by Thomas Healy
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THE NEXT FEW years marked the height of CORE’s influence. With Farmer and McKissick leading the way, CORE established itself as the most visible and effective civil rights group in the country. Donations poured in, surging from $240,000 the year before Farmer took over to nearly $900,000 in 1964. The money enabled CORE to expand its staff (it had 137 paid employees at its peak) and finance a series of ambitious projects, including Freedom Highways, which targeted discrimination at hotels and restaurants along interstate roads, and Freedom Summer, a voter registration drive in Mississippi that attracted thousands of young out-of-state volunteers. Just one of several groups involved in Freedom Summer, CORE became the public face of the campaign when two of its members, along with a third volunteer, disappeared and were later found murdered, their bodies buried under an earthen dam.
Despite its growing influence, CORE was beset by strife. Although it was still the most interracial of the major civil rights groups, Black members were increasingly hostile to white involvement in the organization. Several white chapter heads and national staff (including Carey) were forced to resign, and in 1964, Blacks outnumbered whites in CORE for the first time. The group also began to rethink its commitment to nonviolence. When the Deacons for Defense and Justice formed in the summer of 1964 and announced their intention to defend Black neighborhoods with guns, CORE did not denounce the move. Instead it enlisted the Deacons to protect its field workers, in what Farmer described as “a partnership of brothers.”
These conflicts took their toll on Farmer, and in the summer of 1965 he announced plans to resign. Once again, there was a fight over CORE’s future, and once again McKissick prevailed. The moderate wing of the National Action Council favored George Wiley, a former chemistry professor at Syracuse University who had served as associate director under Farmer. The radical wing, seeking to strengthen CORE’s relationship with poor Blacks, supported McKissick, in part because Wiley’s wife was white. As one staff member explained, it was a choice between a “brilliant university professor married to a white woman and a down-home lawyer who sounded black.” Farmer, himself married to a white woman, initially supported Wiley. But concluding that McKissick had the “empathy and ability to articulate the feelings of the ghetto,” he changed his mind, and when the council cast its ballots in January 1966, McKissick won, twelve votes to eight.
When McKissick took over as national director, at the age of forty-three, CORE was still one of the nation’s leading civil rights organizations, with an illustrious history, a membership of eighty thousand, and a flair for capturing headlines. But internally it was in shambles. Its expenses vastly exceeded its revenue, and as its agenda grew more militant McKissick struggled to raise money from white donors who had supported it in the past. In one month alone, donations plummeted from $44,500 to $19,900. There was also increasing friction between the national office, which wanted more control over CORE’s direction, and the local chapters, which jealously guarded their autonomy.
McKissick spent the first several months of his tenure digging CORE out of its financial hole. He reduced the staff, cut back on travel, and offered creditors twenty-five cents on the dollar. He also moved the organization from its headquarters in the ornate Potter Building in downtown Manhattan to a third-floor walk-up in Harlem. In addition to saving a thousand dollars a month, the move signaled CORE’s new focus on the problems of the ghetto. McKissick’s roach-infested office was upstairs from Smalls Paradise, the legendary nightclub where Malcolm X once waited tables. From there, he launched a series of initiatives designed to help the urban poor, including an ambitious “target city” project, which sought to alleviate unemployment, hunger, and homelessness in the heavily Black cities of Baltimore and Cleveland.
McKissick also became increasingly outspoken, critical of the slow pace of change and skeptical of Lyndon Johnson’s commitment to civil rights, which he thought was being overshadowed by the Vietnam War. In January 1966, he issued a statement condemning the war—more than a year before King announced his own opposition. Five months later, he stirred up trouble at the White House Conference on Civil Rights when he drafted a resolution demanding US withdrawal from Vietnam. That move threatened to derail the conference until Johnson made a surprise appearance to remind the 2,400 delegates that four centuries of injustice could not be undone in a single weekend. The White House also dispatched Arthur Goldberg, the US ambassador to the United Nations (and former Supreme Court justice), to argue against McKissick’s resolution. And when McKissick formally introduced his motion, it was ruled out of order by James M. Nabrit Jr., the former president of Howard University and Goldberg’s deputy, who declared, “I don’t want to put that albatross around the civil rights movement.”
