At Canaan's Edge (76 page)

A new liability of war dissent ripened that same week when the FBI arrested Ken Kesey, author of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
and
Sometimes a Great Notion,
shortly after he announced his intention to defy drug charges “as a fugitive and as salt in J. Edgar Hoover's wounds.” Kesey had outraged some young protesters, and captivated others, by telling antiwar rallies that it was foolish to oppose Vietnam with the politicians' tools of ballyhoo and speeches—“that's what
they
do”—breaking instead into a harmonica rendition of “Home on the Range.” With his cult following of Merry Pranksters, Kesey expressed disdain for the trapdoor psychology of war debate by beatific withdrawal and absurd theatrics. Shortly before the October arrest, he appeared at a flamboyant “Love Festival” to disregard the effective date of a new California statute that outlawed the psychedelic drug LSD. After making bail, he renewed a sporadic cross-country association with renegade Harvard professor Timothy Leary, who in September had proclaimed himself founder of a religion based on spiritual discovery through the use of LSD, marijuana, and peyote, with the signature mantra, “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” In New York, loosely affiliated groups brought a Yellow Submarine prop to a demonstration before the November elections. Others scheduled a “Human Be-In” for January in San Francisco, featuring the new rock groups Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, where the former teach-in activist Jerry Rubin promoted countercultural politics “in the Marxist tradition of Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Karl.”

The hippie phenomenon, modifying the “hip” beatnik rebellion of the 1950s, caught on more slowly than black power in the press. Among politicians, Ronald Reagan recognized it early in the development of counterpoint for his California gubernatorial campaign, which one opposing consultant already called “a major cultural-political watershed.” Reagan framed his call to old-fashioned morality against a blended specter of Watts and Berkeley. He proposed to bypass court review of Proposition 14 with legislation to repeal the state's fair housing law outright, and narrated television ads over ominous film of riots: “Every day the jungle draws a little closer…. Our city streets are jungle paths after dark.” Denouncing Berkeley for “orgies so vile I cannot describe them,” he promised to recruit ex-CIA Director John McCone for a repeat of his Watts commission assignment, this time targeting the incumbent governor and university chancellor for what Reagan termed their “appeasement of campus malcontents and filthy speech advocates.” To take the edge off his attacks, Reagan quipped that a male hippie “dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah.” Ten days before the election, he released a telegram to Stokely Carmichael suggesting firmly that he cancel all speech dates in California, and challenged Governor Pat Brown to send one like it. Much to the satisfaction of the Reagan campaign, the ploy heightened news coverage of Carmichael's October 29 address exhorting Berkeley students to say “hell, no” to the Vietnam draft.

Lyndon Johnson landed triumphant on November 2 after seventeen days and 31,500 miles abroad, the longest presidential trip in history, laden with gifts, including two white kangaroos from Australia. At the palace in Thailand, he had drawn his bath from a silver spigot in the shape of a water buffalo, and his unscheduled detour to South Vietnam's Cam Ranh Bay on October 26 made him the first Commander-in-Chief to salute U.S. troops in an active war zone since FDR at Casablanca in 1943. The pageantry of resolve at Asian war councils spiked his favorable rating on Vietnam to 63 percent, provoking Richard Nixon to attack a long-haul strategy he said “resigns” America to war that “could last five years and cost more casualties than Korea.” Nixon proposed vigorous bipartisan action to win the war by 1968, and the President responded with unusual public venom. (Nixon's barbs cut close to the grim secret forecasts that he and Johnson would fulfill nearly in lockstep despite all their enmity.) At a homecoming press conference, Johnson denounced the “chronic campaigner” whose habit was “to find fault with his country and his government” every other October. He said Nixon “never did really recognize and realize what was going on when he had an official position in the government,” and icily reminded reporters that President Eisenhower once asked them for a week to think of any contribution from his two-term Vice President.

