I sat in on SNCC strategy meetings. The participants were students and mostly Christian believers. They were revolutionaries only in the sense that they were integrated Southerners. The born-again Christians were especially fervent in their belief in integration. Besides born-again Christians, there was a solid corps from Loyola in New Orleans, a Jesuit institution, with another charismatic student leader named Bill Cauldwell, who became a friend. When all of us, black and white together, joined hands in a circle at the end of the first meeting and sang “We Shall Overcome,” it was a profound experience. Unable to wipe my eyes, I hung my head as I sang and swayed, and tears streamed down my cheeks. I was embarrassed—how dare I cry if SNCC people did not?
It was the same summer that I first came to know young progressive white Southerners. I actually knew many progressive white Southerners, but they were mostly old and gay—or they were writers who drank and had a love-hate relationship with the region. I was interested in white Southerners who were more or less my age and who had come of age in a segregated society with all that it entailed. How did they deal with peer pressure? How did they come to believe in integration? I met two young white women in SNCC, Casey Cason and Connie Curry, who told their stories in Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement. First of all, not enough attention has been paid to the fact that all over the South, the YMCA and YWCA were unsung heroes of the civil rights movement. No matter the local laws, the right of the Y to have integrated meetings was sacrosanct—as long as no food or drink was served. (In the South food or drink made it a party.) Despite this idiotic Southern law, Y’s all over the region at least allowed blacks and whites to have contact with each other.
Casey Cason, a beautiful blond Texan with her own star quality as Tom Hayden’s fiancée, talked about her life in the “Southern Freedom Movement” at the University of Texas in Austin, which she entered as a junior in 1957:
I found the Y early on … Here I met black students and entered campus politics, becoming a regional and national Y officer … Here I learned the term “Student Christian Movement,” sometimes shortened to “student movement,” long before there was one … Through the Y, I was grounded in a democratic manner of work, exposed to and educated about race, and a participant in direct action—though not in civil disobedience …
At the NSA congress, Casey was immediately scooped up by the left student caucus, called the Liberal Study Group—forerunners of SDS. This was the early 1960s, but both Casey and Connie were very 1950s women—always keeping an eye open for “Mr. Right.” Casey wrote:
I loved the excitement and edginess and detailed political thinking in the Liberal Study Group, and the guys were sexier, sharper, and more verbose than the Y fellows had been. I met Tom Hayden here, the man I would later marry. When he interviewed me for his campus newspaper he told me how he’d been to California and demonstrated against the execution of Caryl Chessman. He started crying, because he was so angry remembering that he could not stop the legal murder. I was captivated by his intensity and his funny face with its very sad eyes.
I met Casey Cason only once, but twenty-six-year-old Connie Curry, a warm, wonderful woman and a natural leader, became a good friend. Connie, a North Carolina native whose parents were not political liberals and had never talked about racial injustice, first spoke out about race herself in fourth grade when a boy in the cafeteria line referred to one of the servers as a “nigger.” Connie rebuked him, and for her action he later knocked her into a puddle. It made her a liberal. She also described her life in the movement in the book Deep in Our Hearts:
Probably the most enlightening and broadening experience of my teenage life was attending the United States National Student Association (USNSA) congress in Bloomington, Indiana. It was the summer of 1952, and I had just finished my freshman year at Agnes Scott College, a small Presbyterian women’s college in Decatur, Georgia. I must admit that my entry into this NSA world was not entirely from noble motives … “Great way to meet interesting men,” I thought.
NSA lost some members, including Emory and Georgia Tech, after the 1954 Supreme Court decision declaring the “separate but equal” concept unconstitutional. In 1957, after Columbia graduate school, twenty-four-year-old Connie was recruited by beloved New Left political activist Allard K. Lowenstein, who had been president of NSA in 1950, to be an organizer of the Southern Student Human Relations Seminar and field secretary of the Collegiate Council for the United Nations, supported by the Marshall Field Foundation:
The sit-in movement spread like wildfire during the spring of 1960, and my office, supported by the Southern Regional Council’s network, began to report on what was happening. By March 1, we had put out a newsletter listing the places where demonstrations were occurring, how many arrests were being made, and what help was needed …
By Easter, more than seventy thousand mostly black southern college students were involved in demonstrations.
