At Canaan's Edge (38 page)

Ella Baker, the revered senior mentor for SNCC, addressed titters in the audience. “What Bevel has had to say today will be interpreted many ways by many people,” she said gently, chiding him for glib provocation. “Some will claim that he, for instance, is a radical. I hope he is, because the word means getting to the root of things. I hope also he is ready to pay the price of being radical.” Baker and nonviolent strategist James Lawson closed the panel with pleas for a more thoughtful movement, and for recognition that a minority of demonstrators—and only a tiny fraction of oppressed people—were yet committed to nonviolence (“as exemplified,” said Baker, “by the reports coming out of Los Angeles”).

At a plenary session in the newly desegregated Civic Auditorium, King presented the SCLC Freedom Medal to James and Diane Nash Bevel for conceiving what became the 1965 Alabama voting rights campaign. The new landmark law had risen from their anguished response to the Birmingham church bombing, said King, praising them for citizens' initiative unmatched in history. The young couple, still largely unknown, had surmounted the abridgement of their own rights to catalyze a national movement from Selma, where only six months ago Nash had found her husband a comatose prisoner handcuffed to a gurney. There were nods in varying degrees of appreciation and regret among the few who knew that the honorees nevertheless were painfully estranged, and that the wild Bevel who spoke in public about hourly girlfriends was trying only sporadically to reunite with his wife and two young children. Shortly, however, King eclipsed gossip and convention business alike. “Few events in my lifetime have stirred my conscience and pained my heart as the present conflict which is raging in Vietnam,” he said from the podium. “The true enemy is war itself.” King announced that he intended to appeal for peace negotiations in personal letters to world leaders, including Ho Chi Minh, and reporters bolted for telephones.

A buzz of controversy lingered in an auditorium crowd of 3,500 people by FBI estimate. Some in the party of mortician A. A. “Sam” Rayner felt unsettled or deprived by talk of war politics, and not a few looked forward to an unadulterated dose of movement salvation in the closing programs on Friday, August 13, whispering that Daddy King was the real preacher in the King family. Father Richard Morrisroe, on the other hand, searched out Ivanhoe Donaldson and John Lewis among SNCC workers now dressed uniformly in bib overalls and rural work shirts, many of whom considered the convention a showy distraction. Tales of isolated danger and deprivation had made the distinctive SNCC outfit a newly potent image for movement followers, as it was truthfully said that the mere appearance of telltale dungarees in a Southern vestibule could halt a Negro church service, inspiring the worshippers or putting them to flight. Morrisroe asked Lewis to meet Silas Norman and was introduced instead to Stokely Carmichael, who handed him off during SNCC caucuses to the seminarian Jonathan Daniels. Within hours, Morrisroe decided to retrieve his bag and stay on for a second week of annual vacation. His parishioner Sam Rayner drove back to Chicago an emerging figure in South Side reform politics—destined to be the next alderman elected for the ward around St. Columbanus Parish on 71st Street—but his wife “nearly choked him” for leaving their young white priest alone in rural Alabama.

Morrisroe absorbed constant wonder. From a convention lecture by economist Leon Keyserling, he drove to Selma and on Friday into Lowndes County for the first time at speeds sometimes above a hundred miles an hour in a Plymouth Fury rented for Daniels by his Episcopal sponsor, ESCRU, after pursuers recently chased him to the Montgomery city limit. At Trickem, Morrisroe separated from Daniels to attend a nonpolitical revival service with the elderly farm couple, Will and Mary Jane Jackson, near the spot where they had been photographed when the great march entered Lowndes. The choir invited him to sing among them on a rough bench, then delivered him to bunk on the porch floor of the SNCC Freedom House. Morrisroe scarcely noticed hardship there because he was smitten by Gloria Larry, whom he pressed for details of her academic work on French literary antecedents in the
Four Quartets
of T. S. Eliot.

