At Canaan's Edge (39 page)

That night SNCC worker Scott B. Smith slipped into the home of a Hayneville contact, and verified from the sound of freedom songs that the prisoners were held in the new county jail there, next door to the old one with the gallows. He crept across Highway 97, through an alley to a hidden observation spot behind the Lowndes County courthouse, drawn by revolving arrivals to a late conference in the sheriff's office. Sporadic gunfire punctuated the night. Fearing that a lynch mob was being gathered, Smith kept watch until forced to retreat before dawn on Sunday. “Because of the dogs in the area [who] were barking,” he wrote in his report, “I went back to Mrs. Robinson's house.”

August 14–31, 1965

T
HE
Watts crisis spread improvisation with awe. White House aides shared bulletins late Saturday that Governor Pat Brown had known of many fires and one fatality as he left the Greek islands. “When he got off the airplane, we told him that the death toll was up to seventeen,” said Lee White. “Boy, that really sobered him.” Jack Valenti interjected that the number went to eighteen minutes later with injuries climbing from 558. Joe Califano said his former colleagues at the Pentagon were virtually headless because Cyrus Vance and other top deputies had taken August leave, Secretary McNamara himself being secluded on Martha's Vineyard along with Attorney General Katzenbach and speechwriter Richard Goodwin, who was sailing, unavailable to draft a presidential statement on the crisis. (“We ought to blow up that goddamned island,” growled President Johnson.) Califano, commandeering better space than his rookie office in the basement, retrieved LeRoy Collins from a fishing boat for emergency assignment to the Watts area, where a riot curfew forced Otis Chandler, publisher of the
Los Angeles Times,
to postpone the paper's charity football exhibition between the Dallas Cowboys and Los Angeles Rams. Chandler's newest reporter, his byline slugged “Robert Richardson, 24, a Negro,” made the front page with a story headlined “‘Get Whitey,' Scream Blood-Hungry Mobs,” followed Sunday by an instant cultural icon: “‘Burn, Baby, Burn' Slogan Used as Firebugs Put Area to Torch.” Saturday's front-page editorial denounced the failure of “kid-glove measures.” Sunday's mourned “the four ugliest days in our history,” with the death toll subsided at thirty-five, and called for universal prayer “to prevent forever the recurrence.”

Nationally, battle news from Vietnam echoed Watts, and the Beatles performed hits from their new album
Help!
at New York's Shea Stadium, breaking the attendance record for a pop concert. King aborted a Puerto Rico rest trip but stalled the same Sunday in Miami. Bayard Rustin urged him to avoid the certain embarrassment of a visit to Los Angeles, warning that he would be called an Uncle Tom if he helped quell the riots and a failure or worse if they broke out again. King reproached himself for hiding. “I think I ought to be out there,” he told colleagues in the Los Angeles clergy, but they equivocated. The riots were beyond any trauma they had foreseen as hosts of King's rescheduled tour in July, and their ally Governor Brown was lobbying to keep King out of California. King held off until he saw news that Mayor Yorty and a visiting evangelist flew above Watts, with the latter announcing that he perceived the riots as a “dress rehearsal” by “sinister and evil forces…whose ultimate objective is the overthrow of the American government.” The phone rang again for Rev. Thomas Kilgore, head of SCLC's Los Angeles chapter. “Tom,” said King, “if Billy Graham can ride over them in a helicopter, why can't I come out there and talk to those young people?”

King persuaded Bayard Rustin to meet him in Los Angeles Tuesday afternoon, August 17. The rendezvous was personally awkward for Rustin, as Los Angeles had been the site of his arrest in 1953 for “perversion,” which led to a break with his fatherly employer in pacifist work, A. J. Muste, and Rev. Kilgore had served as intercessor during Adam Clayton Powell's hushed political threat in 1960, when King banished Rustin to avoid public accusation that he associated with a homosexual. Now Kilgore led a reception committee that included Norman Houston, president of the local NAACP, and Rev. H. H. Brookins, pastor of the huge middle-class congregation at First AME. Rustin joined them as King made a brief statement to reporters at the airport gate, deploring violence, pledging to minister and listen. He ducked questions about Governor Brown's charge that his visit was “untimely,” reported the
Los Angeles Times,
“and was hustled off to an undisclosed location,” where he and the Californians pondered options on Tuesday night in a climate of poisonous blame.

