American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Unexpected though it was, the police-car sit-in was a spark struck off from long-growing friction between students and authorities, and a spark that ignited afresh the fires of campus rebellion. A “free speech” movement had been kindling at least since May 1960, when Berkeley students had tried to attend hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee in San Francisco; repeatedly refused admission, they staged a sit-in, only to be washed out of the rotunda and down the steps of city hall by fire hoses. Dozens were arrested. Savio and others involved in the police-car sit-in had been suspended by the university after earlier protests. Then, when the university abruptly extended its ban on political activity to a small strip of pavement that had been a haven for political talk and recruiting, activists lashed back that October noon. They were being treated like southern blacks, they protested—their own civil rights were being violated. The university authorities were thrown off guard by the readiness and vehemence of their young adversaries.

  In the heady days after the armistice an unusually broad coalition of student groups, ranging from Goldwaterites and Young Republicans to socialists and Maoists, formed the Free Speech Movement. Because of lingering McCarthyism and relentless red-baiting, “we had to convince people that we were small ‘d’ democrats in addition to whatever else we were,” Savio said later. “We were hung up about democracy.” They sought to make FSM a model of participatory democracy. Students chose representatives to a large executive committee, which in turn elected delegates to a small steering committee that carried out the larger body’s policies and tactics from day to day. The steering committee tried to act by the Quaker method of consensus and the FSM ethic of openness. Aptheker, Savio, and others spent many long nights churning out leaflets with detailed accounts of the day’s happenings; these were printed by dawn and handed out, 20,000 daily, by 8 A.M. The FSM, however, lacked a key dimension of democracy—there were few women in leadership positions.

  The university itself served as one of FSM’s best organizers. When the movement seemed to be losing steam, Berkeley’s chancellor rejuvenated it by bringing new charges against Savio and another leader. Aroused once again, a thousand students took over Sproul Hall, administration headquarters. After a night electrified by Joan Baez’s singing “We Shall Overcome,” and nourished by peanut butter sandwiches, Charlie Chaplin films, and “Free University” classes, the students were beset by hundreds of police who rooted them out floor by floor. Eight hundred were arrested, the biggest campus civil disobedience in the country’s history.

  In response, graduate students organized a strike so widely supported that it shut down the university. Scores of professors emerged from their studies to back the movement. In a remarkable faculty decision the Academic Senate voted overwhelmingly to back the FSM demands. After the vote, Aptheker recalled, “we students parted ranks, forming an aisle through which the faculty seemed to formally march in a new kind of academic procession.” It was only then, ten weeks after the police-car sit-in, that the regents rescinded the ban on campus free speech.

  The Berkeley rebellion, scrupulously nonviolent, the first major white student movement since the 1930s and the first to employ mass direct action on campus, involved much more than traditional political freedoms. Many students felt alienated by the intellectual assembly line of a huge, impersonal “multiversity” harnessed to the needs of large corporations and the Pentagon. Berkeley political theorists Sheldon Wolin and John Schaar observed that the students were “ill-housed, and ill-clad, and ill-nourished not in the material sense, but in the intellectual and spiritual senses.” Students contended that they were being bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated by faceless bureaucrats; they were fighting to gain more control over their lives. They saw the university’s intellectual repression as of a piece with its contribution to basic social ills, from automation to the nuclear arms race, and they hoped that by forcing the institution to live up to its original scholarly ideals, they could take a big step toward reshaping the entire society.

  Clark Kerr, president of the University of California, did not feel like a faceless bureaucrat, pawn of the power elite, or a master of power. He felt more like a punching bag. “The university president in the United States,” he wrote in 1963, “is expected to be a friend of the students, a colleague of the faculty, a good fellow with the alumni, a sound administrator with the trustees, a good speaker with the public, an astute bargainer with the foundations and the federal agencies, a politician with the state legislature, a friend of industry, labor, and agriculture, a persuasive diplomat with donors, a champion of education generally, a supporter of the professions (particularly law and medicine), a spokesman to the press, a scholar in his own right, a public servant at the state and national levels, a devotee of opera and football equally, a decent human being, a good husband and father, an active member of a church.” Kerr played most of these roles with skill and versatility.

