Barbara had spent a lot of time in the South, handling a variety of cases. There were a few racially charged criminal trials and lots of work with our Southern branches. In her early thirties, Barbara was an attractive, self-assured black woman with straight black hair. She seemed to have a read on everyone. Her looks, dress, and manner were consistent with somebody who had gone to the right schools and hung out in the right places. She thrived in a way I thought would be impossible for a black woman in the South. Even in the North, however, segregation was the quiet rule, and powerful women, black or white, were the exception.
Barbara had clocked the requisite hours driving the back roads of the South in search of witnesses, and she’d done hard time in courtrooms where the locals bridled at the presence of a strong-willed black woman. That she had a bully pulpit—or at least the wherewithal to speak forcefully to white men in the Deep South—was almost unthinkable. Often she was in mortal danger. In a word, Barbara had serious grit. She also had a sense of style. I was drawn in by the easy way she told terrifying stories about her travels through Jim Crow territory, among them being followed on deserted highways as she drove between towns looking for witnesses.
“I tell you…,” she would say with a chuckle.
Barbara knew I was anxious about working in the South. But I had to go. That was the way it was. Civil rights lawyers had to go where the cases were, and they were generally not in places with a lot of racial harmony. I remember wondering if maybe Barbara felt that white Movement lawyers had a little more to prove than their black counterparts. The reality, however, was more complicated. Sure, I needed to pay my dues. But I had something to prove that was much deeper than anything that was going on between Barbara and me. In the summer of 1964 a civil rights attorney would have to be fundamentally unbalanced not to be nervous about heading South—especially for the first time. It was a dangerous place to challenge a centuries-old racial caste system. Less than a year had passed since Medgar Evers—an NAACP field secretary at the time—was assassinated in Jackson, Mississippi. He had pulled into his driveway after picking up new T-shirts emblazoned with the legend Jim Crow Must Go, when a bullet from an Enfield M1917 rifle hit him in the back. He didn’t die right away. Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and member of the White Citizens’ Council and the Ku Klux Klan, was arrested eventually, but he got some “good ol’ boy” treatment and walked away from criminal charges until—nearly three decades later—the times bad changed sufficiently that he was prosecuted and put away for good.
Compounding the feeling that I was heading toward a place where I could get killed, three young civil rights volunteers disappeared in Mississippi right before I was sent to Baton Rouge. The disappearance of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney gripped the nation and was the lead story on all the nightly news programs. The three activists went missing in Neshoba County not long after Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price stopped their blue station wagon on bogus speeding charges. Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan splinter group White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, had issued an order to kill Michael Schwerner in particular. That conspiracy was the reason Price had the car’s plate numbers in advance. He arrested all three. And then the plan to kill them was put into play. Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were released on their own recognizance in the middle of the night in a county considered among the more dangerous ones for civil rights workers. Forty-four days later their bodies were found in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi.
* * *
Six years before going to Baton Rouge, I had visited New Orleans on my way to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio for officer training. I had signed up for the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program when I was a sophomore at Harvard. If there was another war like Korea, which had just ended, and there was still a draft, I didn’t want to be a private.
That said, the ROTC program was no cakewalk. I had developed an attitude problem. Trouble started after the appearance of a snarky article that I wrote for the Harvard Crimson. Col. Trevor N. Dupuy, professor of military science and tactics, took issue with my view that the ROTC was more tolerated than admired at Harvard. As Dupuy soured on me, so I soured on the program. But I stuck with it and at graduation was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army Reserves, assigned to the Medical Service Corps.
To begin my active-duty assignment, my dad suggested a road trip—a sort of ritual of the soon-to-be empty nest. Grandma Bessie had given me a shiny new blue Plymouth convertible for graduation, so the drive seemed like a good way to check it out. We would travel down the East Coast to Jacksonville, Florida, where my dad owned a movie theater called the St. John’s that was managed by my mother’s brother. I didn’t give it a thought at the time, but Jacksonville being in the Deep South, the theater must have been segregated.
My dad loved to drive, and we had a good time following the coastal roads, chatting about nothing much. He wasn’t big on fatherly advice or philosophical ruminations, and there was very little if any drama in his emotional makeup. Life didn’t seem to trouble him much. He appeared to be content. I was not. I remember there was no talk about the future—his or mine—which seemed a little odd to me. I was going off to the army for a six-month stint, and that was it. When it was over he and my mother might be home or they might be on one of their many trips to see the world. We didn’t have much in the way of missing one another. I think he saw me as a difficult son and never quite knew how to open up to me. Maybe he wanted to strengthen whatever father-son bond we had before it slipped away. Whatever. We enjoyed each other’s company on the ride down. It felt good being with my father, all by ourselves for a few days, talking about nothing much, eating at the Howard Johnson’s along the highways, looking at the scenery out the car windows.
