After the Tall Timber (13 page)

By nightfall, Kol Yisroel reported that the Israelis had taken Sharm-el-Sheik, the shofar had long been blown at the Wailing Wall by the chief rabbi of the military, and Meyer Weisgal, sitting in his own darkened house with his wife and a group of friends, was contemplating the offers of help for the Institute he had received from patrons and scientists all over the world. Later still, Professor Samuel (doubtless like many other professors at the Institute, and like citizens all over Israel) put away a pistol, which had served him in former wars (he had been in four of them: in 1939, 1948, 1956, and 1967), and with which he had been prepared to defend his family—in that oasis of technology, in a nation of two and a half million—if the war had gone otherwise.

The New Yorker
June 17, 1967

FOR THREE weeks in June, a civil-rights demonstration, under black leadership, and with local blacks in the overwhelming majority, passed successfully from the northern border of Mississippi to the state capital, crossing several counties whose most distinguished citizens had been blacks who died for civil rights. One of the triumphs of that demonstration—the James Meredith March Against Fear—was that none of the marchers were murdered. They were not, like the Selma marchers, protected by the federal government. They demanded protection from the state, and, with certain lapses along the way, they got it. For those weeks in June, Mississippians saw state troopers surrounding blacks not to oppress but to shield them, not to give them orders but to come to terms with their demands. With the support of federal law, and the authority of their own courage and intelligence, the black leaders required the government of Mississippi to deal with them—for the first time—as men. For this reason, if for no other, the march marked a turning point in the black’s relationship to the white community, North and South.

From its beginnings, ever since Abolition, the civil-rights movement has been the child of Northern white liberalism. The Southern segregationist has regarded the black man as his child in a different sense. With the march, the movement proved that as long as the law prevents acts of violence against it from going unpunished, it can assume its own adult leadership—including responsibility for its own radical children. On this occasion, the children were the workers of SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), and the worried parents were the workers of SCLC (the Southern Christian Leadership Conference). Other members of the family were the understanding older relative, CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality); two rich, conservative older relatives, the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) and the National Urban League; and two industrious cousins, MCHR (the Medical Committee for Human Rights) and the Delta Ministry of the NCC (the National Council of Churches). The issues, but for their repercussions outside the state of Mississippi, would not have been issues at all. All branches of the movement were united in trying to develop political assertiveness where the need is great—among the black masses, too poor to afford the restaurants integrated by sit-ins, too ignorant to attend the colleges now open to them, too heavily oppressed to vote. The leaders, by marching in a state where they are hated by violent men, hoped to dramatize personal courage, and to inspire local blacks to take the physical and economic risks that still accompany a black’s registering to vote in Mississippi. For every large minority, the vote is the key to political power, and that SNCC’s rallying cry of “Black Power!” should have proved divisive—and even dangerous—is only the latest in a series of ironies that have beset that organization from the beginning.

A campus offshoot of Dr. Martin Luther King’s SCLC, SNCC always comes to the national attention when it is on the brink of going out of existence. SNCC workers—young intellectuals who have tried valiantly to “speak to the needs” of a poor black community—drew the movement to the rural South, only to be outdone by better-organized and better-financed civil rights groups and by the federal government. SNCC leaders were subject to grinding pressures—personal danger, responsibility for lives, internal dissension—which seemed to wear them down. And it was SNCC leaders—whose awareness of the complexity of moral and social issues had always, characteristically, involved them in agonized conferences lasting several weeks—who came up with the simplistic “Black Power!” slogan.

To the marchers, the meaning of the chant was clear: it was a rallying cry for blacks to vote as a bloc, to take over communities in which they constitute a majority, and to exercise some political leverage in communities in which they constitute a large minority. The local black audience—full of affection for the young radicals but all too conscious of what the power realities in Mississippi are—virtually ignored the chant as bravado. White Southerners heard the challenge to white supremacy and braced themselves. And Northern liberals, already bored or disaffected by tensions in the movement, heard only the overtones; a mob chanting anything, and particularly a spondee followed by an unaccented syllable, seemed distressingly reminiscent of prewar German rhetoric, and alienated white sympathies—which the movement will need as long as the need for a movement exists—still further. (What black extremists in the Northern ghettos heard remains to be seen.) “Black Power!” turned out to be, at best, an expression of political naïveté; at worst, it could be misconstrued as a call to violence, which would bring on retaliatory violence to oppress the blacks more heavily than ever, and cause the country to cheat itself once again of the equal participation of its black minority.

Another irony, which almost obscured the purpose of the march, was that violence should appear to be a major issue in the movement. The only marcher who seriously advocated “violent revolution” was a white college graduate, unemployed, wearing a baseball cap and a few days’ growth of beard. He became known to reporters as the House Marxist, and he provoked from black marchers such comments as “I don’t know what to say to you,” “The first thing you whites want to do when you come to the movement is make policy,” “Everyone has a right to his opinion until he hurts someone else,” and “We gonna have a non-violent march no matter who here.” The House Marxist joined the march at Batesville and left it at Grenada—muttering that the march itself was “only a tool of the power structure in Washington.”

It is true that the marchers were often kept awake for much of the night by discussions of the black’s right to bear arms in his own defense. But the issue was always just that—self-defense—and discussions of it were largely academic. Even SCLC workers have tacitly acknowledged that the strategy of non-violence, so effective in integrating lunch counters, is simply pointless when it comes to facing armed night riders on a Southern highway. Black communities have for years afforded their civil-rights workers what protection they could, and not even the Mississippi government has made an issue of it. The march’s ideologues—mostly Northern pacifists and hipsters, who kept insisting that the argument lay “between a Selma and a Watts”—brought the question unnecessarily into the open and managed to produce what eventually became a split in the movement. (The mere fact that Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, among so many, are dead while Byron de La Beckwith, Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, and Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, among so many others, are still alive should be testimony enough to the movement’s commitment to non-violence. There have been no white-supremacist martyrs yet.) Marchers who, giving way under the strain, exchanged threats and insults with bystanders were quickly surrounded by other marchers and roundly scolded; but when a memorial service in Philadelphia, Mississippi, was engulfed by a white mob armed with hoes and axe handles, the marchers fought back with their fists, and no one—not even the vocal pacifists—protested.

