Then, stepping through the pane of normalcy, the sixty-five moved off in five groups to lunch counters at Loveman’s, Pizitz, Kress, Woolworth’s, and Britt’s. They had steeled themselves for arrest, but well-rehearsed waitresses at the first four counters simply advised the white customers that they were closing and turned out the lights, leaving the Negroes debating what to do next. Only at Britt’s did the management call in the police, who hauled off twenty-one demonstrators in paddy wagons. Bull Connor came out of his office, where, brooding over his defeat by Albert Boutwell, he was formulating a desperate plan to hang on to his job in spite of the election results. In public, Connor castigated the owners of the four closed lunch counters for failing to cooperate with his plan to incarcerate every Negro who challenged segregation. He repeated his public promise to “fill that jail full.”
King shared Connor’s disappointment with the small number of people jailed. He had hoped to begin more impressively, especially now that the Easter deadline was so near. He and his aides perceived an alarming tide of opposition among activist Negroes, many of whom preferred to celebrate Connor’s defeat than to talk of jail. At that night’s special mass meeting, Shuttlesworth announced that they would meet every night until the end of the campaign. Abernathy joked with a crowd of four hundred about the urgency of time. “The white man can learn to do the Twist and the Slop in two weeks,” he said, “but it has taken us two hundred years to learn to live with each other…. Are you ready? Are you ready to make the challenge?” He coaxed some seventy-five new volunteers to come forward to join the jail list, but they managed to get only four of them into jail the next day. Everything seemed to be going wrong. The few reporters who were paying attention puzzled over the gaping difference between these meager results and King’s promise of a “full-scale assault” on segregation. Of the handicaps early in the Birmingham crisis, perhaps the most serious was King’s image as a reluctant and losing crusader. He had been largely out of the public eye for eight months, since his retreat from Albany. His name had faded. He appeared to be a worthy symbol from the 1950s who had overreached himself trying to operate as a full-fledged political leader.
It was like starting over. King had planned to go to jail himself by the third day, but he decided instead to shore up the internal strength of the movement. In painstaking remedial work, he met almost constantly with groups of ministers, preaching to them, answering skeptical and even hostile questions. With the sit-in plans complicated by the defensive tactics of the store owners, movement leaders switched to protest marches on city hall. Fred Shuttlesworth led the first one on Saturday, April 6, taking more than forty people with him into jail. This was a respectable number. Walker decided that what had been lost in clarity—the plain connection between the demonstration and the demands for lunch-counter integration—was more than offset by signs of life in the campaign. In the private strategy session, however, they had some difficulty finding preachers of stature to follow Shuttlesworth into jail the next day. King had been seeking volunteers from his own SCLC board since January, but the only one who was there and willing was James Lawson, who could not be spared from his workshops. Cutting through the dilatory talk of preaching obligations, King turned to “Fireball” Smith, Shuttlesworth’s vice president in the ACMHR, and said, “Smith, I want you to go to jail.” He reluctantly agreed. King asked his brother A.D. to join Smith, and then he recruited John Porter to round out the team of preachers leading the next day’s march toward city hall.
Bull Connor and his K-9 corps confronted the marchers on the sidewalk before a large crowd of bystanders. Unnerved by the sight of the dogs, a nineteen-year-old demonstrator named Leroy Allen pulled a clay pipe out of his pocket, whereupon two dogs swarmed over him, felling him to the pavement. When officers managed to pull the dogs off, they led Allen into the paddy wagon along with more than twenty other marchers and the three preachers. Primal tales of the police dogs raced through Negro Birmingham that night, contrasting sharply with stories about how grand the three preachers looked being led off to jail in their Palm Sunday robes.
Still, jail volunteers were scarce. All of Walker’s cherished details did not save the campaign from the appearance of haphazard spontaneity. Compared with King’s previous ventures, Birmingham was mired in a relative news vacuum. Even the local Negro biweekly treated King’s campaign as a disturbing rumor and provided no firsthand coverage of the demonstrations. In an editorial, it attacked direct action as “wasteful and worthless” and looked to Mayor-elect Boutwell for solace. Some days later, with more than a hundred demonstrators in the Birmingham jail, the paper headlined a luncheon speech by Roy Wilkins in Kentucky. Walker and King expected such treatment from the Birmingham World, which, as a sister paper to the Atlanta Daily World, was owned by King’s Ebenezer nemesis, C. A. Scott.
They did no better in other media. King launched Project C just as the city was bursting with optimism and civic renewal. Editorial cartoons showed the incoming city leaders eagerly rolling up their sleeves, and the white newspapers shut out the segregationists and King alike as blemishes on the civic reform movement. When Bull Connor and the other two city commissioners announced that they would refuse to leave office on April 15—thus posing the threat of a putsch, or a war between rival governments—they were obliged to buy an advertisement in the News to get their intentions published. Almost proudly, the News ran a small story about how both Governor George Wallace and Fred Shuttles-worth were complaining of a “blackout of news” on the sit-ins. Approvingly, the white newspapers passed along Mayor-elect Boutwell’s declared policy toward King: “I urge everyone, white and Negro, calmly to ignore what is now being attempted in Birmingham.”
