With the organization of SNCC, the youth branch of Dr. King and Ella Baker’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, in April 1960, the movement became a young persons’ crusade. The SNCC organizational meeting took place during Easter weekend in Raleigh, North Carolina, at Shaw University (named for Colonel Robert Gould Shaw of the Civil War Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry). Marion Barry from Nashville (future mayor of Washington, D.C.) was elected the first chair. But Atlanta won the prize as the location of SNCC’s headquarters. In April 1960 the young people of Atlanta took center stage. They announced themselves that spring with a full-page ad in the Constitution paid for by the white Southern writer Lillian Smith, author of Strange Fruit, the antilynching novel. It read:
We the students of the six affiliated institutions forming the Atlanta University Center … have joined our hearts, minds, and bodies in the cause of gaining those rights which are inherently ours as members of the human race and as citizens of these United States … We must say in all candor that we plan to use every legal and non-violent means at our disposal to secure full citizenship rights as members of this great Democracy of ours.
The ad did not say, “We the students and professors.” It was an announcement that the young people not only were in the front lines, but were planning the strategy. Asa Ware would have been proud. And he would have been proud of Katie Webb’s great-granddaughter, who was among the younger, but certainly not the youngest, members of the movement. The NAACP leadership of Atlanta picked fifteen-year-old Cheryl Chisholm, daughter of Harriet Nash and Chiz Chisholm, to be one of the high school “integrators.” The heart of almost every black Calhoun had swelled with pride when Cheryl was named an “integrator.” Her mother, Harriet, however, was not thrilled, doubtless thinking of fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, traumatized behind her dark glasses, facing the pack of yowling whites in Little Rock. Harriet decided that Cheryl would not go through that particular ordeal. Instead she would face a much milder ordeal. Cheryl went north in the fall of 1960 to essentially desegregate a white girls’ boarding school, Northfield, in Massachusetts. “Alone in her blackness,” she had great success. Bursting with confidence typical of the Southern branch of the black Calhoun women, Cheryl was an excellent student and a talented modern dancer.
Before leaving for Massachusetts, Cheryl appeared on television on NBC’s news program White Paper with several other Atlanta teens to discuss school integration. Cheryl remembered:
[My mother] wanted me to go to Northfield where one of her peers had gone, so off I went in the fall of 1960 to the cold (on so many levels!) wilds of New England. In order to take those secondary school tests that were required, my mother and I, in hats and gloves, had to go to the Westminster School where I was segregated in a separate room by myself with my own private monitor. My rage made me swear to blow them all off the map, which I did, and the same followed at Northfield where they gave me a single room usually reserved for seniors, and assumed that I couldn’t possibly be a first rate student, being Black and from the South. I kicked ass in the advance placement courses, won the French prize, speaking like a Parisian academician and writing a scholarly thesis in French, was a featured dancer in many productions then was the only one to get into Radcliffe. While there, I taught a freedom school in Dorchester during the Boston school mess and traveled in the summers to Hawaii and Brazil as a concentrator in anthropology doing field work and experiencing the confusion and enlightenment of how differently race was constructed in other places …
That fall, just before the presidential election, Dr. King was arrested in Atlanta for taking part in a sit-in. Senator Kennedy called Coretta Scott King to express his concern. Dr. King was released the next day. Kennedy’s phone call guaranteed that he would win the black vote wholeheartedly, despite old prejudices against Catholicism.
Between 1947 and 1962, twelve blacks were lynched—a far cry from the 1930s when there was a lynching every three weeks. Still, Southern states did all they could to destroy or hinder the NAACP. Roy Wilkins suspended Robert Williams as president of the Monroe, North Carolina, NAACP branch when Williams urged meeting “violence with violence” and “lynching with lynching.” Blacks had to take the moral high ground—it was all they had. All over the South, they were denied voting rights, especially in rural areas. City officials in Tuskegee, Alabama, redrew city lines to exclude all but ten of the four hundred black registered voters. There was a reign of terror against blacks who tried to vote; they were driven in fear of their lives from the polls—beaten, fired, homes destroyed, finally murdered. In large urban areas, like Atlanta, middle-class property-owning blacks could vote—supporting the almost entirely black Georgia Republican Party.
In 1962 the black population of Atlanta was largely responsible for the election of a progressive mayor, Ivan Allen Jr., the businessman son of a prominent family. Middle-class black men had voted in Atlanta since 1870, keeping the Republican Party alive in the South. The difference between Atlanta and the rest of Georgia cannot be exaggerated. There is a vast difference between night rider/KKK racism and Jim Crow racism. Allen’s opponent was arch-segregationist restaurant owner Lester Maddox, who used ax handles to drive away black customers. In the solid tradition of Atlanta’s business community, Allen was not a practicing racist. In fact, he was already known as “progressive.” In 1947 he was the first white head of the Community Chest to attend a fund-raising dinner for the Negro Community Chest. In 1960, as vice president of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, he publicly announced that segregation was bad for business. On the day he took office as mayor of Atlanta, he proved himself a radical by integrating the cafeteria and having all the “white” and “colored” signs removed from city hall. After Allen’s conversations with Dr. King and young people from SNCC, his pragmatic business conviction became a moral conviction. Allen now advocated and led the desegregation of public Atlanta. In a key speech, he asked Atlantans to inspire “the world”:
I wasn’t so all-fired liberal when I first moved into City Hall, but when I saw what the race-baiters were doing or could do to hold back the orderly growth of Atlanta, it infuriated me and eventually swung me to the extreme end opposite them.