  Yet there was something gravely lacking in all this, and the students sensed it. In trying to deal with what historian Frederick Rudolph called the “delicate balance of interests,” in searching ever for consensus, in settling for day-to-day “practical steps” of management and persuasion, Kerr and a host of other university heads evaded the crucial tasks of clarifying educational goals, setting priorities, being controversial, leading rather than mediating and bargaining. Students saw themselves as the least of a president’s concerns. They were now making the multiversity a political battleground.

  While a few of the FSM leaders like Savio had been tutored in civil rights protest in Mississippi, most of the campus dissidents were so immersed in their own battles against the multiversity that for a time they paid little attention to struggles hundreds of miles away in the South or nine thousand miles away in Southeast Asia. The Port Huron Statement had referred to the “Southern struggle against racial bigotry” and Vietnam, American imperialism, and the bomb only as items in a much wider set of problems. Southern black leaders were also so preoccupied with endless crisis and confrontation that they had little time either for the “rich rebels” in northern universities or for peasants far across the Pacific. As the civil rights struggle moved North during the 1960s, widening the arc of black concerns, and as the war in Vietnam escalated, blacks and students were drawn together in the vortex of a new conflict. But the civil rights battle in the North still remained to be fought out.

  In mid-August 1965, just a few days after LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act, the Watts section of Los Angeles burst into violence. It seemed a curious location for a “race riot”—not a place of dark and towering tenements, but a ghetto, in the Los Angeles style, of bungalows and ranch houses, intermixed with trash-filled alleys, boarded-up stores, bars and pool halls, drunks and drug peddlers. It was 98 percent black. Starting with a routine arrest of a black youth suspected of drunken driving, the violence whirled out through the streets on the wings of rumor. Day after day, in torrid heat, blacks looted and torched stores, pelted cops and passing cars, randomly attacked whites, hurled Molotov cocktails, ambushed firemen and policemen.

  Once again neighborhood people—in this case street people—were taking the lead, but this was a leadership of nihilism. In their fury blacks set scores of major fires, tried to burn a local community hospital, and torched the shops of other blacks despite signs on storefronts pleading ownership by a “Black Brother” or “Soul Brother.” The rioters were “burning their city now, as the insane sometimes mutilate themselves,” wrote a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, himself black.

  Martin Luther King flew to Los Angeles and walked the debris-strewn streets of Watts among smoldering ruins of shops and houses, imploring the locals to turn away from violence, which had brought ten thousand National Guard troops into the area. King provoked argument, skepticism, even heckling. Some youngsters told him, “We won.”

  “How can you say you won,” King demanded, “when thirty-four Negroes are dead, your community is destroyed, and whites are using the riot
s as an excuse for inaction?”

  “We won,” a jobless young man responded, “because we made the whole world pay attention to us.”

  Increasingly blacks were turning to the ideas King had fought—to separation from whites rather than integration, to street riots rather than nonviolence, to the religion of the Nation of Islam rather than Christianity. Elijah Muhammad, suspected by some of having instigated the murder of Malcolm X, continued to lead the Nation, with its Muslim schools, businesses, and publications, including Muhammad Speaks, the Muslim weekly newspaper. In 1962 the paper had printed Muhammad’s “Muslim Program,” in which he had trumpeted that since blacks could not get along with whites “in peace and equality, after giving them 400 years of our sweat and blood and receiving in return some of the worst treatment human beings have ever experienced, we believe our contributions to this land and the suffering forced upon us by white America, justifies our demand for complete separation in a state or territory of our own.” He demanded separate schools and a ban on “intermarriage or race mixing.”

