SNCC was always a bit different from the rest of the civil rights movement. SNCC was kids in blue jeans questioning the leadership of older people in suits. It had begun in February 1960, when four students from a black college in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat down at a segregated lunch counter and refused to move. Spontaneously throughout the South young blacks staged similar sit-ins. On April 17, black student protesters met in Raleigh, North Carolina, and founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, always pronounced snick. They were to be an independent group of student activists. In June they sent a letter to Martin Luther King Jr. informing him of their existence. King hoped they would become an active youth wing of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but they wanted to remain independent, and Ella Baker, a fifty-seven-year-old veteran organizer who was an official of King’s SCLC, met with two hundred SNCC activists and urged them to remain independent. They valued King, especially because press coverage is essential to make nonviolence work, and wherever King showed up, the press followed. But they laughed at his exalted position. They called him “the Lawd.” And they disdained what King called a tactic of “calm reasonableness.”
They were extremely active in sit-ins and Freedom Rides that challenged the illegality of segregated interstate buses. SNCC went where other groups wouldn’t. Their courage and energy brought new recruits to the movement by the hundreds. But they paid a price for their daring, being regularly killed, beaten, and arrested.
Zinn, an active supporter of SNCC, wrote that the word that most characterized them was “impatience.” They were impatient with the Kennedy administration, which did so little to enforce federal laws on integration and did virtually nothing to protect protesters in the South, and they were impatient with the civil rights establishment and its leaders, who had few successes. In truth, while they were being beaten and killed and the FBI stood by watching and the press was giving tremendous coverage and the nonviolent movement was earning admiration around the world, very little integration was taking place and few southern blacks were able to vote.
The original SNCC plan was in the best SNCC tradition, to stage a sit-in in Congress to protest their inaction. This was illegal and the protesters would be arrested, but the idea was to bring in wave after wave of protesters. There was also to be a sit-in at the Justice Department to protest their failure to protect and defend the rights of black people in the South.
In the end the sit-ins were replaced by a huge rally at which King did more or less what he had done in Detroit. The only truly militant speech to make it to the podium, the only one that really challenged the political establishment, was by SNCC chairman John Lewis. At twenty-three, the youngest person on the podium, he said that when he started, he “wondered if I’d be able to speak at all.” But he said that by the time he finished, he felt “lifted . . . by a feeling of righteous indignation.” He said that “American politics is dominated by politicians who build their career on immoral compromising”—youthful candor from a future U.S. Congressman. Deleted from the speech under pressure from the movement’s establishment was much harsher language, including “We will not wait for the president, the Justice Department, nor the Congress, but will take matters into our own hands and create a source of power, outside of any national structure, that could and would assure us a victory.” Had Lewis not been censored, his speech might have been remembered as the birth of the black power movement.
Another SNCC activist, Michael Thelwell, wrote in the French black review Présence Africaine, “. . . somewhere along the twisting road that stretched between the first ideas for the March and the abortion of those ideas that was finally delivered in Washington on August 28 lies the corpse of what could have been a real step forward in the struggle for Negro rights in this country.”
But how many people ever read The Nation or Présence Africaine? In the end it was a march, not a sit-in, a polite legal action that Kennedy could endorse and that said little about the anger of those fighting for black rights in a movement that had experienced assassinations, church bombings, and even children murdered.
Bayard Rustin talked of creating theater that could somehow touch people. The March on Washington did just that, but the anger that was covered up seethed underneath. Black nationalist leader Malcolm X said of the March, “It was like putting Novocain in a sore tooth. If the tooth hasn’t been pulled or fixed, it’s hell when it wears off.”
As 1964 approached, the year of “Dancing in the Street,” the Novocain was about to wear off. But in 1963 Motown sold $4.5 million worth of records. Three songs by Martha and the Vandellas were on the Top 100, along with Marvin Gaye, the Miracles, Stevie Wonder, Jackie Wilson, and even the Supremes, with “When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes,” a Holland-Dozier-Holland song. It was the Supremes’ first hit, barely making the chart at 99. Elvis Presley’s “Devil in Disguise” was 100.
Some small measure of racial integration had come—at least to the music world, because at the end of 1963 Billboard decided that there was no longer enough difference between the sale of records to whites and blacks to continue maintaining a black R&B chart.
CHAPTER THREE
SUMMER’S HERE
In 1964 events swirled ever faster. Only a few months passed between April, when President Johnson announced in Chicago his plan to build “a great society of the highest order” that would end poverty, and the early summer, which Johnson called “the summer of our discontent.” So much was happening by summer that to say “summer’s here and the time is right” was bound to be open to many interpretations.
