The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  In a special issue of the campus newspaper Tuesday, ten student leaders issued a warning that violence could only mar the image of the university. By Wednesday, just about everybody on the campus knew there was a riot scheduled in front of Charlayne’s dormitory after the basketball game that night. It had been organized by a number of law-school students. All day Wednesday, the organizers scurried around making plans and bragging about the promises of help and immunity they had received from legislators. Some students got dates for the basketball game and the riot afterward. Reporters, faculty members, and even some students warned Joseph Williams, the dean of students, about the riot and suggested that he ban gatherings in front of the dormitory, or at least cancel the basketball game. But Williams said that neither step was necessary. Just after ten, a small crowd of students gathered on the lawn in front of Center Myers and unfurled a bed-sheet bearing the legend “Nigger Go Home.” Then three or four of them peeled off from the group, ran toward the dormitory, and flung bricks and Coke bottles through the window of Charlayne’s room. Dean Tate had been assigned by Williams to remain with the crowd at the gymnasium after the basketball game, and Williams himself, standing in front of the crudely lettered sign, made no attempt to break up the group. As more people came up the hill from the basketball game—a close loss to Georgia Tech—and a few outsiders showed up, the mob grew to about a thousand, many of whom threw bricks, rocks, and firecrackers. The few Athens policemen present were busy directing traffic, and after about thirty minutes Williams finally agreed to let a reporter phone the state police, who had a barracks outside Athens. Although the university understood that thirty state troopers would be standing ready in the barracks, the desk sergeant said that he could not send the troopers without the permission of the captain. But the captain said he had to have authority from the Commissioner of Public Safety, and the Commissioner, in turn, said he could not make a move without an order from the Governor. (In a failure of communications that still fascinates students of Georgia back-room shenanigans, it was so long before the Governor gave the order that the state police did not arrive until an hour after the riot was over and two hours and twenty minutes after they were called. Then a carload of them came to take Charlayne and Hamilton back to Atlanta.)

  The riot was finally broken up by the arrival, together, of Dean Tate, who waded in and started grabbing identification cards, and of more Athens cops, who started fighting back when they were pushed, and then drove everybody away with tear gas. It had been a nasty riot, but the group courage that sometimes comes to mobs had never infected it. Although the students could have stormed the dormitory several times without meeting any effective defense, they never did. A few hours after the television newscasters had congratulated Georgia on its behavior, the area around Center Myers looked like a deserted battlefield, with bricks and broken glass on the lawn, small brush fires in the woods below the dormitory, and the bite of tear gas still in the air. The casualties were several injured policemen, a girl on the second floor who had been scratched by a rock, and, as it turned out, the university’s reputation. Dean Williams suspended Charlayne and Hamilton, informing them that it was “for your own safety and the safety of almost seven thousand other students,” and they were driven back to Atlanta. Williams’ on-the-spot decision to suspend the target of the mob, rather than those in the mob itself, seemed unrelated to anybody’s safety, since it was made after the last rioter had gone home and after university and Athens officials had assured Williams that order had been restored and that giving in to the mob would only mean going through the whole experience again. Dean Williams and Charlayne, who was crying by this time and clutching a statue of the Madonna, walked right out of the front door of Center Myers into the state-police car, watched only by a few straggling reporters.

