Parting the Waters (154 page)

 

Similar fears penetrated the movement itself. Bayard Rustin spent countless hours arranging police security and imported a supplementary force of four thousand volunteer marshals from New York. From his new headquarters tent near the Washington Monument, he announced that the psychology of peace was fragile and that there was no telling what might happen if attackers burned one of the two thousand buses headed toward Washington, as they had burned the Freedom Ride bus, or if any bombs were detonated, as in Birmingham. It was Rustin's obsession to make sure that no flaw in the arrangements permitted claustrophobia or discomfort to flare up into violence. He drove his core staff of two hundred volunteers to pepper the Mall with several hundred portable toilets, twenty-one temporary drinking fountains, twenty-four first-aid stations, and even a check-cashing facility. Meanwhile, in the great hall of New York's Riverside Church, volunteers worked in shifts to prepare 80,000 cheese-sandwich bag lunches for overnight transport to Washington—to feed growling stomachs, and thereby to prevent growling people. Over the vast march area, Rustin had signs posted high enough to be read by someone jammed in a crowd. “If you want to organize anything,” he kept saying, “assume that everybody is absolutely stupid. And assume yourself that you're stupid.”

As to the program, Rustin notified all speakers that a hook-man would unceremoniously yank them from the podium if their speeches exceeded seven minutes. He was determined to move the huge mass of people into Washington after dawn and out again before dusk, and therefore he could not tolerate the usual stretch of performers' egos. Strict discipline would allow timely evacuation, which would reduce the chances of violence by or upon Negroes wandering strange city streets at night. It would also refute the racial stereotype of imprecision and inbred, self-indulgent tardiness. The planners wrestled not only with logistics but with the weight of perceptions that had accumulated over centuries. Never before had white America accepted a prescheduled Negro political event for national attention. By guilt or aversion, many of the most sympathetic whites retained a subliminal belief pairing Negroes with violence, such that even innocent beating victims were implicated to some degree in their fate.

These stakes prompted the leadership to turn outward—to emphasize their goals and common grievances rather than their particular enemies. Once again, this self-conscious political diplomacy conflicted with the self-conscious foot-soldiery of SNCC leaders. A number of them labored to turn attention to the jailhouse door, where they were. Huddling with John Lewis, each of them added a line or two to the draft of his speech. Courtland Cox helped sharpen the politics by pointing out that nothing in the Administration's civil rights bill would protect Negroes seeking to vote or protest segregation, nor “the hundreds and thousands of people who have been arrested upon trumped-up charges.” Tom Kahn, a young white socialist who had attended Howard University with Cox, helped add language to make the speech more overtly ideological: “If any radical social, political and economic changes are to take place in our society, the people, the masses, must bring them about.” James Forman inserted references to specific outrages, such as the caning of C. B. King by the Albany sheriff, and in his swashbuckling style contributed a vision of conquest: “We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own ‘scorched earth' policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground—nonviolently. We shall crack the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of democracy.” After polishing by Julian Bond and Eleanor Holmes, among others, the final draft of the Lewis speech became a collective manifesto of SNCC's early years. Courtland Cox was so proud of it that when he saw a pile of advance copies of Whitney Young's speech sitting on the press table at the Statler-Hilton Hotel, he mimeographed a stack of Lewis speeches for equal distribution.

Trouble over the speech began on Tuesday afternoon, the day before the march. A Catholic prelate took the Lewis draft to Washington's Archbishop Patrick O'Boyle, who was scheduled to deliver the opening invocation at the march. O'Boyle found Lewis' remarks incendiary, and his complaints soon spread to Burke Marshall, Walter Reuther, and to other white clergymen who had agreed to participate. Within hours, Bayard Rustin was obliged to convene an emergency mediation session at the Statler-Hilton. Lewis stoutly defended his speech against censorship by the elders, who argued in rejoinder that its content—particularly the statement that the civil rights bill came “too little, too late” and was unworthy of SNCC support—was incompatible with the general purpose of the march. This triggered a heated debate on what exactly the purpose was. Word of the dispute filtered downstairs to the hotel lobby, where Malcolm X was fielding questions from reporters, and the Black Muslim leader adroitly cited the reports to buttress his thesis that powerful white forces had made puppets of the Negroes and turned the protest into a Kennedy pep rally, which Malcolm later ridiculed as the “Farce on Washington.” Word of his stinging comments filtered back upstairs to the SNCC contingent. Lewis and several others had met Malcolm that day. They admired him for slinging darts of uncomfortable truth, and yet they also wanted to prove that at least some Negroes were not puppets.

