On the Friday night, after the second day of children’s protests, King spoke at 16th Street Baptist Church to the parents of those who had been arrested that day and the day before. They knew full well the dangers and humiliations of being a black person in Birmingham. Jesus said He’d go as far as Memphis. Can you imagine how they felt with their children at that moment languishing in Bull Connor’s jails? King stood up and tried to make light of the situation: “Not only did they stand up in the water, they went under the water!” he said. “And dogs? Well, I’ll tell you. When I was growing up, I was dog bitten…for nothing. So I don’t mind being bitten by a dog for standing up for freedom!”
Whether or not any of the parents were buying this is unclear. King plunged on: “Your daughters and sons are in jail.…Don’t worry about them.…They are suffering for what they believe, and they are suffering to make this nation a better nation.” Don’t worry about them? Taylor Branch writes that there were rumors—“true and false”—about “rats, beatings, concrete beds, overflowing latrines, jailhouse assaults, and crude examinations for venereal disease.” Seventy-five and eighty children were packed into cells intended for eight. Some had been bused out to the state fairground and held without food and water in stockades in the pouring rain. King’s response? “Jail helps you to rise above the miasma of everyday life,” he said blithely. “If they want some books, we will get them. I catch up on my reading every time I go to jail.”
Walker and King were trying to set up that picture—the German shepherd lunging at the boy. But to get it, they had to play a complex and duplicitous game. To Bull Connor, they pretended that they had a hundred times more supporters than they did. To the press, they pretended that they were shocked at the way Connor let his dogs loose on their protesters—while at the same time, they were jumping for joy behind closed doors. And to the parents whose children they were using as cannon fodder, they pretended that Bull Connor’s prisons were a good place for their children to catch up on their reading.
But we shouldn’t be shocked by this. What other options did Walker and King have? In the traditional fable of the Tortoise and the Hare, told to every Western schoolchild, the Tortoise beats the Hare through sheer persistence and effort. Slow and steady wins the race. That’s an appropriate and powerful lesson—but only in a world where the Tortoise and the Hare are playing by the same rules, and where everyone’s effort is rewarded. In a world that isn’t fair—and no one would have called Birmingham in 1963 fair—the Terrapin has to place his relatives at strategic points along the racecourse. The trickster is not a trickster by nature. He is a trickster by necessity. In the next great civil rights showdown in Selma, Alabama, two years later, a photographer from Life magazine put down his camera in order to come to the aid of children being roughed up by police officers. Afterward, King reprimanded him: “The world doesn’t know this happened, because you didn’t photograph it. I’m not being cold-blooded about it, but it is so much more important for you to take a picture of us getting beaten up than for you to be another person joining in the fray.” He needed the picture. In response to the complaints over the use of children, Fred Shuttlesworth said it best: “We got to use what we got.”
A dyslexic, if she or he is to succeed, is in exactly the same position, of course. That’s part of what it means to be “disagreeable.” Gary Cohn leapt into the taxi, pretending he knew about options trading, and it is remarkable how many successful dyslexics have had a similar moment in their careers. Brian Grazer, the Hollywood producer, got a three-month internship after college as a clerk in the business affairs department at the Warner Bros. studio. He pushed a cart around. “I was in a big office with two union secretaries,” he remembers. “My boss had worked for Jack Warner. He was putting in his last hours. He was a great guy. There was this great office there, and I said to him, ‘Can I have it?’ The office was bigger than my office today. He said, ‘Sure. Use it.’ It became the Brian Grazer business. I could do my eight-hour workdays in one hour. I would use my office and my position to get access to all the legal contracts, business contracts, the treatments being submitted to Warner Brothers—why they passed, what they considered. I used that year to gain knowledge and information about the movie business. I would call someone every single day. And I would say, ‘I’m Brian Grazer. I work at Warner Brothers business affairs. I want to meet you.’”
He was eventually fired, but only after he had stretched his three-month term to a year and sold two ideas to NBC for five thousand dollars each.
Grazer and Cohn—two outsiders with learning disabilities—played a trick. They bluffed their way into professions that would have been closed to them. The man in the cab assumed that no one would be so audacious as to say he knew how to trade options if he didn’t. And it never occurred to the people Brian Grazer called that when he said he was Brian Grazer from Warner Brothers, what he meant was that he was Brian Grazer who pushed the mail cart around at Warner Brothers. What they did is not “right,” just as it is not “right” to send children up against police dogs. But we need to remember that our definition of what is right is, as often as not, simply the way that people in positions of privilege close the door on those on the outside. David has nothing to lose, and because he has nothing to lose, he has the freedom to thumb his nose at the rules set by others. That’s how people with brains a little bit different from the rest of ours get jobs as options traders and Hollywood producers—and a small band of protesters armed with nothing but their wits have a chance against the likes of Bull Connor.
“I still t’ink Ise de fas’est runner in de worl’,” the bewildered Deer complains after a race in which Terrapin has done something that would get him banished from every competition in the world. “Maybe you air,” Terrapin responds, “but I kin head ou off wid sense.”
7.
