by I. F. Stone
The March on Washington
On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered the most famous and frequently-quoted oration of modern times, his “I have a dream” speech, before a massive throng of civil rights marchers on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Stone wasn’t impressed by King’s speech or by any other he heard that day. Instead, he chose to highlight a Socialist Party gathering at which A. Philip Randolph called for economic justice for the poor, black and white alike.
. . .
September 16, 1963
THE MARCH IS OVER, but it will never be forgotten. Every one who was there had his own special moment. Mine was to stand in the early morning inside the Union Terminal and watch the thousands pouring in from New York and Pittsburgh and Chicago, and suddenly to feel no longer alone in this hot-house capital but as if out in the country people did care. Of the Marchers themselves, I along with almost every other observer was impressed with their gentle sweetness, a tribute to the Negro people, who have managed by humor and faith, amid so much suffering, not to be soured.
For me the heroes of the March, or heroines, were the gnarled old colored ladies on tired feet and comfortably broken shoes, the kind who walked into history in Montgomery. Amid the well dressed middle class Negroes and their white sympathizers were many black folk misshapen by malnutrition and hard work. They carried upon them a story more plainly writ than any banner. These were, literally, the downtrodden and the treadmarks of oppression were visible upon their faces. They sang, “We shall not be moved.” But those who saw them—and what life had done to them—were moved.
Then it was a pleasure to see amid the Marchers so many old-time radicals, the unquenchables of so many vanished movements, many of them long ago forced out of jobs and pulpits, now joyously turning up again, with the feeling that they were at last part of a mass upsurge, no longer lonely relics.
With Lincoln behind them, and those eager thousands before them, the speakers at the Memorial were inevitably dwarfed and on the whole disappointing. None—not even Martin Luther King, who is a little too saccharine for my taste—broke through to the kind of simple purity of utterance the place and the occasion called for. The price of having so many respectables on the bandwagon was to mute Negro militancy—John Lewis of SNCC had to tone down his speech under pressure from Archbishop O’Boyle—and the rally turned into one of support for the Kennedy civil rights program. Somehow on that lovely day, in that picnic atmosphere, the Negro’s anguish never found full expression.
Far superior to anything at the Monument were the discussions I heard next day at a civil rights conference called by the Socialist Party. On that dismal rainy morning-after, in a dark union hall in the Negro section, I heard A. Philip Randolph speak with an eloquence and a humanity few can achieve. When he spoke of the abolitionists, and of the heroes of the Reconstruction, it was with a filial piety and an immediacy that made them live again. One felt the presence of a great American. He reminded the black nationalists gently that “we must not forget that the civil rights revolution was begun by white people as well as black at a time when the winds of hate were sweeping the country.” He reminded the moderates that political equality was not enough. “The white sharecroppers of the South,” he pointed out, “have full civil rights but live in bleakest poverty.” One began to understand what was meant by a march for “jobs and freedom.” For most Negroes, civil rights alone will only be the right to join the underprivileged whites. “We must liberate not only ourselves,” Mr. Randolph said, “but our white brothers and sisters.”
The direction in which full emancipation lies was indicated when Mr. Randolph spoke of the need to extend the public sector of the economy. His brilliant assistant on the March, Bayard Rustin, urged an economic Master Plan to deal with the technological unemployment that weighs so heavily on the Negro and threatens to create a permanently depressed class of whites and blacks living precariously on the edges of an otherwise affluent society. It was clear from the discussion that neither tax cuts nor public works nor job training (for what jobs?) would solve the problem while automation with giant steps made so many workers obsolete. The civil rights movement, Mr. Rustin said, could not get beyond a certain level unless it merged into a broader plan of social change.
In that ill-lighted hall, amid the assorted young students and venerables like Norman Thomas, socialism took on fresh meaning and revived urgency. It was not accidental that so many of those who ran the March turned out to be members or fellow travellers of the Socialist Party. One saw that for the lower third of our society, white as well as black, the search for answers must lead them back—though Americans still start nervously at the very word—toward socialism.
The Fire Has Only Just Begun
This condemnation of national hypocrisy in response to the murder of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968, is surely one of the bitterest essays I. F. Stone ever wrote. From today’s perspective, it’s a valuable reminder of how progressive—and therefore dangerous—the thinking of Dr. King really was, and a useful corrective to the warm-and-fuzzy mythologizing of him as a universally beloved hero.
. . .
April 15, 1968
THE ASSASSINATION OF DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., was the occasion for one of those massive outpourings of hypocrisy characteristic of the human race. He stood in that line of saints which goes back from Gandhi to Jesus; his violent end, like theirs, reflects the hostility of mankind to those who annoy it by trying hard to pull it one more painful step further up the ladder from ape to angel.