Republican Jack Shell, who had lost the last gubernatorial nomination to Richard Nixon, announced that the riots carried “amazing political implications” favoring his bid to unseat Governor Brown in 1966, and Brown withdrew most of the riot troops on Tuesday in an assertion of normalcy restored. “I don't know what the governor is doing,” snapped Mayor Yorty, a Democratic rival, who denounced as “the big lie” any fault laid to the city. “He's too busy with press relations.” Chief Parker, having said Negro leaders gave him the idea to pull out of the riot zone for two days, and then denied that he paid any attention to them, switched to a straightforward cry of victory. “We're on top, and they're on the bottom,” he proclaimed, declaring that only fear of police secured order in the riot areas. Parker dismissed critics who perceived racial overtones in his analysis, but he did narrow his postmortem diagnosis of the riot's cause to an Islamic sect among Negroes. From police intelligence reports, he accused “the Black Muslims” of fomenting general insurrection from a spark of disorder.

The smallest Los Angeles crowd since the dawn of professional football turned out Tuesday night for the postponed Rams-Cowboys game, leaving two-thirds of the giant Coliseum empty. With the curfew lifted, members of the Nation of Islam regathered at Muhammad's Mosque of Islam No. 27 on South Broadway, west of Watts, where, shortly after midnight, a surrounding phalanx of one hundred police officers fired by their count one thousand rounds into the structure, shattering every window and splintering doors with shotguns at close range. A coordinated charge turned up three small fires burning inside and “19 men sprawled on the bloodstained floor,” according to the
Los Angeles Times,
nine cut by flying glass. Police arrested them for conspiracy to commit arson on their own building and to murder the officers, then arrested forty Muslims for obstruction as they arrived on summons to “defend the Temple.” In the aftermath, undercover police took one trusted reporter through the demolished auditorium into a small kitchen where the reporter saw that “tables were broken, utensils lay on the floor, eggs had been splattered, cupboard doors had been ripped from their hinges, apparently in the police search for Muslim gunmen and their weapons.” Outside, officers dropped tear gas grenades down storm drains in a last futile effort to locate suspects with guns or riot plans, while from a distance the mosque leader challenged the press to verify official claims of self-defense: “Do you see any bullet marks on this side of the street?”

Correspondents filed dispatches as if from a war zone. One for the
Chicago Tribune
said LAPD officers “stormed the fortified temple of the Negro race extremists,” and the
Los Angeles Times
called the raid a “shattering assault” on taboo space. “The fanatical Black Muslims never have permitted a white man to enter their mosque,” declared the
Times,
overlooking a more violent police altercation at the same mosque in 1962. Few Negroes in Los Angeles forgot that lethal episode, because Malcolm X had captivated mass meetings from the floor of prestigious Christian churches with electrifying oratory about Chief Parker's force as a daily oppression for Negroes, Mexicans, and other minorities regardless of class or deportment. Even Roy Wilkins of the NAACP for once had made common cause with Malcolm, whose racial separatism he steadfastly deplored, against hard, segregated reality in the shadows of Hollywood. (The LAPD recently had expunged formal rules that barred its few Negroes—none in 1965 above the rank of sergeant—from riding with white partners; the California Highway Patrol claimed three Negroes among three thousand officers.) Malcolm X had commuted cross-country to mesmerize Negro Los Angeles through the 1963 show trial, restraining Muslims from the retaliation Malcolm himself had promised, secretly beginning his fateful break from the sectarian doctrines of the Nation of Islam's founder and leader, Elijah Muhammad.

Three Muslims freed after the 1962 raid were seized again
*
in Mosque Number 27, as though back from a minor preview, hours after Martin Luther King had arrived from the East. On Wednesday, King pushed through a crowd that engulfed the Westminster Neighborhood Association in the burned-out heart of Watts, and climbed on a small platform with Rustin a step behind, just above heads packed within reach of their chins. A man shouted, “Get out of here, Dr. King! We don't want you.” A woman shouted at the man, “Get out, psycho.”

Rustin pleaded with the crowd to hear King, who tried several times to begin. “All over America,” he said, “Negroes must join hands and—”

“And burn!” shouted a young man near him.