These young people, disciplined and heroic, were the most inspirational people of basically my own age whom I had ever met. I left the conference with the distinct feeling of spiritual malaise. I was most impressed by their open spirituality. I had been a religious child, sleeping under the gentle eyes of Our Lady, whose picture faced my bed; reading and rereading A Child’s Lives of the Saints; praying every night on my knees; preparing for my First Communion in the Catholic church down the hill from our house in Hollywood; and longing to wear the beautiful white dress that I could look at but not touch. In the pivotal year of 1943, surely influenced by her Hollywood friends, my mother suddenly snatched me, as they probably saw it, from the clutches of Rome. No more First Communion, no more beautiful white dress. I gave up all religious observances except nightly prayers, which my mother often prayed with me. (Like many other lapsed Catholics, she sometimes went to church on Palm Sunday or Easter.) I put religion away, until a Quaker boarding school taught me to appreciate silent meeting. Quakers sang Negro spirituals, almost my favorite music, every Sunday might. I agreed with Mark Twain that spirituals ought to be America’s national music.
Except for the fact that I read some unforgettable books, college was a spiritual wasteland. It would never have entered my mind to seek out the YWCA. I was trying to be sophisticated. Religion was the opiate of the masses or fanatics or both—Francis Cardinal Spellman was one of our favorite villains. When I came back to New York from Wisconsin, however, and realized that I envied the SNCC people their faith without fear, I began going to Grace Episcopal Church, where a friend from Harvard was a priest. It marked the beginning of an evolving religious conversion—from Catholic childhood to Quaker teens to an Episcopalian interlude to a flirtation with Buddhism and back to Catholicism. My great-grandmother Cora Horne went from Congregationalism to Catholicism to Ethical Culture to Bahá’í. Spiritual seeking was clearly part of my DNA. I eventually returned to my childhood home in the Catholic Church—but the journey began with discovering America and singing “We Shall Overcome” with integrated Southern Christians.
Lena began the new decade worrying about authenticity, too. She felt alienated from the black community. She did not live like a Negro, and she did not think like a Negro. But her skin was still black and she still faced the discrimination that all blacks felt—except on a different scale. She felt she had been a good little symbol, but nothing had changed; in the South, blacks still could not vote and their children could not get a decent education. Lena had a lot of anger at the end of 1959. She had a right to be angry. Andy Griffith’s bigotry kept her from playing a part that she really wanted (and helped contribute to the fact that she would be twenty-four years between Broadway shows). Now she was back in her old life, shuttling from club to club. She hated it. It must have felt great for Lena, early in 1960, to unleash her anger on a drunken white bigot at the Luau restaurant in Beverly Hills. She and Lennie were meeting Kay Thompson for a drink. Kay was late and Lennie went to phone her, at which point Lena, at a table on the balcony, looked down upo
n hearing a drunk demand service of a waiter, who said he was in the process of serving “Miss Horne.” “So what?” the drunk shouted. “She’s just another nigger. Where is she?” Lena jumped up from the table, shouting, “Here I am, you bastard, I’m the nigger you couldn’t see!” and started throwing things. The man was hit by an ashtray and the waiters led him away bleeding from his forehead. The story made all the papers and Lena got a bundle of fan mail, mostly from Negroes. Sammy Davis Jr. used the incident in a later movie—with himself as Lena throwing things at a drunken bigot.
