Voices in Our Blood

by Jon Meacham

  The plane finally arrives. Stokely shakes hands with the priest and Houston and walks wearily up the ramp. He is cold and tired and sleeps listlessly on the trip to New York.

  Shortly before eleven the plane lands at Kennedy Airport. Stokely has a date downtown in Manhattan but decides, instead, just to return to the Bronx and go to sleep. By now he is exhausted. The lack of sleep, the missed and delayed flights, the car trips, the questions, sandwiches on the run, the pressures have taken their toll. He walks through the terminal, breathing heavily, peering blankly through his dark glasses. Once outside, he decides to take a taxi and starts walking to the first cab in line. The driver, who is white, stares at Stokely—dungarees, dark glasses, carrying a paper bag of ham sandwiches, looking vaguely ominous—and drives past him to pick up a laughing white couple who carry cardboard cases of tax-free liquor. Stokely tenses, clenches his fist and takes a deep breath and turns toward the second cabdriver in line. This driver, who is a young Negro, has watched Stokely and is now smiling faintly. Stokely walks over, looks at the cabdriver and begins smiling too. He then opens the door and climbs into the cab and returns home for just a brief rest.

  Representative

  The New Yorker, April 1, 1967

  CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT

  Julian Bond, the twenty-seven-year-old Negro whom the Georgia legislature twice refused to seat last year, because he supported draft-card burners (“I would not burn my own draft card, but I admire the courage of those who do”), was seated in January by the United States Supreme Court and has just completed the first half of a two-year term of office. When we learned that he was to give a speech at a banquet on behalf of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (S.C.E.F.) at the Roosevelt Hotel the other night, we walked over there to hear what he had to say. We paused in the lobby long enough to pull out our program and read that S.C.E.F. is “the oldest interracial organization at work in the South to end all forms of segregation, discrimination, and injustice,” and that it now feels itself challenged by events “to undertake anew the task of changing the mind-set of the white community and organizing at the grassroots level that coalition of black and white which will have the strength to bring about a truly democratic society.” Then we took the stairs to the ballroom, on the mezzanine, where the banquet was being held, and as soon as we entered we spotted the tall young legislator standing in a pool of light and looking handsome and a trifle bored as several men adjusted floodlights for a television news interview. We introduced ourself, and Mr. Bond stepped from behind the lights and told us that this would be his third talk of the day. He said that he had spoken at Cheyney State College, near Philadelphia, and then had appeared on a Philadelphia television program, and that after the S.C.E.F. speech he was going straight to bed, because he had to make a speech in Rhode Island the next day.

  “Every weekend has been like this,” Mr. Bond said, in a quiet, even voice that had traces of a Southern accent. “My wife, Alice, and our three kids—a girl of four and two boys, one three and the other ten months—haven’t been very happy about the trips I’ve had to take, but I’ve spoken in cities and towns from Georgia to California.”

  We asked Mr. Bond if his speeches fell into different categories.

  “Two,” he answered, with a smile. “That is, I have only two speeches that I give. The one that I give less frequently is about the two movements in this country—civil rights and peace—and how they ought to learn from each other. The other speech is a history of the Movement, which I usually call ‘What Next for the Negro?’ or ‘Civil Rights—1960 to the Present Day,’ or something that conveys that general idea.”

  “What next for the Movement?” we asked.

  “The 1965 Civil Rights Bill changed the Movement,” Mr. Bond said, without hesitation. “Many people who had previously supported the Movement thought that the passage of that bill meant the job was done. Others did not like the involvement of S.N.C.C., C.O.R.E., S.C.E.F., and S.C.L.C. in the anti-war protests. Then Black Power led to the final falling away. And for the Movement lack of interest is more killing than lack of money.”