The boy in Bill Hudson’s famous photograph is Walter Gadsden. He was a sophomore at Parker High in Birmingham, six foot tall and fifteen years old. He wasn’t a marcher. He was a spectator. He came from a conservative black family that owned two newspapers in Birmingham and Atlanta that had been sharply critical of King. Gadsden had taken off school that afternoon to watch the spectacle unfolding around Kelly Ingram Park.
The officer in the picture is Dick Middleton. He was a modest and reserved man. “The K-9 Corps,” McWhorter writes, “was known for attracting straight arrows who wanted none of the scams and payoffs that often came with a regular beat. Nor were the dog handlers known for being race ideologues.” The dog’s name is Leo.
Now look at the faces of the black bystanders in the background. Shouldn’t they be surprised or horrified? They’re not. Next, look at the leash in Middleton’s hand. It’s taut, as if he’s trying to restrain Leo. And look at Gadsden’s left hand. He’s gripping Middleton on the forearm. Look at Gadsden’s left leg. He’s kicking Leo, isn’t he? Gadsden would say later that he had been raised around dogs and had been taught how to protect himself. “I automatically threw my knee up in front of the dog’s head,” he said. Gadsden wasn’t the martyr, passively leaning forward as if to say, “Take me, here I am.” He’s steadying himself, with a hand on Middleton, so he can deliver a sharper blow. The word around the movement, afterward, was that he’d broken Leo’s jaw. Hudson’s photograph is not at all what the world thought it was. It was a little bit of Brer Rabbit trickery.
You got to use what you got.
“Sure, people got bit by the dogs,” Walker said, looking back twenty years later. “I’d say at least two or three. But a picture is worth a thousand words, dahlin’.”11
1 In William Nunnelley’s biography of Connor, titled Bull Connor, Nunnelley identifies the relevant section of the Birmingham city code as section 369, which prohibited serving “white and colored people” in the same room unless they were separated by a partition seven feet high with separate entrances.
2 My mother, who is West Indian, was taught Anansi stories as a child and told them to my brothers and me when w
e were young. Anansi is a rascal, who is not above cheating and sacrificing his own children (of which he invariably has many) for his own ends. My mother is a proper Jamaican lady, but on the subject of Anansi she becomes the picture of mischief.
3 In Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, Lawrence Levine writes: “The rabbit, like the slaves who wove tales about him, was forced to make do with what he had. His small tail, his natural portion of intellect—these would have to suffice, and to make them do he resorted to any means at his disposal—means which may have made him morally tainted but which allowed him to survive and even to conquer.”
4 The historian Taylor Branch writes of Walker: “Walker was a hotspur. As a New Jersey high school student in the 1940s, he had heard Paul Robeson say that if being for freedom and equality meant being a Red, then he was a Red. Walker promptly joined the Young Communist League. One of his high school papers was a five-year plan for a Soviet-type economy in the United States, and he dreamed of carrying out technically ingenious assassinations against leading segregationists.”
5 Walker continued: “We were just going to give ourselves up to the mob and felt that would appease them. Let them beat us to death, I guess.”
6 Pritchett actually came to Birmingham and warned Bull Connor about King and Walker. He wanted to teach Connor how to handle the civil rights tricksters. But Connor wasn’t inclined to listen. “I never will forget, when we entered his office,” Pritchett remembers, “his back was to us…some big executive chair, you know, and when he turned around, there was this little man—you know, in stature. But he had this boomin’ voice, and he was tellin’ me that they closed the course that day…said, ‘They can play golf, but we put concrete in the holes. They can’t get the ball in the holes.’ And this gave me some indication as to what type of man he was.”
7 This was a running theme with Walker. One time in Birmingham, the city filed an injunction against the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which meant that Walker had to appear in court. The question was: If Walker was tied up in court, how would he run the campaign? Walker’s answer was to register with the court and then have someone else show up in his place every day thereafter. Why not? He said, “You know, all niggers look alike anyway.”
8 Stewart was a huge figure in Birmingham. Every African-American teenager listened to his show. The second part of his message to his listeners was “Bring your toothbrushes, because lunch will be served.” “Toothbrushes” was code for “be dressed and prepared to spend a few nights in jail.”
9 Forman writes: “It seemed very cold, cruel, and calculating to be happy about police brutality coming down on innocent people…no matter what purpose it served.”
10 King thought long and hard before agreeing to use the children. He had to be talked into it by James Bevel. Their eventual conclusion was that if someone was old enough to belong to a church—to have made a decision of that importance to their life and soul—then they were old enough to fight for a cause of great importance to their life and soul. In the Baptist tradition, you could join a church once you were of school age. That meant that King approved of using children as young as six or seven against Bull Connor.