Lena was ready to take the next steps. By now, she was angry with herself for consenting for so long to be a symbol. Her search for a constructive path to protest now led her to join the Delta Sigma Thetas, a national black nonprofit public service sorority with political clout, founded in January 1913 by twenty-two Howard University women who wanted to use their collective strength to promote academic excellence and aid for the needy. The first public act of the Deltas was to participate in the Woman’s Suffrage Procession in Washington, D.C., in March 1913; they were asked to march at the end of the parade so as not to offend Southerners. The twenty-two original members soon became many thousands. Working on Delta projects, touring, and making speeches seemed appropriate to my mother’s age and the sort of life she lived. There were benefits, very clearly for the Deltas and also for Lena. Delta activities helped bring her out of the deep depression she had suffered with the closing of Jamaica.
Back in New York, the first year of the new decade ended with another party for Noël Coward, on his sixty-first birthday that December. Kay Thompson gave the party and forgot to order food. Kay’s personal motto was “Food is the enemy of man.” But the guests sent out to Reuben’s for sandwiches and the champagne flowed. Kay and Lennie played two pianos. Noël sang, Lena sang, Richard Burton sang, and Larry Olivier did a tap dance in his bare feet and boxer shorts on top of one of the pianos. It was probably good to forget politics for a while.
I liked my job at NSSFNS, where I matched up black high school seniors with college scholarships. I liked the job, but I hated the traveling. In 1962 I got a new job—on the clip desk at Life. It felt like the best job of my young life. It was the first job I ever had that was never boring—not for a nanosecond. At $125 a week, the clip desk job meant guarding the AP and UP wires, and reading and clipping multiple copies of dozens of daily newspapers from around the country. In the cheerful, bustling Time-Life Building on Avenue of the Americas, the Life clip desk was central and open to anyone who wanted to check the wires. One of my favorite visitors never spoke, because he was always in a hurry—the helmeted and goggled motorcycle daredevil who raced back and forth from the airport to pick up film and take it to Life. The clip desk was the lowest editorial position on the magazine, and was always manned by a “girl”—usually a graduate of a Seven Sisters college. While I had the requisite Seven Sisters degree, and, like all clip desk girls, became incredibly well-informed on current events, I was still an anomaly. I was the first Negro clip desk girl at Life. In 1962 we were still called Negroes; and not yet having discovered Africa, we were deeply offended if anyone called us “black.”
Racism and anti-Semitism, overt or casual, were not the norm at Time Inc. because Henry Luce, who grew up in China, the child of missionaries, was neither a practicing racist nor a bigot. Time Inc. was proudly liberal—liberal Republican, that is, which, where race was concerned, generally meant good manners and a sense of fair play. In the early 1960s there were still many Americans without either when it came to Jews and Negroes. I could never have gotten a job with the conservative Hearst, for example, and neither could great Jewish, black, or female Life photographers like Alfred Eisenstaedt, Robert Capa, Gordon Parks, and Margaret Bourke-White (whom Hearst would have rejected for being a liberal Democrat). Life was the wildly successful first picture news magazine, the illiterate younger sibling of Time and Fortune, both of which people had to read, instead of just turning pages to look at pictures. Luce had clearly learned from movies that people liked to see faces. So Life had full-page faces, and whole stories told in photographs that were printed in small panel strips, like comics. Luce wanted to shape his times. And his times saw the rise of fascism, which he saw as the great enemy of democracy. Both Japanese and German fascism, which Luce fought in his magazines, extolled the idea of a master race. Life was born in 1936, the year that Jesse Owens debunked Hitler’s racial theories. In World War II, both Life and Time famously championed the Tuskegee Airmen. In 1943, Time and Life both did picture essays on twenty-six-year-old Lena Horne, whose success was supposed to be proof to the Allies that America, unlike Germany and Japan, was not a racist country. Perhaps not as socially redeeming as NSSFNS, Time, Inc., nevertheless passed the race and religion tests with flying colors. Casual misogyny, however, was totally overt.