Society became desperate for explanations—for books or songs or something to explain what all this meant. The first big upheaval that set the stage for 1964 happened in the final weeks of 1963—President Kennedy was publicly murdered. Kennedy, rightly or wrongly, had become such a central symbol of the spirit of change in America that it was difficult not to wonder if he had been killed in an attempt to stop change. In contrast to the ideas of change sweeping the country, Kennedy was a fairly conservative figure—a dedicated cold warrior whose foreign policy revolved around taking on the Communists, and far from a champion of civil rights, which his administration was forever struggling to comprehend and react to. The March on Washington had been a demand that he do more.
Despite this, he was young, and after eight years of Eisenhower, Kennedy seemed the embodiment of change, so that when he was killed, the question often asked was, who had tried to stop the change? Was it really just a drifter named Lee Harvey Oswald? Other theories abounded, especially after a nightclub owner with known Mafia ties, Jack Ruby, shot and killed Oswald before he could attempt to explain his actions. To clear up all of the speculation, the new president Lyndon Johnson commissioned an official inquiry into the two shootings, headed by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren.
The American public spent the first eight months of 1964 anticipating the Warren Report and the rest of the year refuting its findings that both Oswald and Ruby had acted alone. Even the murdered president’s brother Robert Kennedy, who anticipated the Warren Report in June by saying he believed that Oswald was simply a deranged person acting on his own, did not quell the speculation that flourished throughout the summer.
By the spring of 1964 the tragedy of Kennedy’s death had moved to a different part of the collective brain of an increasingly angry America. No longer was it just a tragedy, it was seen as a sign of the times that there were ruthless people who would stop at nothing, and so they also must be ruthless to stand up to them.
The Kennedy assassination marked the end of an era of optimism spurred not so much by the social change that a celebrated few were struggling to achieve as by economic growth. Under Eisenhower, the economy had grown comfortably, at a rate of 2.5 percent a year. But under Kennedy, growth doubled. Between 1960 and 1964, the gross national product, the sum value of American goods and services, had leaped by 25 percent.<
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Detroit participated in that growth. In an April 1964 meeting with stockholders, General Motors reported that retail deliveries of cars and trucks in the past month were the highest in the history of the company.
In February 1964 Life magazine published an article titled “The Emptiness of Too Much Leisure.” By 1964 Americans had more leisure time than ever before. It may be typically American to view this as a problem. Europeans were gaining far more leisure time and worrying less about it. The problem came largely from the success of the trade union movement in obtaining living wages for a forty-hour week, although some research indicated that many Americans worked longer to take advantage of greater overtime pay. In the United States a group of prominent social and political scientists gathered for a conference called “Leisure: A Challenge to Present-day America.” Dr. James C. Charlesworth, president of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, warned that leisure “is growing much faster than our capacity to use it.” He recommended the establishment of departments of leisure in each state government and the compulsory teaching of “leisure skills” in the public school system. But there was some evidence that Americans were figuring it out. The sporting goods industry reported a $20 billion increase in sales over the mid-1950s.
In 1964 there was a great push to sell endless new gadgets to the new leisure class. In June the First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson, launched the first “see-as-you-talk” commercial telephone service for Bell Telephone System. The service was between Washington, New York, and Chicago. The rates, still high by today’s standards, were astounding for 1964. The first three minutes cost $16 between New York and Washington, $21 between Chicago and Washington, and $27 between Chicago and New York. The First Lady explained that it was always a great pleasure when her daughters called her when they were away, and now being able to see them would be “an added dividend.” But people didn’t like the new “picture phone.” They thought the equipment was too bulky and too hard to use and the picture was too small. It was discontinued. Surprisingly there were not a lot of complaints about the cost.
Of course the issues of too much leisure, sporting equipment, and picture phones had not reached the poor, the unemployed, and the majority of black Americans in urban ghettos and southern share-cropping farms. One idea that would be increasingly discussed in the 1960s, that there were two Americas, was evident in the leisure problem.
• • •
When on the day of Kennedy’s death Lyndon Baines Johnson took the oath of office, the age of optimism had brutally ended, but the demands for change were still there. For Johnson in 1964 the first order of business was to show that his administration was continuing the work of the fallen president. The ambitious Kennedy had launched fifty pieces of legislation that were still tied up in congressional committees. The most pressing piece of business was the Civil Rights Bill. The demands only a few months before of 250,000 people on the Capitol Mall could not be forgotten. One week after Kennedy’s death, Johnson had begun calling civil rights leaders to reassure them, starting with Roy Wilkins of the relatively moderate NAACP, then Whitney Young of the Urban League, then Martin Luther King Jr., and then James Farmer. From moderate to radical, though he never made it all the way over to SNCC.
On February 10, the House passed the bill that had been discussed, debated, and reworked for the past eight months. The bill was the most far reaching into the private lives of American citizens in American history. Its primary task was to ensure blacks the right to vote in all fifty states with the same registration requirements as white people. It also made it illegal to discriminate on racial grounds in public places such as restaurants, restrooms, barbershops, gas stations, theaters, clubs, and dance halls. It gave the Justice Department the authority to desegregate schools and established an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to act against job discrimination.
