* * *
Women had been central to the movement from the start, and Spelman students in particular more than made up their share of the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights in Atlanta. Professor Howard Zinn observed that the expression used to be “You can always tell a Spelman girl by…” followed by a list of ladylike virtues. Now, given recent activism, the expression went, “You can always tell a Spelman girl—she’s under arrest.”
Back in the spring, when the presidents of the city’s historically Black colleges advised the students to write and publish why they wanted to protest—in what Lonnie thought might have been an attempt to head off the first sit-in—Lonnie asked the Spelman student Roslyn Pope to compose a message on their behalf. Over a weekend, she prepared a statement expressing all that she had endured, all the daily indignities and frustrations of life under segregation. Professor Zinn gave her access to the campus’s early version of a computer, and she wrote on a long legal pad as Julian Bond typed her words as fast as he could. She cited the Montgomery bus boycott as an inspiration.
We do not intend to wait placidly for those rights which are already legally and morally ours to be meted out … We want to state clearly and unequivocally that we cannot tolerate in a nation professing democracy and among people professing democracy, and among people professing Christianity, the discriminatory conditions under which the Negro is living today in Atlanta Georgia—supposedly one of the most progressive cities in the South.
Atlanta University’s president, Rufus Clement, secured the funds to publish “An Appeal for Human Rights” in not only the Black Daily World but the Journal and the Constitution as well. The students’ declaration was soon picked up by The New York Times and The Nation, and New York’s senator Jacob Javits put their words into the Congressional Record.
Knowing how central the women were to the movement, King wrote a message of gratitude and encouragement to them from his own jail cell. Beginning with the salutation “Hello girls,” King thanked them for “your intrepid courage, your quiet dignity, and your undaunted faith in the power of nonviolence.” He told them, “Never before have I been more proud to be a Negro. Never before have I had more faith in the future.” He believed that “when young ladies are willing to accept this type of self-suffering for the cause of freedom it is both majestic and sublime.”
Some students shared cells with the general jail population, while others were held with friends from the movement. The presence of young people whom King knew and appreciated, and who looked to him for leadership, helped King bear the tedium and stress of prison. Their morale was high, and he took the opportunity to do a little teaching and organizing. He also realized that conditions in the Fulton County Jail were far better than those that others were facing elsewhere. His own treatment seemed to reflect Atlanta’s interest in avoiding bad publicity.
* * *
King had been incarcerated, briefly, only once before. In Montgomery, he had been driving a car full of fellow boycotters when he spied the police behind him. He let his passengers out and was instantly surrounded by the officers, one of whom commanded: “Get out, King; you are under arrest for speeding thirty miles an hour in a twenty-five-mile zone.”
Police put King in the back of their car. He panicked, realizing they were headed in an unfamiliar direction, down roads leading out of town. As they turned down a “dark and dingy street … and headed under a desolate old bridge,” King started to envision a waiting mob. Just then he saw the lights of the Montgomery jail come into view, and in this moment of possible deliverance he felt embarrassed that as a pastor to others he had not even known the jail’s location. Kicking him, they threw King into a rank-smelling cell, where fellow prisoners crowded around him. The toilet was exposed, and men rested on torn-up mattresses and wooden planks. The minister was horrified that human beings were forced to live like this, no matter what they had done. They begged him to help them get out of jail. He told them, “Fellows, before I can assist in getting any of you out, I’ve got to get my own self out.” A cash bail was quickly raised and posted, and before nightfall King was back home.
