Black Like Me (24 page)

I think the general public has never understood the “special” kind of life that civil rights advocates had to lead in those years. Racists showed high ingenuity in developing schemes to destroy a man’s reputation as a means of nullifying his work. For example, many civil rights advocates, white and black, traveled and lectured
extensively. In the early days, a number of effective men were entrapped in situations that either damaged them personally or ruined their reputations. Those who were with lecture bureaus were particularly vulnerable. Anyone could write the lecture bureau for the travel schedule of its speakers. If a man made a long flight to fulfill a speaking engagement, the chances were at least fair that when he landed at the distant airport he might make use of the rest room. It would be enough to plant one or two men in the rest room and accuse him of some indecency. This happened to a Mississippi white attorney in a case that was given maximum publicity in white newspapers. He had to fly to Los Angeles for an appearance. His travel schedule was known. At the end of this flight he went to the men’s rest room, and when he emerged, he was arrested because two men claimed he had indecently exposed himself. He was tried in absentia and found guilty in Mississippi. He was publicly labeled a pervert and his career in civil rights was effectively quashed.

Priests openly involved in civil rights advocacy were menaced with rumors that they were immorally involved with women. An Oklahoma priest told me that one day after Mass, when he had given communion to a lady, she met him at the door of the church, gave him a hate stare, and said, “How’s your woman, Father?” Priests are accustomed to being called by people in all kinds of distress. Another priest in the South told me a lady called him in distress because she could not understand a certain passage from scripture and wanted to come right over and discuss it with him. He let her come, but when she made advances, he repudiated her and sent her away, fearing it was a scheme of racists to throw a “woman rap” at him.

When Father John Coffield became a public figure because he went into voluntary exile from his diocese in protest against the racial injustices condoned there, he was accepted into the Chicago archdiocese. We feared that he would be victimized by character assassins, perhaps even entrapped into this kind of “woman rap.” I went to Chicago to brief him on the precautions he must take now that he stood as a symbol for civil rights, warning him that he must not be alone with any woman, that he must always be able
to account for his time so that no one could say he was at such and such a place at such and such a time. He and his host priests were quite dumfounded. When I saw that they were not really going to believe that men would go to such lengths to vilify Father Coffield, I called Dick Gregory, who happened to be at his home in Chicago. I told him my situation and said I felt Father Coffield would believe him if he would come over and add his warnings to mine. He came to the rectory and we sat up and talked with the priests until six in the morning. He, of course, knew about Father Coffield. He had heard the same rumors I had heard - that Father might be subjected to character assassination. Dick Gregory had already telephoned Chicago’s city officials and told them that if there was any attempt on the part of any racist group to smear Father Coffield, Chicago’s black citizens would block every freeway leading into the city and tie up Chicago until Father’s name was cleared.

We discussed this problem of character assassination and entrapment with Dr. King and Dick Gregory and Whitney Young and other men active in civil rights. We were advised by a black man in the government to take precautions. We should keep our travel schedules secret. We should avoid using public rest rooms unless some reliable person accompanied us, to serve as a witness in the event some plant might accuse us of some immoral act or gesture. We were advised never to get maneuvered into a situation where we were alone with any lady we did not know. In the bad days we were even advised to find some pretext for changing our hotel rooms as soon as we registered. Civil rights workers risked being harassed in their hotel rooms. One minister, shortly after arriving at his hotel, answered a knock at his door and was beaten unconscious by two men wielding baseball bats. In my own case, if I stayed more than three days in any large city, I usually tried to change hotels or else move in with some black family. In one city in Louisiana where I lectured, I could not even stay in the city because all the lodging places had been threatened with bombings if they accepted me as a guest.