Johnson canceled plans to barnstorm for Democrats. Disappointing polls showed that a commander's glow from overseas could not swing local races, and that ineffective appeals for Pat Brown among many doomed candidates more likely would injure his own standing. He went home to Texas instead. On Monday, November 7, beneath attention fixed on the last campaign rallies nationwide, Johnson visited the Welhausen School at Cotulla. “I was the song leader,” he told a group of parents in the room where he once taught jumbled classes. “You would not believe that, but I tried to be, anyway.” He said the school had not changed much since 1928, and that nearly three-quarters of Mexican-American students still left school before the eighth grade. “Right here I had my first lessons in poverty,” he recalled. Those vivid memories still shaped all he sought to accomplish in politics, declared Johnson, “for the conscience of America has slept long enough while the children of Mexican-Americans have been taught that the end of life is a beet row, a spinach field, or a cotton patch.”

W
ITH
S
IDNEY
Logan, the freedom organization candidate for sheriff, John Hulett walked into the Lowndes County courthouse early on November 7 to obtain from Probate Judge Harrell Hammonds a certified copy of the final voter list guaranteed to a new sponsoring group that appeared on the official ballot by meticulous observance of state law. There were 5,806 names in all. “We have enough registered people in Lowndes County to win,” Logan told reporters. Hulett expressed caution, knowing his first-time voters must perform under the harsh scrutiny of election authorities whose presence they were conditioned to avoid. “We have never tried to get out the vote,” he admitted, “so we don't know exactly what we can do.” Later that morning, as never in living memory, officially designated black and white poll watchers mingled at the courthouse to hear the mandatory explanation of rules. When reporters asked what role Stokely Carmichael would play, Hulett tactfully replied that Carmichael no longer lived in Lowndes County and that SNCC workers deferred to local citizens. “The help they have given us is in courage,” said John Hinson, county school board candidate, “letting you know you are an American.”

Carmichael was finishing his third day in jail. Keeping to Selma, he had refrained from public statements about the Lowndes County election, observing a SNCC policy designed to avoid the extra tension of his black power notoriety, but Mayor Joe Smitherman ordered him arrested with Stuart House and Thomas Taylor, who had been urging people to vote from a sound truck. (“I saw some Negroes aroused,” a Selma police officer testified, “who wouldn't usually get aroused on Saturday.”) Only by frantic exertion did Carmichael make bail in time to reach the final mass meeting Monday night near Hayneville, where 650 people packed Mt. Moriah Baptist Church. Divided by residence into the eight voting precincts, they questioned lawyer Morton Stavis about election law—disputed ballots, counting procedure, how to challenge a “graveyard” voter—and watched SNCC's Courtland Cox demonstrate how to use a voting machine. They had posted highway signs with their emblem and safety instructions—“PULL THE LEVER for the BLACK PANTHER and go on HOME!”—but stalwarts who learned what pressures awaited poll watchers at the white-owned ballot sites decided to linger after they voted to show support, keeping the legally required distance of thirty feet.

Carmichael's entrance in the midst of preparations electrified the church. “We have worked so hard for this moment,” he said, reviewing the twenty months since people had been afraid even to mention the voting rights movement in nearby Selma. His speech ranged from naked sentiment—“It is the will, the courage, and the love in our hearts”—to rhythmic thunder: “We will pull that lever to stop the beating of Negroes by whites! We will pull that lever for all the black people who have been killed! We are going to resurrect them tomorrow! We will pull that lever so that our children will never go through what we have gone through…. We are pulling the lever so people can live in some fine brick homes! We are going to say good-bye to shacks! Dirt roads! Poor schools!” After swaying choruses of “We Shall Overcome,” Hulett dismissed the crowd with pleas to come early and look nice, as Carmichael hugged people at the door.