  Such an ideology called for political separatism as well. This was the strategy of Black Power. Born in the anger of the Meredith march through Mississippi, this potent idea was carried North by Stokely Carmichael and other militants and debated at a National Conference on Black Power attended by a thousand delegates in Newark in midsummer 1967. In the spirit of Malcolm X’s black nationalist program, the aim now was to organize a separate black “third force,” which was either to gain control of one or both major parties or to strike out on its own. The most extreme expression of political separatism was the Black Panther party, founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby George Seale a year and a half after Malcolm’s death. His party, Panther chairman Seale said, “realizes that the white power structure’s real power is its military force.” So blacks had to organize themselves “and put a shotgun in every black man’s home.”

  The force of black desperation and anger was now both vitalizing and fragmenting the black leadership. The once liberal-left NAACP now stood on the right of an array of black groups. King’s SCLC was shifting a bit to the left, and SNCC even more so, as it dropped much of its white membership. Also on the left stood CORE, but it still sought to work through the machinery of the two big parties. On the far left, separated from the rest -by their cult of violence, stood the Panthers. “The thrust of Black Power into national politics sounded the death knell of civil-rights alliances,” according to historian Thomas L. Blair. “It brought the black masses into what Frederick Douglass called the ‘awful roar of struggle.’ It revealed basic differences over ideology, methods, tactics, and strategy” among black groups as well as conflicts over power and status within the Democratic-liberal-labor-left civil rights coalition.

  Yet at the heart of the new black politics was a powerful political consciousness rooted in an old and expanding black culture. More blacks were turning, for reasons ideological and spiritual, to their origins in Africa, to their way stations in the Caribbean. They looked up to their own heroes and celebrities, to their own artists, writers, musicians, dancers, their own actors on and off Broadway and in the ghetto, their own black history and myths. They read such journals as Black Theatre, Black Scholar, Black Poetry, Black Enterprise. Negro Digest changed its name to Black World, as blacks drove the very word “Negro,” and all it connoted, out of their vocabulary and their conscious lives. There was black dress, food, slang, jazz, hairstyles, and black jive and rapping, and above all black soul, which encompassed all of these things and more. Black religion embraced Christianity, Islam, and varieties thereof, including fundamentalism, evangelicalism, Catholicism, belief in the Kawaida value system or in a Christian black nationalism that proclaimed Jesus as the Black Messiah. Many of these beliefs were in flux; black Roman Catholics, for example, tripled in number over the three postwar decades.

  Thus Black Power had its own rich culture, history, literature, religion, style, values. But it lacked a coherent political strategy, and the issue of strategy more and more arrayed black against black. Even while he led the Meredith march through the Mississippi heat, King could hear young blacks behind him bitterly criticizing nonviolence. “If one of these damn white Mississippi crackers touches me,” he heard a young voice say, “I’m gonna knock the hell out of him.” They should sing, someone said, “We Shall Overrun,” not “Overcome.”

  The issue of strategy came to a head in a new and bitter battlefield: Chicago. After his successes in the South, King decided to make the “City of the Big Shoulders” his first major northern target, not only to force Mayor Richard Daley to end racism in hiring and housing but to prove that nonviolence could work in northern ghettos. To show his commitment he settled in a shabby, urine-stenched tenement in one of Chicago’s worst slums. During the long planning and mobilizing process Black Power militants booed King on the streets. Though hurt and angry, he reflected that he and the other leaders had preached freedom and promised freedom but had been “unable to deliver on our promises.” Few could question King’s militance in Chicago. After affixing a set of demands to the metal door of City Hall, in Martin Luther style except for the adhesive tape, King readied his forces for nonviolent sit-ins, camp-ins, boycotts.