11 Walker makes a similar claim about the famous photographs of protesters being hit by Connor’s water cannons. The people in the photographs, he says, were spectators like Gadsden, not demonstrators. And they had been standing outside 16th Street Baptist Church all afternoon—on a typically humid Birmingham spring day. They were hot. “They had gathered in the park, which is a shaded area. And the firemen had set up their hoses at two corners of the park, one on Fifth Street and one on Sixth Street. And the mood was like a Roman holiday; it was festive. There wasn’t anybody among the spectators who were angry, and they had waited so long, and it was beginning to get dark now. So, somebody heaved a brick because they knew that—in fact, they had been saying, ‘Turn the water hose on. Turn the water hose on.’ And Bull Connor, then somebody threw a brick, and he started turning them on, see. So they just danced and played in the hose spray. This famous picture of them holding hands, it was just a frolic of them trying to stand up [unintelligible] and some of them were getting knocked down by the hose. They’d get up and run back and it would slide them along the pavement. Then they began bringing the hose up from the other corner, and instead of Negroes [unintelligible] they ran to the hose. It was a, it was a holiday for them. And this went on for a couple of hours. It was a joke, really. All in good humor and good spirit. Not any vitriolic response on the part of even the Negro spectators, which to me, again, was an example of the changing spirit, you know. When Negroes once had been cowed in the presence of policemen and maybe water hoses, here they had complete disdain for them. Made a joke out of it.”
Part Three
The Limits of Power
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Ecclesiastes 9:11
Chapter Seven
Rosemary Lawlor
“I wasn’t born that way. This was forced upon me.”
1.
When the Troubles began in Northern Ireland, Rosemary Lawlor was a newlywed. She and her husband had just bought a house in Belfast. They had a baby. It was the summer of 1969, and Catholics and Protestants—the two religious communities that have lived uneasily alongside each other throughout the country’s history—were at each other’s throats. There were bombings and riots. Gangs of Protestant militants—Loyalists, as they were called—roamed the streets, burning down houses. The Lawlors were Catholic, and Catholics have always been a minority in Northern Ireland. Every day, they grew more frightened.
“I’d come home at night,” Lawlor said, “and there would be writing on the door: ‘Taigs out.’ ‘Taigs’ is a derogatory word for an Irish Catholic. Or ‘No Pope here.’ Another night we were there, we were very lucky. A bomb came into the backyard and didn’t explode. One day I went to knock on my neighbor’s door, and I realized that she was gone. I found out that day that a lot of people had gone. So when my husband, Terry, came home from work, I said, ‘Terry, what’s going on here?’ And he said, ‘We’re in danger.’
“We left the home that night. We had no phone. You remember, this is in the days before mobiles. We walked out. The fear was in me. I put my son in his pram. I gathered up best we could pieces of clothes for him and ourselves. There was a tray at the bottom of the pram, and we stuffed them all in the tray. And Terry says to me, ‘Right, Rosie, we’re just going to walk straight out of here and we’re gonna smile at everybody.’ I was trembling. I was a teenage mum, a teenage girl who got married, nineteen, married, new baby, new world, new life. Taken away from me like that. D’you know? And I have no power to stop it. Fear is an awful thing, and I remember being really, really scared.”
The safest place they knew was the all-Catholic neighborhood of Ballymurphy, in West Belfast, where Lawlor’s parents lived. But they had no car, and with Belfast in turmoil, no taxi wanted to venture into a Catholic neighborhood. Finally they tricked a cab into stopping by saying their baby was sick and needed to get to a hospital. They shut the car door and Terry told the driver, “I want you to take us to Ballymurphy.” The driver said, “Oh, no, I’m not doing that.” But Terry had a poker, and he took it out, and he placed the point against the back of the driver’s neck and said, “You’re going to take us.” The cabdriver drove them to the edge of Ballymurphy and stopped. “I don’t care if you stick that in me,” he said. “I’m not going any further.” The Lawlors gathered up their baby and their worldly possessions and ran for their lives.
At the beginning of 1970, things got worse. That Easter, there was a riot in Ballymurphy. The British Army was called in: a fleet of armored cars with barbed wire on their bumpers patrolled the streets. Lawlor would pus
h her pram past soldiers with automatic rifles and tear-gas grenades. One weekend in June, there was a gun battle in the bordering neighborhood: a group of Catholic gunmen stepped into the middle of the road and opened fire on a group of Protestant bystanders. In response, Protestant Loyalists tried to burn down a Catholic church near the docks. For five hours, the two sides fought, locked in deadly gun battle. Hundreds of fires burned across the city. By the end of the weekend, six people were dead and more than two hundred injured. The British home secretary responsible for Northern Ireland flew up from London, surveyed the chaos, and ran back to his plane. “For God’s sake, bring me a large Scotch,” he said, burying his head in his hands. “What a bloody awful country.”
A week later, a woman came through Ballymurphy. Her name was Harriet Carson. “She was famous for hitting Maggie Thatcher over the head with a handbag at City Hall,” Lawlor said. “I knew her growing up. Harriet was coming around with two lids of pots, and she was banging them together and she was shouting, ‘Come on, come out, come out. The people in the Lower Falls are getting murdered.’ She was shouting it up. And I went out to the door. My family was all there. And she was shouting, ‘They’re locked in their houses. Their children can’t get milk, and they haven’t got anything for a cup of tea, and there’s no bread, and come out, come out, we need to do something!’”
David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants Page 16