At Canaan's Edge (48 page)

The next day, as SCLC's Willie Bolden led two hundred marchers back from the courthouse to a church outside Crawfordville, Howard Sims and Cecil Myers broke from a crowd of Klan hecklers past restraints to pummel stragglers. Sims said their “Black Knights” splinter group favored “a little more action” than rival Klans, and papers from the Augusta, Georgia,
Chronicle
to the
New York Times
featured the graphic picture of Myers chasing down SCLC photographer Brig Cabe with a fist raised to strike. The attack made extra news because Sims and Myers were accused in the July 1964 night bushwhacking of Lieutenant Colonel Lemuel Penn on a highway near Athens, Georgia. A local jury had needed only eighty-one minutes to acquit them of murder, despite two confessions from Athens Klan Klavern 244, and the Justice Department was trying to convince the Supreme Court on a separate appeal that Sims and Myers at least should face lesser federal charges for willful violation of protected civil rights. (Hoping so, President Johnson privately opined that Penn had been targeted with two other visibly Negro officers on their drive home from U.S. Army Reserve summer duty: “I think a soldier in uniform ought to have something to do with it, doesn't it?”)

In Natchez, 1,200 movement supporters marched downtown on the night of October 6, shortly after a federal judge lifted curfews with an order upholding the right to peaceful protest. Grand Dragon E. L. McDaniel mobilized a counterdemonstration of paramilitary Klan units along the route, and his deputy roamed nearby streets in a sound truck that blared the local theme song, “Move Them Niggers North.” Face-offs primed for disaster brought a negotiated settlement within forty-eight hours, but overnight reaction to its most basic concession made city authorities renege. “Never,” Mayor John Nosser announced on October 9, could a deal go forward that would “ask city employees to address anyone as Mr., Mrs., or Miss.” The mayor's statement, which quieted charges that white leaders had “knuckled under” to the NAACP on courtesy titles, renewed a standoff of marches, boycott, and cross burnings that lasted for weeks, with constant sparks of violence and grim pressure on everyone, including the mayor himself. Born in Lebanon, Nosser had two sons in the Klan. While the boycott of segregated businesses already had forced him to lay off nearly half the 147 employees at his four food stores, renegade Klan units also had bombed his home and two of his Jitney Jungles to underscore warnings against suspected compromise. The vise squeezed Nosser into a wishful escapism, and soon he would claim that Natchez could have prevented the entire racial crisis by offering a police escort at Negro funerals.

Charles Evers mastered his own internecine strife from the day of the George Metcalfe bombing, when he arrived in Natchez to supersede the wounded NAACP leader with a declaration of war. “We're armed, every last one of us!” he shouted at the emergency mass meeting. “And we are not going to take it!” By his startling audacity, Evers once again baited the fury of NAACP superiors in New York. Roy Wilkins had seethed against his maverick presumption since the 1963 funeral of Medgar Evers, when Charles took an unassailable public moment to inform Wilkins that he would assume his martyred brother's job in Mississippi, notwithstanding the lack of an offer or his dubious qualification as a self-described Chicago bootlegger and petty criminal. Wilkins publicized his latest maneuvers to fire Evers in September, only to be checked when Evers invited King's SCLC and other civil rights groups into Natchez with open hints that a hidebound NAACP might fail the challenge of a united movement. A month later, having consolidated a central position in the high-visibility boycott, Evers jettisoned the allied groups. On October 19, his aide privately demanded that King withdraw Rev. Al Sampson “and those individuals who are here with him,” charging that criticism of Evers by the SCLC team betrayed an “unwillingness to cooperate.” Evers himself disparaged the Natchez SNCC staff as “outside agitators.” On December 3, with Metcalfe still in the hospital, he alone would join a dyspeptic Mayor Nosser with news that commanded the front page of the
New York Times:
“Natchez Boycott Ends as Negroes Gain Objectives.” The thousand-word agreement called for a biracial commission, the opening of some city jobs to Negroes, integration of public facilities including the library and hospital, and the required use of courtesy titles by city officials and signatory merchants alike, specifically banning the diminutives “boy,” “uncle,” “auntie,” “hoss”—“or any other offensive name.” Success made Charles Evers indispensable to Roy Wilkins.