  · · ·

  From the moment the two arrived on campus, Charlayne attracted much more attention than Hamilton. At the time, some onlookers explained this by devising complicated anthropological theories about the greater interest in the enemy female. Others said it was only natural that unfriendly students should believe the girl more likely to be frightened away by their presence and that friendly students should think her more in need of their support. Dean Tate’s answer is that it was merely a matter of convenience. He calculated that two or three times during the day there were two thousand students within two hundred yards of Charlayne, whose classes at the Henry W. Grady School of Journalism kept her on the busiest part of the campus, whereas there were far fewer students around the science center (which is removed from the main campus), where Hamilton spent most of the week. The fact that Charlayne took a dormitory room, while Hamilton moved in with a Negro family in Athens, made the difference even greater. Then, after the riot, stories about it, including a widely published picture of Charlayne leaving the dormitory in tears, made her better known to people outside Athens as well. The immediate result of Charlayne’s publicity was that in her first week or two at Georgia she received about a thousand letters—three or four times the number Hamilton got—from all over the United States and several foreign countries. Charlayne’s mother filed all the letters by states, the Georgia and New York folders ending up the fattest, and later sent each of the writers a reprint of an article Charlayne wrote about her experience for a now defunct Negro magazine called the Urbanite. I was interested in seeing just what people wrote in such letters, and during my trip this spring I borrowed the folders from Mrs. Hunter, who has them stored in a big pasteboard box. Charlayne told me later that the University of Georgia library would like to have the letters eventually but that she hesitated to give them up, especially while some of the writers might be embarrassed by even a historian’s perusal of their names and opinions. That was an understandable objection, I thought, but it did seem like the justice of scholarship for the university to end up with nearly a thousand expressions of outrage at its behavior. There were only fifteen or twenty abusive letters, I discovered, and this surprised me, but I was more surprised to find that most of the particularly foul ones were from the North. The unfriendly letters from the South, even if they were written in the guise of kindly advice, were instantly recognizable, since in almost every case they contained no conventional salutation. “Dear Charlayne” would have been too chummy, and anybody willing to say “Miss Hunter” apparently would not have written a letter in the first place. Most of the writers solved the problem by starting out with a flat “Charlayne Hunter,” as if they were beginning a formal proclamation. There were also surprisingly few crank letters, although some of the writers were obviously just lonely people who wanted somebody to write to, and a few of the letters, like one from Italy that began, “Dear Little Swallow,” reflected emotions other than sympathy. A number were from Negro undergraduates (their own experiences with separate but equal education revealed in their spelling) who sent along a picture and hoped that a correspondence might develop. Many of the writers told Charlayne they were praying for her; many of the Catholics mentioned her conversion to Catholicism. She received dozens of prayer cards, copies of sermons by Harry Emerson Fosdick and Norman Vincent Peale, Seventh Day Adventist tracts, and two books by Gandhi. Several letters were from college student councils or N.A.A.C.P. chapters that had taken resolutions supporting Charlayne and deploring the action of those who persecuted her. Most of the letters from individuals also expressed admiration for Charlayne’s “courage and dignity”—the phrase was used almost as one word—and outrage at the mob. There was often a mention of helplessness in the letters from Northerners, which included phrases like “This must be small comfort” and “Of course, I can never really understand.” Some of those who believed they could never really understand nevertheless tried to establish their credentials for understanding, listing personal experiences with prejudice or with Negroes. A girl at the University of Connecticut told Charlayne that her high school had a Negro teacher, who was considered by all the students to be the best teacher in the school; the yearbook h
ad been dedicated to him four out of the five years he had been there, she said. A young white woman in West Virginia wrote that she was attending a formerly all-Negro college. “Your people are teaching me,” she noted. But the great majority of the letters from the North had no personal experiences to offer. In many of them, a picture of Charlayne cut from a newspaper was enclosed, and most of them seemed to be from sensible, decent people who were appalled by the picture of a pretty girl being bullied by a mob and felt they had to write, even if they didn’t know quite what to say.

  The letters from Georgia had a different theme. Many of them were from University of Georgia alumni, who seemed to have a very specific and compelling reason for writing. They wanted to tell Charlayne that all of them were not like the mob or the people who permitted it to form. As I read through their letters, it seemed to me that each person who wrote felt he had to assure Charlayne of that or she might not know. On the whole, of course, the Georgia letters were also more realistic. But none quite captured the plain realism of a young boy in Rochester, New York, one of two dozen pupils in a parochial-school eighth grade who had apparently written to Charlayne as a class project. “Dear Miss Hunter,” he said. “I am very sorry for the way you are being treated. I hope you have the courage to take this treatment in the future. Respectfully yours.”

  I had first discussed the letters with Charlayne two years before, when she was back in Atlanta for the weekend after her second week at the university. Since her return to the campus following the riot, she had been under police protection, and in consequence she was now cut off from the rest of the students even more sharply than she had been during the chaotic first week. She seemed amazed and moved by the number of people who had written to her, but she found some of their letters slightly off the subject. “All these people say ‘Charlayne, we just want you to know you’re not alone,’ ” she said, smiling. “But I look all around and I don’t see anybody else.”…

  · · ·

  The pattern of the students’ attitude toward Charlayne and Hamilton emerged during the week of their return. The fraternities and sororities let it be known that anybody interested in his own position on campus would be wise not to talk to the two Negroes. Another group of students, most of them associated in one way or another with Westminster House, the campus Presbyterian organization, formed a group called Students for Constructive Action. They posted signs about the Golden Rule in the classroom buildings and arranged to take turns walking with Charlayne and Hamilton on their way to classes. The girls in Center Myers had all trooped down to visit Charlayne the first night she was in the dormitory, reinforcing a widely held opinion that girls would always be kind to a new girl, even a new Negro girl, but on the following night—that of the riot—their behavior changed drastically. After the first brick and the first Coke bottle had crashed into her room, Charlayne went to a partly partitioned office, ordinarily used by one of the student counsellors, and stayed there during most of what followed. A group of Center Myers coeds soon formed a circle in front of the office and marched around, each screaming an insult as she got to the door. “They had been told to strip their beds, because tear-gas fumes might get into the sheets,” Charlayne said to me later. “They kept yelling that they would give me twenty-five cents to make their beds, although at the hourly rate I was being paid by the N.A.A.C.P., according to them, it wouldn’t have made much sense for me to work for a quarter. They kept yelling, ‘Does she realize she’s causing all this trouble?’ Out of all the girls who had visited me the night before, only one girl came in and stayed in the office with me. But I finally made her go to bed. After a while, Mrs. Porter, the housemother, told me to get my things together, because I was going back to Atlanta, and that’s when I started to cry. Dean Williams carried my books and my suitcase, which was pretty nice. He could have made me carry them. When we went by to pick up Hamp, he wanted to drive his own car back. I guess by then my imagination was running wild; I could imagine K.K.K. all up and down the highway. I didn’t want Hamp to drive, and I almost got hysterical. Finally, he said O.K., he’d go with the troopers. Dean Tate went with us, and talked all the way back about the little towns we went through—things like why ‘Dacula’ is pronounced ‘Dacula,’ instead of ‘Dacula.’ The next day, at home, the lights were low, and people kept coming by saying how sorry they were. It felt as if I had been ill for a long time and was about to go, or as if somebody had already died. I was going back to Athens, but I was glad we didn’t have to go back for two or three days.”