Many of the most contentious parts of the bill were rights already guaranteed outside of the South. For example, one of the most controversial parts of the bill was the provision against job discrimination. Though seldom enforced, such measures already existed in twenty-five out of the fifty states but in no southern states. With good reason, the Civil Rights Bill was seen as being aimed at the South. This put the Democrats in a difficult position in a presidential election year, because Democrats, John Kennedy included, won elections with a solid block from the South.
American politics had been frozen in its Civil War configuration. Southerners continued to vote for Democrats because in the years leading up to the Civil War their party had fought for the right to southern slavery. The Republicans, on the other hand, were despised in the South and embraced by northern African Americans—the only blacks who got to vote—for they represented the party of Abraham Lincoln. In Detroit as in most of the North the first politically active blacks were Republicans.
In 1964, the entire political configuration started to change. It was first seen in Alabama in 1962, when a Republican came within 6,800 votes of taking a Senate seat from the Democrats. No serious national political strategist failed to notice that race. The Civil Rights Bill, if passed, could cost the Democrats the South.
On June 19, at 7:49 at night, the bill passed the Senate by a vote of 73 to 27. It was one of the rare occasions in history when every senator voted. Most of the votes against it were from the South, but a notable exception was Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination who also voted against the Civil Rights Bill.
Nor did all blacks cheer the new law. Before it was passed, heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali, who had announced his membership in the fast-growing black nationalist group, the Nation of Islam, said, “The bill won’t change the hearts of the slave masters, and like the counterfeit money it is, if the Negroes tried to spend it, they would be arrested.”
Cassius Clay’s winning the heavyweight title on February 25 in Miami and becoming Ali was a major event of 1964. This was still a time when heavyweight champions mattered. The current heavyweight, Sonny Liston, was not much of a standard-bearer. He was known to have underworld connections and he himself had a criminal record, having served time for armed robbery. But he was a brutal puncher and a fearsome-looking opponent. Almost everyone expected him to easily defeat the young Cassius Clay, and many people openly looked forward to it, because Clay was brazen and outspoken. He was an early rapper, composing humorous rhymes to talk about his fights. In short, he was what was known in the South as an uppity Negro. Bookmakers took seven-to-one odds that Liston would win.
No one seemed to notice that Clay was actually not only faster than Liston but larger than he was, and he easily dispatched the champion in six rounds. But there was more to this fight. In his corner was black nationalist leader Malcolm X. At a press conference the following day, Clay announced with Malcolm X that he had joined the Nation of Islam and had changed his name. So now the heavyweight champion of the world was a militant black—what was known as a “Black Muslim.” This was as clear a sign as any that there was a new kind of change in black America. A few days later Malcolm X announced that he was leaving the Nation of Islam and was forming his own group, and that 1964 was to be the bloodiest year ever in the civil rights struggle.
After his victory, the unpredictable Muhammad Ali shouted from the ring to Sam Cooke, who was at his corner, and called him “the greatest rock ’n’ roll singer in the world.”
What was Sam Cooke, the gospel singer turned R&B star, known for sweet, harmless tunes, doing with Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali? Was he, too, turning militant? Was this to be a new age for R&B? A few months earlier, Cooke had recorded “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Moved by all that was happening, he felt that he, too, should speak out. But it worried him to be openly political, and he considered softening the lyrics, playing it safe, like Motown.
• • •
By the spring of 1964 it was clear that change was going to come in the un
finished business of the Civil War, racial integration. Author James Baldwin described the coming change as “the achievement of nationhood, or, more simply and cruelly, the growing up of this dangerously adolescent country.” In May a black student was attempting to be the third ever at the University of Mississippi. The first, James Meredith, had been able to attend only by force of National Guard troops in 1962. Meanwhile, Ross Barnett, the governor of Mississippi, arrived at New York’s City College and attempted to deliver a speech on the dangerous “mongrelization” that the Civil Rights Bill would cause, but was pelted with raw eggs by students.
Also in May, tensions marked the one-year anniversary of the military occupation of Cambridge, Maryland, by National Guard troops. Americans had come to watch the approach of summer each year with dread because it had become the season of such racial strife. The vice mayor of Atlanta, Sam Massell, warned in late May that “boycotts, the pickets, and sit-ins will be mild compared to the strife that may descend on our cities if we don’t promptly show good faith in seeking equitable solutions.”
This was true not only in the South. New York City seemed particularly ripe for some kind of social explosion. In April, at the opening of the 1964 World’s Fair, young blacks announced a “stall-in.” They planned to drive on the Long Island Expressway, which approached the fair, and then pretend their cars had broken down, causing massive traffic jams. The black leadership in the city urged the young people not to do this, but they went ahead with their plan. They demanded a halt to construction until the industry was integrated, a rent strike, that the school system immediately produce a timetable for integration and the police do the same, and a police review board to investigate abuse.
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