28
Testing Freedom
PRESIDENT JOHNSON swore in General Maxwell Taylor as his new ambassador to South Vietnam about the time the Muslim paternity suits were filed in Los Angeles, but the national stage on July 2 belonged to the Congress, where resistance to the civil rights bill collapsed that morning. “In a few minutes you will vote on this montrous instrument of oppression upon all of the American people,” declared Representative Howard Smith as he yielded the floor effort to delay or amend the Senate-passed version. At 2:05 P.M., Majority Leader Carl Albert called into Johnson’s Cabinet meeting with word that “we are past the danger point” on final roll call. The President briefly channeled his excitement into the political debate of the moment, betting that Dwight Eisenhower would not support the longshot anti-Goldwater candidate, William Scranton. Then he excused himself to eat lemon cake at a seventeenth-birthday celebration for his daughter Luci, freeing the White House staff to make logistical preparations for him to sign the civil rights bill before dark.
Johnson had resolved not to wait the two days until July 4th. Rushing to strike a note of national relief before independence festivities, he entered the East Room of the White House at 6:45 P.M. to face television cameras and a host of dignitaries. Robert Kennedy sat next to Senator Everett Dirksen in the front row, near Lady Bird Johnson. Martin Luther King sat next to AFL-CIO president George Meany in the second row, in front of Secretary of State Dean Rusk and a few seats over from J. Edgar Hoover.
The President introduced the finished legislation before him as a legacy of the American Revolution. “One hundred and eighty-eight years ago this week a small band of valiant men began a long struggle for freedom,” he said, adding that the founding Americans “knew that freedom would be secure only if each generation fought to renew and enlarge its meaning. From the minutemen at Concord to the soldiers in Viet-Nam, each generation has been equal to that trust.” Alongside this war metaphor, Johnson claimed footing for the new civil rights law in the moral universe: “…those who are equal before God shall now also be equal in the polling booths, in the classrooms, in the factories, and in hotels, restaurants, movie theaters, and other places that provide service to the public.”
Johnson completed a brief national address—“My fellow citizens, we have come now to a time of testing. We must not fail. Let us close the springs of racial poison”—then used seventy-two ceremonial pens to sign H.R. 7152 into law. With his Justice Department officials and eight Negro leaders (including Rosa Parks and James Forman), Johnson withdrew to the Cabinet Room to argue for restraint in the uncertain new world of enforcement. The leaders resolved to curtail street demonstrations, calling them unnecessary and potentially “self-defeating” in the election year. Before the movement leaders emerged—solemn and yet giddy in triumph—the “time of testing” commenced outside. The owner of the Heart of Atlanta motel had filed suit within the hour, challenging as unconstitutional the fresh requirement that he accommodate Negro customers. Also in Atlanta, a diminutive restaurateur repulsed the first Negro arrivals at the Pickrick, his popular fried chicken house, in a public confrontation that made him instantly a symbol of white resistance. Lester Maddox would build himself into the next governor of Georgia as a peppery ingenue of segregation, maintaining then and later that his stand had nothing to do with racial hostility or caste.*
Most Southern politicians urged at least a grudging compliance. “As long as it is there, it must be obeyed,” declared Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, and Senator Allen Ellender of Louisiana announced that “the laws enacted by Congress must be respected.” Over the next several months, visible public separations broke down across the South in countless pioneer dramas—often mutually and meticulously prearranged to control discomforts on all sides. The generally peaceful sectional adjustment became a comforting theme of national news, seasoned by flamboyant exceptions like Lester Maddox and by apprehension over deeper applications of the law. Police in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, rescued Hollywood actor Jack Palance and his family from the local movie theater after a mob stormed the box office on a false rumor that Palance had escorted a Negro inside. Mississippi Governor Paul Johnson held a morose news conference on the night of July 2. Predicting that rapid enforcement of the new law “could cause a great deal of civil strife,” he advised the state’s business leaders not to obey it. The governor bristled when reporters asked about the three civil rights workers then missing eleven days from Neshoba County—“I have no reason to believe that these people have been killed”—and warned that the whole issue would bring “a very bad reaction against Lyndon Johnson.”