This kind of thing continued throughout the early and mid-sixties. We led strange, hidden lives. We were advocating
one thing: that this country rid itself of the racism that prevented some citizens from living as fully functioning men and as a result dehumanized all men. We were advocating only that this country live up to its promises to all citizens. But since racism always hides under a respectable guise - usually the guise of patriotism and religion - a great many people loathed us for knocking holes in these respectable guises. It was clear that we would have to live always under threat. When we would get together - with Dick Gregory, Martin Luther King, Sarah Patton Boyle, P.D. East, or any of the hundreds of more or less public advocates of civil rights - we compared notes and discussed this. One thing was clear: we had to accept the fact that these principles were worth dying for, and that there were plenty of people who were willing to see us disappear. In one year we lost seven friends and colleagues in death, of whom only one died a natural death; the others were killed. Dr. King and Dick Gregory became almost fatalistic in accepting the fact that they were dead men and that it was only a matter of time before that fact became a reality. They and many, many others acted with a bravery and heroism almost incomprehensible to most men. They went into areas of extreme danger. This is possible occasionally, but it is almost impossible to keep it up. The human nervous system will not stand it.

I got a glimpse of it up close one day in Chicago when we learned that a black man had been found murdered in a town called Liberty, in Mississippi. In those days you could only get an “official version” of such events. No black person would talk to you long distance for fear the operator was listening and would report the call. So the official version said simply that the victim, Mr. Louis Allen, had been found shot, but since he had not been involved in civil rights, it was apparently just an ordinary killing. We did not believe it, so we decided to go there together and see what black people had to say about this. In those days we worked such trips this way. We would fly into a nearby city - either Memphis or New Orleans. A Mississippi car, driven by black people, would pick us up and drive us to the area of trouble. We would get our answers as rapidly as possible and get gone.

But even as we were making our arrangements, the nervousness
overwhelmed us. There was some flaw in the planning. We called our contact again from the airport in Chicago. Dick Gregory wanted to make sure the pickup car would have someone he knew. I heard him shout into the phone: “I’m not going to get in a car with anybody unless I know who he is!” By then we were both trembling. We were shaken with tremors of pure fear. When I mentioned this to Dick Gregory, he mumbled, “That’s what we call knee-knocking courage.” I suppose almost everyone in that kind of work had to learn a simple technique: to make our wills say “yes” even when our bodies and our nervous systems said “no.” It is possible to go places and to function even when you are frightened. We discovered, incidentally, that although Mr. Allen was not involved in civil rights, as the officials stated (as though that were a good enough reason for getting killed!), he had had the misfortune to witness a white man’s attack on a black man and had been forced to testify to that in a court hearing the Wednesday before the Saturday on which he was found shot.

In a sense we led absurd lives in those days of terrible tensions. We formed a kind of loose confederation, without organization, exchanging information, helping one another. I deliberately did not belong to any organization. All of us, blacks and whites, were more or less in touch with one another and at the same time pretty independent. If something occurred in an area where one of us might be, particularly if it involved an injustice done to a black man, whichever of us was closest to it tried to find out what had really happened and tried to help, if possible. Because the Klan and Klan sympathizers were strong, we often stayed in the homes of brave black people.

Often when I was doing investigative work in the South, I would travel with my old friend, P.D. East, the white editor of
The Petal Paper
, one of the heroes of early resistance to racism in his southland. He was a comic genius who worked effectively by ridiculing the racists. He was broken, harassed, and impoverished because of this. But even in tragedy he was irrepressibly funny. One day we were driving through a particularly disturbed area of the South where the Klan was strong. We were very nervous for fear someone would recognize us. In those days, strange things
happened. Police cars, for example, would simply get behind you and trail you so that you did not dare call on the person you intended to see for fear he would receive reprisals later. Filling stations, service stations, were particularly adept at spotting suspicious persons and reporting them to the police or highway patrol. The police could stop you on any pretense - you were going too fast, or you had broken some law - and question you and harass you. Since so many of the lawmen were racists, it could be a nerve- wracking experience. I forget where we were going that day, but we were driving through a beautiful forest on a good highway and I heard P.D. begin to curse under his breath. We were driving very carefully so as not to attract attention. I looked back and saw a police car, or perhaps a highway patrol car. In a moment the car began to flash its dome flasher. We had to stop.