  It was too late. The street people moved first. In the 100-degree heat youths turned on water hydrants and reveled in the cold jets, but when they were accosted by the police, violence erupted, turning that night and the next day into open war between hundreds of police and thousands of blacks. In vain King and his associates toured the war-swept area preaching nonviolence. By the time several thousand National Guardsmen started patrolling the area, two persons had been killed, 56 injured, almost 300 jailed. King grimly proceeded with his demonstrations. Day after day blacks marched through white areas of Chicago. They were met with epithets, Confederate flags, rocks, bottles, bricks.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” King said. In all the demonstrations down South he had “never seen—even in Mississippi and Alabama—mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I’ve seen in Chicago.” Somewhat intimidated, and under heavy pressure from Chicago’s Catholic hierarchy, Daley met with King and other black leaders to patch together an agreement on housing, mainly consisting of promises. Some blacks praised King for forcing the mayor to the bargaining table. Others called it a sellout.

  So the black leaders continued to divide and argue over political ways and means. In all the diversity of attitudes and style, however, there could be discerned a remarkable agreement over the highest values and ultimate ends. Just as blacks from left to right apotheosized liberty and equality, so did both black nationalists and Muslims. Elijah Muhammad’s 1962 manifesto proclaimed at the very start, “We want freedom,” as did the Black Panther party program six years later. Blacks invariably backed egalitarian ideas as well. Inevitably interpretations of such values differed. Thus the Muslims declared they wanted “full and complete freedom” and spelled this out, while the Panthers defined their freedom as “power to determine the destiny of our black community.” Whether this kind of agreement on overarching values, camouflaging disagreement over specific policies and tactics, could serve as a basis of political unity remained as dubious in the black community as it always had in the white.

  A storm was rising in the mid-sixties, however, that would bring blacks into stronger harmony. As LBJ’s escalation in Indochina proceeded apace, blacks were drawn more and more into the Vietnam resistance, out of motives ranging from compassion for people of color in Indochina to distaste for “whitey’s war” fought so disproportionately by black men. As King became increasingly outspoken against the war, the White House distanced itself from him and the black movement. This hurt, because time and again King still needed Administration help. But he could not resist this higher call. “We must combine the fervor of the civil rights movement with the peace movement,” he said in February 1967, in his first talk entirely devoted to Vietnam. “We must demonstrate, teach and preach, until the very found
ations of our nation are shaken. ”

  Rolling Thunder

  He had known from the start, Lyndon Johnson told Doris Kearns the year after he left the White House, that he would be crucified either way he moved.

  “If I left the woman I really loved—the Great Society—in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home. All my programs. All my hopes to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless. All my dreams to provide education and medical care to the browns and the blacks and the lame and the poor. But if I left that war and let the Communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as a coward and my nation would be seen as an appeaser and we would both find it impossible to accomplish anything for anybody anywhere on the entire globe.”

  LBJ elaborated. “Oh, I could see it coming all right. History provided too many cases where the sound of the bugle put an immediate end to the hopes and dreams of the best reformers.” The Spanish-American War had drowned the populist spirit—World War I, Wilson’s New Freedom—World War II, the New Deal. It could happen again. The conservatives always loved a war. “Oh, they’d use it to say they were against my programs, not because they were against the poor—why, they were as generous and charitable as the best of Americans—but because the war had to come first. First, we had to beat those Godless Communists and then we could worry about the homeless Americans. And the generals. Oh, they’d love the war, too.” That was why he had been so suspicious of the military.

  “Yet everything I knew about history told me that if I got out of Vietnam and let Ho Chi Minh run through the streets of Saigon, then I’d be doing exactly what Chamberlain did in World War II. I’d be giving a big fat reward for aggression. And I knew that if we let Communist aggression succeed in taking over South Vietnam, there would follow in this country an endless national debate—a mean and destructive debate—that would shatter my Presidency, kill my administration, and damage our democracy.” Truman and Acheson had lost their effectiveness when the communists took over in China. The “loss” of China helped cause the rise of McCarthy. But compared to what might have happened in Vietnam, all that was “chickenshit.”