And now, how long ago it all seems. How odd it is to go back over the old newspapers, the astonishing photographs in Life magazine, the flaming buildings, the girls in hair curlers and shorts, the loaded shopping carts, “Get Whitey,” and “Burn, baby, burn,” and the National Guard, the crisis, the curfew, and Police chief Parker’s curtain line, “We’re on top and they are on the bottom.” In the summer of 1965 “as many as 10,000 Negroes took to the streets in marauding bands.” Property damage was forty million; nearly four thousand persons were arrested; thirty-four were killed. A commission headed by John A. McCone produced a report called, “Violence in the City—An End or a Beginning?” (Imagine the conferences about the title!) It is somewhat dramatic, but not unnerving since its cadence whispers immediately in our ear of the second-rate, the Sunday Supplement, the Reader’s Digest.
•
The Watts Report is a distressing effort. It is one of those bureaucratic documents, written in an ambivalent bureaucratic prose, and it yields little of interest on the surface and a great deal of hostility below the surface. (Bayard Rustin in Commentary shows brilliantly how the defects of Negro life are made to carry the blame for Negro behavior in a way that exonerates the conditions that produced the defects.) In our time, moral torpor and evangelical rhetoric have numbed our senses. The humble meters of the McCone Report are an extreme example of the distance a debased rhetoric puts between word and deed. A certain squeamishness calls the poor Negroes of Watts the “disadvantaged” and designates the police as “Caucasians.” “A dull, devastating spiral of failure” is their way of calling to mind the days and nights of the Watts community.
The drama of the disadvantaged and the Caucasians opens on a warm night and a drunken driver. Anyone who has been in Watts will know the beauty and power of the automobile. It is the lifeline, and during the burning and looting, car lots and gasoline stations were exempt from revenge. Watts indeed is an island; even though by car it is not far from downtown Los Angeles, it has been estimated that it costs about $1.50 and one-and-a-half to two hours to get out of Watts to possible employment. One might wonder, as he reads the opening scene, why the police were going to tow the drunken driver’s car away, rather than release it to his mother and brother who were trying to claim it? For this is a deprivation and frustration not to be borne in the freeway inferno. Without a car you are not truly alive; every sort of crippling, disabling imprisonment of body and mind attends this lack. The sight of the “Caucasians” and the hot night and the hatred and deprivation burst into a revolutionary ecstasy and before it was over it extended far beyond Watts, which is only the name for a small part of the community, into a much larger area of Negro residence.
And what is to be done, what does it mean? Was it gray, tired meat and shoes with composition soles at prices a little starlet might gasp at? Of course we know what the report will say, what we all say; all that is true and has nevertheless become words, rhetoric. It’s jobs and headstarts and housing and the mother at the head of the family and reading levels and drop-outs. The Report mentions some particular aggravations: the incredible bungling of the poverty program in Los Angeles; the insult of the repeal of the Rumford Fair Housing Act; the Civil Rights program of protest. The last cause is a deduction from the Byzantine prose of the report which reads: “Throughout the nation, unpunished violence and disobedience to law were widely reported, and almost daily there were exhortations, here and elsewhere, to take extreme and even illegal remedies to right a wide variety of wrongs, real and supposed.” Real and supposed; in another passage the locution “many Negroes felt and were encouraged to feel,” occurs. These niceties fascinate the student of language. They tell of unseen enemies, real and supposed, and strange encouragements, of what nature we are not told.
Still, the Watts Report is a mirror: the distance its bureaucratic language puts between us and the Negro is the reflection of reality. The demands of those days and nights on the streets, the smoke and the flames, are simply not to be taken in. The most radical re-organization of our lives could hardly satisfy them, and there seems to be neither the wish nor the will to make the effort. The words swell as purpose shrinks. Alabama and California are separated by more than miles of painted desert. The Civil Rights movement is fellowship and Watts is alienation, separation.
“What can violence bring you when the white people have the police and the power? What can it bring you except death?”
“Well, we are dying a little bit every day.”
The final words of the Report seem to struggle for some faint upbeat and resolution but they are bewildered and fatigued. “As we have said earlier in this report, there is no immediate remedy for the problems of the Negro and other disadvantaged in our community. The problems are deep and the remedies are costly and will take time. However, through the implementation of the programs we propose, with the dedication we discuss, and with the leadership we call for from all, our Commission states without dissent, that the tragic violence that occurred during the six days of August will not be repeated.”
How hard it is to keep the attention of the American people. Perhaps that is what “communications” are for: to excite and divert with one thing after another. And we are a nation preeminent in communications. The Negro has been pushed out of our thoughts by the Vietnam War. Helicopters in Southeast Asia turned out to be far easier to provide than the respect the Negro asked for.
“The army? What about the army?”
“It’s the last chance for a Negro to be a man . . . and yet it’s another prison, too.”