I was nervous about reporting for active duty, but I kept that to myself. The Medical Service Corps was a little scary. I knew nothing about military medicine. We were not taught about the wounds of war at Culver or at Harvard, and I had taken no science courses there. I saw no blood or broken bones when I directed The Consul for the Harvard Opera Guild. Commanding had never been my thing, discussion and persuasion being more my approach to getting things done. Even as a cadet officer at Culver, I had avoided bossing the plebes around. Perhaps that had something to do with feeling like an outsider myself. For sure, I’d never barked orders to carry a stretcher or drive an ambulance or anything else. Others in the ROTC program seemed to like the idea of command, while I had come to look at authority with a skeptical eye. But I was not about to talk about my concerns with my dad.
The overnight stay in Jacksonville was uneventful. We had dinner with my uncle Shel and aunt Harriet at their lovely home on the St. John’s River. A black maid served us. She smiled and treated me as if I were a young master. I smiled the way a regular person would—not a master—and tried to act as if she were a real person—not a servant. But I was a master, and she treated me the way I supposed she might any other white man—that big smile meant to hide true feelings. I had traded that kind of smile at the homes of friends and relatives more times than I could count, but I felt the conflict. Later I would learn that Florida led the country in lynchings and had a long history of whites torching black areas. I knew much less then, but I was still self-conscious when it came to my relationship with black people who served in white homes. I wanted warmth and attention, which I got from Bill and Lorraina, and hoped to keep that by signaling that I was their friend and, despite my preppy clothes, not on the way to becoming a white master.
The next morning I drove west toward the Gulf Coast and New Orleans. Alone, I started to feel apprehensive. I was in the Deep South, a young Jewish kid, driving a shiny new car with New York plates. Northern Jews weren’t exactly welcome down South, especially outside a few big cities. I could sense the hostility on those lonely roads, especially toward the likes of me with my curly black hair and my horn-rimmed glasses. I was hyperaware that I didn’t look like “them.” W
hites down there were pretty sure the North was once again trying to impose its views on the South, but the first attempts at integration associated with the civil rights movement had not rippled out to the small towns I was driving through—gas stations still had their Whites Only signs on restrooms. Restaurants didn’t need any signs to let folks passing by know who was welcome and who was not. In fact it didn’t seem that signs were necessary anywhere. Looking in car windows in the towns I passed through, I saw only whites.
I remember wondering where the blacks were—where they lived, where they worked, and—more important to me—I wondered how Bill felt when he was down here. He had to be completely on edge if I felt the way I did. It was better when my father was in the car with me. “They” would be far less likely to hassle him. He seemed more like one of them. Alone, I kept the top up and drove carefully.
I stopped off in New Orleans, where a friend from Culver met me. I let him take the wheel of my snappy new car. Speeding through the center of town, we were stopped by the police. But my friend, who was related to former governor Huey Long, hardly blinked an eye. Like magic, the cops tipped their hats and let us go. It was quite different from the experience I would have a few months later at that integrated dance outside Fort Sam Houston, where I stupidly remarked on the size of a cop’s flashlight and he punched me in the face before dumping me in a paddy wagon and depositing me in the local lockup with an assortment of drunks and whoever else they picked up that night. With the traffic stop behind us, my Culver pal whisked me off to check out a nightclub featuring drag queens doing some crazy dance numbers. We listened to jazz on Bourbon Street, and we ate crabs on a pier on Lake Pontchartrain. That was New Orleans, my friend said. There was another New Orleans—the Ninth Ward and many other impoverished areas—but it was invisible to me.
Prior to Barbara telling me that I had to go down South sooner or later, these were my only experiences of that part of the world.
* * *
In 1964 Baton Rouge was under the thumb of a racial reactionary and a tough-talking backroom boss named Leander Perez. The local NAACP’s first target in its campaign to crack the policy of total segregation was the state capitol’s cafeteria. But the branch’s efforts had stalled under the watchful eyes and nightsticks of a thuggish ring of state troopers.
It was a time when public officials at all levels, from governor right down to local sheriffs, were in open defiance of the law of the land. The Supreme Court had ruled that the Constitution prohibited segregation in any public facility. The law was routinely being flouted. I was not going to Baton Rouge to push a new or complex legal theory. The legal precedent had already been set. Instead I was going there to show the Louisiana NAACP leadership that my boss, Robert Carter, had a growing legal staff that could help them.
Two black men dressed in business suits met me at the airport. They were officers from the local chapter of the NAACP. We shook hands and headed for the parking lot.
“Your door lights are broken,” I told them as we drove off the parking lot into the darkness.
The man driving looked puzzled for a moment, as if he were processing my ignorance about Movement work in the South.
“They’ve been disconnected,” he told me.
We stopped outside a small blacks-only motel. The lightless street was deserted and silent.
“It’s getting late,” the other man said. “We’ll have plenty of time to talk in the morning.”