  Mr. Bond paused long enough to light a cigarette, and continued, “On the other hand, the Movement people are more interested now in local programs, which don’t necessarily make front-page splashes, the way the sit-ins did—things like backing candidates for the Board of Supervisors of Sunflower County, in Mississippi, and getting federal registrars to go there. That’s Eastland’s county, you know, and there is not one single federal registrar anywhere in it. The Movement used to spend most of its time trying to get federal legislation on housing, voting, and public accommodations. It has come to realize now that laws by themselves are never going to change the face of the country, since even the laws that exist today are not being enforced. That is why the emphasis now is on more local thrust—more contained thrust, if you will.”

  We asked Mr. Bond about his first session in the Georgia House of Representatives.

  “Well, fortunately for me, several of my friends from Fulton County had been seated the year before, and since we are seated according to counties, we were all together,” he said. “They kept me filled in. I had campaigned on a promise to introduce a minimum-wage bill for domestic workers, and when I was prevented from taking my seat, Ben Brown, an old friend from the sit-in days, and John Hood, another colleague, introduced it, but it didn’t get out of committee. In fact, it barely got into committee. I myself introduced three privileged resolutions, the most radical of which was for official recognition of Negro History Week in Georgia. The others were for recognition of Dr. Benjamin E. Mays on his retirement after twenty-seven years as president of Morehouse College, and for recognition of Morehouse on its hundredth anniversary. My three, along with the hundreds of others for recognition of all kinds of things, passed. One of my biggest problems in the legislature was getting used to the flowery language.”

  When it was time for Mr. Bond to give his speech at the Roosevelt, we noted an absence of flowery language and a tendency to come straight to the point. He spoke briefly of the National Conference for New Politics and of the need for race consciousness. (“Negroes must not forget race consciousness as long as they are victims of racism,” he said.) Then he spoke of the early Negro activists and the heritage of dissent they helped to create in this country. Finally, he made his main point by means of four quotations. The first was from a Negro newspaper of 1842:

  If war be declared, shall we fight with the chains upon our limbs? Will we fight in defense of a government which denies us the most precious right of citizenship? . . . We ask these questions. . . . The states in which we dwell have twice availed themselves of our voluntary services, and have repaid us with chains and slavery. Shall we a third time kiss the foot that crushes us? . . . No!

  Mr. Bond’s voice rose, then fell at an even pitch as he introduced his next quotation—from Henry McNeal Turner, one of twenty-seven Negroes who were expelled from the Georgia legislature in 1868:

  The black man cannot protect a country if the country doesn’t protect him; and if, tomorrow, a war should arise, I would not raise a musket to defend a country where my manhood is denied. . . . I will say this much to the colored men of Georgia. . . . Never lift a finger nor raise a hand in defense of Georgia, unless Georgia acknowledges that you are men, and invests you with the rights pertaining to manhood.

  Mr. Bond paused for a moment, then continued with a quotation from a newspaper article by Lewis Douglass, son of Frederick Douglass, written in 1899:

  It is a sorry, though true, fact that wherever this government controls, injustice to dark races prevails. The people of Cuba, Porto Rico, Hawaii and Manila know it well, as do the wronged Indian and outraged black man in the United States. . . . The question will be asked: How is it that such promises are made to Filipinos thousands of miles away while the action of the administration in protecting dark citizens at home does not even extend to a promise of any attempt to rebuke the outlawry which kills Americ
an citizens of African descent for the purpose of gratifying bloodthirstiness and race hatred? . . . It is hypocrisy of the most sickening kind to try to make us believe that the killing of Filipinos is for the purpose of good government and to give protection to life and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

  Mr. Bond’s last quotation was from W. E. B. DuBois, who wrote in 1904:

  I believe in the Prince of Peace. I believe that War is Murder. I believe that armies and navies are at bottom the tinsel and braggadocio of oppression and wrong; and I believe that the wicked conquest of weaker and darker nations by nations white and stronger but foreshadows the death of that strength.

  Mr. Bond was quiet for a few seconds, then asked the audience to consider those statements in the light of events today, and sat down.

