At Canaan's Edge (27 page)

T
HE POLITICAL
leaders Upham and Daniels sought to emulate were largely inaccessible. King traveled—“I pray he doesn't get bumped off,” wrote Daniels—and the scattered SNCC staff members withdrew three times within a month for a cumulative seven days of internal debate. The commandeered staff car emerged as a new symbol of SNCC disorganization bordering on anarchy. Project directors complained that fieldworkers blithely left rural posts to joyride in Atlanta. “How do you deal with people who tell you they're going to shoot you if you take away their cars?” asked Muriel Tillinghast of Mississippi. Former SNCC chairman Marion Barry traced a loss of communal spirit to the reduction in direct action protest; he lamented that jail-going witness no longer weeded out frivolous politics. Carmichael argued that assorted free spirits—called “floaters”—were merely symptoms of SNCC's lack of a signature program after Freedom Summer of 1964. Some bemoaned an acute leadership vacuum since Bob Moses had changed his name to Parris in his mysterious farewell ceremony two months earlier. Others objected that Moses and his wife, Dona, set a debilitating example by floating anonymously into Birmingham while still on the SNCC payroll. “I will not look for them,” announced a peeved Silas Norman. “They must contact me.”

Moses missed a three-day SNCC retreat to address the first major rally against the Vietnam War on April 17 in Washington. Colleagues left behind perceived his speech as yet another visionary leap of courage, but the shift of subject highlighted SNCC's division in two respects. First, like the nascent antiwar movement itself, the Washington rally of twenty thousand was composed almost entirely of white people, which raised the hidden issue of racial tensions within a civil rights group that aspired to rise above them. Moses had presided over painful debates about internal hostility even before the Southern movement was flooded with white volunteers who stayed after Freedom Summer, and it was partly to escape the personal and political strain of integrated projects that some sixty SNCC staff members so readily left Mississippi for Selma. Second, the Vietnam speech hazarded a new protest in the arena of national politics, where young SNCC workers—especially Moses—felt beaten down, worn out, and betrayed. Many had come to regard the national government as a stifling enemy. “How many of us are willing to condemn LBJ's voting bill?” urged Courtland Cox, the influential theorist out of Howard University. An analysis by SNCC's research director, Jack Minnis, dismissed the proposed law as “completely fraudulent…because the whole racist structure of the enormously complex U.S. government provides those who govern with too many ‘outs.'”

SNCC activists broadly rejected the goal of federal action that had anchored the movement's anguished appeals for racial justice. On the brink of history's verdict, they asserted that the landmark civil rights laws would be empty pieces of paper, and their grievance ran deeper than predictions of failure and nonenforcement. Significantly, movement veterans turned sour on the inherent nature of national politics. “Lyndon and Hubert and their friends continue the confidence game that passes for government in the Great Society,” wrote Minnis in the April 15 edition of his investigative newsletter,
Life with Lyndon.
The freelance weekly had become a phenomenon within SNCC since January, based on its caustic portrayals of President Johnson as the tool of impersonal forces—chiefly profit and centralized power—behind an empty husk of liberalism. In a fateful irony, this approach mirrored language being crafted by George Wallace and others from the opposite political pole.

SNCC workers vented contradictions. Hard-liners shouted that purists were immorally withdrawn. Purists said hard-liners were immorally engaged. (“They say that since the power structure is so immoral, what we should do to get power is to be sneaky and underhanded ourselves.”) A forlorn team of Mississippi workers protested Forman's blatantly inconsistent posture toward the Selma demonstrations—“What in the hell is going on?”—then resigned in frustration. “We destroy each other,” wrote one, “but mostly offer each other no comfort.” Silas Norman chastised Ivanhoe Donaldson for serving as marshal of the grand Montgomery march even though he opposed it. Mississippians pleaded for Donaldson to return to the grassroots survival projects he championed, only to be shocked when he turned up instead to say he was running SNCC communications director Julian Bond for a seat in the Georgia legislature.

“What will Julian do if he loses?” asked a bewildered staff member.