Several blocks away, Bob Moses led a crew of pickets on the sidewalks outside the Justice Department. Ever aloof from public speeches and political deals, even those of his closest SNCC colleagues, Moses remained fixed upon the deeds that he saw as the essence of good faith. If the federal government would fulfill its duty to protect would-be voters and lawful demonstrators, he insisted, the movement could accomplish the rest by hard work. To him, all else was political vapor. No march could make these underlying realities more or less compelling, and part of him rebelled against conniving with federal authorities to create a public climate for recognizing responsibilities that already were obvious. Together with supporters of the Americus prisoners and the Albany Nine, he attacked the Justice Department for retreating shamefully into politics. Moses himself carried a picket sign that caused more than a few pedestrians to brush by him as a doomsday kook: “When There Is No Justice, What Is the State but a Robber Band Enlarged?”

Late that night, King returned to Washington from two days on the road. Sealing himself off in his suite at the Willard Hotel, he began to outline his speech for the next day. His opening sentence bowed to Lincoln: “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.” King would have liked to stamp the moment with his cry for a Second Emancipation Proclamation, but he knew he would reap confusion or worse by introducing a strange alternative to the civil rights bill. Instead he conjured up the safer notion that Lincoln and the Founding Fathers had issued all Americans a “promissory note” guaranteeing basic democratic freedoms. From there he developed an opening run on the clanking, dissonant metaphor of a “bad check” of liberty for Negroes—“a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.' But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt…So we have come to cash this check…”

King wrote new language for one of his standard refrains, “
Now
is the time,” ending with a rebuttal of the rumors that the movement was being tamed by success or by the Kennedy Administration. “Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual,” he wrote. He turned aside briefly in a paragraph addressed to incipient Negro separatism within the movement—not only from Malcolm X but also from King's exasperating colleague Adam Clayton Powell, who of late had been sounding off about how Negroes needed to purge the civil rights organizations of white influence. King blended a plea for renewed nonviolence with a call for a “biracial army.” “The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people,” he wrote. It was a measure of the extraordinary national shift since spring that King felt obliged to nurture white allies rather than to scold them desperately, as in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” This was a complicated, delicate line of racial politics, and he returned to urgency in a third paragraph on a cumbersome new refrain: “We cannot be satisfied…we can never be satisfied…we cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.”

These few themes exhausted the seven minutes. All night long King pared his language so that he could squeeze in a run on his common refrain, “With
this
faith…With
this
faith…” His final result was a mixture of truncated oratory and fresh composition. The speech was politically sound but far from historic, nimble in some streaks while club-footed through others. King gave his handwritten draft to Wyatt Walker for typing and reproduction just as the Moses picket line was ending its all-night vigil at the Justice Department. Also that morning, Robert Kennedy was calling Archbishop O'Boyle to renew the stalemated discussions over the acceptability of the John Lewis speech, and FBI agents, on order from Hoover, were calling Charlton Heston and other celebrities in their Washington hotel rooms, warning them to stay indoors because the government expected violence. None of these contending parties had yet found a formula to shape or define the March on Washington. This privilege fell to the anonymous people who had spent the night on trains and buses.