Allen was so impressive that in July 1963 President Kennedy personally asked him to come to Washington to testify in support of what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Allen was the only Southern white elected politician to speak in the bill’s favor. He called segregation “slavery’s stepchild”:
I have to be honest with myself and admit that up until the time I had to make the decision whether to go to Washington or not go, my liberalism on the race issue had been based to a large degree on pragmatism: it was simply good business for Atlanta to be an open city, a fair city, a “City Too Busy to Hate,” a city trying to raise the level of its poorest citizens and get them off the relief rolls … I am certain that at this point I had finally crossed over and made my commitment on a very personal basis. And I think I took some of my friends with me.
After his Washington testimony, many white Atlantans refused to speak to him, and Allen and his family were under police protection for a year, having received death threats.
Death threats were a serious matter in the South in 1963. The centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation saw the Southern practice of assassination run amok. In April, William Moore, a white ex-marine, now a Baltimore mail carrier, who planned to walk from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, to protest segregation, was killed by a sniper while resting on the side of an Alabama highway; in June, Medgar Evers was shot dead by a Mississippi sniper; in September, Addie Mae Collins, Carol Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Robertson were killed by the Birmingham church bombers; and in November, President John F. Kennedy was killed by an assassin’s bullet in Texas.
W. E. B. Du Bois, an iconic adopted son of Atlanta University, had died, aged ninety-five, in West Africa the day before the August 1963 March on Washington. It seems sad that Du Bois, in his despa
ir, could not have waited a little longer before giving up on America. In 1961, at the age of ninety-three, he had joined the Communist Party and moved to Ghana, where he died. If he had only seen the March on Washington before becoming a Communist and moving to Africa, he would have seen a movement that was both integrated and moral—led by students of all ages and clergy of all faiths. The civil rights movement recognized Du Bois as its founding father. At the same time, because of his age and African life, he was seen as somewhat detached. He had been born a free Yankee in western Massachusetts, in the beautiful Berkshires—a boy whom color did not touch until he went south. Because he went south, he chose to be a Negro instead of the American he had always felt himself to be in Massachusetts. Then in old age, he chose to become an African and a Communist. What does it say about Du Bois? It says he never found a home in America, although his family had lived in the same place since colonial days. It looked as if Du Bois rejected America—but maybe America rejected him because he was black and wrote the truth about racism. Indeed, maybe America broke his heart because, after all those generations, it looked in 1961 as if systemic racial injustice would never go away. Despite his titanic accomplishments, Du Bois may well have died in great sadness. The black left, whose leadership came from the middle class, was born in despair.
In 1964, forty-three-year-old Dr. Helen Nash, a black Calhoun and the first black woman to join the attending staff at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, married James Abernathy, with whom she shared a love of travel, boating, and dogs. Helen was another late but happy bride.
That year newspapers reported that the Atlanta Housing Authority had honored her grandfather by naming a senior citizen high-rise after him:
Atlanta honored a long deceased Colored citizen in this vein Monday morning by naming the latest housing project after him. The Antoine Graves project for senior citizens will bear the name of the man who apparently was first to conceive the need and possibility for planned residential neighborhoods for his race in this city, and did so much toward achieving that end that his memory will be preserved in a land mark that will stand for generations to come.
Antoine Graves died in March 23 years ago, at the age of 79, and has many grandchildren and great-grandchildren to toast his memory.
But more than this he apparently won the respect of powerful white leaders and businessmen in the earlier days of Atlanta while gaining just as great a reputation as a man proud of his race, and willing to struggle for the betterment of the people … Two of his daughters, Mrs. H.E. Nash, wife of a pioneer Atlanta physician, and Mrs. W.J. Arnold, whose husband is in real estate, live in the city.
Other black communities in America were not as peaceful as Atlanta. It was a summer of race riots: in Jacksonville, Florida; Dix-moor, Illinois; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Jersey City, Keansburg, and Paterson, New Jersey; and Rochester and Harlem, New York. There was a split in the NAACP after the summer rioting, when Roy Wilkins spoke of “criminal elements” in the riots. It is uncertain whether Wilkins was speaking of the real thing or just a “criminal”-style “homeboy” wardrobe. There was never any “criminal element” in the Southern protests, by the way—the “criminals” all came from Northern gangs.
