At Canaan's Edge (85 page)

With Carmichael seated in a front pew, King apologized for the rare use of a manuscript. His sermon embellished recent Vietnam speeches with confessions on the cumulative burden of nonviolence. He acknowledged resentment that history's victims remained so accountable for the overall state of race relations, still obliged to catalyze progress by further suffering and improvisation, and he bridled like Malcolm X that America admired nonviolence mostly when practiced by blacks for the comfort of whites. “They applauded us on the freedom rides when we accepted blows without retaliation,” King declared with an edge of sarcasm. “They praised us in Albany and Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. Oh, the press was so noble in its applause and so noble in its praise that I was saying be nonviolent toward Bull Connor.” His trademark passion, while quivering to defend a steady course, let slip rage at being patronized and misunderstood: “There is something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say be nonviolent toward Jim Clark, but will curse you and damn you when you say be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children!” The congregation broke into applause. “There is something wrong with that!”

May–June 1967

C
LEVELAND
Sellers intercepted King in Atlanta for emergency counseling. He was twenty-two, polite and sturdy by nature. His parents, a schoolteacher and a rural entrepreneur, had implored him in 1962 not to risk their hard-earned tuition to diversions at a college outside South Carolina—only to watch him disappear from Howard University into a maelstrom of protest and jail they preferred not to hear about. Now Sellers recalled late-night debates on the Meredith march to tell King he could no longer raise a spiritual objection to violence and was resolved instead to take a political stand against the draft. Such a defense would only weaken bleak prospects in court, King replied, but he advised Sellers to make sure he could look at himself and others with belief to last beyond a maximum five-year prison sentence. Satisfied, he offered prayer for strength, and Carmichael provided escort to the showdown on Monday, May 1, whispering, “Don't let them get to you.” Like Ali, Sellers made national news—“Rights Leader Refuses to Be Inducted into Army”—by ignoring the ritual order to step forward. A
New York Times
account of the tense ceremony stressed fashion details: “He showed up at the induction center at 7
A.M.
wearing a mustache, sunglasses, a green turtleneck sweater and a brown collarless jacket. He wore brown shoes but no socks, and his brown and white checkered trousers came to about six inches above his ankles.” Carmichael told reporters that sixteen SNCC colleagues had been drafted so far by a Selective Service system just now accepting its first black officials—one of 161 board members in South Carolina, five of 509 in Georgia—to offset charges of biased conscription for a racist war.

Sellers attracted notice as program secretary for a national organization of greatly magnified public presence since its black power doctrine and sharp attacks on American purpose in Vietnam, but zestful alarm in the press masked organizational disintegration already far advanced. Only about seventy SNCC staff members remained. With the ranks thinned of extraordinary figures such as Bob Moses, Diane Nash, and John Lewis, those who still endured persecution and fatigue joked that every word in SNCC's storied name was now a misnomer. They were no longer students or nonviolent. They no longer coordinated sacrifice beyond the wisdom and courage of the nation's elders, nor operated by egalitarian grassroots committee. Instead, they competed for celebrity attention while reverting to youthful disputes as tawdry as snipes at their clothes.

One feud snapped over car keys, as Carmichael battled Bill Ware and separatist colleagues who had spearheaded votes to expel white staff members at December's Peg Leg Bates conference. When Ware's Atlanta project refused to surrender a Plymouth from the tiny SNCC fleet, Sellers tracked down and hot-wired the car for a trip to Mississippi, but Carmichael had a flat tire on the way, and, lacking a trunk key to reach the spare, had to flag down a passing motorist to borrow a jack so he could hitchhike with the damaged tire in search of repair. When Sellers filed a police report to recover a commandeered station wagon, Ware denounced him for stooping to “a racist henchman cop of the white master Allen of Atlanta to settle an internal dispute between the supposedly black people of SNCC.” Ware's telegram to James Forman threatened retribution for “calculated conspiracy to destroy the black ideology”: “We have tapes and other information that could fall into black people's hands across the country.” Carmichael sent the Atlanta project a one-sentence reply: “You have been fired from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.” Elsewhere, he suspended the North Carolina project, closed dysfunctional support groups in Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and confided that staff members were dodging eviction in Washington, where “most of the equipment has been stolen from the office.”