The President and the Washington establishment had been working desperately up until the very moment of Dr. King’s killing to keep him and his Poor People’s March out of the capital; his death, at first, promised to let them rest in peace. The masses they sang were not so much of requiem as of thanksgiving, that the nation’s No. 1 Agitator had been laid to rest at last. Then a minority of his own people, and not all of them the ignorant and the hungry, celebrated his memory with an orgy of looting while black radicals and New Leftists hailed the mindless carnival as a popular uprising. Since the liquor stores were the No. 1 target, it might sourly be termed the debut of Marxism-Liquorism in revolutionary annals. Those among his own people who sneered at his nonviolent teaching as obsolete now seized upon his death as a new excuse for the violence he hated. Thus all sides firmly united in paying him homage.
Dr. King was a victim of white racism. Its record encourages such murders. Dr. King was only the most eminent in a long series of civil rights victims. The killers are rarely caught, even more rarely convicted; the penalties are light. The complicity, in this case, may go further. It is strange that the killer was so easily able to escape when the motel in which he was killed was ringed with police; some came within a few moments from the very direction of the fatal shot. Violent anti-Negro organizations like the Klan have their cells in many police forces. The Memphis police had shown their hatred in the indiscriminate violence with which they broke up Dr. King’s march a week earlier. The Attorney General should be pressed to include the Memphis police in his investigation of the slaying.
Though Dr. King was the greatest Southerner of our time, few Southern political leaders expressed any sorrow over his passing. Most, like Stennis of Mississippi, ventured no more than antiseptic and ambivalent condemnation of all violence. In the House on April 8 the few Southerners who spoke deplored the riots more than the killing. The one exception was Representative Bob Eckhardt of Texas, who dared call Dr. King “my black brother.” Privately many white Southerners rejoiced, and their influence was reflected in the scandalous failure to declare a holiday in the District the day Dr. King was buried. Though stores closed, government offices were open and Negro mailmen delivered the mail as usual. This is still, despite its black majority, a Southern-ruled town; it shuts down on Washington’s birthday, but not Lincoln’s.
The most powerful of the District’s absentee rulers, Senator Robert C. Byrd (D. W. Va.), went so far as to imply in a Senat
e speech April 5, that Dr. King was to blame for his own death. Byrd said those who organize mass demonstrations may “in the end . . . become themselves the victims of the forces they set in motion.” While Dr. King “usually spoke of nonviolence,” Byrd went on smugly, “violence all too often attended his action and, at the last, he himself met a violent end.” This should make Byrd the South’s favorite criminologist.
Byrd is the Senator to whom the blacks of Washington must come for school and welfare money. As chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on the District of Columbia budget, Byrd wields far more power than the city’s figurehead Negro “Mayor.” He has used this key position to block liberalization of welfare rules not only in the District but in the country, since the federal government can hardly apply elsewhere rules more liberal than those he will allow in the District. Byrd has become the national pillar of the “man in the house” rule. This, as the report of the Commission on Civil Disorders protested, makes it necessary for the unemployed father to “abandon his family or see them go hungry.” In this sense not a few of the child looters in our gutted ghettoes can trace their delinquency straight back to Robert C. Byrd.
For whites who live like myself in almost lily-white Northwest Washington on the very edge of suburbia, the ghetto disorders might have taken place in a distant country, viewed on TV like Vietnam (which it begins to resemble), or as a tourist attraction on a visit in the bright spring sunshine before curfew to the sullen and ruined ghetto business districts. It was not until five days after the trouble started that two young soldiers turned up for the first time to guard our own neighboring shopping center—“as a precautionary measure,” they explained—and tape appeared on its liquor-store windows. Even sympathetic and radical whites found themselves insulated from what was going on not just by the military cordons but even more by an indiscriminate black hostility. Even some liberal and leftist families with children moved out of integrated neighborhoods on the edge of the ghetto in apprehension. These were our first refugees from black power.
Nothing could be more deceptive than the nationwide mourning. Beneath the surface nothing has changed, except perhaps for the worst. The President has called off his address to a joint session indefinitely. His Senate Majority Leader, Mansfield, warns the Congress not to be “impetuous” in reacting to the disorders. How fortunate we should be if all our dangers were as remote as this one! The new civil rights bill, if it passes, is more likely to bring new evils in its anti-riot provisions than reform in housing.
In Washington, as in most cities hit by black violence, the police and the troops have been on their best behavior to the point where business spokesmen are complaining that there has been too much leniency in dealing with looters. For once, to the Administration’s credit, lives have been put ahead of property. Had police and soldiers begun to shoot, the killings would have become a massacre and the riots a black revolution. As it is, in Washington at least, the black community has been grateful for the protection afforded it. But this leniency is unlikely to survive when and if white rather than black areas begin to go up in smoke. There is little time left for the big multi-billion-dollar program which alone can rehabilitate the hopeless and bitter generation of blacks that racial discrimination and the slums have bred. Whites still think they can escape the problem by moving to the suburbs, and as long as they think so, nothing will be done. There are already 55,000 troops in our 110 scarred cities—more than we had in Vietnam three years ago. Already the police talk of guerrilla war. If it comes, a half million troops will not be enough to contain it. A looting suspect told one reporter at a police station here, “We’re going to burn this whole place. It might take years but well do it.” This is the agony of a lost race speaking. If we cannot respond with swift compassion, this is the beginning of our decline and fall.
