Pillar of Fire (93 page)

 

B
Y
FBI
COUNT
, 161 students filed out of Brown Chapel for Selma's Wednesday afternoon march, walking silently in small groups to comply with the city parade ordinance. Once safely past Wilson Baker to the courthouse sidewalk, they pulled from their clothing small signs ranging from “Let Our Parents Vote” to “Jim Clark Is a Cracker.” Sheriff Clark, under community pressure to try smothering the protest with nonreaction, permitted the group to stand unmolested, but he waved up two yellow buses to strategic spots that concealed the pickets from reporters stationed across Alabama Avenue. His obvious sensitivity prompted the students to detach roughly half their number around the corner to the Lauderdale Street sidewalk. Clark countered by moving one of the buses to block sight of them, which excited press interest in what the Selma paper called “a ludicrous game of ‘hide the demonstrators.'” The sheriff withdrew to confer with legal advisers in the courthouse.

Clark emerged at 2:54
P.M.
with a new plan. “Move out!” he shouted to the students, and his deputies herded them eastward in single file down the middle of Alabama Avenue. They crossed Broad Street and passed the City Hall jails. When students asked where they were going, deputies called out, “You wanted to march, didn't you?” At Sylvan Street, instead of left toward Brown Chapel, Sheriff Clark turned the line right at a trot, down to a road that ran out of town along the bend of the Alabama River. Some deputies applied billy clubs and cattle prods to move the students along, while others brought up cars so that Clark and the others could ride alongside the flanks at a pace stepped up to a full-blown run past the Cosby-Carmichael gravel pit.

At a creek bridge two miles up River Road, Clark posted a rear guard to block press photographers and private vehicles. Ahead, clumps of students began bolting into fields where pursuit was difficult. Some stopped to vomit. At a federal hearing on whether Sheriff Clark had violated the injunction to keep constitutional order around the courthouse, Letha Mae Stover would testify that she fell out and told a deputy that it would do no good to keep punching her in the back. The whole line of students was collapsed or dispersed within a mile of the creek bridge, and Clark returned to announce with a wink that he had been marching the students under truancy arrest six miles to the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge, his jails being full, when they “escaped.”

There were overflow mass meetings Wednesday night, at which Silas Norman vowed to rise up against Sheriff Clark's cattle drives for children, and King reported firsthand that Selma already made President Johnson “aware of our groans…aware of our yearnings.” Then, in a midnight strategy session at the Torch Motel, SNCC leaders challenged King's pained recommendation to drop Bevel's boycott of the appearance book. King called it a small positive step. Ivanhoe Donaldson called it an empty promise from the federal courts, objecting that ordinary citizens still had to walk past cattle prods to get into the courthouse. King said the movement needed relief from adverse press about the boycott, such as the AP story “Negroes Don't Know What They Want.” SNCC leader Courtland Cox said the appearance book offered no hope to illiterate Negroes who could not sign it. When King and Andrew Young advocated resting Selma with dramatic moves into other counties, “in order to get a registration bill passed,” arguments broke out over who should speak for local people in strategic decisions. L. L. Anderson and F. D. Reese, the only Selma speakers recorded in the minutes, complained of efforts to exclude them because they were preachers.

Before dawn, the SNCC caucus voted to end the boycott of the appearance book after all, saying they wanted every chance to gain enough votes to drive Sheriff Clark from office. King left for Montgomery to catch an early morning flight for fund-raising speeches in Michigan. He called Clarence Jones from the road, asking for speech drafts against what he called a “deterioration” in Negro-Jewish relations, and vented himself on the growing animosity of SNCC leaders. He told Jones it was the same as Albany in 1962, when they charged that he skimmed publicity off their groundwork. The most hostile ones were those who spent the least time in Selma, he said. They were irrational, and had “no sense of political timing.” Whereas he bit his tongue, King complained, they were carrying their bitterness to an eager market in the press.
*
Jones calmed him by volunteering to ask Harry Belafonte to moderate another truce meeting.

