At Canaan's Edge (74 page)

Folksinger Joan Baez arrived in Grenada that weekend with fellow pacifist Ira Sandperl, and children beseeched them to intercede with fearful families to obtain consent for integration, saying their parents would listen to white people. These requests introduced them firsthand to the strain within the mixed SCLC staff over imbalances of racial risk and authority. On Monday, September 19, carrying schoolbooks, Baez and Sandperl joined escorts for the mile-long walk through a corridor of Highway Patrol officers and sullen bystanders to the two white schools, where the 160 black students comprised 10 percent of the overall enrollment. Young Richard Sigh would wear a leg cast until January. (Over the Christmas holidays, fourteen volunteer tutors from UCLA and Georgetown would offer supplemental lessons to relieve deficiencies and grinding ostracism in regular class.) On that Monday night, Martin Luther King arrived to salute the battered pioneers at a tumultuous mass meeting of a thousand people. “His speech was fiery in tone but moderate in content,” reported the
New York Times.

Andrew Young summoned Baez early the next morning to a local minister's home. He said King refused to get out of bed, and asked her to sing. Extreme rousting measures for exhaustion had failed, which meant King was despondent beyond tired, and Young pushed Baez past an anxious household to be a siren of revival. She sang “Pilgrim of Sorrow” in a cappella soprano until King smiled faintly by the second or third verse. Rising to touch off the usual late scramble, he escorted two young girls from the movement center at Bell Flower Baptist Church to Lizzie Horn Elementary, his hands lightly on their shoulders. Young carried a child just behind. Baez, admiring the jive gaits of energetic girls who seemed oblivious to danger, moved forward to ask King half in jest, “Why are we doing this? In the white school they'll lose all this spirit.” King shushed her and pointed to photographers. “Not while the cameras are running,” he said with a smile. Later he said the girls must take their spirit into a tough world, but he relapsed into depression himself. King skipped his own scheduled news conference, irritating stranded reporters so much they wrote about the insult, and slipped away to catch a plane from Memphis.

G
RENADA MARKED
a convergence of what King called “valley moments.” On September 19, the day he arrived there, the Civil Rights Act of 1966 failed in the U.S. Senate when a 52–41 vote fell short of the margin required to shut off a Southern filibuster. Defeat was hardly a surprise, as pessimism had circulated for months. (Bracing for the vote ten days earlier, White House Press Secretary Bill Moyers announced, “We have received no word that the bill is dead.”) Still, finality was a compound blow. Lost were mandates for diversified juries and courthouses, plus federal protections for civil rights work. Without the latter, given the refusal by some states to prosecute crimes of racial persecution, the Justice Department possessed only the poor remedy of an outmoded 1870 Reconstruction statute under which the thirteen men in Grenada had just been arrested. King knew the chances of conviction were slim, even for unprovoked public violence against children. All eight Grenada defendants who went to trial would be acquitted the next June, despite fair instructions from Judge Clayton and consistent testimony from eyewitnesses, including a courageous police captain. (Diana Freelon, one of the teenagers beaten on the first day of school, would be elected mayor of Grenada 38 years later, in 2004.)

Almost plaintively, editors of the
New York Times
had tried to salvage the 1966 bill by stressing a comfortable preoccupation with the South: “The Senate has an obligation today to do justice for the Southern Negro…. The pending bill, like its four predecessor measures dating back to 1957, is essentially a bill for the relief of the Southern Negro.” In sharp contrast, the Senate filibuster focused on the national implications of the open housing section, and Sam Ervin of North Carolina gleefully noted a shift in discomfort “now that others' oxen are being gored.” Minority Leader Everett Dirksen of Illinois doomed the bill by rising on his crutches to call the housing provisions “a package of mischief for the country.”