Notwithstanding King’s name and the city’s public image as the Bastille of segregation, outside observers ignored the showdown too. President Kennedy made no statement about the demonstrations, and answered no questions because Washington reporters asked none. The Administration’s only move was a phone call from Burke Marshall, who, acting on a request from the publisher of the Birmingham News, called King to urge delay. Marshall told Walker that Robert Kennedy himself opposed the demonstrations as an “ill-timed” ambush on a reform city government that was not yet in office. National publications reflected the mood of the White House. Birmingham news played in the back pages of The New York Times, which headlined its first Project C stories “Integration Drive Slows…Sit-Ins and a Demonstration Plan Fail to Materialize…Demonstrations Fail to Develop.” King complained that never had his work received such negative press in the North.
Most people were in no mood for Birmingham, anyway. During the first exuberant spring since the brush with Armageddon in Cuba, established organs of the mass culture promoted almost anything that was optimistic. Life magazine celebrated the government’s plans for using hydrogen bombs to blast out new harbors and a copy of the Panama Canal, and predicted that LSD, peyote, and other hallucinogens soon would be harnessed to make people “more productive and generally effective.” There was infectious awe over miracles—both profound ones such as the discovery of the DNA molecule, the “key to life itself,” and prosaic ones such as the invention of the pop-top beer can. Young Jack Nicklaus challenged Arnold Palmer in the Masters tournament, and the most popular song that April was the Chiffons’ bubbly “He’s So Fine.”
By the time King’s volunteers finally began to trickle forward, a meager press appetite for civil rights had settled elsewhere. In the Mississippi Delta, SNCC registration leaders had managed almost unconsciously what King hoped to do by careful design: build a movement that could seize national attention. They succeeded so well that the Kennedy Administration’s internal messages on civil rights focused on Mississippi, not Birmingham, even after King’s followers began filling Bull Connor’s jail. The dreamy grit of the Mississippi students framed an irresistible story of violence and innocence, such that Claude Sitton and other leading reporters stayed with Bob Moses in Greenwood.
To Hollis
Watkins and Curtis Hayes, his initial recruits from McComb, Moses added some fifteen SNCC workers to a voter registration project now scattered over six counties of the rich plantation country of the Delta, between the loops of the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. Group labels mattered little to the workers. Diane Nash Bevel worked for SNCC. Her husband James drew a semi-regular paycheck from the SCLC in Atlanta, which excited mild envy but no scorn. Amzie Moore and Aaron Henry, both of the NAACP, frequently joined their night councils as father figures.
After the discouragements of 1962, their realistic goals for 1963 did not extend much beyond survival. The ruling whites of Mississippi had demonstrated that they were hardly complacent about Negro voting, even in counties where less than 5 percent of eligible Negroes had registered. Ever sensitive to political danger, the Mississippi legislature added a requirement that names of new voter applicants be published in the newspapers for two weeks prior to acceptance. Another new law allowed current voters to object to the “moral character” of applicants. Facing these laws, plus the shootings and padlocked churches, no Mississippi Negro could hope to slip quietly in or out of the courthouse.
The registration movement lived in a tiny glass house. SNCC staff members commonly had no more than thirty dollars a month to cover all personal and office expenses for a county-wide pilot project. Payroll checks, which were sent out sporadically at best, often went to the wrong place or the wrong person. Poverty and internal disorganization severely curtailed movement operations, and, with the post office, the phone company, and all other public facilities in hostile hands, logistical frustrations reached humorous extremes. Sending a message was an art; getting a ride was an ordeal; finding a meeting place was a saga. Even when the volunteers could move and speak, fear among Negroes shut most doors to them. A turnout of twenty sharecroppers was considered a mass meeting. In December 1962, Moses conceded to the Voter Education Project that “we are powerless to register people in significant numbers anywhere in the state.” He listed three conditions for change: (1) the removal of the White Citizens Council from control of Mississippi politics; (2) action by the Justice Department to secure safe registration for Negroes; and (3) a mass uprising of the unlettered, fearful Negroes, demanding the immediate right to vote. “Very likely all three will be necessary before a breakthrough can be obtained,” wrote Moses.
Desperation drove him to take wild gambles. On January 1, with the endorsement of Martin Luther King and the support of the Gandhi Society, Moses filed a federal suit in Washington against Robert Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover. Joining Sam Block, Hollis Watkins, and other young SNCC plaintiffs, he sought an injunction ordering Kennedy and Hoover to enforce six different sections of the federal code that made it a crime to harass or intimidate those trying to vote. They wanted examples to break patterns. Whether or not convictions ensued, they wanted white children to ask their parents why the FBI was arresting a sheriff or a registrar. Such enforcement would signal a marked change from the current practice in which FBI agents were asked only to gather information for possible use in civil suits that may or may not, some years later, result in a court order.