Conflicting passions fell hardest upon Diane Nash Bevel. Her husband was running a fever inside the county jail. Prisoners sent word that his outspokenness and shaved head made him a special target for deputies who had hosed down his cell in the February cold. She had supported Bevel's boycott of the appearance book at the Torch Motel, worrying out loud about setting a precedent for rural counties of high illiteracy, but she endured looks from friends who knew how openly Bevel was flouting their marriage. He excused serial rascalism behind a bluster of nonviolent theory. Hatred and violence sprang from the want of love, Bevel preached. He claimed that he gave and received abundant energy by resolving these “contradictions” in his bed. Unabashed, he seduced more than one movement wife while her spouse, his bosom colleague, was in jail.

The forced march of children compounded strains across town. Judge Hare's pressure to resume mass arrests collided with growing opinion that polite segregation worked better than cattle prods, and a passionate editorial urged citizens to restrain senseless hard-liners “playing to a worldwide audience.”
*
Wilson Baker, who had smuggled SNCC workers beyond the creek barrier to retrieve injured students, saying, “I'm human, too,” threatened to arrest Clark himself if he lost his temper again. However, Baker warned that he would kill any students who dared to disturb Mrs. Baker by picketing near his home.

On Thursday morning, when movement spirits rallied behind a student march four times larger than Wednesday's, Nash desperately tried to rescue Bevel after a doctor at the jail diagnosed his fever as viral pneumonia. She called reporters and badgered Selma officials until she secured his transfer to segregated Berwell Infirmary, where she and Bernard Lafayette were stunned to find Bevel shackled to a hospital bed with a sheriff's deputy guarding the door. Now she hounded the Justice Department by phone, as during the Freedom Rides of 1961, and secured letters that the shackles violated hospital procedures even for murderers. Her crusade pushed Sheriff Clark into a concession before dawn on Friday. He ordered the irons removed, then collapsed early that morning of chest pains, later diagnosed as exhaustion. The front page of Saturday's
New York Times
featured a photograph of SCLC worker Richard Boone in a Bevel-style skullcap outside the white hospital, Vaughn Memorial, with movement students kneeling in prayer for Clark's recovery. “Thus ended,” reported the
Times
, “the fourth week of street demonstrations protesting barriers against Negro voting in Alabama.”

 

F
OR TWO DAYS
in Atlanta, Bob Moses again refused pleas to address SNCC's future course. Some 250 staff members, nearly half from Mississippi, had gathered in the old chapel pews of Gammon Theological Seminary for freedom songs mixed with often raucous debates among ardent newcomers and weary or jail-damaged veterans, with more than a little drinking in the wings. Ella Baker announced that someone had stolen valuables from her satchel. John Lewis and the leadership first pushed through a statement of identity: that henceforth the basic unit of SNCC would be the paid staff member, superseding the campus-based coordinating committees from the sit-ins. Structurally, this meant that SNCC could be governed by majority vote instead of brotherhood consensus, which favored the ambitions of James Forman and others to build a disciplined political “field machine.” Forman hailed the decision as a “working-class victory” over dreamy self-sacrifice. Most of the field staff sprang from the poor of the South, which made the focused constituency a runaway hit with all SNCC's factions—“floaters” and religious purists, as well as Forman's “hard-liners.” Speakers championed them in language destined to spread across the political spectrum. They castigated liberals as treacherous or naive, and rejected as misguided SNCC's history of appeals to a just national purpose in the federal government.

Jesse Morris, a staff worker from Mississippi, formally proposed that the governing executive committee be restricted to black Southerners without a college education, which touched off six hours of heated argument late Friday night, February 12. Forman called the debate “stormy, even traumatic, and at times totally confusing.” Some ridiculed SNCC for limiting its own franchise; others shouted that SNCC should make good on rhetoric about giving local people the power to be free. Fannie Lou Hamer questioned the deeper meanings of prestructured votes, saying, “I just don't understand.” Several hours into the fracas, Morris brought forward a dozen newcomers from Mississippi, saying he had bolstered their courage with whiskey to prove that unlettered people could speak effectively before large groups. The qualifications issue remained unresolved when Moses at last stepped forward.