Other strains snapped when the program secretary caught his live-in girlfriend repeatedly in trysts with staff member Hubert G. Brown. Sellers cursed and beat her in a savage outburst—for which he would offer public contrition—shrieking that such betrayals tore apart SNCC's already frayed network of trust. Brown, who had met with President Johnson as a student leader during the Selma crisis, supervised Alabama registration projects since Carmichael left to become SNCC chairman. Late in March, he addressed the second anniversary meeting of the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights. Brown somberly discussed the two recent arsons at movement churches, but he brightened with sly speculation about a subsequent arson of white property. “Lightning hit over here at Good Hope Presbyterian,” he cried, relishing hope above murmurs and laughter that the amazing coincidence “straightened things out in white folks' minds.” SNCC worker Scott B. Smith took the floor to make a blunt speech. “I have learned how to hate,” he said. “I know how to hate.” An old man waved his cane to object that their mission was to make everybody “be better people, both white and colored.” Black Panther leaders John Hulett and Sidney Logan already had rolled a trailer onto the ashes of the anti-poverty site to rebuild homemade furniture for job classes, but vigilante mystery stirred. Logan's baby bull was found shot in the head. Twenty cattle owned by Probate Judge Harrell Hammonds were poisoned, prompting hushed debate about whether it was Klan punishment for letting Panther candidates on the 1966 ballot or a black warning not to trust white moderates. When gifts of fresh beef arrived for the refugees still living in the tent city on Highway 80, Scott B. Smith hinted that African butchers had been recruited in the night from Tuskegee's veterinary school, and there were rumors of bull genitals hung from Klan mailboxes. “Burning churches and killing cows ain't going to do it,” Panther candidate Robert Logan told a mass meeting. “Our movement is stronger than ever.” Still, upstarts adopted a refrain of sarcastic swagger: “Yeah, lightning.”

Stokely Carmichael issued a statement on the church burnings—“Black people are now serving notice that we will fight back”—and ended public remarks about arson with a vow: “We'll all worship in one church or we'll all worship outside.” These cryptic references, like Carmichael's mixed reception on black campuses, failed to make news. Some students at Miles College in Birmingham called him a reverse supremacist and a “damned fool” for advocating an all-black faculty, while Carmichael scolded them for accepting a lame curriculum—“You are all a bunch of parrots”—and needled them for bourgeois self-absorption. (“Why are you here?” he asked females enrolled at Morgan State. “So you can kick down a door in the middle of the night to look for a pair of shoes?”) What registered beyond the halls was his daredevil cry against white America. At Tougaloo, reported the
Baltimore Afro-American,
“Carmichael's strong anti-Vietnam statements set off almost five minutes of chanting, ‘We ain't going, hell no!'” At Miles, reported the
New York Times,
he exhorted students to repudiate American law. Quoting Frederick Douglass, that there could be no freedom while slaves obeyed their masters, he won thunderous acclaim for his updated maxim: “If you want to be free, you've got to say, ‘To hell with the laws of the United States!'” The
Nashville Banner
vainly urged Vanderbilt to forestall a riot by barring Carmichael, and on the night after his departure, an unruly customer at Fisk's dinner club sparked three days of altercation that left ninety students arrested and fifty injured, three of them shot by the five hundred anti-riot police still massed on high alert. The Tennessee House of Representatives passed a resolution that Carmichael should be deported regardless of his U.S. citizenship. Shouts of vindicated alarm from all sides prompted a
New York Times
editorial, “‘Black Power' in Nashville,” cautioning that “it is not easy to determine if these disturbances were touched off by Mr. Carmichael's fiery words or by the preceding effort to silence him.” This aura enveloped SNCC's chairman through the Mobilization rally down into federal court later in April, accompanied by Hubert Brown, to appeal his far-fetched conviction for inciting Selma's black voters to riot before the November election.