The months have gone by. And did the explosion in Watts really do what they thought afterward? Did it give dignity and definition? Did it mean anything in the long run? We know that only the severest concentration will keep the claims of the Negro alive in America, because he represents all the imponderables of life itself. Anxiety and uncertainty push us on to something else—to words which seem to soothe, and to more words. As for Watts itself: the oddity of its simplicity can scarcely be grasped. Its defiant lack of outline haunts the imagination. Lying low under the sun, shadowed by overpasses, it would seem to offer every possibility, every hope. In the newness of the residents, of the buildings, of the TV sets, there is a strange stillness, as of something formless, unaccountable. The gaps in the streets are hardly missed, where there is so much missing. Of course it is jobs and schools and segregation, yes, yes. But beyond that something that has nothing to do with Negroes was trying to be destroyed that summer. Some part of new America itself—that “dull, devastating spiral of failure” the McCone Commission imagines to belong only to the “disadvantaged” standing friendless in their capsule on the outskirts of downtown Los Angeles.
1966
THE APOTHEOSIS OF MARTIN LUTHER KING
MEMPHIS, ATLANTA, 1968
THE DECAYING, downtown shopping section of Memphis—still another Main Street—lay, the weekend before Martin Luther King’s funeral, under a siege. The deranging curfew and that state of civic existence called “tension” made the town seem to be sinister, again very much like a film set, perhaps for a television drama, of breakdown, catastrophe. Since films and television have staged everything imaginable before it happens, a true event, taking place in the real world, brings to mind the landscape of films. There is no meaning in this beyond description and real life only looks like a fabrication and does not feel so.
The streets are completely empty of traffic and persons and yet the emptiness is the signal of dire and dramatic possibilities. In the silence, the horn of a tug gliding up the dark Mississippi is background. The hotel, downtown, overlooking the city park, is a tomb and perhaps that is usual since it is downtown where nobody wants to go in middle-sized cities. It is a shabby place, poorly staffed by aged persons, not grown old in their duties, but newly hired, untrained, depressed, worn-out old people.
The march was called for the next day, a march originally called by King as a renewal of his efforts in the Memphis garbage strike,
efforts interrupted by a riot in the poor, black sections the week before. Now he was murdered and the march was called to honor him. Fear of riots, rage, had brought the curfew and the National Guard. Perhaps there was fear, but in civic crises there is always something exciting and even a sort of humidity of smugness seemed to hang over the town. Children kept home from school, bank and ten-cent store closed. If one was not in clear danger, there seemed to be a complacent pleasure in thinking, We have been brought to this by Them.
Beyond and beneath the glassy beige curtains of the hotel room, the courthouse square was spread out like a target, the destination of the next day’s march and ceremony. All night long little hammer blows, a ghostly percussion, rang out as the structure for the “event” was being put together. The stage, slowly forming, plank by plank, seemed in the deluding curfew emptiness and silence like a scaffolding being prepared for a beheading. These overwrought and exaggerated images came to me from the actual scene and from a crush of childhood memories. Memphis was a Southern town in which a murder had taken place. The killer might be over yonder in that deep blue thicket, or holed up in the woods on the edge of town, ready to come back at night. Of course this was altogether different. The assassin’s work was completed. Here in Memphis it was not the killer, whoever he might be, who was feared, but the killed one and what his death might bring.
Not far from the downtown was the leprous little hovel where, from a squalid toilet window, the assassin had been able to look across and target the new and hopeful Lorraine Motel. Now the motel was being visited by mourners. The black people of Memphis, dressed in their best, filed silently up and down the ramp, glancing shyly into the room which King had occupied. At the ramp before the door of the room where he fell there were flowers, glads, and potted azaleas.
All over the Negro section, rickety little stores, emptied in the “consumer rebellion,” were boarded up, burned out, or simply empty, with the windows broken. The stores were for the most part of great modesty. Who owned that one? I asked the taxi driver.
“Well, that happened to be Chinee,” he said.
Shops are a dwelling and their goods and stuffs, counters and cash registers are a form of interior decoration. Sacked and disordered, these Memphis boxes were amazingly small and only an active sense of possibility could conceive of them as the site of commercial enterprise. It did not seem possible that by stocking a few shelves these squares of rotting timber could merit ownership, license, investment, and produce a profitable exchange. They are lean-tos, chicken coops—measly and optimistic. Looters had sought the consolations of television sets and whiskey. The intrepid dramas of refrigerators and living room suites, deftly transported from store to home, were beyond the range of this poor section of the romantic city on the river.
The day of the march came to the gray, empty streets. The march was solemn and impressive, but on the other hand perhaps somewhat disappointing. A compulsive exaggeration dogs most of the expectations of ideological gatherings and thereby turns success to failure. The forty to sixty thousand predicted belittled the eighteen thousand present. The National Guard, alert with gun and bayonet as if for some important marine landing, made the quiet, orderly march appear a bit of a sell.