It was a stinging defeat, but it showed that McKissick was a force to be reckoned with. And if his conduct at the conference alarmed moderates, it was nothing compared to what was to come. For in the months ahead, he would help pave the way for the next phase of the civil rights movement: the rise of Black Power.
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BLACK POWER DID not emerge all at once, out of nowhere. It was an idea that had deep roots in African American thought and rhetoric. It was implicit in the writing of Paul Robeson and the speeches of Malcolm X, and it was explicit in the work of Richard Wright, who used the phrase as the title of a 1954 book about Africa’s Gold Coast. But the event that marked the ascendance of Black Power as a rallying cry and a political force was the March Against Fear in June 1966. Launched by James Meredith, whose admission to the University of Mississippi under armed guard four years earlier had gripped the nation, the march was intended as a departure from the typical civil rights demonstration. Instead of staging a massive rally led by the usual suspects, Meredith planned to walk the 220 miles from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi, by himself. His goal was to show that Blacks would not be cowed by the threats and violence whites had unleashed in response to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But the march showed just how pervasive that violence was. On the second day of his journey, Meredith was gunned down by a white man wielding a shotgun in a pickup truck. The gun was loaded with bird shot, so Meredith’s injuries were not life-threatening. In some ways, though, the choice of ammunition was particularly dehumanizing. As Meredith said afterward, “He shot me a like a goddamn rabbit.”
McKissick knew Meredith well. They had met years earlier through the NAACP, and after McKissick moved his family to New York in early 1966, Meredith often visited their home in Harlem. So when McKissick heard about the shooting, he announced at once that CORE would continue the march on Meredith’s behalf. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee quickly agreed to join in, and by the next morning McKissick, King, and Stokely Carmichael (SNCC’s newly elected chairman) were at Meredith’s bedside in Memphis securing his blessing for their plan.
The three men resumed the march a few hours later, driving out to the spot where Meredith had been shot, linking arms, and taking off down the long, straight road. They didn’t get far before they, too, were ambushed. About two hundred yards down the road, a group of highway patrolmen ordered them to the shoulder. When King attempted to explain what they were doing, one of the officers pushed him, and King toppled to the ground, nearly bringing the others down with him. Holding back their rage and doing their best to preserve their dignity, the three men reordered themselves in a single file and walked a few miles along the side of the road before driving back to the Lorraine Motel in Memphis to plot their strategy.
It was a daunting task, planning a journey over two hundred miles—four times the distance of the Selma-to-Montgomery march the year before. They had to decide where they would sleep each night, how they would transport food and other provisions, and how they would provide for the thousands of marchers they expected to pick up along the way. They also had to decide what they hoped to accomplish. The leaders of the NAACP and the Urban League soon joined the others in Memphis, and they
argued that the march should be used to pressure Congress into passing the 1966 civil rights bill. Carmichael disagreed, believing the march should focus on voter registration. King sided with Carmichael, but the two men clashed on other issues, such as whether the march should be interracial and whether the Deacons for Defense and Justice should be allowed to participate. These struggles gave the march a chaotic and contentious atmosphere that led the Washington Post to refer to it as a “strange parade—half army of liberation and half civil rights carnival show.”