Perhaps the reason for the disproportionate emphasis on divisive issues during the march was that civil-rights news—like news of any unified, protracted struggle against injustice—becomes boring. One march, except to the marchers, is very like another. Tents, hot days, worried nights, songs, rallies, heroes, villains, even tear gas and clubbings—the props are becoming stereotyped. Radicals and moderate observers alike long for a breakthrough into something fresh. The institution of the civil-rights march, however, is likely to occupy a long moment in American history, and the country might as well become familiar with the cast.

THE DRONES: In every march, there seem to be a number of white participants from out of the state who come with only the fuzziest comprehension of the issues but with a strong conviction that civil rights is a good thing to walk for. The last to be informed of events and decisions—after the police, the press, the nation as a whole—the drones trudge wearily along. They become objects of hostility when black marchers—forgetting that the only whites within scorning distance are likely to be friendly whites—mistake who their enemies are. In the March Against Fear, the drones turned out to be the only continuous marchers. Leaders dropped out repeatedly—Martin Luther King to attend to affairs in Chicago, Floyd McKissick for a speaking engagement in New York, Stokely Carmichael for a television appearance in Washington—and most of the local blacks could march only part of the way. But the drones stuck it out. Some were thrust into action, and reacted in various ways to dangers of which they had not been fully aware. A mustachioed anthropologist from a Northern university, for example, volunteered for a voter-registration task force in Charleston, Mississippi. When the white population proved hostile, he simply drove back to the march, leaving the rest of the task force to fend for itself. After two more incidents of this kind, he was punched in the jaw by another marcher, and wisely went home. Two drones from the North arrived in a station wagon, bringing their three-year-old son with them. The child, whom they left alone for naps in their car by the side of the road, became covered with mosquito bites, and was twice found wandering by himself, screaming in terror at the sight of a large, barking dog. On the night of the tent-pitching in Canton, Mississippi, the child was rendered unconscious by tear gas, but his parents were preoccupied with what they thought was the need to precipitate another episode. “We’ve got to pitch those tents again,” they insisted, on the second night in Canton. “By backing down, we’re only deceiving the local people.” (The drones were the last to learn it was the local blacks who decided that they had proved their point and that another act of civil disobedience would be unnecessarily dangerous.)

THE PRESS: Reporters have become, despite their neutrality as observers, an integral part of the movement, as they cover one of the last of the just wars. Some of the time, the television networks alone had more than a hundred men accompanying the march, with planes and helicopters overhead, couriers cruising along the line of march in cars, a press truck, and walkie-talkies adding to the din of the already crowded airwaves. (The night security guard, the Deacons for Defense and Justice, and even passing Klansmen were all equipped with citizens’-band radios. The police and the FBI, of course, had radios of their own.) At times when the marchers were silent, the only sounds along the route were disembodied voices on the radio.

The press was jeered by roadside segregationists, threatened by troopers during the tear-gassing in Canton, harassed by a water moccasin planted aboard the press truck in Yalobusha County, and attacked outright by the mob in Philadelphia, but all this did not make the civil-rights workers any the less unhappy with what they came to regard as their unfavorable reviews. Marchers accused the reporters of exaggerating dissension in the movement (when there was a brief argument aboard the press truck, marchers gleefully cried, “Dissension in the press! A split! A split!” Reporters responded with cries of “Press Power!”), and even of generating some dissension by distorted reporting of events.

As far as the wire services were concerned, the marchers had a point. The Associated Press, in particular, made almost daily errors in its coverage—errors that seemed to reflect a less than sympathetic view. The AP quoted Stokely Carmichael’s cry, in the face of the tear gas, “Now is the time to separate the men from the mice!” as “Now is the time to separate the men from the whites!”—implying racism in what had been only a call for courage. It repeatedly identified Willie Ricks, a demagogue affiliated with SNCC, as an aide to Dr. King, of SCLC—implying that the organization most deeply committed to non-violence was severely compromised. The sort of story that AP was determined to listen for and report is suggested by a question that an AP correspondent asked some civil-rights workers who were arming themselves to repel a second attack on their headquarters in Philadelphia; he wondered whether the incident would “encourage Negroes in the promiscuous killing of whites.” In a sense, of course, the AP’s mistaken report of James Meredith’s death was what brought the civil-rights leaders and the press to Memphis in the first place; but there were signs each day that subscribers to the wire service, North and South, were getting a distorted version of what was going on in Mississippi. Other members of the press were more than competent. Their mere presence contributed substantially to the safety of the marchers, and they have proved to be an important factor in the pacification of the South.

THE WHITE SUPREMACISTS: Stock characters out of the Southern bestiary, they line the route of every march. Shouting epithets, waving flags, wielding hoses, throwing objects, or just gazing in malevolent silence, they congregate most often at gas stations and grocery stores—a grotesque parody of small-town America. In conversation, they invariably protest that “our niggers are happy,” express earnest worry about “niggers raping our women,” and show their only traces of real animation when they contemplate disposing of the problem. “I’d spray the whole bunch with sulfuric acid,” said a Navy recruiter in Greenwood. “What I’d do,” said a tourist from Arab, Alabama, sputtering over his grits, “I’d get me some dynamite, and run me a line to the side of the road  . . .”