At Canaan's Edge (64 page)

John Doar diverted Justice Department lawyer Charles Nesson into last-minute negotiations over the Lowndes County nominating convention. “If we do not hear from you, or if the US Government does not find itself able to protect the participants,” Stokely Carmichael petitioned Doar, “we shall be forced to look to such resources as we can muster on our own.” On April 26, Sheriff Frank Ryals had forbidden access to the Hayneville courthouse, but Carmichael, citing Alabama law that founders of a local party must convene “in or around a public polling place on the day of the primary,” pressed a right to use the county's only qualifying site. Ryals bluntly informed Nesson that it would be more than dangerous enough in Lowndes County for the first ordinary black voters, and any convention of Negroes on the courthouse lawn would become a “turkey shoot.” John Hulett insisted they had no choice. Rattled, Nesson dashed between Selma and Montgomery for ideas to avert a disaster.

The freedom organization meanwhile continued nightly mass meetings, and SNCC research director Jack Minnis finished local workshops on practical government. He used illustrated booklets to explore simple questions—“How does voting work?” “What is politics?”—plus primers and statute books for leadership seminars. New rivals for a “freedom nomination” addressed the packed candidates' forum at Mr. Moriah Church. “Vote for me and I'll stand up for fair treatment,” declared Jesse “Note” Favors, whose opponent, Sidney Logan, vowed to wipe out the ingrained fear of the sheriff's uniform. The children of bricklayer John Hinson, who was running for a seat on the board of education, handed out paper cutouts of a schoolhouse marked “Vote for Hinson.” Some speakers wrestled regrets about missing their first vote for governor to nominate local candidates instead. Others jumped up to testify when Hulett relayed official warnings that a party convention meant suicide. “We been walkin' with dropped down heads, a scrunched up heart, and a timid body in the bushes, but we ain't scared anymore!” cried an old farmer who urged the crowd not to meddle or pick a fight, but to stand. “If you have to die, die for something,” he said, “and take somebody before you.”

Nesson returned on Sunday, May 1 with a proposal to relocate from the courthouse to a black church near Hayneville, where the convention, though still unguarded, would be less inflammatory to white voters on primary day. An emergency movement caucus rejected his verbal assurance that the change would be legal. Any judge who disagreed could strike their slate from the November ballot, Hulett replied, and his people would take their chances at the courthouse unless Alabama authorities specified in writing that the church met the statutory requirement to be “in or around a public polling place.” The renewed standoff obliged Nesson and cohorts to chase down Attorney General Richmond Flowers in the final sprint of his own campaign. To sign the proposed legal finding would encourage withdrawal from the Democratic primary, which would cost him votes for governor, and any accommodation to Negroes would further alienate white voters. On the other hand, Flowers knew from the Liuzzo and Daniels trials that he may not have a single white supporter in Lowndes County anyway, and his own fearful experience had kindled nagging admiration for the besieged movement. Flowers signed, and Nesson rushed the legal opinion back for posting at the Hayneville courthouse by three o'clock on Monday afternoon, May 2. Joyful news for Hulett reverted instantly to pressure. Less than a day remained to spread notice of the site switch across seven hundred square miles of plantations with few cars and virtually no telephones.

O
N THE
climactic primary morning, John Doar supervised five hundred federal observers in Dallas County. From Selma, where lines stretched back from the courthouse to Brown Chapel before the polls opened, he drove eighteen miles to find the tiny hamlet of Orville flooded with rural Negroes waiting to cast their first votes. The turnout jumped above 17,000, nearly triple the county norm, and voters across the state surmounted hardships in combustible crowds. Parents carried “Stand Up for Alabama” pamphlets that Governor Wallace had distributed through the students at every white school. An election official blamed the Negroes for delays, charging that one confused voter lingered in a booth for twenty-eight minutes. Negroes in Wilcox County complained that false information about a polling place ended only when voting equipment was spotted at Harvey's Fish Camp, a bait shop decidedly unfriendly to them, but local women soon passed out fried chicken to boost morale along the line. In Birmingham, an old man who fainted in the hot sun refused an ambulance until he could “pull that lever” on what might be his last chance, and others waiting late into the night built fires to keep warm. A woman with a “Vote Wallace” sign stood hours behind a man wearing a “Grow with Flowers” button.