“And work together in a creative way,” King persisted.

A young woman called out that “Parker and Yorty” should come themselves to “see how we're living.” Another cried, “They'll burn the most.” A third scoffed that big shots never would bring air-conditioned Cadillacs to Watts.

King promised to do “all in my power” to persuade the police chief and mayor to talk with residents. “I know you will be courteous to them,” he said with a smile, which brought howls of laughter. He asked about living conditions, police relations, and details of the riots, then shouted out that he believed firmly in nonviolence. “So maybe some of you don't quite agree with that,” said King. “I want you to be willing to say that.”

“Sure, we like to be nonviolent,” called out one man, “but we up here in the Los Angeles area will not turn that other cheek.” He denounced local Negro leaders as absentees: “They're selling us again, and we're tired of being sold as slaves!”

Over cheers and cross-talk, another man's voice prevailed. “All we want is jobs,” he yelled. “We get jobs, we don't bother nobody. We don't get no jobs, we'll tear up Los Angeles, period.”

King continued when the exchanges died down. “I'm here because at bottom we are brothers and sisters,” he said. “We all go up together or we go down together. We are not free in the South, and you are not free in the cities of the North.”

This time he ignored interruptions. “The crowd hushed, though,” observed reporters for the
Los Angeles Times,
“as Dr. King began to speak in an emotion-charged voice.” A correspondent for the Negro weekly
Jet
agreed: “The jeering had stopped, and the cynics were drowned out by applause and cheers.” King preached on the suffering purpose of the movement to build freedom above hatred. “Don't forget that when we marched from Selma to Montgomery,” he intoned, “it was a white woman who died.” He called the roll of white martyrs who had joined black ones, crying out that James Reeb had followed Jimmie Lee Jackson in Selma, as Schwerner and Goodman were lynched with James Chaney in Mississippi, the year after Medgar Evers was shot. “Elijah Muhammad is my brother, even though our methods are different,” King shouted to a thunderclap of surprise, and his peroration built hope on boundless redemption. “There will be a brighter tomorrow,” he cried. “White and black together, we shall overcome.”

King moved on to see Governor Brown, who was preoccupied with appointments to a riot inquiry modeled on the Warren Commission. They held a joint press conference of sober but vague cooperation, after which King let slip candor in a personal telegram: “I am very sorry that you see me only as a demonstrator.” The governor seemed benign, however, after a sequestered meeting with Mayor Yorty and Chief Parker on Thursday, August 19. King emerged shaken after nearly three hours and managed platitudes for reporters about an “in-depth, frank discussion,” conceding that the city leaders “didn't agree with most of the things we said.” Pressed for examples, he cited their refusal to let him visit prisoners in the Lincoln Heights jail and their denial that poverty or police conduct contributed to the riots. Because virtually every local Negro had called for Parker's resignation, King said, he had suggested that an independent review board could “do a lot to relieve tension” over specific charges of brutality. It would broaden the scope of judgment beyond police officials who might be partial to their own command.

Mayor Yorty overheard the last of the press exchange. He stepped forward to declare King's visit “a great disservice to the people of Los Angeles and to the nation.” To question police conduct after a riot was to “justify lawlessness,” he charged, and King “shouldn't have come here.” As for reports that his was the only major city not receiving, nor diligently seeking, federal funds in the new War on Poverty, Yorty deflected blame to “changing dictates” from Washington that he said “certainly helped to incite the people in the poverty area.” He rejected any notion that Parker should be discharged or even permitted to resign. “Race relations would go to a low ebb,” said Yorty, “because the white community would not stand for it.”

Reporters jumped to the spilled insults—“King Assailed by Yorty After Stormy Meeting”—and elicited confirming euphemisms on both sides. Yorty's aides said the exchange had been “far from friendly.” Rustin told them King had endured “crude” language without losing his temper. Later, Rustin made notes that the session left him and King “completely nonplussed,” despite their experience with segregationist officials in the South, because Parker and Yorty steadfastly denied the existence of prejudice anywhere in Los Angeles. When he cited to them the heavy local majority to repeal California's fair housing laws, wrote Rustin, they insisted that Proposition 14 was a nonracial affirmation of personal choice in real estate.