friends, mock his romanticism. Alton tells Sidney, who likes to wax poetic about nature, that Sidney admires the wrong parts of the work of Henry David Thoreau. Wally chimes in,
How’s about the rest of Thoreau, Nature Boy? Poor old Henry tried his damndest to stay in the woods, but the world wouldn’t let him—it never does. What about that, Sidney? What about the Thoreau who came back and called the first public meeting to defend John Brown? What about the Thoreau who was locked up in jail when that holy of holies, Ralph Waldo Emerson came strolling by and asked (playing it), “Well, Henry, what are you doing in there?” And Thoreau, who was in “in there” for protesting slavery and the Mexican War, looked out at him and said, . . . “The question is, Ralph, what are you doing . . . out thay-ah?”2
I wonder if Lorraine asked herself the same question. In 1961, she purchased a home in the Hudson Valley in a town called Croton-on-Hudson. And in her final years, she was often in that pastoral place rather than in the thick of uprisings. She called it, and I imagine she laughed whenever she said it, “Chitterling Heights”: a Black woman’s oasis, named after an African American delicacy of pig offings, upstate.
What was she doing out there? Away from the Village artist activists, and even farther away from the Deep South, which held her greatest hopes.
The Hudson Valley, where Croton is located, is well known as a school and subject of American landscape paintings. The paintings are stunning and remarkably accurate. The landscape is, for lack of a more distinctive word, breathtaking. Nineteenth-century artists, a first generation of counterculture in the valley, gave way to communists and trade unionists who settled in Croton in the early twentieth century. Like Thoreau sitting at the edge of Walden Pond in Concord, up there in the midst of natural beauty the Lefties could turn away from industry, capitalism, and exploitation and imagine another kind of social relation. Eventually the Mount Airy section of Croton-on-Hudson became so popular with leftist New Yorkers that it was known colloquially as Red Hill. Numerous well-known radicals settled there: writers John Reed, Louise Bryant, Edna St. Vincent Millay,
and Max Eastman; dancer Isadora Duncan; actress Gloria Swanson; Daily Worker editor Robert Minor and his artist wife, Lydia; William Gropper; Louis Waldman, a socialist expelled from his seat in the New York State Assembly; and Alexander Bittelman, one of the famous defendants in the federal prosecution of Communists under the Smith Act in the 1950s.
Lorraine probably settled in the area because of so many like-minded people. It was an oasis of sorts. But it wasn’t completely free of the ills of everywhere. The region also had a history of racism and anti-Semitism directed toward the few Black people and largely Jewish radicals who visited. And yet, though she was certainly a rarity in many ways, and she was away from “the struggle,” Lorraine fell in love with Croton. Her dogs Chaka and Spice ambled, ran, and panted. She began to learn the names of flora and fauna. And though she could not swim and was afraid of the water, she enjoyed the lakes and the trees.
The dance between retreat and revolution, like Henry David Thoreau’s dance between the pond and the jail, was made especially complicated by Lorraine’s illness. Croton wasn’t just her Walden; it was her convalescent home.
A month before Jimmy described seeing Lorraine leave the Bobby Kennedy meeting clutching her stomach; she’d had a seizure. In a letter to her friend Evelyn Goldwasser, Lorraine described how that spring was filled with ailments. First, she had collapsed. Doctors told her that the cause was anemia from bleeding ulcers, and she was placed in the hospital for ten days. In that time she did not improve, and so she was given blood transfusions and an abdominal operation. Lorraine didn’t know anything more specific than that. In August, she fell seriously ill again and went to Boston to see gastric specialists, who told her that her enzymes were, in her words, “literally chewing me up.” She wrote, “Therefore I might die, and as a matter of fact, given the nature of the operation to correct it I might also die on the table, etc., and all that sort of thing. Well they operated again and I didn’t die and it was successful and I will be well again.”3 At the time of her writing, Lorraine had been home in Croton for three days, but she was going to have to return to Boston for another surgery in October. She felt terrible, but “grateful for being alive—mostly.”4