The defeat was a stinging referendum on King's open housing campaign in Dirksen's home state. More broadly, it neutralized his dream formula of patriotic appeals for the whole nation to “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.” No longer did calculated sacrifice from Birmingham or Selma catapult issues to a transforming national stage. With attitudes hardening for Vietnam, vanguard movements receded to local stature. For all its faults, the voluntary agreement in Chicago was stronger than federal fair housing laws. For all its grit and tribulation, the Grenada, Mississippi movement created no resonant symbols like Rosa Parks or the four martyred Birmingham schoolgirls, and aroused no groundswell for federal protection. Those themes lost public traction.

Always before, King had beacons in reality to buttress his slave-grounded oratorical conviction that a morning star would rise from bleakest despair: the
Brown
decision, anti-colonial triumphs across Africa, a generally favorable press. Now he learned that the Supreme Court, sick of demonstrations, might reimprison him for the Birmingham jail campaign of 1963. Some liberation heroes in Africa already had turned tyrant, and King had just submitted to questions for a CBS television special on black power. “Don't you find,” asked correspondent Mike Wallace, “that the American people are getting a little bit tired, truly, of the whole civil rights struggle?” News of Grenada and the Senate failure overlapped an influential front-page series in the
New York Times,
“Civil Rights: A Turning Point,” with a subtitle pointed downward, “Support for Negro and His Problems Found to Wane.” The first installment explored a central question: “How deep does white disengagement go, and where does it leave the Negro?” A second article—“Housing Equality Hits a Raw Nerve…Idea of a Negro Neighbor Stirs Anxiety”—prompted Stanley Levison to decry an exposed point of view. “We are witnessing almost a propaganda drive to drive away white liberals,” he complained on his wiretapped line. The September 21 conclusion surveyed predictions of backlash across the political spectrum. “It's fear,” said Chicago Representative Roman Pucinski, who offered a bill to limit racial demonstrations. House Republican leader Gerald Ford called Democrats “the party with the big riots in the streets,” and unnamed representatives said Congress considered Stokely Carmichael an anarchist. Harlem's Adam Clayton Powell relished his claim of expertise about the scary side of black power. “These are a new breed of cats,” he told the
Times.
“They hiss A. Philip Randolph. They boo Martin Luther King. They even picket my church.”

Racial anxiety paralyzed the upper reaches of the administration. Attorney General Katzenbach blocked a proposed White House summit on civil rights strategy, forecasting disaster at every turn. He said concrete progress in jobs and education had come too slowly to help, especially with the Vietnam budget constraints, while President Johnson's notice would magnify debilitating controversy whether or not he excluded the proponents of black power. “The President does not strengthen the leadership of Roy Wilkins or Martin Luther King,” Katzenbach asserted, “when they are made to appear to be his lieutenants or apologists.” White House aide Harry McPherson chafed against Katzenbach's prevailing logic, grumbling that President Johnson “has not (to my knowledge) talked to any Negro at all” through the death throes of his civil rights bill. Something must be wrong, he fumed, when most Americans still identified race as the nation's chief domestic problem, and trusted Johnson's leadership, yet somehow the President felt hamstrung by minuscule public support for a youth doctrine. “Surely, the next generation of Negro leadership does not have to be dominated by Stokely Carmichael and Willie Ricks,” McPherson wrote Katzenbach on September 20, and he warned the President not to shirk his historic mantle. “You are stuck with it, in sickness as in health,” McPherson advised. “The very fact that you have led the way toward first-class citizenship for the Negro, that you are identified with his cause, means that to some extent your stock rises and falls with the movement.”

