American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Some of the delegates came to Jackson straight out of tar-paper shacks, wearing borrowed suits, with no memory of political involvement, but catching on, participant Sally Belfrage reported, “with some extraordinary inner sense to how the process worked, down to its smallest nuance and finagle.” The eight hundred grass-roots representatives, mostly black and poor and including many women, chose sixty-eight delegates to journey to Atlantic City. At last blacks could challenge white power inside one of its power centers. Or could they?

  The Boardwalk, Atlantic City, late August 1964. Balloons and bunting adorned the façades of the convention hotels; the very ocean air smelled like “popcorn and seaweed”; the severe features of LBJ frowned from countless posters. Across the water a huge billboard, proclaiming “In Your Heart You Know He’s Right,” reminded Democrats that Barry Goldwater, the champion of the Republican right wing, had been nominated by the GOP six weeks before. Crowding the boardwalk in their Sunday best were hundreds of southern blacks, who had journeyed with the MFDP delegates to the resort town. Delegates and their backers had two tasks: to lobby vigorously for the seating of their “freedom delegation” in place of the official “lily-whites” and to sustain an around-the-clock vigil on the boardwalk.

  Fannie Lou Hamer stole the show by picturing graphically before television cameras her gripping tale of being beaten in jail, that “woesome time for us when we was arrested in Winona.” All they had wanted to do, she said, was “to register, to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America the land of the free and the home of the brave?”

  With the President watching with a hawk’s eye from Washington, his aides, instructed to gain any kind of compromise that would avert an uproar on TV, had planned to offer the MFDP no votes but the privilege of the floor, along with a new rule that would open Democratic parties in the South to blacks in the future. So electrifying was the testimony of Hamer and others, expertly stage-managed by the redoubtable civil rights lawyer Joseph Rauh, that this compromise collapsed in the face of the public response and Freedom Party militance.

  The Johnson people now offered the MFDP a slightly better deal—two at-large votes as well as the promised nondiscrimination rule for the future. A formidable array of civil rights notables—King, Bayard Rustin, Wilkins, Humphrey, Rauh, and even Walter Reuther, who flew to Atlantic City at the behest of the White House—were willing to go along with this, but despite intense pressure an overwhelming majority of the MFDP delegates dug in their heels. Two token seats, handpicked by the whites? “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats!” Hamer proclaimed. And what good was a nondiscrimination rule without a guarantee of black voting rights? So that deal too collapsed. MFDP delegates in protest occupied the empty seats of the lily-white delegation, which had walked out in their own protest against Johnson’s brokerage.

  In the evening the boardwalk vigil broke into song amid cries of “Freedom Now!” But it was not freedom now; this battle was lost. The little army that had tried to inject moral passion and commitment into pragmatic electoral politics returned to its southern battlefield, dejected, disillusioned, but by no means defeatist. Its troops had learned once again that to deal on equal terms with the “big boys” they had to wield power on their own. But power meant votes—and they were still seeking to put their hands on the ballots that were their passports to freedom and democracy.

  When Lyndon Johnson trounced Barry Goldwater in November 1964, taking 43.1 million popular votes to Goldwater’s 27.2 million and all but 52 of the 538 electoral votes, the reasons were manifold: the nation’s post-assassination tribute to John Kennedy, LBJ’s vigorous coalition building, rising prosperity, the Arizonan’s inept handling of moderates in his own party, the President’s reassurances about nuclear war. Black votes for LBJ in the “Solid South” were not a reason. Despite their hard struggles, most blacks could not vote for the President even if they wished to do so. Only 23 percent of Alabama’s blacks were registered to vote in 1964, only 6.7 percent of Mississippi’s. Against a certified Southerner, or at least Southwesterner, Goldwater carried the bell of southern states from South Carolina through Louisiana. The Democracy, even with a Texan heading the ticket, was still losing its old white bulwark in the Solid South without gaining a new electoral base there. But after the big November win the complacent leadership of the Democratic party lost little sleep over the problem.

  So once again it fell to the most physically vulnerable, the most politically impotent people in the United States to act in this moral crisis of American freedom. In January 1965, SCLC launched a crucial voting rights campaign in Selma, Alabama, a city with one of the most egregious registration barriers. Fresh from the pinnacle of world acclaim for winning the Nobel Peace Prize, King led a march toward the county courthouse in Selma, where after kneeling in prayer he and Abernathy and hundreds of others were jailed. Within a week over three thousand more had been arrested. In the nearby town of Marion, after state troopers set upon black people during a peaceful march, young Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot down as he tried to protect his mother and grandfather, both badly beaten. When Jackson died a few days later, SCLC’s James Bevel and local black leaders resolved to march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery, though Governor Wallace had banned such action and King was in Atlanta.