Bulletins on gunshot fatalities were spreading nationwide from Los Angeles. After seventy-five people were injured on Thursday, a second lull had convinced authorities again that the riot was spent. Police units withdrew from the emergency perimeter at dawn Friday. Mayor Yorty and Lieutenant Governor Glenn Anderson flew to San Francisco for separate engagements even as angry crowds reconvened near Wednesday's arrest site on Avalon, and an ominous entry appeared in the log at police headquarters: “10:00
A.M.
Major looting became general.” Marauding bands leapfrogged from the twenty blocks previously sealed toward a peak riot area of 46.5 square miles. Arsonists torched emptied stores. Poet and columnist Langston Hughes reported the sight of a woman stopping obediently at red lights as she rolled a looted sofa down the street. Most of the press retreated because of assaults on white journalists, including a KABC-TV correspondent who was dragged off and was missing for two hours. For information that rioters had invented hand signals to identify and protect residents by neighorhood, office messenger Robert Richardson gained a kind of battlefield promotion as the first Negro reporter ever hired by the
Los Angeles Times.
By midday, California authorities summoned Governor Pat Brown from vacation in Greece, and mobilized 14,000 National Guard troops. Police units, amid rumors that commanders felt slighted by the call for help, moved ahead of them into the riot zone. At 6:30
P.M.,
LAPD officers shot Leon Posey standing unarmed outside a barber shop, in what would be ruled an accidental homicide. Half a dozen Negro deaths quickly followed this first official casualty—one shot in the back, one firing a gun, one carrying liquor and another shoes. Rioters harassed firefighters called in from a hundred different engine companies.

Shortly before midnight in New York, FBI wiretap monitors came alive to an incoming call from King's secretary, Dora McDonald. “The Negroes have broken into some gun stores,” she told Stanley Levison. “They have guns and those big Army knives, and are covering about a 140-block-square area.” She said King wanted Levison to draft a telephone statement for him to deliver over Los Angeles radio stations. “Also,” said McDonald, “a man from the
New York Times
called and has given me twelve questions that he would like Dr. King to answer.” She dictated them to Levison—“what is the text of the letter,” the mode of transmission to Ho Chi Minh, the names of intermediaries, the apportionment of blame for the war, and the specifics of King's peace plan? Two questions asked how Bevel's “more militant” stance could be reconciled with nonviolence, and whether King approved.

Levison dictated suggested replies well after midnight to McDonald in Atlanta, for relay to King at his Miami stopover en route to address the Disciples of Christ convention in Puerto Rico. The Vietnam letter was still merely an idea. “Most reporters will try to draw him into going further, until they have a real story,” Levison told McDonald. “He hasn't formulated specific proposals for ending the war, and hasn't said he has.” The New York FBI office rushed a transcript by encoded Teletype to headquarters at 3:41
A.M
. Saturday, and supervisors added to an edited text the sinister preface that a “long-time Communist” was influencing King on Vietnam. The classified report to the White House and Justice Department omitted entirely the intercepted remarks that Levison offered King for broadcast to the rioters in Watts: “I know you have grievances that are hard to live with. I know that any Negro can reach the end of his patience…but it is not courage nor militancy to strike out blindly…. Tonight the whole world is watching you. If you want all America to respect you, if you want the world to know that you are men, put down your weapons and your rocks…. Negroes in the South were not less oppressed than you, and we have run Jim Crow from thousands of places without using a rock or a bullet…. Come back to our ranks…where real and permanent victories have been won and will be won in the right way.”

F
IVE JOURNALISTS
found more than twenty teenagers seated around Jimmy Rogers in the shaded area of a church lawn on Pollard Street, taking shelter from heat that already was thick by the appointed hour. The reporters were following a story tip from the SNCC office in Selma, where Silas Norman had supervised advance notice also to federal and state officials: “This Sat. Aug. 14 at 9
A.M
. there will be a demonstration in Ft. Deposit, Lowndes Co. Ala. Klan is very active in area. We demand protection of demonstrators.” Ominous attention gathered as the young people hand-lettered picket signs such as “No More Back Doors,” debating which stores most deserved challenge for cruel habits of segregation aimed at them and their sharecropper parents. A sedan pulled up with two FBI agents to warn of hostile men milling nearby with clubs and shotguns. Cars cruised by slowly with “Open Season” bumper stickers, after a Klan slogan said to be popular locally since the hung jury in the Liuzzo trial. The rented Plymouth Fury arrived bearing Jonathan Daniels, Gloria Larry, Richard Morrisroe, and project director Stokely Carmichael, who conferred while scouts reconnoitered the grim scene only blocks away over the pine hill: a hundred Negroes waiting outside the tiny post office that housed the federal registrars, frozen under the glare of vigilantes who mingled in the street with uniformed officers and deputies. A ninety-three-year-old woman in line allowed that she had not ventured into town for fifty years. Several of the reporters were both shaken and puzzled to be threatened as “Freedom Riders,” an anachronism from 1961, by local men apparently enraged at the sight of white people speaking civilly with Negroes.