  The Second Coming of Martin Luther King

  Harper’s Magazine, August 1967

  DAVID HALBERSTAM

  He is perhaps the best speaker in America of this generation, but his speech before the huge crowd in the UN Plaza on that afternoon in mid-April was bad; his words were flat, the drama and that special cadence, rooted in his Georgia past and handed down generation by generation in his family, were missing. It was as if he were reading someone else’s speech. There was no extemporizing; and he is at his best extemporaneously, and at his worst when he reads. There were no verbal mistakes, no surprise passions. (An organizer of the peace march said afterwards, “He wrote it with a slide rule.”) When he finished his speech, and was embraced by a black brother, it seemed an unwanted embrace, and he looked uncomfortable. He left the UN Plaza as soon as he could.

  On that cold day of a cold spring Martin Luther King, Jr. made a sharp departure from his own past. He did it reluctantly; if he was not embittered over the loss of some old allies, he was clearly uneasy about some of his new ones. Yet join the peace movement he did. One part of his life was behind him, and a different and obviously more difficult one lay ahead. He had walked, marched, picketed, protested against legal segregation in America—in jails and out of jails, always in the spotlight. Where he went, the action went too. He had won a striking place of honor in the American society: if he was attacked as a radical, it was by men whose days were past. If his name was on men’s room walls throughout the South, he was celebrated also as a Nobel Prize–winner, the youngest one in history; he was our beloved, Time Magazine’s man of the year; his view of Christianity was accepted by many Americans who could never have accepted the Christianity of Billy Graham. In the decade of 1956 to 1966 he was a radical America felt comfortable to have spawned.

  But all that seemed long ago. In the year 1967, the vital issue of the time was not civil rights, but Vietnam. And in civil rights we were slowly learning some of the terrible truths about the ghettos of the North. Standing on the platform at the UN Plaza, he was not taking on George Wallace, or Bull Connor, or Jim Clark; he was taking on the President of the United States, challenging what is deemed national security, linking by his very presence much of the civil-rights movement with the peace movement. Before the war would be ended, before the President and King spoke as one on the American ghettos—if they ever would—his new radicalism might take him very far.

  On both these issues there had been considerable controversy and debate within the King organization, especially among those people who care most deeply for King, and see him as the possessor of a certain amount of moral power. On the peace issue none of King’s associates really questioned how he felt; rather they questioned the wisdom of taking a stand. Would it hurt the civil-rights movement? Would it deprive the Negroes of King’s desperately needed time and resources? And some of these peace people, were they really the kind of people King wanted to play with? On the ghettos there were similar problems.

  No one is really going to accomplish anything in the ghettos, goes the argument, until the federal government comes in with massive programs. In the meantime King can only hurt and smear his own reputation; he will get dirt on his hands like the other ward heelers if he starts playing with practical day-by-day politics in the North. In the North, in addition to the white opponents, there are all the small-time Negro operators who will be out to make a reputation by bucking Martin King. Yet the ghettos exist, and to shun them is to lose moral status.

  II

  After the New York peace rally I traveled with King for ten days on the new paths he had chosen. It was a time when the Negro seemed more than ever rebellious and disenchanted with the white; and when the white middle class—decent, upright—seemed near to saturation with the Negro’s new rebellion. The Negro in the cities seemed nearer to riots than ever; the white, seeing the riots on TV, wanted to move further away from the Negro than ever before. A terrible cycle was developing. At press conference after press conference he said no, he didn’t think his stand on Vietnam was hurting the civil-rights movement or damaging the Negro cause with the President; no, he didn’t think Stokely Carmichael’s cry of black power had hurt the Negroes; no, he didn’t plan to run for the Presidency. It was a week which began in New York with an announcement that King would go to the Holy Land in the fall on a pilgrimage.

  Then came the first question: “And do you relate this to Vietnam?” No, King said, there were no political implications.