Carmichael himself made bail after a week in Atlanta's lockup. (The judge drastically reduced his bond after a grand jury, lacking testimony that he had advocated or practiced violence, returned a weak indictment for misdemeanor riot.) He resumed a travel schedule that matched King's, fueled by publicity so intense that SNCC's New York office compiled by mid-September an encyclopedia of journalism about black power. “It shows how the press cultivated a rising hysteria among whites,” wrote staff member Elizabeth Sutherland. Four months of stories conveyed chills and thrills like a blockbuster horror movie, obsessing critics and fans alike. “Everything seemed to go on fast forward,” Carmichael said later. “His style dazzles,” wrote
New York Times
correspondent Bernard Weinraub, who followed as “Stokely Carmichael rushes from ghetto to ghetto with the drive of a political candidate…. He sleeps just a few hours a night. He eats on the run and drinks milk to keep up his energy.” Carmichael popped out of cars to gasps of recognition, and delivered impromptu speeches: “This country don't run on love, brothers. It's run on power, and we ain't got none!” Weinraub's profile for
Esquire
magazine, “The Brilliancy of Black,” called him “the most charismatic figure in the Negro movement.” For
Ebony
magazine, historian Lerone Bennett accompanied him from a childhood block in the Bronx, where his family still occupied the only black household, down to South Georgia and across into Lowndes County, Alabama. “A shiver of nervous exhilaration ran through Carmichael's body,” Bennett concluded. “He pushed the accelerator to the floor, took both hands off the wheel and shouted: ‘I don't care what white folks say, we are home, baby. Baby! We're
home!
'”

Carmichael would remember black power as a ride on the tail of a comet. “Who could have thought it? I mean two simple, clear, very commonly used English words,” he wrote, granting that King had been right to worry about cross-racial connotations. Almost daily in speeches, SNCC's new chairman recited a passage from
Alice in Wonderland:

Carmichael's claim to master his own words clashed with the dominant culture's inclination to hear what it pleased. He tried to carve out meaning for black power with stabs at mainstream civil rights. “He says that LBJ killed the civil rights movement the moment he stood before nationwide TV and said, ‘We shall overcome,'” wrote Eldridge Cleaver, who chaired a Malcolm X Afro-American Society in California. “‘But he will never,' Carmichael says, ‘stand before the nation and say, ‘We want Black Power.'” For SNCC, Carmichael had opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1966 as “a fraudulent bunch of words” and “hypocrisy which attempts to delude the black people of America.” When King joined an intra-movement plea to suspend picket lines during the White House wedding, Carmichael called him a lackey in a public telegram: “You have displayed more backbone in defending Luci than you have shown for the colored people of Vietnam being napalmed by Luci's father.” He proclaimed alienation from white sympathizers—“All those people who are calling us friends are nothing but treacherous enemies”—and when a professed colleague at a forum nearly begged him to recognize the potential for exceptional white allies, Carmichael refused with unflinching directness like the late Malcolm X: “No, not one.” Prestigious journals invited him to define black power by personal confrontation. “We cannot be expected any longer to march and have our heads broken in order to say to whites: come on, you're nice guys,” he wrote in the September 22 issue of
The New York Review of Books.
“For you are not nice guys. We have found you out.”

T
WICE IN
Chicago, obscured by publicized summer meetings with King and Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, Carmichael encountered his Alabama jail mate, Richard Morrisroe. At the intensive care unit in Montgomery, Morrisroe had been haunted by skin privilege from what he learned of emergency kindness and medical exertions to prolong his life, whispering to Carmichael that a similarly mangled black victim would have died many times over. Now, still feeble and unsteady in physical therapy, Morrisroe suffered reverse disorientation. He said his wounds still hurt too much to shift easily into a movement with no place for white people. “You're different,” Carmichael replied. Warmly but awkwardly, he urged Morrisroe to look past political tactics in steadfast witness for inclusion.

Richmond Flowers, the lame-duck attorney general of Alabama, had waited more than a year for Chicago doctors to approve a day trip south for Morrisroe. On September 13, 1966, he met Morrisroe at the Montgomery airport and drove in mutual trepidation past a quiet Hayneville crime scene to the Lowndes County courthouse. Once Morrisroe managed his first sworn testimony, recalling details from the fetid week in jail until the second shotgun roar and his weak cries for water, Flowers asked him delicately by pre-agreement to show the grand jury his wounds. Morrisroe stood to remove a clerical collar and shirt, revealing bright sunken scars massed entirely along the back, indicating that he had been shot in retreat, and the attorney general noted the absence of “even one BB pellet” on the stomach. By exhibiting a priest on the witness stand in dramatically torn flesh, Flowers intended to shame Tom Coleman's claim of self-defense.