  On a Sunday early in March six hundred people strode out of Brown Chapel, crossed over the Alabama River, and ran straight into a solid phalanx of helmeted and gas-masked state troopers, who with little warning lunged at them with clubs and whips, cracking heads and lobbing tear-gas grenades. Troopers and the sheriff’s posse pursued them back to the church, using whips and cattle prods, hurling one youth through a stained-glass window that depicted Jesus. When King, who was keeping in close touch with federal authorities, told the Selma marchers to “put on their walking shoes” and this time personally led them across the bridge to face the troopers—only to turn the long column around abruptly and lead them back into town, as if by prearrangement—SNCC leaders denounced him for the apparent deal. But King was still trying to draw the line between militance and violence.

  By now protests sounded across the country, as pictures of mounted horsemen flailing and clubbing fleeing blacks in the initial fracas appeared on television screens and front pages, and SCLC flashed telegrams to hundreds of northern clergy urging them to join King in two days to pick up the march. President Johnson was aroused to the finest words and most important domestic action of his presidency. Calling for a strong voting bill with provisions for federal registrars and the banning of literacy tests, he told a joint session of Congress, his big frame hunched over the podium, that at times history and fate met in a single moment in a single place “to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom.” So it had been at Lexington and Concord and at Appomattox, and so “it was last week in Selma.” Congress applauded and began the long process of passing the measure.

  The Selma activists would not wait or let up. A few hundred marchers once again set off for Montgomery, now guarded by ten times as many troops deployed by the President. For five days these “mudcaked pilgrims” trekked through the heat and drenching rain, through dense swamps, past half-collapsed shacks, rickety Baptist churches, a dilapidated black school at a place called Trickem. Along the way, or encamped at night, they sang.

  We shall overcome,

  We shall overcome,

  We shall overcome some day.

  Oh, deep in my heart

  I do believe,

  We shall walk in peace some day.

  Or the more militant:

  Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,

  With the cross of Jesus going on before!

  Christ, the royal Master, leads against the foe;

  Forward into battle see His banners go!

  At the end, after the marchers surged into Montgomery while Wallace peered out from his office, Martin Luther King stood near
the bronze star marking the site where Confederate President Jefferson Davis had been inaugurated.

  “How long?” he asked. “Not long,” he answered, repeating the litany again and again as more voices joined the stirring rhythm.

  “How long?” he concluded. “Not long, because mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; tramping out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored …

  “His truth is marching on!”

  Euphoria could never last very long in the struggle for civil rights. One of King’s rapt listeners that day was Viola Liuzzo, a white volunteer from Detroit who was helping to ferry the marchers back to Selma. She was shot to death by four Klansmen—one of them an FBI informer—as she was driving on a desolate highway in the swamps of Lowndes County. When LBJ was finally able to sign a strong voting rights bill early in August 1965, he could proudly declaim, “They came in darkness and they came in chains. And today we strike away the last major shackles of those fierce and ancient bonds.” But shackles remained. And even as the President spoke, the civil rights movement was changing, dividing, turning more to the black ghettos in the North.

  SNCC was beset by growing pains as well as battle fatigue. An influx of white organizers after “Freedom Summer” intensified black-white friction. Conflict mounted between the more group-oriented leaders, represented by Ella Baker and Bob Moses, who were trying to carry on the original SNCC spirit and lifestyle, and the “hard-liners,” led by James Forman and Cleveland Sellers, who wanted a more disciplined, centralized, and politically effective organization. And a very different kind of leadership was arising outside of SNCC, in the cities of the North.

  The black leaders in the South were waging their struggles for a constituency that was eroding. During the 1960s the South lost nearly one-eighth of its black population. In another of America’s massive migrations, almost a million and a half blacks “left the South for the already overcrowded ghettos and marginal neighborhoods of the urban North” between 1960 and 1970. By 1960 blacks numbered over half of Washington’s population, over a quarter of the people of Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis, almost a quarter of Chicago and Houston. The ghetto populations of Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan were around 95 percent black. It cost “roughly a thousand dollars” in lost wages to be black, it was estimated; the economic cost to the nation of discrimination was over ten billion a year.

  It took a child of the ghetto to translate these figures into human terms. In a stunning portrait of the Harlem he had known for forty years—the Harlem where his family had “moved from house to house, and from neighborhood to neighborhood, within the walls of the ghetto,” in a desperate effort to flee its creeping blight—Kenneth Clark etched the sociology and pathology of the black poor. Dark Ghetto was his “anguished cry” about the life and plight of these urban prisoners. Clark captured the physical ugliness of Harlem, the dead-end jobs, dilapidated housing, street kids killed by cars in their only playground, broken families, absent fathers, insensitive social workers, rampant venereal disease, drug addicts vomiting in the Tombs, the gang leaders and dope peddlers. He captured the bitter, angry talk of the streets too: “The flag here in America is for white men” who will “lynch you” and “fry you”—“The only thing you can do is to kill us”—“I’m not a man, none of us are men!”—“Why in the hell— now this is more or less a colored neighborhood—why do they have so many white cops?”—“So we’re out on the sidewalk, right on the sidewalk; we might feel like dancing, or one might want to play something on his horn. Right away here comes a cop.”