Now, at the Fulton County Jail, a student leader, Bernard Lee, slept in the bunk above Dr. King. Lee was, like most students, excited to spend time with a famous figure. Lonnie’s perspective was different, as he had known Dr. King since childhood. Lonnie had always admired how talented M.L. was—his effortless grace with words, how he could cite complex philosophical ideas and Bible verses. Yet M.L. was cool, too: he could shoot pool, flirt with girls, tell a good joke. They shared childhood experiences, yet came from such different backgrounds. Lonnie grew up in an Atlanta alley behind a fish market, and until he arrived there, at age eight, he had lived in Calhoun County, near the Alabama border. He said, “I was born looking up at the bottom. I was not on the bottom, I was looking up at the bottom. The bottom was up there.” Lonnie joined the Navy after his freshman year at Morehouse to earn GI Bill money for college. Despite his high score on an aptitude test, he was assigned to clean the bathroom for two hundred men on his ship. This position did not stop him from being perceived as a leader. Their tours took Lonnie around the world, beyond the segregated way of life he grew up with. When his period of enlistment concluded, he decided to return to the South. He sensed a revolution coming—it was at least possible—and he would regret missing it.
Lonnie appreciated the fact that M.L. never tried to dominate their movement. King had come to some of their tense meetings with Atlanta college presidents, rarely saying anything, whether out of loyalty to both sides or a wish to let the students speak for themselves. The student leaders appreciated that King’s presence added weight to their cause in the eyes of older leaders.
King often felt unworthy of this admiration, once saying, “I am conscious of two Martin Luther Kings … somebody foreign to me … there’s a kind of dualism in my life.” His friend Stanley Levison called him “an intensely guilt-ridden man … And it could be said that he was tortured by the great appreciation that the public showed for him. If he had been less humble, he could have lived with this kind of acclaim, but because he was genuinely a man of humility, he really couldn’t live with it.” As a little boy, King’s sense of guilt was so strong that he twice threw himself out of a second-floor window, once when he and A.D. accidently knocked his grandmother down, and again, later, when he had been out playing during her fatal heart attack. He paid little attention to earning money or garnering awards, believing he should not benefit from his ministry, to the more practical Coretta’s dismay. He understood the power of his preaching, his ability to elevate his listeners, but these talents seemed to be separate from his inner self-doubt.
Jail time so far had felt like a movement retreat for the eleven students in the same cell block as King, complete with workshops. They would sing together, meditate, and find games to play. Lonnie saw a lighthearted King few ever witnessed. Yet Lonnie also observed an intense, searching side of King, who would spend hours talking about what the ministry of Jesus and the mission of Gandhi meant to this movement. King told them about Thoreau and about Joan Bondurant’s Conquest of Violence; he shared stories of his Montgomery bus boycott experiences with them and joined in discussions about what the Atlanta student campaign should do next.
The long days in jail were, happily, punctuated by updates from the outside world, with Reverend Otis Moss and other representatives from the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights filling them in on the state of the ongoing actions happening across the city. They were cheered that more students were joining them; the more crowded the jails, the greater the pressure on the city. Hollowell or someone from his legal team would visit as well, but his news was discouraging, with no headway in negotiations with the city to report.
* * *
Julian Bond visited the students at Fulton County Jail on Thursday afternoon. He took in the modern design of the new building, its lobby far better lit than any place in Big Rock, its cell doors opened by new ele
ctronic technology—a “modernistic substitute for the dungeons of old.” In the end, though, there was only cold comfort behind gray steel bars.
Bond had been Lonnie King’s first recruit. After Lonnie read about the North Carolina sit-in back in February, he spotted a student he remembered from class registration in the Yates and Milton Drugstore, a student gathering place near the Morehouse campus. Recalling that the skinny kid had mentioned that he had interned for Time magazine in high school, Lonnie approached him. The fullback who busted through opposing lines was brandishing a newspaper. “Have you seen this?” he asked Bond.
At first thinking he meant newspapers in general, Bond was mildly insulted. But Lonnie pressed him. “What do you think about it?”
Now understanding that Lonnie meant the North Carolina sit-in, Bond said, “I think it’s great.”
“Don’t you think it ought to happen here in Atlanta?”
“I’m sure it will happen here; surely someone here will do it.”
