I returned to New York City feeling despondent, disappointed by McCarthy’s inability to connect with black America. Also, the McCarthy campaign rejected my proposal to hire black staffers on the grounds that the staff was there on a volunteer basis. “We can’t treat whites and blacks differently,” one of the campaign higher-ups said, trying to appease me. It had zero effect on my thinking. I could afford the luxury of volunteering, and I knew from my work at the NAACP that very few black people were in a position to do that.
On balance, however, even with blacks working on his campaign, I viewed Kennedy as an opportunist. In his speeches he said little of importance about race issues, and when he did talk about race it was as a stepping-stone to something else. As for Humphrey, I was disgusted by his continued support of Johnson’s war.
With no black leader able to pick up Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, mantle, I was not alone in thinking that the nation was drifting toward chaos and bloodshed.
As I faced the reality that spread out before me, I began reflecting on my experiences at the NAACP. It had become clear that the Supreme Court would not open more doors to black Americans. Just as Wilkins wanted to stay out of war politics, most of the Supreme Court justices—as well as lower-court judges—wanted to steer clear of the politics and social realities that allowed segregation to exist on a massive scale in Southern and Northern cities and schools. At the edges, here and there, a few judges from time to time challenged segregation’s impact, but I sensed that the judiciary as a whole would uphold the established order. The Supreme Court justices had delivered a knockout blow to openly racist laws and opened the way to the passage of the far-reaching 1960s civil rights laws, which it upheld when challenged in court. But the Supreme Court turned its back on more subtle forms of racism and in my view would continue to do so at least until the pressure for change built up again. Someone had to pierce the thick hide of the Supreme Court’s intransigence, and sound the alarm about the recidivism that was under way. And I was young and sufficiently filled with myself to think I could do that. So I began to write a critical analysis of the Supreme Court’s decisions in race-related cases. A few weeks later I was finishing what would be the first draft when McCarthy campaign staffers got in touch and asked me to come to Los Angeles to help with the California primary. I was skeptical, but Bobby Kennedy’s campaign was still cautious on civil rights issues, and there was new energy in the McCarthy camp. I liked his continued call for nonmilitary projects for defense contractors that were designed to help create minority-friendly policies. The campaign even had a plan for low-income housing projects in the suburbs, which would allow job seekers—including blacks—to live where the job opportunities were. Compared with Kennedy, who was relying on emotion and his network of black support, McCarthy’s campaign had more substance, even though it was still a virtually all-white operation. Again in Los Angeles, I was the white guy working with our limited black support. At campaign headquarters, however, we expected that our black support would be minimal. I felt like an odd man out. But I figured that one way or the other, either McCarthy or Kennedy had to beat Humphrey for the Democratic nomination if we were going to end the war.
On the night of the primary Kitty and I watched the returns upstairs in the headquarters hotel. McCarthy was losing by a few percentage points, and the ballot count was winding down. From our perspective that was good news. Kennedy had threatened to withdraw from the race if he lost in California, but he was needed to neutralize Humphrey. The hope was that Kennedy and McCarthy together could prevent Humphrey from winning the nomination on the first ballot. If that happened, there was a chance that the Democratic Party might see the wisdom in choosing McCarthy, who was not as polarizing as the other two candidates. Perhaps he could heal the party, and provide a midcourse correction for the nation.
Then that fantasy exploded. On television, in front of our eyes, Robert F. Kennedy was shot. We stared at the screens in disbelief. Some of us cried. Some held each other silently. As minutes turned to hours and what had happened became clearer, we shuffled off into the night. Kennedy was not our candidate, but emotionally he had reached us. It wasn’t too hard to forgive him for holding back from the real politics we thought would make a difference. As Kennedy died, I felt that part of my life was draining away with his. The McCarthy campaign was suspended. Kitty and I returned to New York. Over the next few days I watched the gathering of the pained and powerful on television. It felt as if I were in a trance. Familiar faces flickered on and off the screen. Their words seemed unreal. A second Kennedy’s death, following King’s assassination, was incomprehensible. But there it was.
Still on leave from the NAACP, I initially had nothing to do upon my return to New York. Gene McCarthy seemed like a shadow of himself, withdrawn and keeping his own counsel. The war in Vietnam continued. There were more protests. The Black Panthers were on the rise. I could relate to their armed militancy, but could not envision their liberating black America. Eventually the white legislatures and police would put down this openly armed show of power, I believed. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, the clown princes of the youth rebellion, articulated my outrage, but I was removed from that scene with its drugs and pranks. White America was watching from the sidelines, and the NAACP seemed hobbled by Roy Wilkins and his narrow vision.
I went back to work on my first draft of the Supreme Court article. The more alone I felt, the stronger my prose became. School segregation was my first target; I attacked the Court for allowing it to fester in the North and the South alike. Other sections accused the Court of turning its back on peaceful civil rights demonstrators arrested by repressive police, and refusing to hear cases in which local officials had used federal urban renewal War on Poverty funds to engage in “Negro removal.” The Court had retreated into conservatism, I charged, and would remain an obstacle to racial progress until a strong broad-based social movement emerged to demand equality.