The numbers of the National Guard, the body count, spoke almost of a sort of psychotic imagining. They were on every street, blocking every intersection, cutting off each highway. There, in their large brown trucks, crawling out from under the olive-brown canvas, were men in full battle dress, in helmets and chin straps which concealed most of their pale, red-flecked and rather alarmed Southern faces. They guarded the alleys and the horizon, the river and the muddy playground, thoroughfare and esplanade, newspaper store and bank. It was as if by some cancerous multiplication the sensible and necessary had been turned into a monstrous glut.
The march, after all, was mostly made up of Memphis blacks. Was this a victory or a defeat? There were also some local white students from Southwestern, a few young ministers, and from New York members of the teachers’ union with a free day off and a lunch box. Mrs. King came from Atlanta for the gathering, a tribute to her husband and also a tribute to the poor sanitation workers for whom it had all begun.
The people gathered early and waited long in the streets. They stood in neat lines to indicate the absence of unruly feelings. Part of the ritual of every public show of opinion and solidarity is the presence of a name or, preferably, the body of a Notable (“Notable” for a routine occasion, and “Dignitary” for a more solemn and affecting event such as the funeral to be held in Atlanta the next day). Notables are often from the entertainment world and the rest are usually to be known for political activities. Like a foundation of stone moved from site to site, only on the Notables can the petition for funds be based, the protest developed, the idea constructed.
The marchers waited without restlessness for the chartered airplane to arrive and to announce that it could then truly begin. A limousine will be waiting to take the noted ones to the front of the line, or to leave them off at the stage door. The motors are kept running. After an appearance, a speech, a mere presence, out they go by the back doors used by the celebrated, out to the waiting limousine, off to the waiting plane, and then off.
These persons are symbols of a larger consensus that can be transferred to the mass of the unknown faithful. They are priests giving sanction to idea, struggle, defiance. It is believed that only the famous, the busy, the talented have the power to solicit funds from the rich, notice from the press, and envy from the opposition. Also they are a sunshine, warming. They have the appeal of the lucky.
The march of Memphis was quiet; it was designed as a silent memorial, like a personal prayer. Hold your head high, the instructions read. No gum chewing. For protection in case of trouble, no smoking, no umbrellas, no earrings in pierced ears, no fountain pens in jacket pockets. One woman said, “If they make me take off my shades, I’m quitting the march.” Among those who had come from some distance a decision had been made in favor of the small gathering in Memphis over the “national” funeral in Atlanta the following day. “I feel this is more important,” they would say.
In the march and at the funeral of Martin Luther King, the mood of the earlier Civil Rights days in Alabama and Mississippi returned, a reunion at the grave of squabbling, competitive family members. And no one could doubt that there had been a longing for reunion among the white ministers and students and the liberals from the large cities. The “love”—locked arms, hymns, good feeling—all of that was remembered with feeling.
This love, if not always refused, was now seldom forthcoming in relations with new black militants, who were set against dependency upon the checkbooks and cooperation of the guilty, longing, loving whites. Everything separated the old Civil Rights people from the new black militants; it could be said, and for once truly, that they did not speak the same language. A harsh, obscene style, unforgiving stares, posturings, insulting accusations and refusal to make distinctions among those of the white world—this was humbling and perplexing. Many of the white people had created their very self-identity out of issues and distinctions and they felt cast off, ill at ease, with the new street rhetoric of “self-defense” and “self-determination.”
Comradeship, yes, and being in the South again gave one a remembrance of the meaning of the merely legislative, the newly visible. Back at the hotel in the late afternoon the marchers were breaking up. The dining room was suddenly filled with not-too-pleasing young black boys—not black notables with cameras and briefcases, or in the company of intimidating, busy-looking persons from afar—no, just poor boys from Memphis. The aged waitresses padded about on aching feet and finally approached with the questions of function. Menu? Yes. Cream in the coffee? A little.
So, at last business was business, not friendship. The old white waitresses themselves were deeply wrinkled by the stains of plebeianism. Manner, accent marked them as “disadvantaged”; they were diffident, ignorant, and poor and would the
mselves cast a blight on the cheerful claims of many dining places. They seemed to be the enduring remnants of many an old retired trailer camp couple, the men with tattooed arms and the women in bright colored stretch pants; those who wander the warm roads and whose traveling kitchenettes and motorized toilets are a distress to the genteel and tasteful.
In any case, joy and flush-cheeked nuns were past history, a folk epic, full of poetry, simplicity and piety. The pastoral period of the Civil Rights Movement had gone by.
•
At the funeral in Atlanta, rising above the crowd, the nez pointu of Richard Nixon . . . Lester Maddox, short-toothed little marmoset, peeking from behind the draperies of the Georgia State House . . . Many Christians have died without the scruples of Christian principles being to the point. The belief of Martin Luther King—what an unexpected curiosity it was, the strength of it. His natural mode of address was the sermon. “So I say to you, seek God and discover Him and make Him a power in your life. Without Him all our efforts turn to ashes and our sunrises into darkest nights.”
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 19