For McKissick, the march was perhaps his finest moment. He was funny and approachable, relating to the marchers on their own terms. When a pickup truck passed by with a group of teenagers riding in back, he called out playfully, “I got my mojo on ya, you gotta come!” (They did.) Another time, as the crowd set up camp for the night, he hopped onto an oil drum and explained that there was a men’s tent and a women’s tent—and severe penalties for fraternizing between the two. “Don’t be surprised if your name is read into the Congressional Record for carrying on the process of integration,” he jokingly warned. “You have a constitutional right to be human, but this is a movement of the spirit.” And unlike King, whom young activists mockingly referred to as “de lawd” for his sometimes imperious bearing, or Ralph Abernathy, who would march just long enough to have his picture taken before getting back into an air-conditioned car, McKissick was willing to get his hands dirty. He walked nearly the entire distance from Memphis to Jackson, taking only a short break to fly back to New York for a fundraiser. Even physically, McKissick seemed more at home in rural Mississippi than either King or Carmichael. King was short and soft, with sensitive eyes and delicate hands. Carmichael was long and lanky, like a teenager who hadn’t yet filled out. McKissick, standing six feet tall, had broad shoulders, a barrel chest, and a strong grip. He often served lunch to the marchers, then cleaned up afterward. He also got into long, philosophical discussions about the importance of nonviolence. As one historian wrote, “McKissick cast his arms wide, trying to pull everyone under the march’s banner.”
Yet even McKissick couldn’t put a lid on the disagreements that were simmering beneath the surface. Ten days into the march, Carmichael was arrested for erecting a campsite on the grounds of a Black school. When he was released that night, he headed to a rally at a local park. Standing on the bed of a pickup truck, he railed against the forces of racism and inequality, urging the crowd to adopt a new slogan. “We been saying ‘freedom’ for six years and we ain’t got nothing,” he cried. “What we got to start saying now is ‘Black Power!’” The crowd cheered wildly, repeating the phrase over and over, and soon there was a sharp divide among the marchers, with King’s followers chanting “Freedom now,” and Carmichael’s allies responding with “Black Power.”
McKissick (center) during the March Against Fear with Martin Luther King Jr. (left) and Stokely Carmichael (right).
Events soon pushed McKissick into the latter camp. On the seventeenth day of the march, organizers requested permission to set up camp on the grounds of a Black elementary school in Canton, Mississippi. When white officials denied their request, the organizers went ahead anyway. But as the marchers erected their tents, a caravan of highway patrol cars pulled up, and seventy-five officers filed out. Wearing riot gear and armed with rifles and tear gas, they advanced to within ten yards of the crowd and donned gas masks. Some marchers fled, but around two thousand remained, and McKissick climbed on top of an eighteen-wheel truck to instruct the crowd in nonviolent resistance. Suddenly, the officers fired tear gas into the crowd, and an acrid smog descended on the field. As marchers ran to escape the smoke, officers struck them with rifle butts and kicked those who fell to the ground. One officer hit a priest, and when another marcher yelled, “He’s a man of God,” the officer responded, “I’ll put him with his God,” before striking the priest again.
During the attack, a gas canister hit McKissick in the knee, knocking him off the truck. When he landed, he heard a crack and felt a searing pain shoot up his back. Fighting back tears and nearly incoherent, McKissick let loose his anger. As one historian put it, “something shifted inside Floyd McKissick, both literally and figuratively.” “I’m tired of having to negotiate for our constitutional rights,” McKissick told a reporter for the New Yorker. “When the tear gas came, I fell off that truck like a scrambled egg.… They don’t call it white power. They just call it power. I’m committed to nonviolence, but I say what we need is to get us some black power.”
Because it took place at night and was hard to capture on film, the incident in Canton didn’t receive the same coverage as the 1965 attack on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, in which civil rights marchers were mowed down by police armed with billy clubs and tear gas. But it was just as brutal and traumatic; those who were there referred to it as “the Night of the Valley of the Shadow of Death.” As with the attack in Selma, though, it only reinforced the resolve of the marchers, who announced they would pitch their tents at the same school the next night. McKissick, meanwhile, lashed out at President Johnson for failing to protect the marchers. “We’re sick and tired of begging,” he said. “That man thinks you don’t bleed, you don’t cry, you don’t suffer.”