“I have a message for you,” he said quietly. “I have changed my name. I will no longer be known as Bob Moses.” These words caused an electrified hush in the chapel.

He said they should go back to the Morris proposal, which highlighted their direction. “If you want to keep a man a slave, then give him the vote and tell him he's free,” said Moses. “If you vote for that executive committee and don't stay here to work out the programs, then don't tell me you're free.” It might take five months or five years, he said, but they would not give the time. The real program would be left as usual to the dominant officers and dialecticians, the very people whom the enshrined but intimidated field staff could not address without the fortification of alcohol.

“I am drunk,” said Moses. Though he clearly was not, he acted out stumbles and slurs while delivering a poetic reverie on symbols of power and spirit in a democratic movement. Moses said people in SNCC faced so many paradoxes to keep hold of themselves in a whole world gone mad like Mississippi, which feared nonviolence as murder and excused murder as order. He talked of growing up in Harlem under family stress so severe they had to call an ambulance for his mother, and recalled hearing his father scream at the doctors, “She's not crazy! She's not crazy!
You're
the ones who're crazy!” He said years later they had picked up his father, raving on the street that he was the actor Gary Cooper, and had taken him to Bellevue Hospital for extended psychiatric treatment. He told stories of his father loving the whole family very much.

Moses looked up. “I want you to eat and drink,” he said. He solemnly passed around a block of cheese and a jug of wine. Wordless, some pretended to drink after the jug was empty. “Some of you need to leave,” said Moses. They were becoming creatures of the media, contending for power, and to avoid all that he was adopting his mother's maiden name. “From now on, I am Bob Parris,” he said, “and I will no longer speak to white people.”

He left the chapel before anyone could respond. “Did he mean it?” someone whispered. Interpretations ranged from sacramental cleansing and mental breakdown to staged parody. Some thought he was abdicating his name and place because of the suffering he felt he left too close in his wake. Others thought it was brilliant, and ran off to see whether he would answer to Parris. The former Bob Moses never attended another SNCC meeting.

 

M
ALCOLM
X returned home late Saturday from eight days in Europe. A neighbor called in a fire alarm at 2:46
A.M.
the next morning, February 14, saying that noises of breaking glass awakened her to flames in the house across the driveway. The first Queens fire truck arrived at 2:50
A.M.
to find Malcolm on the front sidewalk with a .25-caliber pistol, having hustled barefoot in underwear out the back door with his pregnant wife and four daughters, aged six months to six years. In the cold, four-year-old Qubilah complained of tear holes in her pajamas. Nearly an hour later, Malcolm returned inside with fire inspectors to retrieve a few clothes and his “insurance” tape recordings from the attic. He deposited his family with friends and caught an early morning flight to Detroit.

He was intent on keeping his schedule, in part because he needed the speaking fees. FBI sources reported that his Detroit hosts summoned doctors with sedatives that made Malcolm sleep most of Sunday, and observed him receive backstage a bonus collection of $200 to help replace smoke-damaged clothes. In daily speeches that week, he made passing references to his desperate plight—hotly denouncing conspiracy theories that he had firebombed his own home,
*
and wishing out loud for a truce. (“Elijah Muhammad could stop the whole thing tomorrow, just by raising his hand,” he declared. “Really, he could.”) However, Malcolm curtailed public remarks about an internecine war too obscure for his audiences, and delivered instead sweeping statements of credo. “I have to straighten out my own position, which is clear…,” he said. “I don't believe in any form of discrimination or segregation. I believe in Islam. I am a Muslim. And there's nothing wrong with being a Muslim…. Those of you who are Christians probably believe in the same God.” He lectured on racialism he found pervasive, from congressional committees and judges to commanders “dropping bombs on dark-skinned people” in Asia, and by contrast he belittled the celebrated new civil rights law that left the federal government still powerless to protect Negroes seeking the right to vote in Alabama. “Think of this,” shouted Malcolm. “Those school children shouldn't have to march.” He advocated world recognition and perspective for a race problem “so complex that it was impossible for Uncle Sam to solve it himself.”