Nerves started tight at First Baptist Church in Hayneville, half a mile from the courthouse. A farmer fidgeted with three shotgun shells in his overalls. FBI agents took photographs, and reporters interviewed SNCC leaders from Atlanta and Mississipi. At three o'clock, having received final instructions, supporters of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization spilled outside the church into a roped-off area where movement clerks verified names against the county's list of registered voters with poll taxes paid to date. “We wanted to make it all legal,” Carmichael announced. Those approved filed past seven stations to vote separately for each local office. For voters who wanted to match names with faces, the competing candidates themselves smiled from designated spots nearby. Voices on a bullhorn kept repeating the most important legal notice: no one should vote who intended to participate also in the Democratic primary, as overlaps could invalidate the entire freedom ticket. Groans answered reports that more than a hundred Negroes were voting at the courthouse. Volunteers collected the completed ballots—each one headed with the official black panther emblem and creed, “One Man, One Vote”—and placed them into cardboard boxes on the seven wooden tables. Worry turned slowly to relief among voters milling in the churchyard to await the count, mostly sharecropper men in Sunday hats and women in earrings and print dresses. Scattered SNCC workers sang freedom songs. “We're making history, that's right,” an old woman repeated to herself. Jumping to the church steps, Willie Ricks praised the “bad niggers” of Lowndes County in a comically triumphant speech before Hulett called everyone back inside to announce the nominees. John Hinson defeated Mrs. Virginia White for the school board 511–327. Mrs. Alice Moore received 852 votes running unopposed for tax assessor (“Tax the rich to feed the poor, that's my slogan”). Sidney Logan, having defeated Note Favors 492–381, accepted the nomination with brief remarks that he had wanted to run for sheriff since Deputy Lux Jackson and his gun had shooed them away from their first attempt to register.

A bigger story obliterated the Lowndes County initiative before the polls closed. “It's a Lurleen Landslide!” declared an early edition of the
Montgomery Advertiser
dotted with cutlines of shock: “Exuberant Wallace…Ecstatic…Smiles, Hugs…No Runoff.” From the Jefferson Davis ballroom, Governor Wallace hailed a mandate “to return constitutional government to this country.” By contrast, Martin Luther King glumly observed from Birmingham's Thomas Jefferson Hotel that “white Alabamians are desperately grasping for a way to return to the old days of white supremacy.” The editor of the
Advertiser
expressed amazement that
“literally,
most all white Alabamians voted for [Lurleen] Wallace.” Her vote far exceeded that of the nine male contenders combined, and nearly tripled that of second-place Richmond Flowers. With his heavy black support, the Attorney General had calculated that he could become governor with only 21 percent of the white vote, but so crushing was his loss that the
New York Times
said “it may be many years…before any serious Alabama politician will risk a close political identification with the Negro.” Stung by the results,
Times
editors wisely took solace in the huge biracial turnout: “The fact of overwhelming importance about Alabama's primary was its peacefulness.”

Only a student newspaper and one small socialist journal reported a tiny gush of black optimism for November's general election. “We're going to take power in Lowndes County and rule,” an ebullient Stokely Carmichael predicted on primary night. “We don't even want to integrate…. Integration is a subterfuge for white supremacy.” Farmers intent cities were pulling off a miracle of civic organization to put their candidates on the ballot, argued Courtland Cox, and the
Times
“has a hell of a lot of nerve” to excoriate them for sacrificing a handful of anti-Wallace votes in the Democratic primary. “It's not our job to get Wallace out of the party,” added Carmichael. “Did they ask the Jews to reform the Nazi Party?” He said the four-to-one black majority in Lowndes opened a new political phase of the movement. “Nonviolence is irrelevant,” he declared. “What King has working for him is a moral force, but we're building a force to take power. We're not a protest movement.”

Alabama's primary day raised three distinct waves of euphoria. The broad civil rights coalition celebrated one cliffhanger victory only after Justice Department lawyers beat back weeks of courthouse attempts to steal, impound, and disqualify ballot boxes from six minority precincts in the Dallas County sheriff's race. To John Doar, the final, supervised count was the culmination of a career struggle in public service to establish voting rights and law in mutual support above the long, hard disillusionment of race—in this case by securing for Wilson Baker his fair margin of victory over the virulent segregationist Jim Clark. Separately, on the center stage of Alabama politics, Governor Wallace asserted his full hegemony by summoning both U.S. senators and all eight representatives to stand mute while he read a proclamation pledged to defy freedom-of-choice desegregation guidelines for the 1966–67 school year as a “totalitarian” blueprint “devised by socialists” in Washington, “which has as its objectives the capture and regimentation of our children and the destruction of our public education system.” Almost simultaneously, SNCC staff members rolled from Hayneville into Tennessee with a notion to treat all of America like Lowndes County.