  There was nothing new in all this; what was new was the sheer number and size of the ghettos by the 1960s, along with hardening intractability of the conditions. Bad nourishment, education, motivation, housing, poor speech habits, combined with few hopes, low expectations, no jobs—all these fortified one another and produced the prison that millions of blacks could not escape.

  Also new was the rise of black leaders attuned to the pathology and politics of the city. One of these was Malcolm X. Son of a Baptist minister who had organized for Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, Malcolm Little had worked as a shoeshine boy and in a dining car, then made his way as a hustler, drug dealer, and pimp. Jailed for robbery, he wrote to Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam, or Black Muslims. On his release he converted to the sect and took the name Malcolm X.

  A tall, thin, copper-colored man, charming and witty offstage but polemical in the podium or pulpit, he soon won followers with his blistering attacks on the Kennedys, on King, on integration and intermarriage, on the white people as devils. He broke with Muhammad in March 1964 and in a hurricane of activity set up his own Muslim group, founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity, and made two long journeys to the Middle East and Africa, during which he converted to orthodox Islam and communed with African revolutionary leaders.

  He shaped a grand strategy—to ground the struggle of Afro-Americans firmly in the global majority of people of color, to gain moral and material help from Third World countries, to raise the “civil rights struggle” to the level of “human rights”—and as a beginning to put American racism on trial before the United Nations. Less and less was Malcolm a separatist as the years passed, or even a pure and simple black nationalist. Nor was he a Marxist, though he identified with African-style socialism. While he castigated civil rights leaders like King for their caution and compromise, he wanted to cooperate with the freedom movement. But he disdained the “masochism” of nonviolence and justified not only armed self-defense but “tit for tat” revenge against the Klan and other white terrorists. Ultimately he believed that freedom would come “either by ballots or by bullets,” but he also called for freedom “by any means necessary.”

  While equally radical, Stokely Carmichael was of a different cut from Malcolm. He had made his way out of the New York ghetto to the select Bronx High School of Science and then to Howard University, from which he moved into the Mississippi freedom struggle. Concluding that blacks could not rely on white allies and must create their own power base independent of the Democratic party, Carmichael mobilized local citizens, notably ministers and older women, to form the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. Its symbol was a black panther, which when pressured “moves back until it is cornered,” explained a local leader, “then it comes out fighting for life or death.” In May 1966, Carmichael was elected chair of SNCC, while the former freedom rider Ruby Doris Smith Robinson replaced Forman as executive secretary, at a pivotal meeting that decided that white SNCC members should henceforth organize only white communities.

  One month later, James Meredith was wounded by a shotgun blast while on a one-man “march against fear” from Memphis to Jackson. Black leaders gathered in Memphis to discuss taking up Meredith’s fallen banner. Carmichael, supported by armed members of the paramilitary Deacons for Defense, demanded that the march be confined to blacks, that the Deacons be authorized to provide armed protection for marchers, and that the trek be used to “highlight the need for independent, black political units.” The NAACP’s Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young of the Urban League angrily packed their bags and returned to New York. King, Carmichael, and Floyd McKissick, representing CORE, hammered out a compromise. But as the Meredith march wound slowly through the Delta bitter disagreements persisted.

  Carmichael was arrested in Greenwood and greeted upon his release by a huge night rally. “This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested,” he shouted, “and I ain’t going to jail no more.” The crowd cheered him on. “The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothin’. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!” Calls for “Black Power!” rose again and again from the crowd. The cry, which starkly encapsulated SNCC’s new political vision, electrified black youth even as it ignited a storm of criticism from older leaders and liberal allies. On the march the nightly rallies turned
into contests over which chant—“Black Power” or “Freedom Now”—could drown out the other.

  King had met with Carmichael and other SNCC leaders to try to break the deepening impasse. King said he understood the new slogan’s magnetic appeal to young blacks who, after he and others had lifted their expectations, now felt betrayed because their elders had not delivered. But the slogan would be self-defeating, he insisted; while the concept of black power was sound, the image it conjured up would alarm the media. Every other ethnic group had created its own power base, Carmichael replied— why not black people?

  “That is just the point,” King answered. “No one has ever heard the Jews publicly chant a slogan of Jewish power, but they have power.” The same was true of the Irish and Italians. “Neither group has used a slogan of Irish or Italian power, but they have worked hard to achieve it. This is exactly what we must do.” They must build racial pride and through a program, not merely a slogan, “refute the notion that black is evil and ugly.”

  “Martin, I deliberately decided to raise this issue on the march in order to give it a national forum,” Carmichael admitted, “and force you to take a stand for Black Power.”