SNCC CHAIRMAN JOHN LEWIS arrived at summer project headquarters in Greenwood for the voter registration canvass on Friday, July 3, when jubilee optimism about the movement’s destiny caused one local woman to address the courthouse registrar Martha Lamb by her first name. (“Guess she will never pass until Mrs. Lamb is ousted,” a summer volunteer candidly wrote home.) In private, Lewis joined the staff debate over an unusually stern dictum from Bob Moses that the summer project would engage in no testing whatsoever of the new law. Against conventional assumptions and a tide of enthusiasm, Moses clung to movement policy that sit-ins for integrated hamburgers or library cards were not worth the cost of repression in a state inflamed already over the summer project’s very presence. White Greenwood mooted the most tempting target by closing public swimming pools for both races.
Dissenters grumbled that Moses was too cerebral in his relentless focus on long-range political work. Word reached Greenwood of rejoicing that the tough business owners of faraway St. Augustine, Florida, had voted unanimously to accept Negro customers. In Albany, Georgia, where King had cut losses in his desegregation campaign two years earlier, Rev. Samuel Wells blessed the first integrated meals all across town, in celebration unspoiled by a salted milkshake at the Krystal or even his own arrest at the suburban Victory Club restaurant. A blue-ribbon NAACP delegation from New York made national headlines by integrating two of Jackson, Mississippi’s, premier hotels—the Heidelburg and the King Edward.* For an SCLC conference in Birmingham, the city that had arrested him on the street fifteen months earlier, Martin Luther King with three dozen colleagues checked into a polite welcome at the Parliament House. “White folks act like they intend to do right by this Civil Rights Bill,” Andrew Young wrote in a burst of optimism.
In crisis meetings, young colleagues reminded Moses that SNCC owed its original allure in Mississippi to the direct action of the 1961 Freedom Riders, who had rolled into Parchman Penitentiary to take their beatings and abuse for integrated bus travel. Freedom Rider Stokely Carmichael felt torn between the fear-conquering bravado of demonstrations and his respect for Moses, who had appointed him project director for the Delta counties. Carmichael’s movement persona was built on carefree jests in the face of danger—“I don’t worry about a gun pointing at me unless the guy is shaking,” he quipped. “If he’s scared, I’m scared”—and he nearly wept to hear himself counseling volunteers for once to back down and postpone challenges to segregation in public places even now, with the new law behind them. To crestfallen faces, and worries that SNCC might lose its vanguard reputation, Carmichael could only argue at mass meetings that no Negro in Greenwood would dare go against segregation without the full and considered support of the local movement.
Silas McGhee was not there to hear Carmichael. A year out of high school, independent-minded at twenty-one, he agreed with the argument of his civics teacher that any civil rights law was superfluous to the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment. Still, having avoided the movement meetings, he walked on July 5 from his family farm in Browning three miles on foot to the downtown Crystal Grill, only to find it closed. Disappointed, he decided not to waste his solitary effort and walked instead to the Sunday matinee at the Leflore Theater.
Sight of him drove the nervous attendant to confer with the manager, who eventually resolved to sell McGhee a ticket. His presence in the darken
ed theater soon attracted hecklers, ear flickers, snack spillers, and hard brawlers before McGhee fled to refuge in the manager’s office. When he finally convinced hostile police officers that he was not part of a conspiracy, they took him home in a cruiser. His delivery by police brought together the McGhee family in alarm. To his brothers, who demanded to know why he had gone off alone, Silas replied, “Well, you wasn’t nowhere around when I decided to go. I just went.” To his mother, Laura, who wanted to know whether the trauma was worth it, he replied, “No, mother, I don’t even like [movie comedian] Jerry Lewis.” Although Silas McGhee was far from comfortable as a movement representative, his trip to the Leflore Theater made him such a word-of-mouth sensation in the Mississippi Delta that Aaron Henry invited him to address an NAACP function in Clarksdale by midweek. In Greenwood, Stokely Carmichael and Sam Block recruited the new celebrity. While praising his example, they discouraged such tests in accord with the summer project’s painful restraint.