Bob reviewed my drafts and encouraged me. In July, still on leave, I hosted with Herb Reid, a renowned Howard law professor and close friend of Bob’s, a get-together for Senator McCarthy and NAACP delegates at the association’s national convention in Atlantic City. In our hotel’s presidential suite, Herb and I were delighted when scores of delegates—and of course Bob Carter—showed up to meet McCarthy.
We heard that Wilkins was not pleased.
* * *
In August I went to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago to participate in McCarthy’s final futile struggle. There I witnessed Mayor Daley’s slap across the face of an already horrific year, as his Chicago police and the National Guard crushed the rising tide of young Americans who flooded Grant Park and the streets to protest the war and the sure-thing nomination of Daley’s candidate, Hubert Humphrey.
I left Chicago shaken and feeling cowardly for watching from the sidelines. As soon as I got back to New York from Chicago, I returned to the NAACP. While I worked on finishing up the Supreme Court article, I got back to my waiting cases. Besides the low hum of opposition between the young Turks and the old guard on the board, little had changed in the universe of the NAACP. The legal department was the same. But for me everything was different. King was dead, and his philosophy of nonviolence was dying as well. Angry voices rose from every quarter.
In Gary, Indiana, Cleveland and Cincinnati, South Bend and Kokomo, and many other small and midsize cities all around the United States, public school integration had remained a crucial and yet unattained goal throughout the 1960s. In large cities, however, the way community leaders approached school integration began to change radically. The war certainly had something to do with it. The disproportionate number of black men who were being conscripted only to reappear in body bags highlighted how little things had changed.
The Movement’s younger leaders started chanting “Black Power,” and the result was predictable. Whites were scared, and Roy Wilkins voiced his opposition. As even the most liberal whites began to be forced out of, or to pu
ll back from, active participation in the more confrontational groups such as SNCC under the leadership of its new chairs, Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, the struggle for racial equality took on a no-more-turn-the-other-cheek tone. In New York City the most visible conflict was over community control of the schools, as efforts to desegregate the schools had gone nowhere and the schools were miserably failing the children in nonwhite neighborhoods.
The effort to gain control of the public schools was a natural outgrowth of the lack of action by the highly centralized board of education. After years of promising the black community that it would devise a plan to integrate the city’s schools, the board of education instead began a building program in predominantly black and Latino areas that would lock the children into their ghetto neighborhoods. As the building program went forward, administrators abandoned even the pretense that whites would attend these schools, and made no bones about the fact that it was designing these buildings especially for the local ghetto children. In East Harlem the construction of a windowless school as part of a new intermediate school complex called IS 201 particularly inflamed local residents and the local NAACP branch. When accused of creating a prisonlike structure for minority children, school administrators replied tersely that it was a sensible solution to avoid the constant repair of broken windows.
In response to pressure, the state legislature in 1968 passed a decentralization law that set up experimental boards in East Harlem and the mostly black Ocean Hill–Brownsville section of Brooklyn, as well as the relatively integrated Two Bridges section of Lower Manhattan. Under the new law, locally elected governing boards took over many of the central board’s functions for the day-to-day management of certain schools, including IS 201, as well as for the elementary schools from which they drew their student bodies.
Both the IS 201 and Ocean Hill–Brownsville community boards and their newly hired administrators quickly moved to rid their schools of teachers they believed had little interest in teaching their children. In doing so they followed the logic of Dr. Kenneth Clark, who had been the influential expert in the 1954 Brown case. In his book Dark Ghetto, Clark emphasized that one of the main reasons why ghetto children did so poorly was that too often the middle-class administrators and teachers who taught them held the opinion that they could not learn.
When the new community boards tried to transfer ineffectual teachers out of their schools, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) resisted, denouncing the move as a breach of the union’s contract and claiming that the move was racism against whites. Even after the community boards pointed to the many white teachers they had kept, the claims of racism mounted. Accusations of anti-Semitism also filled the air, as many white teachers were Jews. Nor did their young, enthusiastic replacements, many of whom were also Jews, quiet the charges.
Calling a strike, UFT president Albert Shanker closed down the system with the exception of the three experimental school districts. After two months the central board capitulated and ordered the community boards to take the “underperforming” teachers back. When the boards, with strong parental support, refused, the central board obtained court orders prohibiting further opposition, and forced the matter. A massive police presence both inside and outside the schools enforced the central board’s edicts. If parents entered the school, they were subject to arrest.
NAACP branches in Harlem and Brooklyn asked Bob to send lawyers to defend the local leadership, and he assigned the job to me. But the state court judges who heard our cases were in no mood to listen to anything our side had to say. Despite my requests for hearings, one judge after another refused to allow the local community boards to call witnesses in defense of their position regarding the staff they had dismissed from their schools. To many in the black communities, and to me as well, it was a classic example of white man’s justice.
Meanwhile, in September, I finished the Supreme Court article, and it was accepted for publication in the New York Times Magazine. I was ecstatic. Tormented by the indifference of judges and overwhelmed by my own feelings of ineffectiveness, I was now about to unleash a thunderbolt at the myth that the judiciary—especially the Warren Court—had remained a great liberal bastion and a patron of black advancement.