Jack Minnis lobbied quietly for Stokely Carmichael to unseat John Lewis as national chairman during SNCC's annual meeting at a wooded church camp in Kingston Springs, near Nashville. Carmichael agreed to run, furious that Lewis had campaigned for Richmond Flowers without once coming to support the unique Lowndes gamble sanctioned by his own organization, but a powerful ethos of shared risk and camaraderie discouraged personal ambition. Leadership in SNCC was considered an accident or distraction never to be sought, and no one spoke openly of the contest. Instead, all through the second week in May, young movement veterans buried internal politics within their marathon strategy debates. They labored to remember and revise the founding assumptions of college students caught up in six years of upheaval since the 1960 sit-ins. “We assumed that we could forget history,” one confessed, “because we were different.” Charlie Cobb recalled a shared sense of responsibility to bring injustice into the healing light of government attention. As late as 1963, a mission “to free men's minds” for equality had been accepted across the SNCC's broad spectrum of personality, from skeptical power analyst Courtland Cox to Christian mystic Charles Sherrod. “We assumed that this country is really a democracy, which just isn't working,” said Carmichael. “We had no concept of how brutal it could be if we started messing it up.”

Ivanhoe Donaldson argued that “interracial democracy” had become too vague a purpose now that the whole country gave it lip service, and pushed for organizing targeted “pockets of power” like the Bond campaign in Atlanta. James Forman advocated a world perspective on colonialism. Ardent racialists objected that SNCC had nothing to learn from white men like Karl Marx. Shrewd dialecticians explored worlds of meaning inside the word “vote,” from the structure and process of raw politics to bonds of “consciousness” between citizens. Attacks on the forthcoming White House Conference indirectly struck at Lewis, who had attended the planning sessions, but Lewis had proved himself no stooge of President Johnson by his vehement opposition to the war in Vietnam. Conflict tore at Bob Mants among many others. He could not reconcile the Carmichael who “talked black” in Lowndes County with the loyalist who defended some forty white staff members from proposals to make SNCC an all-black vanguard. Mants pleaded with Carmichael not to abandon him for the tinsel glory of a national office. While angry with Lewis for ignoring their work in Lowndes, Mants still took comfort behind Lewis's steadfast courage on Pettus Bridge. With talks exhausted toward midnight on May 13, Carmichael supporters made perfunctory, half-joking nomination speeches in the face of the chair's heartfelt desire to stay on, and Lewis won reelection to a fourth term 60–22. Carmichael himself voted for the incumbent with a shrug.

Worth Long of Arkansas, having arrived late from Mississippi with Julius Lester, a quick-witted SNCC worker from Fisk University, gained the floor to ask what just happened, and his awed response silenced the hall. “John Lewis?” Long frowned. “How'd y'all do
that?
You can't do that.” Jack Minnis, who seldom spoke in meetings, vented his frustration that the candid objection came too late to do any good. “Sorry 'bout that, white boss,” retorted Long, who jumped from exposed personal ground to a procedural outburst: “I challenge this election!” He accused Forman of allowing the vote to proceed on sentimental regard for Lewis once half the staff members had slipped off to bed. In pandemonium, while some rushed to summon absentees and others fumbled for the bylaws, Minnis quickly devised a plan to revive Carmichael by turning SNCC culture in his favor. Accordingly, Cleveland Sellers resigned as national program secretary to make way for a clarifying revote, and Ruby Doris Robinson likewise relinquished her fresh mandate to replace Forman as executive secretary. When Lewis adamantly rejected pressure to follow suit, he broke the spell of deference. Previously sheepish voices said he hungered too much for office. Some confessed a tacit consensus that he had not represented SNCC's evolving independence for at least two years. Wounded, Lewis soon lashed out at unjust conspirators, then pleaded that Carmichael was not a Southerner. Several articulate Northerners retorted that Lewis was a copy of his hero Martin Luther King, and wincing admirers wished he did not invite the comparison. Worth Long later asserted that Lewis “was finished” when he fell back on his commitment to nonviolence.