JOHN LEWIS moved eastward to Selma, Alabama. Since the Freedom Day march the previous October, the small local movement there had operated clandestinely from fragile sanctuary provided by Father Maurice Ouellet’s Catholic mission. Literacy teachers, registration workers, and a few itinerant SNCC staff workers—successors to Bernard Lafayette—carefully avoided cross-racial contact or association with one another in public, and they solicited outside help with the utmost discretion. (“Would appreciate any mail in plain envelopes,” wrote director Mary Varela of the Selma Literacy Project to Andrew Young at SCLC.) On Saturday, July 4, four fresh literacy volunteers from Northern colleges, who had chosen Selma over Freedom Summer in Mississippi, broke free of established caution to celebrate the new civil rights law at the segregated Thirsty Boy Drive-In Restaurant. Sirens quickly converged, and Sheriff Jim Clark of Dallas County introduced himself with a cattle prod to the back of Silas Norman, brother of aspiring opera singer Jessye Norman.
With the four literacy workers hauled away to jail, their car impounded, sympathy crowds overflowed that afternoon from the Negro balconies to the white downstairs seats of Selma’s two movie theaters. This breach of segregation in turn prompted a rallying alarm among whites (“There’s niggers in the Wilby!”), and Sheriff Clark closed both theaters after chasing the Negroes outside. When the commotion generated a packed church for a Sunday night mass meeting at the AME Zion Hall, a posse of fifty special deputies invaded behind tear gas and billy clubs to disperse what Sheriff Clark called a riot. It was then that John Lewis arrived.
On Monday morning, July 6, Lewis led seventy aspiring voters to the courthouse on a designated day for registration. Sheriff Clark’s deputies herded them into a back alley out of sight, chased off reporters and twenty marchers who changed their minds, then placed Lewis and fifty holdouts under arrest. “The Negroes were marched five blocks to jail,” reported the New York Times. “Repeatedly jolted by the cattle prods, they responded with ‘freedom songs.’” Rev. Ralph Abernathy drove down from the Birmingham SCLC conference on Tuesday to pledge Martin Luther King’s full support at what would be the last mass meeting in Selma for nearly six months. On a complaint signed by Sheriff Clark, Judge James A. Hare issued an injunction banning any “assembly of three persons or more in a public place” under the sponsorship of SNCC, SCLC, or any of forty-one specified movement leaders including John Lewis, Amelia Boynton, Rev. L. L. Anderson, Mary Varela, Silas Norman, and literacy teacher Marie Foster. The movement’s brief spurt of visible optimism fell back beneath unbroken segregation. “New Law Hoax, Fraud, Says Governor Wallace,” declared Selma’s leading newspaper, which highlighted Wallace’s new rhetorical theme that “liberalism is destroying democracy in the United States.”
From Boston, Harold DeWolf wrote Martin Luther King on July 3 that he had stopped off to lobby the White House staff on his way home. He found that Lee White and other Johnson aides were working to develop the biracial committee for St. Augustine regardless of its beginnings as a trick, and he saw the positive adaptation of local business as a sign that “one of the main objectives of the whole freedom movement in St. Augustine seems mostly accomplished.” Back in Florida, however, the opposition took the initiative to spoil any afterglow about the new law. The St. Augustine Klan marched on the night of July 4, and the next day, unsatisfied after chasing away what few Negroes approached restaurants, one squad of segregationists ambushed families fishing off a bridge on Sunday afternoon—lashing a group of six with bicycle chains, cutting one young man badly enough to require forty stitches in his back, then lurching toward another who jumped to safety in Matanzas Bay. Not until Thursday did testers dare to appear downtown, and when James Brock kept his word to serve them, Hoss Manucy threw up picket lines outside the Monson Motor Lodge with Confederate flags and signs reading, “Niggers Ate Here.” Within a week, Lee White advised President Johnson that most of the complying businesses in St. Augustine had resegregated, “claiming that they were afraid.”