  A Negro reporter who had been out to St. Alban’s Hospital in Queens and had talked to the soldiers there said, “The war doesn’t bother them. The soldiers are for it.”

  Later, on the way to the airport (most of King’s life is spent going to airports, and it is the only time to talk to him), King’s top assistant, Andy Young, commented on the fact that the Vietnam question had come from a Negro reporter. “It always does,” he said. “Every time we get the dumb question, the patriot question, it’s a Negro reporter.” A New York minister said it was the Negro middle class wanting respectability and playing it close on Vietnam. “They’re very nervous on Vietnam, afraid they’re going to lose everything else.” King added, “Yes, they’re hoping the war will win them their spurs. That’s not the way you win spurs.” The ghettos, he said, were better on the war issue than the middle class.

  III

  The most important stop on King’s trip would be Cleveland, where he was thinking of making a major summer effort to break down some of the ghetto barriers. It is a strange thing the way a city can rise to national and international fame over racial problems. Sometimes it is predictable. The word was always out in the South, for instance, that Birmingham was a tough city with a tough police force and Bull Connor; Negroes in Georgia and Mississippi knew about Bull Connor fifteen years before. Little Rock, which we once heard so much about, was an accident, its crisis deriving from its own succession laws and Orval Faubus’ ambition.

  Now there are cities imprinted on our memories that we barely know about, cities which we have forgotten, but in the Negro world, and in that part of the white world which is trying to cope with the coming fire, the word is out: Cleveland, where four people died in riots last summer, is likely to be a very tough place with all the worst aspects of the ghetto, and almost none of the safety valves. Unlike New York, where Mayor John Lindsay at least visits the slums, Mayor Ralph Locher seems to have written off the Negro vote, and to depend on the Italians, the Poles, and other white minorities. The Negro ministers there are interested in King’s coming in for the summer action program, and though this is early May, a chilly day, and King is asking someone to find him a topcoat, there is a feeling that we will hear a good deal more about Cleveland before the summer is over, probably more than we want to.

  King is edgy because the Negro community is divided. He does not want to get caught in a cross fire, and he is sensitive to what happened with his ill-fated organizing effort in Chicago last year.

  Yet there are advantages in Cleveland. It is smaller than Chicago, better laid out geographically, and the Mayor is not so smart as Daley. His Chicago machine has enough Negro support to keep the Negro community divided; Locher’s indifference to the Negro
es in Cleveland may eventually force them to unite. But they must be brought together by someone from the outside. Here, then, is one of the ironies: for years the crisis was in the South, and Northern Negroes sent money and support there. In the process the most skilled leadership rose up in the South, fashioned out of the crises faced there, while in general the Northern leadership, so far lacking such direct and dramatic crises, lacks prestige; it must summon help from the South.

  King is met at the airport by one of the older Negro ministers who is representing the Negro Ministers’ Association. The preacher is about sixty, very pleased to be meeting King. As soon as we are in the car he starts talking about an earlier King speech and how much he liked it. Everyone else smiles politely, and there is a murmur of approval from King, which dies as the preacher continues, “I mean the way you got up there, Doctor King, and you told those Negroes they got to improve themselves, they got to help themselves more, isn’t anyone else going to help them, and they got to clean up themselves, clean up their houses, clean up the filth in the streets, stop livin’ like pigs, they’ve got to wash up. They can’t just wait for someone to come to their doors with a welfare check, they got to help themselves.”

  There is silence in the car as he continues, his voice gaining in enthusiasm as he carries on, for he is preaching now, and driving a little faster too.

  King says nothing, but from the back of the car, quite softly, the Reverend Bernard Lee, a King assistant, says, “You got to have something worth cleaning up, Reverend,” almost as an apology.

  The tension rises a little in the car; King is silent, and Bernard Lee speaks again. “It’s easier said than done, Reverend. You’ve got six generations just trying to make do, and they’ve given up fighting.”