E
VERS ECLIPSED
a worn, fragmented Natchez SNCC project. A bomb meant for its first Freedom House had destroyed the building next door in August of 1964, after which local sentries posted themselves nightly at the few Negro homes that offered shelter. The acceptance of armed protection, except in avowedly nonviolent demonstrations, was a common adjustment of movement standards to Mississippi gun culture, but the Natchez project gained whispered notoriety when young staff members themselves stockpiled firearms in a shack bought with Freedom Summer donations. Sending notice to the powerful Klan units of Adams County, they deliberately left shotguns and rifles on display for white service workers who installed the telephone. Annie Pearl Avery, a strong-voiced former dishwasher and disciple of Fred Shuttlesworth, who had strained to keep herself nonviolent into jails from Albany to Danville, left Natchez for Alabama with a pistol strapped to the inside of her thigh.

For project director Dorie Ladner, the guns closed off one line of SNCC's competitive distinction from Charles Evers, and compounded divisions that already plagued the interracial cadres thrown together in Mississippi. Bill Ware, a black Mississippian educated in Minnesota, advocated clarifying pan-African doctrines he had encountered in Ghana as a Peace Corps volunteer. Mary King, a white minister's daughter from Virginia, escaped Natchez jointly with Dennis Sweeney into a short-lived marriage in California. Sweeney, a charismatic aspiring political theorist from Stanford, for two years had chosen to test a “naked affirmation of democracy” in the most violently persecuted projects of Natchez and McComb, which freighted him with a brooding edge. Brooding herself, Mary King joined Sandra (Casey) Hayden to circulate that November an influential manifesto aimed in part to heal one rift festering inside the civil rights movement—between its black and white women—with a solidarity based in gender. “There seem to be many parallels that can be drawn between treatment of Negroes and treatment of women in our society,” they wrote, proposing to analyze a “caste system” they found pervasive and personal because the sexes, unlike the races, could not find practical respite in isolated communities. “Women can't withdraw from the situation (a la nationalism),” they observed, but the Natchez staff of fifteen dwindled away in separate colors. By October, three of them—Bill Ware, Janet Jemmott of Chicago, and George Greene of Greenwood—migrated to Lowndes County in Alabama.

In the absence of Silas Norman, now conscripted into the Army, the Alabama SNCC staff gathered to confront emergencies such as a cutoff notice for the utility bill of $11.66 at one Freedom House. Martha Prescod, badgering the Atlanta SNCC headquarters for support funds, received mostly evasive requests for cutbacks. Direst scarcity mandated Stokely Carmichael's rule that no county project could spend more than $40 per month, restricted to gasoline, leaflets, and rent. The two stick-shift Plymouths for drop-off and rescue were reserved for Carmichael and George Greene, who enjoyed an admiring debate over their relative skills as chase drivers. Scott B. Smith worked Barbour County mostly alone. Cleophus Hobbs and Annie Pearl Avery covered Hale County on foot. Donald Hughes and Cynthia Washington divided Wilcox. Jimmy Rogers elicited a pledge that fellow fieldworkers, resolving never to pay for food, should canvas long and well enough to gain donated meals at farmhouses.

Throughout the Black Belt, fear since the Jonathan Daniels murder and Coleman trial had dropped the pace of voter registration to a third of the early rush to federal registrars, but cumulative totals for Negroes began to approach white registration: 1,328 to 1,900 in Lowndes. As pressures rose, including threats of eviction against potential voters, SNCC workers joined other civil rights groups on October 9 at the Tuskegee Boy Scout camp to exchange organizing ideas for subsistence, such as food cooperatives and primitive health clinics. Alabama investigators patrolled the camp to take file photographs, refusing to leave. Preachers from Mobile brought a troubled boy disowned by his family for taking part in the movement, and the delicate task of arranging foster care for reenrollment in a school somewhere fell to Rev. Francis Walter, who succeeded Daniels in an ecumenical ministry
*
sponsored by church groups and the Synagogue Council of America. SCLC representatives, including Albert Turner and Harold Middlebrook, reached agreement with the SNCC project directors to reinforce each other's registration drives in key counties. They mobilized together a trial run for Negroes to vote first in a low-stakes November election of farm councils, administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. After lengthy exploration, however, SCLC staff members were undecided about SNCC's proposal to form separate political parties by county.