Alone in that bare-bones room, I was scared. I wondered if we had been followed. Why had they abandoned me there? It felt as if I had been left to fend for myself, and all I could think about was the disappearance of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman. I pushed the dresser against the door of my tin-roofed cell. I looked around at the motel room the way an intruder would see it, and decided to put a pillow where my head would be if I were sleeping in the bed. Then I wrapped myself in a sheet and lay down on the floor between the beds. Every bug landing on that tin roof set my teeth on edge. I was terrified. I lay there watching the shadows for the slightest change, and the raking light from passing cars move across the ceiling and down the wall. I barely managed to control my fear. Somewhere “out there” nameless, faceless people wanted to kill me, and there was no one to protect me. The colleagues I came to help had left me, a Jew from New York City, in a black motel to get snatched by the Ku Klux Klan and killed in some godforsaken swamp. I was the one who needed help. I felt like a sacrificial lamb and a lost soldier sleepwalking in someone else’s war. Every time I willed my eyes closed, some sound or another—simple creaks, the tin roof moving in the wind, or a car going by—made my eyes pop open again. Then it was morning.
The local NAACP guys who had dropped me off at the motel brought me to the capitol and showed me the “Closed” sign on the cafeteria door. We walked over to the federal courthouse, and I filed a civil rights complaint with the clerk. The idea was to get an immediate hearing. We were in luck. The judge was available, and so was an assistant Louisiana attorney general.
I don’t remember the judge’s name, but he was famously unfriendly to interference from Yankees like me, especially when it came to race issues.
We greeted each other cordially.
“What’s this case about?” he drawled.
As I started to explain that Negroes had a constitutional right to eat in the statehouse cafeteria, the judge looked at my colleagues from the local NAACP and then back at me.
“Down here we call them Nigras,” he said. Then he swiveled back to me with a smile and added, “No offense intended.”
He looked pleased with himself.
I glanced over at my associates. Their faces were frozen. I turned back to look at the judge. A part of me thought he wouldn’t have said that to a non-Jew, and all the hurt of being called a “kike” washed over me. The anti-Semitism I experienced at Culver was long gone, but the way it flashed through my mind when he said “Nigra” was as if it were happening all over again. That said, this was no cadet I could wrestle to the floor. I couldn’t demand he take it back. This was a federal judge appointed to the bench for life by the president of the United States. None of my preparation was any good. It didn’t matter that I’d been warned he was a race baiter—one of several openly racist federal judges whom President Kennedy appointed to appease the South. He was testing me.
With Bob’s indomitable approach to racists playing in the back of my mind, I let instinct guide me: “My clients are called Negroes,” I said.
“The court is adjourned.”
That was the reply. Without another word the judge disappeared through a courtroom door. I stood speechless.
“What happens now?” I asked the clerk.
He flashed a smile at me.
“Court’s over,” the clerk said. “You can go now.”
Alone at my table in the courtroom, I wondered if I had done the right thing. We had made no progress, and the judge was gone. I walked back to my clients, worried about their reaction. To my relief, they were pleased.
“You did fine,” they told me, laughing about the way the judge had fled his bench.
I called Bob in New York to tell him what happened and to ask for instructions.
“You’ve done enough,” Carter replied. “Come on home.”
Catching an afternoon plane back to New Orleans, I made a late flight to New York. A few days later the bodies of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney were found buried in the Bogue Chitto Swamp. I was horror-stuck as I watched the television coverage. Goodman and Schwerner were young Jewish men like me. Chaney was black. The fear I had experienced in that motel room bubbled to the surface as I saw the evening news. If these men could be brutally murdered and buried in a muddy grave, so could I. Oddly, however, there was something about my one day in the South and these killings that made me want to go on more than ever. I sensed that this was what things looked like when a dying part of society ran scared. Just as the federal judge in Baton Rouge thought he could put a
halt to the changing status of African Americans by abandoning his own courtroom, those racists in Mississippi thought they could kill two Jews and a black man without fear of punishment. In fact the killers considered themselves public-spirited citizens fighting the “good fight” to protect their communities from an alien invasion. The South was a place where the murder of a black man was on a lesser level than the destruction of property. Lynching was carried out in public, sometimes with the full participation of law enforcement, and those “public-spirited” communitarians made no bones about what would happen if anyone snitched to the Feds about the parties responsible. For civil rights workers, the killings served as a warning that the South’s rural back roads were dangerous, and for me that meant trying to stay out of harm’s way as far as possible. But even so, I felt a determination growing inside me to go wherever I was sent and do my work no matter the consequences.
The deaths of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner marked a change in me. That was the moment in time when I became a more dedicated part of the Movement, rather than an isolated individual left to sink or swim on my own. That was when I felt like a part of something huge and important. That sleepless night in the motel had been a test. It was the last time I would doubt my peers or the situations I found myself in with them. Letting me fend for myself for a few hours in that motel in the Negro part of town offered me a fleeting sense of what my black counterparts in the Movement did every instant of their lives. It was an object lesson about why putting me up in one of their homes carried unacceptable risk for them and for their families—as well as for me. That night in the motel taught me the most important lesson a person can get: that I had a lot to learn.
As much as I wanted to face that judge again, there was no return to Baton Rouge. The motel where I stayed was burned to the ground later that summer. The lawsuit I filed to integrate the capitol cafeteria languished. A local NAACP attorney worked on it until the following year, when the cafeteria was quietly reopened to white and black people, and the lawsuit was dropped.
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