Except for photographers, women at Life were second-class citizens and were all paid less than men. Except for photographers, women could not cover danger zone stories, like the bloody desegregation battle of the University of Mississippi, where a French journalist was killed. Most of the editors at Life, Olympian figures in shirtsleeves who stood around a huge table planning the weekly magazine as if they were strategizing a battle, seemed to be World War II veterans. They also seemed to be Protestant, Republican, Ivy League types who nonetheless enjoyed the fact that an Ivy League Irish Catholic Democrat, John F. Kennedy, a verified war hero, was in the White House. In 1962 and ‘63 there were only three and a half big stories: the Kennedys, the astronauts, and civil rights—the half-story was Vietnam. We saw Madame Nhu up close when she came to visit a fellow Catholic, Clare Boothe Luce, Mrs. Henry Luce, to explain why Buddhist monks were immolating themselves to protest the Luce-supported Nhu family’s injustices. It was the last idealistic phase of both civil rights and Vietnam. The two struggles were closely connected. Before the 1960s turned ugly, civil rights and Vietnam created a generation of slightly left-of-center and slightly right-of-center idealists who both believed that JFK, the first president born in the twentieth century, was on their side.
Political idealism, however, did not preclude sometimes giving the clip desk girl a friendly pat on the bottom if these men passed her in the hall. The pats were avuncular rather than lustful—as if given absent-mindedly to a good animal, or a child. They were, above all, gestures from on high. Protestant Ivy Leaguers who had won the war had an enormous sense of entitlement—but they never would have patted Margaret Bourke-White, whose camera made her an honorary man. The patting gesture seemed to be reserved for the clip desk girl simply because she was a “girl,” or possibly to acknowledge her existence without having to remember her name. Since my feminist consciousness was in the cellar, I did not speak out. Strong women were not generally admired by either men or women. In reality the pats did not bother me—they seemed to go with the clip desk job. After six months on the clip desk I was promoted to reporter. The title had no gender, and no pats, but women reporters still got less pay than men in the same job. I did a story with W. Eugene Smith, a photographer of great humanism, known for his compassionate photo essays (“A Country Doctor” was one of his most famous). As the reporter, I made notes for the picture captions and carried Smith’s equipment.
One of the secrets of my success at Life was a small pill from a doctor known to many sophisticated New Yorkers as “Dr. Max,” or “Dr. Feelgood.” He never bothered to examine patients, but he handed pills to people who came to him via word of mouth. Young New York career girls, then as now, were constantly dieting. With Dr. Max’s pill, you were never hungry. You took one half in the morning and concentrated like a demon all day. With one half in the evening, you could “twist” like a demented person all night. The “secret” of the pill was unknown to me. I had never heard the word “speed” used in a medical context. I was lucky that I had learned very quickly in college that I could not drink—so I never mixed speed and alcohol. I traveled in a crowd that was called “international” (in an un
kinder era its members would be known as “Eurotrash”). There was lots of French spoken, especially by people who were not French. Between working and dancing, and the pill, I had little time for food or sleep. I lived on cigarettes, coffee, candy bars, Coca-Cola, and the occasional enormous meal on weekends when I had not taken the pill. When I eventually stopped taking Dr. Max’s pills for good, I wondered why I was so tired all the time.
In the spring of 1963 Lena and Lennie were at their house in Palm Springs glued to the television as Birmingham, Alabama, under Sheriff Bull Connor and his dogs, horses, and fire hoses, exploded in a war against black children and teenagers. The Deltas had actually asked Lena to go to Birmingham to sing on the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on Mother’s Day. But Lena was afraid to fly. She had not flown since the war, having been frightened on too many army tours. The request had come too late for her to take the train. She was sorry and asked them to give her more notice next time. She immediately felt guilty. Of course, she would fly the next time. What was going on in Birmingham was warfare against unarmed black youth. That same evening she got a call from James Baldwin, saying that Attorney General Robert Kennedy wanted to meet with some prominent Negroes to discuss the civil rights situation. It was Lennie who helped her make the decision to fly to the attorney general’s meeting. Apparently the clincher to his argument was “If you don’t go, maybe you won’t love me anymore.”
The Black Calhouns Page 29