A lone SCLC emissary turned up to report on October 18 that King's staff in Atlanta found the idea of independent parties legally and politically troublesome, requiring an enormous diversion of energy. Gloria Larry was among observers who heard the SNCC staff members resolve to go forward by themselves. Since the Daniels funeral, she had tried to resume her graduate studies at Berkeley, but soon withdrew with apologies to the department chair for a persistent emptiness toward literature, and made her way back to Selma by bus. Only the day before, Larry had slipped again into St. Paul's Episcopal Church, which precipitated a hushed suspension of worship. An usher had appeared in the painful silence, taking messages quietly back and forth about a woman member's wish not to have a Negro seated in the same pew, then stood exasperated behind Larry to notify the congregation: “She won't move.” The three sudden words jolted Larry up and out of the sanctuary. She yearned to join the SNCC staff, but movement friends wondered why Larry still hazarded white churches at all. Almost penniless, she scrounged to the point of coveting the irregular $10 staff stipend, but she found herself slightly apart from a SNCC ethos she called “relational.” Young black veterans were turning inward. Emotional exposure at St. Paul's no longer made sense to them, any more than SCLC's worry that independent county parties would alienate the national Democrats.

No movement worker attended the retrial of Klansman Collie Wilkins for murdering Viola Liuzzo, and the only Negro at the Lowndes County courthouse stayed just long enough to testify on October 20 about surviving the night ambush while helping Liuzzo ferry marchers out of Montgomery. “Leroy,” a lawyer called out wryly to Leroy Moton on cross-examination, “was it part of your duties as transportation officer to make love to Mrs. Liuzzo?” Judge Thagard blocked the gratuitous suggestion by defense counsel Arthur Hanes, who had replaced Klan Klonsel Matt Murphy after serving as a pallbearer at his funeral. A hard-line former mayor of Birmingham, who had closed city parks rather than integrate, and refused audiences with Negroes (“I'm not going to meet with 'em,” he told the press late in 1961. “I'm not a summertime soldier, I don't give up when the enemy shows up”), Hanes nevertheless was known as a gentleman segregationist of sober deportment befitting a former FBI agent. He presented the case to the jury as a “Parable of the Two Goats,” describing his accused client as a Scape Goat for the nation's sins, and the state's chief witness, FBI informant Gary Thomas Rowe, as the Judas Goat who had betrayed his Klan oaths and Southern heritage to a revamped empire of pagan Romans in Washington. “Maybe the murderer is from the Watts area of Los Angeles,” Hanes proposed. For the prosecution, Richmond Flowers offered a folksy, derisive rebuttal that the unsupported defense theory—of murder committed by Liuzzo's own civil rights friends—required jurors to believe that phantoms had borrowed, used, and returned a murder weapon owned by the Birmingham Klansmen. “It is absolutely undisputed that this is the gun that killed that woman,” he declared, holding the pistol. In a fiery summation on the honor of his Confederate grandfather, and on the dangers of corrupting fact with hatred, Flowers ripped from
Black's Law Dictionary
the page that defined “true verdict,” shredding it before the jurors. “If you do not convict this man,” he argued, “you might as well lock up the courthouse, open up the jail, and throw away the keys!” Tempering any hope that his skill or prestige as attorney general might seal victory in the case, which had split 10–2 for conviction in May, Flowers posted a well-known marksman conspicuously in the Hayneville courtroom to cover his back. The jury took ninety-five minutes to acquit the indicted triggerman of all charges on Friday, October 22. By Monday, national reaction spurred the Justice Department to announce formal support for the ACLU lawsuit against all-white juries in Alabama, and President Johnson received strategy memos on the intractable “chamber of horrors” in racial crimes: an “unbroken chain” of jury verdicts that were unanimous and binding, yet perceived almost everywhere to be grossly unjust.

K
ING WAS
in Europe for a brief speaking tour. He addressed the Free University in Amsterdam, visited the expatriate blues pianist Memphis Slim as well as Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, and was treated with Coretta at the Haynes soul food restaurant in the Montmartre district of Paris. Learning there of the Hayneville verdict, he canceled his British engagements to rush home for protests. The alternative, he told French reporters, was to accept “the beginning of vigilante justice” that could nullify the civil rights laws. New “OPEN SEASON” bumper stickers already proclaimed that integrationists could be killed with impunity in Alabama, and advance news of his return prompted a detailed threat relayed from Lowndes County to the FBI, that attackers waited to kill King “and anyone who is there to protect him.”