Naïvely, or perhaps disingenuously, Moses characterized the suit as a friendly demonstration for the benefit of its targets, Hoover and Kennedy. The litigation “does not reflect any antipathy toward the defendants or any lack of appreciation of the two-year record of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice,” he said in a statement. Instead, taking at face value all the Justice Department’s disclaimers about the restraints of federalism, the plaintiffs sought to prove to Kennedy and Hoover that “their powers are immeasurably greater than they possibly realize.” Not surprisingly, Kennedy saw the lawsuit as a threat to the prestige of the entire Administration, founded as it was on the explicit premise that the Justice Department had “systematically refused to take action.” Justice Department lawyers maneuvered successfully to block the lawsuit as a crank scheme.
Mississippi authorities attacked the registration project more actively by shutting off distribution of federal food surpluses in two Delta counties. COFO workers, confronted with a famine in the heart of their registration area, sent out nationwide appeals for emergency relief. At first only restricted circles responded—Freedom Ride veterans, members of civil rights groups, students who drove South with carloads of donated canned goods—but the project grew over a bitter winter as grim facts reinforced Mississippi’s unsavory reputation. The cutoff affected Sunflower County, home of Senator James Eastland, and adjacent LeFlore County, where Emmett Till had been lynched and where the White Citizens Councils of Mississippi had their headquarters. In LeFlore County, the cutoff stopped food relief to some 22,000 people—nearly half the county population, mostly Negroes, fully a third of whom had an annual income of less than $500. At SNCC’s first major fund-raiser, on February 1, the relief appeal dominated a Carnegie Hall evening headlined by Harry Belafonte and the Albany Freedom Singers. A few days later, in Chicago, comedian Dick Gregory announced that the stories had moved him to pay for a charter plane that took seven tons of food into Mississippi.
More than six thousand sharecroppers stood in line outside the Wesley Chapel in Greenwood, hoping for some of the supplies. A smattering of American Indians among the Negroes bore witness to the Delta’s lingering Indian heritage. (LeFlore County and its principal town, Greenwood, were named for the last high chief of the Choctaw nation, Greenwood LeFlore.) Even after some thirty tons came in by plane and truck, there were enough cheese and blankets only for about a seventh of those in line, more than 90 percent of them illiterate. As the Negroes least likely to take or pass the registration test, these destitute sharecroppers seemed a poor choice of clientele to the COFO registration workers. But the registration campaign was moribund anyway, with only fifty Negroes having taken the test in the preceding eight months, and sharecroppers had begun to trickle into the nighttime registration meetings. By Delta standards it was a great event when seventy-five of them showed up on February 11 to hear James Bevel. He sang freedom songs, then preached on the connection between the voter registration effort and the cutoff of food. “Don’t let the white man do your children as he has done you,” he pleaded.
The next day, far away in the White House, the sufferings of the Mississippi sharecroppers intruded upon the ceremonies at the Lincoln’s Birthday reception. Members of the Civil Rights Commission took advantage of their private moment with President Kennedy to say that they felt an urgent duty to investigate racial conditions in Mississippi. Chairman John Hannah said he was embarrassed that never in its five-year history had the commission held hearings in the one state that, more than any other, cried out for the commissioners to fulfill their purpose of fact-gathering and public education. Hannah knew he was raising a sensitive topic, as the Justice Department had lobbied to keep the commission out of Mississippi. Kennedy told him that he thought hearings in Mississippi would serve no purpose and might ruin what little chance the Justice Department had for success in its county-by-county litigation.
Private contentions over Mississippi reached Wiley Branton by a different route. Having sent some of his Voter Education Project grant money into the COFO registration projects, Branton was shocked when Bob Moses listed in his official reports numerous purchases of food and clothing made with VEP money. Branton demanded to know the meaning of this blatant violation of VEP rules. Any half-intelligent IRS auditor could look at those reports and know that the VEP had gone beyond its stated, tax-exempt purpose, he sternly told Moses.
“I know, Wiley,” Moses replied. “But what can you do when you’re faced with all those people standing in line?”
His description of the relief lines first drew the reproach out of Branton, then turned him around. “All right, but don’t document it!” he told Moses. “Don’t put it in the reports.” Branton had second thoughts as soon as he put down the phone. He knew he was partial to the Mississippi project. The students were a refreshing contrast to projects elsew
here, in which adult leaders often haggled over the portion of grant money they could keep for expenses, and Branton’s harrowing experiences at COFO’s founding meeting the previous August had given him a firsthand appreciation of the ceaseless threats hanging over the Mississippi registration workers. Still, he was a stickler by nature, and had not come as far as he had in the treacherous field of Negro law by giving in easily to sentiment. The strategic side of his brain told him that Roy Wilkins was correct—that the marginal voter registration dollar was wasted in Mississippi. Branton realized that he must either put a lot more money into Mississippi or none at all. He sent his VEP field director, Randolph Blackwell, to investigate.
Greenwood erupted before Blackwell could get there. Early on February 20, an anonymous caller told a SNCC volunteer that she would not be working in Greenwood anymore, because the office “has been taken care of.” She rushed downtown to find four Negro businesses near the SNCC office being destroyed by fire. Although the SNCC office escaped damage, many local Negroes believed that the fire was a bungled arson attempt against the registration campaign or the relief project, and when Sam Block said as much to a small public gathering two days later, Greenwood police arrested him for “statements calculated to breach the peace.”
Parting the Waters Page 101