  Calvin Trillin

  SEPTEMBER 7, 1963

  WE FLEW TO Washington the day before the march and, early the next morning, walked from Pennsylvania Avenue past the side entrance of the White House and toward the lawn of the Washington Monument, where the marchers were gathering. It was eight o’clock—three and a half hours before the march was scheduled to move from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial—and around the Ellipse, the huge plot of grass between the White House grounds and the lawn of the Washington Monument, there were only about half a dozen buses. Most of them had red-white-and-blue signs saying “Erie, Pa., Branch, N.A.A.C.P.,” or “Inter-Church Delegation, Sponsored by National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Commission on Religion and Race,” or “District 26, United Steelworkers of America, Greater Youngstown A.F.L.-C.I.O. Council, Youngstown, Ohio.” On a baseball field on the Ellipse, three men were setting up a refreshment stand, and on the sidewalk nearby a man wearing an N.A.A.C.P. cap was arranging pennants that said “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Let the World Know We Want Freedom.” Most of the buses were nearly full, and many of the occupants were dozing. Sitting on a bench in front of one of the buses, some teen-agers were singing, “Everybody wants freedom—free-ee-dom.”

  On the lawn of the Washington Monument, a group of military police, most of them Negroes, and a group of Washington police, most of them white, were getting final instructions. Women dressed in white, with purple armbands that said “Usher” and blue sashes that said “Pledge Cards,” were handing out cards to everybody who passed. “I’ve already contributed to this,” a man near us told one of the women. But the card asked for no money; it asked instead that the signer commit himself to the civil-rights struggle, pledging his heart, mind, and body, “unequivocally and without regard to personal sacrifice, to the achievement of social peace through social justice.”

  Outside march headquarters—a huge tent with green sides and a green-and-white striped roof—workers were setting up a rim of tables. One table held a display of pennants, offering a large one for a dollar and a small one for fifty cents. Inside the tent, a man wearing a CORE overseas cap, a blue suit, an armband with the letter “M” on it, and a badge saying “Assistant Chief Marshal,” was testing a walkie-talkie, and another man was issuing instructions to a group of program salesmen. “Now, everybody report back by nine-fifteen, or whenever they give out,” he said. Two or three Negroes were sorting signs that said “The Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Lynchburg, Virginia.” In a roped-off area near one end of the tent, the official signs for the march were stacked face down in large piles, most of them covered by black tarpaulins. Next to the signs, in an enclave formed by a green fence, half a dozen women sat behind a long table. Two signs on the fence said “Emergency Housing.” Nearby, three or four television crews had set up their cameras on high platforms.

  By this time, there were several thousand people on the lawn, many of them gathered around the Monument. An ice-cream truck had managed to drive to within a hundred feet of the Monument and was starting to do an early-morning business. Many of those gathered near the Monument were sitting on the grass, and some were sleeping. Three boys dressed in khaki pants and shirts with button-down collars were using their knapsacks for pillows and had covered their faces with black derbies. There were, we thought, surprisingly few knapsacks and sandals in the crowd. Most of the people were neatly dressed, and as they waited for the pre-march
program to start, they acted like ordinary tourists in Washington, or like city people spending a warm Sunday in the park. A man took a picture of a couple standing in front of a sign that said “New Jersey Region, American Jewish Congress”; a policeman was taking a picture of two smiling Negro couples; a woman who was selling programs balanced her programs and her purse in one hand and, with the other, took pictures of the sleepers with derbies over their faces.

  By nine o’clock, a group of marchers had congregated outside a green fence surrounding a stage that had been set up several hundred yards from the Monument; they were standing six or eight deep against the fence. More people were arriving constantly—some in couples and small groups, others marching in large contingents. A group of young Negroes walked behind a blue-and-gold banner that said “Newman Memorial Methodist Church School, Brooklyn, N.Y., Organized 1900.” Another group of Negroes—older, and wearing yellow campaign hats that bore the letters “B.S.E.I.U.”—followed four boys who were carrying a long banner that said “Local 144” and two flag-bearers, one carrying the American flag and one carrying a flag that said “Building Services Employees International Union.”

  In front of the headquarters tent, a group of young people in overalls and T-shirts that said “CORE” were marching around in a circle, clapping and singing.

  “I’m going to walk the streets of Jackson,” one girl sang.

  “One of these days,” the others answered.

  “I’m going to be the chief of police,” another sang.

  “One of these days,” the crowd answered.

  Near the singing group, a double line of Negro teen-agers came marching across the lawn. All of them were dressed in black jackets. They had no banners or pennants, and they filed by in silence.