On election day in Lowndes, cool and sunny, clumps of voters held up pieces of white paper to beckon the few roving poll drivers who circled rural highways. They ate premade sandwiches dispensed outside the Benton precinct, where large morning numbers allowed fellowship to the point of comforting banter. They held steady in Hayneville, where Tom Coleman and other Klansmen stalked alongside evenly divided lines. For poll watcher Eddie Mae Hulett, wife of the movement leader, the first worrisome sign at Benton was a truckload of sharecroppers who refused to look at her when she asked if they needed help, going meekly into the voting booth with a white official suggested by their plantation owner. The Justice Department observer found no basis to intervene. Driver Andrew Jones, after a long day under siege in Fort Deposit, saw the lights go out suddenly at the City Hall polling station. He told voices accosting him in the dark that he was waiting to take the poll watchers home, then grabbed a striking hand and hung on until something hard from behind “cracked the hide on my head.” Jones fell under blows as two of his daughters jumped from the station wagon and ran screaming for help. They managed to get him into Selma's Good Samaritan Hospital by way of the Lowndes freedom headquarters at Mt. Gillard Baptist Church, where the bloody sight of him superseded a climactic election night. Carmichael and John Hulett activated their emergency vow that attackers would get only “the first shot” for free, and armed black posses scrambled across the county like Minute Men, fanning out to ward off follow-up attacks. SNCC's Jennifer Lawson wielded the Jackson family rifle to protect the Lowndes County Freedom House near White Hall. In a yard near Fort Deposit, guarding Andrew Jones's wife and nine children, Scott B. Smith wore military fatigues and brandished his shotgun until dawn.

All seven nominees from the freedom organization lost fairly close races, and the three who worked for white employers also lost their jobs. Fort Deposit poll watcher Clara McMeans promptly got fired from a maid's livelihood because the boss said her activity “was reflecting on him and his friends.” The Andrew Jones family was evicted before he was released from the hospital. Since encountering Carmichael in Montgomery on the last day of the Selma march, Jones had become Fort Deposit's first registered black citizen, watched the first local demonstrators go to jail on a garbage truck with Jonathan Daniels, and forfeited both paying jobs as a lumber worker and janitor for the Alabama power company. Now he remained in Fort Deposit to build a home on land donated by a movement farmer, with grit that inspired outsiders who witnessed the 1966 election. Months later, volunteer Mark Comfort would lead a truck convoy back from California with food and supplies for evictees still holding out in the tent city. “Even though we lost, the people have strong confidence,” John Hulett said on the day after the vote. Alice Moore took a politic line about her defeat for tax assessor, saying she always expected to lose by a few hundred intimidated no-shows and plantation voters but had not wanted to discourage anyone by letting on. Charles Smith, president of the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights, noted philosophically that half the county's eligible black voters still had not registered. “I think the cat did well for the first time out,” he announced.

Democratic principle inched forward in Lowndes County. A movement that had shaped national commitments from Alabama and Mississippi returned there to begin everyday politics based on a common right to vote. The fledgling local group, having attracted more than twice the required 20 percent of total election turnout, gained official recognition under Alabama law as the Lowndes County Freedom Party. “We have a party now,” declared Stokely Carmichael. “Black people aren't discouraged. We're on the move.” He said so from Boston, however, and the party to acquire fame with him was about guns instead of the vote or Alabama, where he now planned for SNCC to maintain no more than a token presence.
*
A phenomenon took root from reports that went home to Oakland, California, with Mark Comfort—of armed defenders springing up election night in the dark countryside to win “The Battle of Fort Deposit” without firing a shot, preserved in a trophy photograph of one rifled warrior next to the highway signboard image of a black panther.

Notions to adapt the striking ballot symbol had circulated in the wake of Carmichael's speeches since May. J. Edgar Hoover secretly alerted FBI offices to talk of forming a New York black panthers outfit among activists with a “propensity toward violence” and no “actual connection” to the “legitimate political party” in Alabama, but Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale quickly preempted all contenders. Beginning that fall from Oakland, their Black Panther Party for Self-Defense flashed lightning with military poses of black separatist rebellion from the heart of big cities. The sensation all but expunged real antecedents that were sound and contrary in every respect—ballot struggles by patriot sharecroppers, quilting women, and priestly martyrs—just as fascination with black power eclipsed Stokely Carmichael's six prior years in the nonviolent movement.