From that moment, McKissick became one of the most vocal advocates of Black Power—second in influence and visibility only to Stokely Carmichael. He declared the civil rights movement “dead,” argued that nonviolence had “outlived its usefulness,” and proclaimed that 1966 would be remembered as the year “when black men realized their full worth in society—their dignity and their beauty—and their power.” So combative was his rhetoric that aides to King urged him not to attend CORE’s annual convention in Baltimore that summer. As they explained, CORE was “yelling black power louder than SNCC.” King’s aides weren’t the only ones who had noticed. The FBI soon began surveilling McKissick, and many of the remaining white members of CORE resigned. One of them was Lillian Smith, a southern writer who had served on the National Action Council for two decades. Announcing her departure, she referred to the Black Power advocates within CORE as “the new Killers of the Dream.”
• 3 •
“Look Out, Whitey!”
Critics often said it was unclear what “Black Power” meant, to which McKissick had a ready answer. Appearing on Meet the Press shortly after the March Against Fear, he pointed out that the phrase consisted of “two little bitty words in the English language.” The first was “black,” and “everybody who has gone through the sixth grade knows what ‘black’ means.” The second was “power,” and “everybody who has gone through the sixth grade knows what that means.” Yet, McKissick went on, “I get a letter from a professor at Harvard saying, ‘Explain black power.’ That means putting power in black people’s hands. We don’t have any and we want some. That simply is what that means.”
McKissick’s protestations aside, there was confusion about the meaning of Black Power. Did it mean Black people were planning to rise up and launch a violent assault on white society? That was what many whites feared, and although few Blacks advocated violence, they were not above tweaking whites for their hysteria. (Thus the title of Julius Lester’s 1968 book, Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama!) Was Black Power about attaining political power through voter registration and redistricting? If so, that was less physically terrifying to whites, though still objectionable. Or was Black Power simply a slogan connoting racial pride—the wearing of African clothes and hairstyles, the elevation of Black culture?
According to a document issued by CORE, Black Power had six elements: economic self-sufficiency, political representation, an improved self-image, the development of Black leadership, the enforcement of federal laws, and the mobilization of Black consumers. McKissick embraced all six elements, but the one he emphasized most forcefully was economic autonomy. “Unless the Black Man attains economic independence, any ‘political independence’ will be an illusion,” he wrote in his 1969 book Three-Fift
hs of a Man. Why? Because as long as Black people were economically dependent on whites, they would be too frightened to exercise their political rights. In northern cities and the rural South, “white storeowners withhold credit from Blacks who register to vote, creating a loss of tools and fertilizer, food and commodities,” McKissick explained. “The alternative is obvious: don’t register to vote and the lifeblood of credit becomes available; don’t register to vote and the white racists can perpetuate themselves in power. The fear expressed by many poor Blacks at the thought of registering to vote is fully understandable—it is the fear of not having enough to eat.”
McKissick was not the first Black leader to draw a link between economics and racial progress. Booker T. Washington had emphasized the importance of financial independence more than eighty years earlier, launching the National Negro Business League and urging Black workers to develop skills that would make them indispensable to white companies. “The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house,” he declared in his Atlanta Exposition address in 1895. W. E. B. Du Bois, who objected to Washington’s narrow focus on industrial training, agreed with him about the value of economic self-sufficiency, arguing that Black consumers should shop exclusively at Black businesses. It was this spirit—along with discrimination by white proprietors—that led to the creation of Black Wall Street, a thriving commercial district in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that was a model of Black entrepreneurialism until white mobs destroyed it in a race massacre in 1921. The civil rights movement itself was born out of economic discontent. The first March on Washington Movement, in 1942, was triggered by the exclusion of Black workers from defense jobs and was called off only when President Roosevelt issued an order banning discrimination in all war contracts. And the 1963 March on Washington was a demonstration for “jobs and freedom,” the former being thought indispensable to the latter. As a young John Lewis put it that day, “We march today for jobs and freedom, but we have nothing to be proud of, for hundreds and thousands of our brothers are not here. They have no money for their transportation, for they are receiving starvation wages or no wages at all.”