The teenagers lettered another picket sign: “Wake Up! This Is Not Primitive Time.” None flinched when the FBI agents returned to urge cancellation in the face of mob violence or arrest. They grumbled instead against the agents' standard disclaimer—that Bureau personnel were strictly observers, lacking enforcement powers to intervene—and lumped FBI intimidation with others they were itchy to confront. “I don't want to scare the older people away from voter registration,” said one, “but we need this.” Negroes still had to slink around to back doors, said others, and only something drastic would plant the idea in both races that Fort Deposit was part of America. A spirited local girl added that she “sure would like to get one good whack at the Man,” which dissolved peers in howling approval but prompted another huddle among the SNCC staff.

They agreed the demonstration was not their idea—most of them privately opposed it—and first asked Rogers to propose cancellation. When the teenagers demanded to go forward, some veterans favored deferring to local initiative even at the risk of an “open graveyard,” while others said they could not dodge responsibility behind a modest ideological pose. They reopened leadership issues that ranged, SNCC-style, as far as Carmichael's reflections on the 1938 humanist novel
Bread and Wine,
by Ignazio Silone, in which he said an educated radical, disguised as a priest, wrestles with the subtle morality of inspiring damaged poor people to risk revolt against Mussolini. The standard for Carmichael was transparently shared risk. He argued that they could and should oppose any demonstration without a pledge of nonviolence, and told the teenagers that smacking the Man gained nothing but cheap regret. Daniels mimicked his extroverted pose of assurance for people in the grip of fear, until young John McMeans insisted that his friends give up commando notions or go home. “If that's what you want to do,” said Carmichael, “don't take anything they can call a weapon. Not even a pencil.” The teenagers reluctantly surrendered nail files and pocketknives. Daniels, Larry, Morrisroe, and Ruby Sales stepped forward to round out the escorts called veterans, although only Morrisroe among them had been arrested even once (with Al Raby in Chicago), and kept to himself among strangers. In soothing small talk, Carmichael learned that poet Gwendolyn Brooks was a member of Morrisroe's Chicago parish, and remarked that a good friend at Howard had served as a Carmelite priest in Bolivia. SNCC staff members Jean Wiley and Martha Prescod compiled a family notification roster for bail.

They moved out in three groups of ten at 11:30, more than two hours late, but demonstrations scarcely lasted a minute. Fifty armed men closed on the first signs raised outside McGough's Grocery, and a deputy among them said the pickets were going to jail. “For what?” asked Jimmy Rogers, who briefly considered the halting reply—“for resisting arrest, and picketing to cause blood”—while enveloped in a posse quivering to be a mob, then numbly replied, “All right.” As the pickets were marched toward the other groups, clumps of local men fell upon the reporters in two cars nearby, banging, yanking at locked doors while impeding their getaway, and from Golson Motors ran Jack Golson, the county coroner with a shotgun and his brother Carl, the registrar, who smashed a passenger-side window and the windshield with a baseball bat before the car lurched away. A truckload of men chased another car whose driver, panicking when hemmed in, tried a U-turn and bumped into the pursuing truck. Stokely Carmichael, regretting that he had allowed SNCC staff member Chris Wylie to drive, stepped out proposing that gentlemen should let the authorities settle the incident, but both he and Wylie were in handcuffs by the time they reached the miniature Fort Deposit jail.

The car with the shattered windshield drove up like a ghost, the reporters having doubled back in their own variations on the debate they had witnessed all morning—telling one another they could not abandon the story, or were crazy, or must distract the crowd from the young prisoners who bulged from a jail building no more than ten by fifteen feet. On the passenger's side, blood ran from head cuts down the arm of
Life
correspondent Sanford Ungar, who had stared transfixed by the attack and wound up with shards of glass in his mouth. One bystander looking amazed into the car erupted in a convulsive rant about body paint, shaved heads, and “nigger wigs,” as ideas occurred to him for completing the reporters' defection from the white race. Shortly afterward, driver David Gordon would record in an interview that he sat frozen with Ungar until the demonstrators were herded onto the rear of a flatbed truck used to collect the city's garbage, and that amid menacing shouts about trash disposal, “I looked directly at Stokely and he had the most serene expression on his face I've ever seen.” Prisoners waved to stunned friends in the post office line before the truck pulled away. The reporters, blocked from following, managed to identify one of them as a Bessie Lee Caldwell, holding her new registration slip.