DOWN IN HATTIESBURG, Lawrence Guyot devised a unique way of emphasizing that the Freedom Summer projects should stick to themselves and leave segregated public places alone: a festive 4th of July picnic. After noon that Saturday (because Vernon Dahmer still demanded a full morning’s work on holidays), the entire four hundred acres of Dahmer’s farm became party ground for nearly two hundred movement workers, including the last few Freedom School teachers off the bus from a training course in Memphis. Northern volunteers who came steeped in mental preparation for terror and destitution walked instead into a celebration of fellowship—hayrides, games, music, a massive fish fry, and watermelons so abundant that Mississippians simply cracked them open to scoop out the sweet red meat with their hands. Some newcomers pitched in with joyful relief, while others hung back. Stanley Zibulsky of New York assumed his host Vernon Dahmer was a white man before learning otherwise, which scrambled his indoctrination about what was safe in Mississippi. Shaking hands, picking cautiously at what to him was a strange new fried fish called mullet, he stared blankly at the day’s one incident of panic among movement veterans, when daredevil SNCC worker Doug Harris drove the hayride tractor outside the invisible refuge line of Dahmer property. Zibulsky slept on Victoria Gray’s floor for his first night in Mississippi, eyeing a nearby sentry with a shotgun, so locked in fear that his bowels refused to move for the next thirteen days.
Hattiesburg’s Freedom Schools, planned for about one hundred teenagers, overflowed on Monday with more than six hundred students ranging in age from eight to eighty-two, partly on the success of Victoria Gray’s prior recruitments for Septima Clark’s SCLC citizenship schools. The rush confounded the nervous summer volunteers, many of whom were classroom teachers experienced in traditional instruction. One of them wondered how to teach movement history when not a single student had heard of the Brown decision. Richard Kelly of Chicago and Paula Pace, daughter of Truman’s Secretary of the Army, scrambled to keep ahead of their own assigned readings on African history. A course in basic civics faltered when the word “mayor” was understood as “mare,” and the youngest students of a Jewish volunteer would not listen until they could feel his head for the devil’s horns that their preacher had assured them lay under his yarmulke.
The question, “Where do roads come from?”—which was meant to introduce the practicalities of citizenship and voting—evoked instead a one-word answer, “God,” and then a lengthy detour through theology. Discussion on any subject broke down walls, however, and some teachers abandoned lectures for song, theater, testimonial, and debate. One class used a Volkswagen bus to simulate tests of a white-only restaurant, with improvisations followed by critiques about how realistically Negro boys could play police officers, or whether personal trust in the summer volunteers was stable enough for them to play “roles” as segregationists. Meeting outdoors in the summer heat, other teachers rigged up a phonograph to play recitations of poetry by Countee Cullen, Margaret Walker, and Langston Hughes, which stimulated an outpouring of commentary and spontaneous
verse. Volunteer Barrington Parker III, the austere son of a pioneer Negro judge, broke down in tribute to the untrained folk poets in his class, saying their expression “has so much more depth than what passes for culture in our society.”
Menacing cars occasionally glided by the five Hattiesburg Freedom Schools, and there were daily reports of incidents. In Moss Point, sixty miles to the southeast on the Gulf coast, Lawrence Guyot was addressing a voter registration rally on opening Monday, July 6, when shots rang out and young Jessie Mae Stallworth fell wounded by a sniper. (“I saw a woman lying on the ground clutching her stomach,” wrote a summer volunteer. “She was so still and looked like a statue with a tranquil smile on her face.”) Some sixty miles west of Hattiesburg, eight specially trained volunteers established the first movement presence in McComb since the Herbert Lee murder of 1961,* and night riders bombed the group Freedom House on the night of July 8, knocking project leader Curtis Hayes unconscious and leaving Stanford volunteer Dennis Sweeney with a concussion. That same Wednesday in Hattiesburg, sheriff’s deputies arrested Rev. Robert Beech on a technical charge that one of his small personal checks, though good for payment, had been “uncovered” briefly during its clearing process.
Pillar of Fire Page 56