Bob was pleased. When the advance copy arrived from the Times, set in type and ready to go, he made arrangements with Henry Moon to run off thousands of copies of my article so that he could publicize the militancy of his legal staff.
On Sunday, October 13, 1968, the New York Times Magazine published my article. The editors titled it “Nine Men in Black Who Think White.” The title worried me a little, because they had lumped Thurgood Marshall with the other justices, and I assumed that might anger him. But it certainly was eye-catching.
The next day I went to work proud as a peacock. Bob met me for lunch, after returning from court where he had defended a group of black Columbia University students arrested during an antiwar sit-in. He left to go to a NAACP semiannual board of directors meeting at the Hilton Hotel, and I returned to the office.
There was a note on my chair when I arrived. It was from a colleague, and it said I had been fired for writing the Times article. I thought it was a joke. Then Bob called.
“I know you’re not going to believe this,” he said, “but the board fired you.
“Don’t worry,” Bob reassured me. “I’ll get them to reconsider and this foolishness will blow over.”
But I was worried. According to the NAACP press release, the board disavowed my article because I had attacked the Supreme Court, which had done so much for the civil rights movement.
I was stunned. For more than an hour, I hung out with the rest of the legal staff, laughing at their kidding, but feeling like the world was upside down. Sure I had supported Gene McCarthy, but I had played by the rules and taken a leave of absence, which was more than could be said for some of the NAACP bigwigs who had openly supported Humphrey while they continued to work. Then Bob called to say that he tried to have the board reconsider, but it refused to budge. “Just stay put,” he told me.
Waiting for him to return, I was filled with anxiety. The NAACP had become my home, but now it was alien territory. Until a few hours ago, as a staff attorney, I could fight for racial justice and confront my own personal demons at the same time. Now the NAACP was cutting me off and setting me adrift.
By discarding me so quickly, the NAACP leadership was telling me that no matter how hard I worked and no matter what I had achieved, I would always be a marginal person, an outsider, not “one of them.” On one level I understood that just as white people had used and discarded black people all the time, so I was being tossed aside. But on an emotional level I was deeply wounded. I had given the NAACP my all.
Working for the NAACP, I had distanced myself on a deep psychological level from my own white world. Now I was being told to leave this sheltered place for reasons that were unclear to me.
* * *
Calling Kitty to tell her the news was difficult. When she asked how they could do that to me, I shrugged and said I didn’t know why they had treated me so harshly. Back in the office, Bob was furious. The attack on me was the NAACP leadership’s way of trying to control him, he explained. To fire me without consulting him first was an affront to his authority. Our staff who had gathered in Bob’s office agreed that Wilkins and his supporters had used my article to weaken Bob for being too close with the more militant board members, the young Turks.
“I don’t have to approve what my staff members write,” Bob declared, “but everyone in the association knows I liked your article, and they know I hold you in high regard.”
Listening to Bob, I felt even more conflicted. This fight about the direction and leadership of the NAACP had been brewing for a long time. It had been easier to attack me because I was white, but their target was a black man who had achieved so much and was the best civil rights lawyer in the country.
“You’ve done enough for them” was a common and pr
ofoundly discomfiting refrain I heard from acquaintances and family when they heard what happened. Others told me to get on with my life: Get another job, move on. Kitty, however, was my rock, and her support was a lifeline.
As for the article, some scolded me for it. Jack Greenberg wrote a highly critical letter to the New York Times Magazine in which he defended the Supreme Court and said I didn’t understand how the law developed. When Bob read Jack’s letter, he said it only showed how conservative Greenberg was. But to many in the legal profession the article marked me as a radical.
A few days later Bob told me that his friends and supporters wanted to use my termination as a way to challenge the leadership. “Do you want to stay?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied, unsure of my own feelings, but convinced that was the answer he wanted to hear.
“Well, just act like nothing has changed,” he said. “Go back to work, and we will see what happens.”
Back in the office, Deputy Executive Director John Morsell dropped by. “Don’t take it personally,” he said. “You’ve done a good job, and everyone likes you. You are welcome to stay as long as it takes you to make arrangements for other attorneys to handle your case. There is no rush.”
That made me feel even more disoriented.
A few weeks passed. I continued working, and there had been plenty of discussion and internal politicking, but I was still fired. Bob and the rest of the legal staff announced that they would resign unless I was reinstated. The issues, they said at a press conference, involved both freedom of speech and due process, two rights that the association had long fought to uphold. When the board refused to reinstate me, Bob and the entire staff resigned.
* * *
In truly Kafkaesque fashion afterward, we all continued to show up to make whatever arrangements we could for others to take over our cases, and to find new jobs. But I couldn’t shake the profound sense of loss. I kept circling back to the thought that I had disrupted and changed the course of my colleagues’ lives, and threatened the viability of the legal program at the NAACP as well as helping the organization’s conservatives to weaken the more effective members who still worked there.
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