Approximately 38 percent of Negroes of voting age in the South were registered to vote compared with 60 or 70 percent in the North. Some one thousand volunteers, white and black, were involved in the “Mississippi Summer” voter registration project. Young people poured into the South like nineteenth-century Missionary teachers—essentially to teach civics by establishing “Freedom Schools.” Mississippi’s civics lesson began with multiple murders: Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee in May; and James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in June. (Moore, Dee, and Chaney were black and Goodman and Schwerner were white.) Elsewhere, in July, Lieutenant Colonel Lemuel Penn, a black army officer driving home to Washington, D.C., after army reserve training at Fort Benning, was shot and killed by a sniper on a Georgia highway. The South was a war zone.
Curiously enough, while the streets of the South were erupting, the racial atmosphere between black and white men in the real war zone of Southeast Asia was described in this period as “sweetness and light.” The Vietnam War was the first war since the Revolution in which blacks and whites served together from the outset as equals under the American flag. There were really two Vietnams. Those who were there in the early 1960s, products of Eisenhower social moderation and Kennedy social justice, were mostly volunteers and full of patriotic idealism. Those who arrived in 1968 or later, after all the assassinations, were draftees whose thoughts on patriotism and the military were probably nihilistic.
On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated in Harlem. A few days later, attention turned again to the South. On February 26 Jimmie Lee Jackson of Marion, Alabama, just outside Selma, was shot and killed by a policeman whom Jackson had attacked when the policeman struck Jackson’s mother. Jackson’s death triggered the biggest civil rights demonstration since the March on Washington. It was also, sadly, one of the bloodiest. Dr. King and John Lewis of SNCC had decided at once that a march from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital, to protest Jackson’s murder and support voting rights would be a good outlet for community anger and grief. On March 7, before the unarmed marchers had even left Selma, the violent police assault on them at Pettus Bridge was captured by television cameras. The marchers were beaten back. But thousands more volunteers, black and white, recruited by TV images of horrendous police brutality, poured into Selma for the second march—which produced one of the most iconic civil rights images of all. Matt Herron’s great picture for Look magazine, shot from below, looking up to three young people in white shirts, two boys and a girl, leading the parade under a John Ford sky, followed by billowing Stars and Stripes, seems to be a meeting of the spirit of the civil rights movement and the Spirit of ‘76. But the brutality continued. By the time the Selma-to-Montgomery march was over, two more civil rights workers, both white, were dead. James Reeb, a Unitarian minister, was beaten to death on a Selma street, and Viola Liuzzo, a Catholic Michigan housewife, was shot by a sniper on the road outside Montgomery as she drove marchers from Selma to Montgomery.
“Don’t Tread on Me” read the posters of the National States Rights Party, three of whose members were indicted for the night rider assassination of Willie Brewster, a black worker in a pipe foundry in Anniston, Alabama, after a States Rights Party rally in July 1965. After thirteen hours of deliberation and twenty ballots, an all-white jury returned a second-degree murder conviction against one of the men, who was sentenced to ten years in prison. It was the first time in the civil rights era that a white person was convicted of killing a black person in Alabama. The verdict was a shock to black and white alike.
Elsewhere, Oneal Moore, a black deputy sheriff, was killed in June in Louisiana; August saw the Watts riot in Los Angeles. Also in August, in Lowndes County, Alabama, Richard Morrisroe, a Roman Catholic priest from Chicago, and Jonathan Daniels, an Episcopal seminarian studying in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were both shot. Morrisroe was wounded, but Daniels was killed at point-blank range by a deputy sheriff who claimed Daniels had pulled a knife on him. Morrisroe and Daniels had both responded to Dr. King’s call to clergy of all denomination to support the voting rights marchers. Daniels had decided to stay on after the march. When he arrived in Alabama, Daniels wrote: “I lost my fear in the black belt when I began to know in my bones and sinews that … in the only sense that really mattered I am already dead, and my life is hid with Christ in God.”
That same August Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, eliminating all qualifying tests for voter registration that abridged the right to vote on the basis of race or color. Calling on Congress to pass the bill, President Johnson had used evocative words: “[We] must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”
According to Tuskegee University data, between 1882 and 1968, the number of racially motivated mu
rders of black men and women in Georgia was second only to the number in Mississippi. Overall, in that same period 4,743 black persons were hanged, shot, or burned alive in the South. Those who “disappeared” were not counted.
This is not the end of the story, however. In 1981 Casey Cason returned to Atlanta and wrote a kind of epilogue of her experience:
Connie Curry and Julian Bond recommended me for a job in Atlanta, with the Southern Regional Council … The day I arrived to interview, John Lewis and Julian came by and we sat on Connie’s front porch to have a drink. I found myself breathing shallowly, feeling panicked. When I left the South we could not have appeared together publicly in a white neighborhood in this way. The next day Connie and I went to City Hall.
When I left Atlanta, the only nonwhites in City Hall would have been a janitor, kitchen help. Now almost everyone, both elected officials and employees, was black. These two events showed me that we had in fact defeated segregation … Then I went to work as administrative aide for the Department of Parks, Recreation and Cultural Affairs. I was with black folks again, in Mayor Andy Young’s Administration …
The Black Calhouns Page 31