“Let me do the talking,” P.D. growled.

“I won’t open my mouth,” I said.

We waited, almost paralyzed with fright. Both of us were extremely hated in that particular area.

The officer approached the driver’s window of the car and asked P.D. where we were going.

In a voice of humble cordiality, P.D. gave some response.

The officer replied with greater warmth, said we had made a turn back there without flashing the turning lights. Relieved that he apparently did not recognize us, we began testing the turning lights and found one of them did not work. He said he would not ticket us, but we should get it fixed at the next stop. P.D. thanked him profusely and we drove on down the highway, watching in the rearview mirror to see that the patrol car was not following. It turned and headed in the opposite direction and both of us heaved sighs of loud and profound relief.

“That was a close one, Griffin,” P.D. said. “Did you see how cool I was handling him?” P.D. asked this brashly, in complete contrast to his mild and meek manner with the officer.

“You were great, P.D.,” I said. “Let’s hurry up and get out of this part of the country. The next one might recognize us.” He accelerated slightly and we drove on in silence as I watched the tall trees flash past the car windows.

Suddenly P.D. exploded. “Why, that ignorant sonofa-bitch. That insulting,
ignorant
sonofabitch!”

“What’re you talking about, P.D.?” I asked.

“Do you realize that ignorant bastard didn’t even recognize us? Hell, Griffin, we’re famous, and he didn’t even recognize us. I’m insulted.”

“You’d better thank God he didn’t.”

“Well, I do thank God he didn’t,” P.D. said, “but that doesn’t make it any less insulting.”

In spite of everything, however, those days of the early and mid-sixties were full of hope. The country seemed to be awakening to the depth of injustices suffered by black people. Hundreds of college students, white and black, poured into black areas to register black citizens for the vote. In areas outside the South, students on campuses were deeply concerned and picketed local businesses that continued the practice of discrimination. These events became a matter for world news coverage. The world watched and mourned the bombings of Birmingham. The world watched, outraged and inspired by the events of Selma, enthralled by the Washington March. A major civil rights bill was passed in 1964, and if it was controversial, it at least nullified a lot of local discriminatory ordinances.

The great surge of concern was important but it was also deceptive. Many white civil rights advocates did not keep in close touch with the reality being lived by black Americans. For example, the noted Ralph McGill, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and editor of
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
, did a major article for
Look
magazine in which he stated that the civil rights battle had been won. It was all over. Only a few diehard bigots were left, he said. Everything was rosy.

I was in Atlanta when the article hit the newsstands. McGill had been highly respected by black people. I visited several of the black scholars in the universities that day, including Dr. Benjamin Mays and Dr. Samuel Williams. All who had seen the article were stunned, embittered, and outraged by McGill’s totally unrealistic
and misleading statements - stunned that a man of his impressive credentials could be so out of contact with truths that almost any black man could have told him.

The truth is that if things looked beautiful to whites sympathetic to the movement, this was a surface appearance. What lay beneath the surface was another matter. It is true that hope and determination now largely replaced the old despair and that was in itself a tremendous advance. But still the problems of daily living for the vast majority of black men had not changed. Black people were still fired from their jobs for daring to register. Economic discrimination was rampant all over the land. The black press covered many events and developments that were never mentioned in the white press. To get anything like a full picture, you had to read the black press. It was revealing to see how few whites did. Again and again, in lectures to universities with good social science departments where students were fired with enthusiasm for racial justice, I found that the school libraries, which took every newspaper published here and in Europe, did not have any subscriptions to black newspapers, scholarly journals or magazines. We were already a land of two peoples (more, of course, but we are concerned with two here) possessing entirely different sets of information, and we were out of touch with one another.