D
ISTANT ADMIRERS
of the Lowndes County movement launched a spectacular debut on May 2, one day after Cleveland Sellers refused Army service. They created an icon for the era, offered in tribute, but they could scarcely have imagined better images to conceal their inspiration from rural Alabama. Commotion riveted the California Assembly when a wall of reporters and photographers banged backward through the doors, facing the bearers of shotguns and rifles who had asked directions to the second-floor chamber in Sacramento. Legislators gasped in mid-debate. Many of them scattered as two dozen young black men pressed forward with guns pointed toward the ceiling, several in leather jackets and black berets, accompanied by six unarmed black women. One intruder loudly proclaimed citizens' protest of a gun control bill endorsed by “the racist Oakland police” as officers converged into standoff. Defenders risked grabbing some but not all the stone-faced men, and discovered their weapons to be fully loaded, before a deal permitted Bobby Seale to read aloud a founding manifesto that denounced “the racist power structure of America” for historical repression of nonwhite people from native Indians to the Vietnamese: “The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense believes that the time has come for Black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.” Seale's group then withdrew under an exit truce across the capitol lawn, past news cameras and gaping tourists, including an eighth-grade social studies class on a field trip with chaperones. A huge cruiser posse arrested twenty-six of the retreating demonstrators near a gas station four blocks away.

Such was the “colossal event” conceived by manifesto author Huey P. Newton, a twenty-five-year-old emigrant from Louisiana named for its late flamboyant governor Huey P. “Kingfish” Long. To defend followers in their showcase criminal trial, Newton invested his first Black Panther speaking fee in a pound of marijuana, which he cut into “nickel bags” for sale from the back of his roving Volkswagen. Issuing strict orders for his small, militarized command to resist targeted stops by Oakland police—“We don't give up our guns, we don't give up our dope”—he set a pattern for clashes until his own murder for drug debts outside a crack cocaine house in 1989. By contrast, Newton's instant fame spread romantic theories about revolutionary violence. One
New York Times
profile—“A Gun Is Power, Black Panther Says”—explained his rationale for storming the Assembly. A longer article, which introduced the poster photograph of Newton staring with scepter and carbine from a flared cane-back throne, explored his debt to the writings of Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Mao Zedong. A front-page survey on May 7—“The New Left Turns to Mood of Violence in Place of Protest”—observed that the Argentine guerrilla Che Guevara gave burgeoning white activists across the country their own ethnic model in the mold of Malcolm X and Huey Newton. “When we have organized the white radicals, we can link up with the Negro radicals,” said Students for a Democratic Society leader Greg Calvert, who announced an active campaign to foment urban sedition. “We aren't a bunch of liberal do-gooders,” claimed William Pepper of the more moderate Vietnam Summer coalition. “We are revolutionary.” The
Times
reporter noted parenthetically that New Leftists rejected liberal as “a dirty word.”

The birth of Oakland's Black Panthers resonated also in mainstream politics. It guaranteed passage of the bill Bobby Seale denounced before the Assembly, as Governor Reagan soon would sign new firearm restrictions with an extra provision banning weapons in public places, but Pyrrhic victory for gun control already had backfired on a grander scale. Less than a week after the sensational scare in California, officers of the National Rifle Association made front-page headlines—“Rifle Club Sees Guns As Riot Curb”—with a counterpoint study showing Negro involvement in nine of eleven selected mob actions, arguing without historical precedent that armed private citizens “could prove essential” to maintain public order. The NRA harvested fear across the color line while crusading for unfettered weaponry as vociferously as the Black Panthers, and Governor Reagan gained political stature from the specter of Huey Newton's guns. Appearing on the traumatized capitol grounds just as Bobby Seale drove away, he reassured voters by keeping a picnic date with the social studies class. Poise in crisis elevated a battered new governor who was roiling his political base with the largest state tax increase in history and the first major law to permit “therapeutic” abortion. (“I had been led to believe there was a honeymoon period,” Reagan quipped, “but evidently I lost the license on the way to the church.”) Now he renewed attacks on “central casting anarchists” with the authority of a candidate who had vowed to clamp down on unruliness from Watts to Berkeley. On May 15, debating Robert Kennedy in a town forum televised from London, Reagan said protest undermined domestic hope and prolonged war abroad. While Kennedy defended difficult ground—disputing students who called U.S. intervention immoral, groping for peace talks and elections (“Can you deliver the North Vietnamese?”), confronting urgent complexity from “a heritage of 150 years we've been unjust to our minority groups”—Reagan said the problem “lies in the hearts of men,” and pictured welcome change since his early years in radio when “the rulebook called baseball ‘a game for Caucasian gentlemen.'” He imagined a bright future “if the Berlin Wall should disappear.” Surprised reviewers thought the disparaged rookie governor held his own with his simple story lines.