 

It was the first—and essentially the last—mass meeting ever to reach the national airwaves. Relatively few Negroes and almost no whites had experienced the mood of that central institution—not during the bus boycott or the Freedom Rides, nor since then from the churches of Albany, Birmingham, or Greenwood. As a result, the term “mass meeting” meant very little when the pilgrims spilled out singing freedom songs. A trainload that had boarded in Savannah singing “We Shall Not Be Moved” arrived at Washington's Union Station singing “We Shall Overcome.” Andrew Young was there when hundreds of movement people from another city stepped through the train doors singing, “Woke up this morning with my mind set on freedom. Hallelu, hallelu, hallelujah!”

According to march historian Thomas Gentile, twenty-one charter trains pulled in that morning, and buses poured south through the Baltimore tunnel at the rate of one hundred per hour. A jaunty young Negro finished a week-long journey on skates, having rolled all the way from Chicago wearing a bright sash that read “Freedom.” An eighty-two-year-old bicycled from Ohio, and a younger man pedaled in from South Dakota. Small high school bands improvised on corners of the Mall. Determined high spirits converged from all directions in a kind of giant New Orleans funeral—except that here there was hope of removing the cause of the underlying pain, and here the vast acreage between the Capitol and the Washington Monument muffled the excitement with the dignity of open space. Among the tens of thousands of inpouring whites, plainspoken workers from the UAW and other unions mingled with students and over-earnest intellectuals. Few of them were completely at ease in a swelling sea of dark faces, but nearly all of them forgot their apprehensions. They were swept away by what in fact was the ordinary transport of countless mass meetings, while movement veterans absorbed revelatory homage from palpable symbols of white prestige —the television cameras, movie stars, and dearest edifices of American democracy. A chorus of news cameras clicked as James Garner pushed through the crowd hand in hand with Negro actress Diahann Carroll; they were among dozens who had arrived on the Hollywood “celebrity plane” organized by Harry Belafonte and Clarence Jones. Even those who had attended a hundred mass meetings never had witnessed anything like Marlon Brando on the giant stage, holding up for the world an actual cattle prod from Gadsden as an indictment of segregationist hatred.

At the Washington Monument staging area, a public address system came alive shortly after ten o'clock with the voice of Joan Baez, who entertained the early-bird crowd by singing “Oh Freedom,” a spiritual that Odetta had made popular. Odetta herself came on next, singing “I'm On My Way,” and her mountainous voice prompted Josh White to jump up beside her out of turn. White, whose career reached back into the 1920s and 1930s, when young Communist Bayard Rustin had been one of his sidemen, asked Baez to join them during a number, and soon Peter, Paul and Mary stepped in among them. The trio took the lead on one of their new hits, Bob Dylan's “Blowin' in the Wind,” and then Dylan himself stepped out among them. He had just written a ballad about the death of Medgar Evers. It was a rare moment for folk music, as the performers on the stage had gained celebrity status for themselves and celebrity for their overtly cross-racial tradition. To underscore their respect for the movement, they brought on the SNCC Freedom Singers from Albany. Baez had just persuaded one of them, Bernice Johnson, to give up the study of opera for what became a luminous career as a performer and student of music derived from Africa; Rutha Harris, much to her eventual regret, was about to turn down a recording contract because she had promised her mother she would finish school in Albany. A potpourri of Americana filled the interludes between songs. The first Negro airline stewardess led cheers. Norman Thomas, the old patrician Socialist, looked tearfully over the huge crowd and said, “I'm glad I lived long enough to see this day.”

The warm-up music did not appeal to everybody, and great masses of people stepped off toward the Lincoln Memorial long ahead of schedule. Some sought good seats for the afternoon rally. Others were simply eager to march. Teenagers from Danville wore white sweatshirts and black armbands to signify racial injustice in their hometown, and another young group danced down Constitution Avenue with signs saying they had been arrested in Plaquemine Parish, Louisiana. Rustin's crowd-control marshals lacked the numbers or the heart to hold them back. The streams of early marchers grew so thick that it required almost a military operation to create the illusion for posterity that King and the other sponsors had gone ahead of them all. Marshals waded in from the flanks in sufficient force to open a temporary wedge of space. The leaders squeezed in, locking arms against the dammed tide behind them, which held just long enough for news photographers to catch the scene from a flatbed truck.