The Mason-Dixon Line
Moves to New York
Journalist James Traub has labeled the 1968 school crisis centered on the Ocean Hill–Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn as “one of the great, agonizing racial psychodramas in New York history,” and the following dispatch from its front lines suggests many of the swirling, conflicting emotions that helped make it so. At any time, the challenges of educating poor children within a vast, bureaucratic system would tend to make a battle over control of neighborhood schools a complex and emotional issue; in 1968, at the height of a national debate over race relations and with an anti-civil rights backlash among many whites being led by presidential candidate George Wallace, the conflict was sharply intensified. After a two-month strike by the United Federation of Teachers, the power of the local Ocean Hill–Brownsville school board was effectively shattered—and so was the long-standing Black-Jewish alliance that had long played a progressive role in New York City politics.
. . .
November 4, 1968
ON MY WAY INTO NEW YORK CITY from La Guardia, the taxi-driver told me that his daughter, after a first year as teacher in a black ghetto, had transferred out to Long Island in despair. “The children were wonderful,” he said. “The trouble was the parents.” An hour later at lunch a Jewish schoolteacher from Brooklyn complained of the black children in her mathematics class for slow learners, but said the black parents, when she called on them for help, were without exception not only cooperative but grateful. But teacher and taxi-driver agreed in blaming Mayor Lindsay, though just for what was not clear. Indeed very little in New York’s crisis is clear, perhaps because the real motivations are kept hidden as shameful. More and more people, particularly among the striking teachers, and in the Jewish community, are flailing about in hysteria. A sample: I asked the Brooklyn schoolteacher just what was the issue in the strike. She replied with appalling simplicity, “Anti-Semitism.” How do you win a strike against anti-Semitism? By circumcising all gentiles and turning Black Muslims into Black Jews? “What does Mr. Shanker want?” the mayor asked in a similar vein in a radio interview next day. “For the police vans to come into the [Ocean Hill–Brownsville] community, arrest them and send them to New Jersey?” Is the Exodus to be re-enacted, this time with a black cast?
The plain truth is that John V. Lindsay is in trouble because he suddenly finds himself the Mayor of a Southern town. The Mason-Dixon line has moved north, and the Old Confederacy has expanded to the outer reaches of the Bronx. Even without this tide of racism, it would take a genius with two heads to govern the city successfully. Some of its basic problems are universal. One is size. Another is bureaucracy; the educational bureaucracy has entrenched itself in a maze of regulations beyond effective public control. A third is poverty; by next year one of every eight New Yorkers will be on relief. The city is choked with automobiles and people. Even if all eight million were a multiple birth from the same mamma, they would aggravate the hell out of each other. But in New York, as elsewhere, those of a different color, whether black or Puerto Rican, are no longer willing to accept second- or third-class citizenship submissively. They are pushing upwards into the better jobs and the sunnier places. In New York, the world’s biggest Jewish city, this has created a special problem—a confrontation between blacks and Jews. This is rapidly turning Lindsay into the world’s most down-trodden WASP.
The defeat two years ago of his proposal for a civilian review board to hear complaints against the police was the first disturbing signal in what had been the most liberal city in the country. New York’s lower-middle-class whites were reacting like their counterparts elsewhere. In the struggle over schools the fears have now spread to liberal teachers hitherto sympathetic to the civil rights movement. Conflicts in the ghetto with Jewish landlords and storekeepers were relatively easy to contain. But the teachers’ strike has churned up fears in an educational establishment that Jewish teachers and principals have dominated for a generation. Now that black unrest seems to threaten union standards and their jobs they are reacting like less liberal and less intellectual “ethnic” groups. The teachers’ union is moving closer to the benighted old-line A
.F.L. craft unions. A formidable anti-black coalition is shaping up. One of its victims may be the good name of the Jewish community.
If this great city is to be saved from race war, more Jewish intellectuals are going to have to speak up in ways that their own people will resent, just as white Southerners resented those who spoke up for the Negro. The teachers’ union is exaggerating, amplifying and circulating any bit of anti-Semitic drivel it can pick up from any far-out black extremist, however unrepresentative, and using this to drive the Jewish community of New York into a panic. Albert Shanker and the teachers’ union are exploiting natural Jewish fears of anti-Semitism in order to win the community’s support for the strike and for its major objective, which is to prevent effective decentralization and community control of the school system. Unless more Jewish leaders speak up in public and say what they do in private, this manufactured hysteria may prove a disaster for both the black and the Jewish communities. Peoples, like generals, tend to be obsessed by their last war. To hear some New York Jews talk one would think the America of 1968 was the Germany of 1932. They do not see that they themselves are caught up in the backlash which is creating in Wallace the nearest American counterpart to Der Fuehrer, that they are joining the rednecks, that the danger lies in white racism not black. The latter is despairing and defensive; the former holds the potential of a new Nazism in its effort to maintain white supremacy. It would be eternally disgraceful were Jews this time to be among the Brown Shirts.