“Don’t you think we ought to make it happen here?” Bond was about to ask what, exactly, he meant by “we,” when Lonnie said, “You take this side of the cafe, I’ll take the other side. We’ll call a meeting.” Thus, the Atlanta Student Movement began, and Bond, whose life was changed that day, could not say no. They canvassed the store and got twenty students for their first meeting.
Bond understood that the civil rights movement was not about waiting for NAACP lawyers to arrive, but doing something yourself, forcing the issue, just like in Montgomery during the bus boycott. During their first citywide sit-ins in the spring, Bond’s experience of jail revived fears he’d experienced in childhood after the murder of Emmett Till (who, if he had not been murdered, would have been roughly the same age as the students in 1960). To Bond’s relief, when the other prisoners heard about the student protest on the radio, they told him, “Good for you.” With enough charges against him under various statutes to keep him in jail for ninety-nine years, Bond whipsawed between a panicked fear of dying in prison and the feeling those in the movement called a “freedom high.” Hollowell got Bond out that spring, and now Bond’s role was to remain on the outside cranking out communications. Because of their frustrations with the conservative (and determinedly Republican) Daily World, the students had started their own newspaper, The Atlanta Inquirer, in July.
Curious as to how the students were holding up after their first night in prison, Bond was reassured to find a confident group in high spirits. The students were undeterred, vowing to not accept bail until Atlanta desegregated its lunch counters. Some students regretted not having brought along cigarettes and toothbrushes, and others told him how bad the food was. He saw students reading and writing with the peace that came from their convictions. As Bond passed by, each of his friends asked for news. They begged for more books, which Bond thought their professors would be surprised to hear. As they faced hours of boredom, studying was looking better and better. Herschelle Sullivan told Bond, “The spirit is wonderful!” Bond’s news of more arrests from the protests heartened her.
Lonnie said he was “extremely happy when I heard about the enthusiasm that was expressed by the students who were left behind. This type of follow up action will surely bring about the desired results that we all want.” He wrote, “Those in jail feel they have already gained a larger measure of freedom by going to prison.” The question posed by the Inquirer was not how long the students would remain behind bars but how long those on the outside “will be content with the comfortable jails they have been condemned to live in all their lives.”
* * *
Lonnie cherished his hushed, late-night conversations with Dr. King, finding they were both in accord in their willingness to pay the ultimate price. Lonnie believed, “You gotta face the challenges, and if that means that some of us get killed in order to bring about liberation … then that’s kind of the way it is.”
King later wrote of how incarceration affected him:
There is something inherently depressing about jail … It leaves one caught in the dull monotony of sameness. It is almost like being dead while one still lives … It is life without the singing of a bird, without the sight of the sun, moon, and stars, without the felt presence of the fresh air. In short, it is life without the beauties of life; it is bare existence—cold, cruel, and degenerating.
The only thing that really relieved King’s intense dislike of prison were visits from his family and close staffers, which improved his state of mind. Luckily, Fulton County allowed daily visits by Coretta. Jail was a necessary evil he was willing to endure; it was isolation that really ground him down.
SNCC students, religious leaders from King’s own denomination and from different faiths, and private citizens moved by his arrest sent supportive telegrams to the jail from around the country. While cautious about direct action such as the sit-ins, the NAACP leader and sometimes-rival Roy Wilkins wrote from New York, “It could be that your example will fire men and women everywhere of both races to end the discrimination that hurts both races.”
Morning papers around the country printed the news from Atlanta. An AP story informed readers that a “highly organized, well-trained group of Bible-packing Negroes descended upon downtown Atlanta.” Many, like the readers of The Kansas City Times, saw the wire photograph of King being led away by a stern plainclothes white police officer. Major papers nationally covered the story, though it made only page thirty-nine of The New York Times.