“I don't know,” shrugged Donaldson. He solicited SNCC's first campaign contribution with pragmatic flair, ignoring an ingrained consensus that neckties and electoral politics were paths to corruption. Voters from Atlanta's new 136th district never had been consulted by a candidate, he said, and they deserved better than the nominee decreed by Negro preachers. Also, Bond's name was an asset because of his prominent family and yet his face was unknown, which allowed Donaldson and SNCC co-worker Charlie Cobb to triple the personal reach of the campaign by passing themselves off as the candidate in door-to-door visits. Frank Soracco, who was white, confined his work mostly to headquarters in the back of a wig shop on Hunter Street.

Moses, answering to Parris, dropped by SNCC's final April debate with a meditation on the growing pains of freedom. The movement was opening doors to millions, he said, but there could be no shortcut to institutionalize “the meaningful release of their energy.” This he called a central problem for the balance of the twentieth century. He drew sketches of organizational theory as colleagues sat spellbound or puzzled. “If the direction really comes from the bottom,” Moses patiently declared, “the people have to get together and hash out what they think are their problems.” Including SNCC's problems. Without a deadline. No one called him a floater in person, and several tried to fathom the democratic gist of his message. “People get strength from each other,” said Stokely Carmichael.

Rancorous abstraction gave way to divided practice. White SNCC workers drifted away or took up support functions for Negro fieldworkers who ventured deep into isolated territory. The small team in Lowndes County found a freedom house that lacked indoor plumbing, donated by farmer Matthew Jackson of the newly born voting rights group, LCCMHR. From there, Carmichael and Bob Mants slowly canvassed the giant rural county on foot and on borrowed mules, at first claiming victory when frightened Negroes allowed them to come near. An old woman outside Calhoun politely turned them down. “I can't do no registering,” she said. “My head done blossomed for the grave.” Later, in a small epiphany, an ancient invalid named “Aunt Ida” Bowie announced that she had been expecting them since “I seed y'all up there around Abraham Lincoln”—a reference taken to mean the 1963 March on Washington. She sent relatives to the tiny mass meetings.

Carmichael aimed to burrow deeply into Lowndes. To find others like Aunt Ida he recruited Scott B. Smith, a fieldworker he admired for proven ability to start alone from a roadside drop in a strange county without funds or transportation. Smith was a Chicago street hustler who had come south to volunteer after Bloody Sunday, but he cultivated a backwoods aura by wearing a necklace made of mysterious “haunted” bones—some said deer antlers—and discoursed knowledgeably on the subtle importance of black moonshiners to rural churches. He quickly predicted that the town of Fort Deposit would be the “powder keg” for Lowndes County, where the new project tried to forestall violence by working quietly out of sight. Whatever happened, Carmichael argued, SNCC workers would be foolish to begrudge popular affection for Martin Luther King. He had seen Alabama black people climb over each other just to touch him. “The people didn't know what was SNCC,” Carmichael trenchantly observed. “They just said, ‘You one of Dr. King's men?'” He urged his colleagues to answer, “Yes, ma'am,” and to forge bonds in daily service so that even King would have to “go through the SNCC workers” in the next crisis, making common cause of leadership from top and bottom.

K
ING FIRST
tested Boston. Beneath giant murals on a theme chiseled into the frieze of the Common Court—“Milestones on the Road to Freedom in Massachusetts”—he addressed a joint session of the legislature on Thursday, April 22. “For one who has been barricaded from the seats of government,” he began, “and jailed so many times for attempting to petition legislatures and councils, I can assure you that this is a momentous occasion.” Standing galleries cheered his tribute to their slain native son, President Kennedy, for introducing the civil rights bill, and applauded his report that “many communities are now complying…with amazing good sense and calm reasonableness.” When King touched upon aspects of the “desperate question” that remained, however, observers noticed legislators edging forward, some on overflow camp stools packed in the aisles. “He never mentioned Boston or Massachusetts specifically, but he did stress ‘school imbalance' [and] ‘de facto segregation,'” reported the
Boston Globe.
“Let me hasten to say,” King hedged in the Common Court, “that I come to Massachusetts not to condemn but to encourage. It was from these shores that the vision of a new nation conceived in liberty was born, and from these shores liberty must be preserved.”