Atlanta’s Journal and Constitution were both known as racially moderate papers, which meant they expressed vague sympathy for the students’ cause while at the same time criticizing the sit-ins. The Journal’s editorial on Thursday night was titled “There Are Better Ways” and maintained that the students had already made their point in the spring and should simply rely on the courts instead of increasing tensions through sit-ins. The editors wrote, “There are less provocative ways of seeking to achieve their aims than by pressure, bull-dozing and the risking of popular good will by dramatics.” The Constitution agreed, focusing on store owners’ rights and the uncertainty around school desegregation, believing the students “can only breed resentment, not reason, in this reasonable and sympathetic city.” The paper also accurately noted that neither Kennedy nor Nixon had yet spoken up for them, which indicated to the editorial writers that the students’ actions were unwise.
The Constitution also wondered why both Kennedy and Nixon were not questioning the new Georgia trespassing law, especially “at a time when both of them desperately need the Northern Negro vote.” One Journal article asserted that King junior’s participation was the students’ greatest accomplishment, indicating his support for their approach over the NAACP’s legal tactics. It was “a further strengthening of the position of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as the No. 1 leader of the Southern Negro.”
King wrote a statement for the Inquirer: “Our decision to stay in jail rather than accept bail grows out of a deep moral and spiritual motivation. It is neither a publicity stunt nor an outer expression of rabble rousing.” He noted that a thousand students had turned out at Mount Moriah Baptist Church the previous night to vow they would do what was needed to keep pressure on the city. King also dictated a letter for the SCLC to send out to the NAACP and other potential supporters for emergency funds. “It is difficult to prophesize what tomorrow will bring … we may remain in jail indefinitely.”
Meanwhile, in New York, Kennedy was mobbed during a ride through Brooklyn, sitting in a convertible rolling past thousands of onlookers from Flatbush to Bedford-Stuyvesant. Nixon spoke on television from New York, and when the subject of King came up, he suggested that he would have a White House conference on civil rights if elected and that he was the candidate who would get civil rights legislation passed. Though he called his platform the strongest ever on civil rights, he said that civil rights was about “performance and not campaign promises.” He sounded like the candidate more than willing to speak up for King.
This was the Nixon whom Jet’s political reporter Simeon Booker called “Mr. Civil Rights during the Eisenhower Administration” and a “civil-rights workhorse.” This was the Nixon who was endorsed by the Black-owned Los Angeles Sentinel in 1950 when he declared that segregationists were as dangerous to how the world viewed America as communists were. Campaigning in 1956, Nixon said, “Segregation, discrimination and prejudice have no place in America,” and to reinforce his message once moved his entourage out of a Missouri hotel because it would not let the Black journalists covering him stay there. This Nixon also said in 1956 that “most of us here will live to see the day when American boys and girls shall sit, side by side, at any school—public or private—with no regard paid to the color of their skin.” Kennedy and southern Democrats voted for an amendment weakening the 1957 civil rights bill, allowing federal civil suits for voting rights violations to be judged by juries, which would inevitably be made up of white southerners. Nixon called it “one of the saddest days in the history of the Senate, because it was a vote against the right to vote.”
Nixon’s early sympathies might have been fueled by his sensitivity to the disadvantaged—perhaps because he felt that was exactly what he was. He was the boy who woke at 3:30 a.m. for the drive to Los Angeles to get stock for his family’s modest store. Even after reaching the vice presidency, he still felt as if he could not measure up in the eyes of those who judged him, no matter what he did. He was nearly dropped from the ticket in 1952, in the wake of a campaign finance scandal, before saving himself with the famous Checkers speech, in which he highlighted his modest personal means. He had to listen as Eisenhower, whose approval he felt he could never quite fully attain, told him before the 1956 reelection campaign that he might want to take another role in the administration (he refused). Whether it was the media, liberals from elite colleges, or the wealthy who ruled his party, he had a sense that no matter how hard he worked, he was never seen as good enough. Nixon’s Quaker values also encouraged him to combat racial prejudice. At Whittier College, he insisted the social club he founded accept Black members; he revered his Native American college football coach; he openly condemned segregation while in law school at Duke; and he even joined an NAACP chapter during his first congressional campaign.
Nine Days Page 9