The thunderous approval that had answered his call to Pettus Bridge still echoed along King's motorcade route to Back Bay. At Temple Israel, for a thousand people on the last night of Passover, he recalled informally that landlords had offered rental lodging to the telephone voice of a new Boston University graduate student in 1951, “at place after place…until they found out I was a Negro.” By such constriction in real estate, concluded the 1965 Kiernan Report on Education for the commonwealth, 70 percent of all eighty thousand Massachusetts Negroes were cordoned inside the single Boston district of Roxbury, where decay advanced as from a girdled tree. King had toured Roxbury on his way to meet Governor John Volpe and the legislature—climbing into the dilapidated tenement apartment of Betty Jennings, a recent refugee from the segregated South, and speaking to parents through a bullhorn outside Campbell School, where students crowded up to fifty per class. His hardest task was often to prevent the swell of bitterness, he explained at Temple Israel, so as to develop constructive nonviolence. “Every Negro must prepare for ‘the Passover of the Future,'” he said.

“Boston is not the worst city in the United States,” King told reporters early Friday outside Roxbury's Blue Hill Christian Center. He mentioned people of conscience who had served there, including James Reeb and Mary Peabody, mother of the previous governor, before her jail witness the previous spring in St. Augustine. Rev. Virgil Wood, the former SCLC coordinator in Virginia, presented a choir of recovering alcoholics who had returned from the Montgomery march and now scrubbed Roxbury streets for King's visit. Then, behind closed doors, local leaders exhibited a weak case for a Boston movement. They were “horribly divided along class lines,” one conceded. Their nemesis, white school defender Louise Day Hicks, had mobilized more effectively. Some worried that Irish teenagers had stoned the NAACP float in the past two St. Patrick's Day parades, while others discounted prestigious allies. They gave Lieutenant Governor Elliot Richardson a sporting nickname, “I Was With You In Selma,” based on a conversational refrain they said he used to finesse talk of race in Boston. King laughed, but he could not lightly risk the support of politicians like Richardson, who indeed went to Selma. The voting rights bill still faced crippling amendments under filibuster, and even settled law would be a fragile base for what King called “creative optimism.” Only Wednesday, approaching the eleventh anniversary of the unanimous
Brown
decision, he had told the New York City Bar Association that a mere 1.18 percent of Negro students in the South attended class with any white children.

King emerged two hours late for his first march about conditions in the North, covering three miles out of Roxbury with six hundred police guards and crowds estimated between twenty and fifty thousand. Cold rain drove some to shelter under store awnings along Tremont Street, but most raised umbrellas like King himself for the rally on Boston Common. Within sight of gravestones and monuments for storied heroes of democratic struggle—Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, Crispus Attucks, Robert Gould Shaw, William Lloyd Garrison—he exhorted Americans not to become “a nation of onlookers,” then parried questions from reporters in a subsequent rush to the airport. King denied picking on Boston, or worrying over Harry Truman's latest public accusation that he was “a troublemaker,” or resenting a diversion of energy to peace issues. “I have no objection to civil rights leaders speaking against war as against segregation,” he said, in a comment generating a headline—“King's New Tack: End The Viet War”—that circled back in thank-you telegrams from pacifist friends A. J. Muste and Benjamin Spock, urging him to join their war protests. Distractions from the altar crowded in the same day, as Southern Presbyterians debated a motion to rescind an invitation to King, and two leading churches, St. John's Episcopal of Savannah and First Baptist of Houston, voted to deny admission to Negroes. King complained that his sleeping pills no longer worked and that his vacation felt more like a prison than rest. Aides discussed recommending to him a more drastic psychiatric approach for depression—“not using those words, of course.”

P
RESIDENT
J
OHNSON,
asking if he had somehow offended King, remarked toward the end of April that he was falling out of touch with civil rights leaders. “Normally they're tellin' you that you are either playin' hell, or you're doin' a good job,” he grumbled to an aide, “and we just haven't heard anything.” Johnson wanted help in particular to hire enforcement officials for the equal employment section of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which took effect in July. Prospective candidates, mindful of their own careers, were shrinking from a task that figured to rankle major employers nationwide. “None of them want to do it,” groused Johnson. “I've got to get some good people.” He ordered more bundles of his Selma speech shipped to the leaders for distribution to potential recruits.