Means of Ascent (2 page)

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A
S THE LONG LINE
of limousines began to pull away from the White House in the darkness, the protesters were there, outside the gates, as they had been for weeks. Over their radios they had been listening to the latest bulletins from Selma, and they were singing “We Shall Overcome.”

It was a song of defiance—even as a hymn sung in black churches a century earlier it had contained the line “I do not yield”—and of demand: it had emerged from the churches into a broader sphere in October, 1945, during a strike in South Carolina by black women tobacco workers against a company that seemed too strong to be beaten; one day, after months of futile picketing, some of the women, surrendering, dropped off the picket line during a
storm and went back to work; the others, to keep their courage up, began to sing in the rain, and suddenly one of them started singing the church song, adding two new lines—“We will win our rights” and “We will overcome.” After the strike ended—in victory—the hymn was kept alive (with “will” changed to “shall”) because two of the pickets attended a “folk school” in the mountains of Tennessee
that had been founded to train labor and civil rights organizers, and taught the students its theme: “We shall overcome / We shall overcome / We shall overcome some day. / Oh, deep in my heart / I do believe /
WE SHALL OVERCOME
some day.” (It was in that school that a new verse was added—during a raid in which local deputy sheriffs forced the students to
sit on the floor in the dark for hours while they smashed
furniture and windows in a search for “subversive” materials. Sitting in the dark, one of the students, a terrified black high school girl, began to sing: “We are not afraid / We are not afraid / We are not afraid today.…”) In 1959, a white folk singer from the school taught it to the founding conference of the black Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and led audiences in singing it at other civil rights rallies. Over the years, its tempo
had been speeded up, but now the folk singer could feel the black audiences instinetively
“tugging at the rhythm,” and “I thought I’d better stop playing my banjo and just let them sing”—and as they sang it, they slowed it back down to its original stately, solemn, powerful meter, appropriate to its mighty words.

Nineteen sixty was the year of the first sit-ins to desegregate department store lunch counters in Southern cities. The young, neatly dressed blacks, sworn to nonviolence, sitting on the counter stools were taunted in attempts to make them relinquish their seats. When the taunts failed, mustard and ketchup were poured on them, to mingle with the spit. Then they were pulled off the stools, and knocked to the floor, and kicked and beaten as they lay there. Police arrived,
arrested them and flung them into paddy wagons. But they got their breath back, and as the wagons drove off, from their barred windows could be heard: “Deep in my heart / I do believe / We shall overcome some day.”

During the next years the hymn was sung at a thousand sit-ins, during a thousand “freedom rides.” A new verse, “We’ll walk hand in hand,” had been added, and that verse inspired a ritual: civil rights workers would cross their arms, and with each hand clasp the hand of the person standing next to them, and sway rhythmically as they sang. As the movement caught the conscience of Northerners, black hands were, more and more, clasping
white, and there was another verse: “Black and white together.” The hymn was sung in triumph: on August 28, 1963, during the March on Washington which organizers had been afraid would be poorly attended, when the quarter of a million persons who had come to demand justice sent it thundering across the nation’s capital—that was the moment when it became the anthem of the civil rights crusade of the 1960s. And it was sung in sorrow: when, eighteen days
later, the four little black girls were killed in the bombing of their church in Birmingham, Alabama. As the pallbearers came slowly down the steps of the church, carrying the four small coffins, at first the only sounds from the throng—not only local residents but an astonishingly large number of people who had come from other cities—were sobs. There was no signal, but suddenly, all at once, several people began singing, and over the sobs of mothers rose up the words:
“We shall overcome some day.”

During the next summer—“Freedom Summer”—it was sung when the college students and the clergymen and the thousands of white men and women volunteers from the North were leaving to go down to Mississippi to try to win for black men and women the right to vote. (
“The buses pulled up, and all belongings were piled aboard. But the kids refused to get aboard until we all stood in a large circle alongside one bus and sang
‘We Shall Overcome’ … with arms crossed, holding hands.… Then the departing kids got aboard.”) After their arrival in Mississippi, the volunteers heard it in unexpected places. “
We were sitting on
the steps at dusk, watching the sun folding into the flat country.… Cotton harvesters went by—and then the sheriff—and then a six-year-old Negro girl with a stick and a dog,
kicking up as much dust as she could with her bare feet. As she went by, we could hear her humming to herself, ‘We Shall Overcome.’ ” It was sung that summer on the hot, sweaty nights in Mississippi’s black churches, thirty-seven of which were bombed or burned that year. (
“Tonight, at our mass meeting, as we were singing ‘We Shall Overcome,’ a girl was shot in the side and in the chest. We fell to the floor in
deadly fear …”) It was sung by the volunteers when they were being beaten, and Viola Liuzzo was singing it in the moment she was killed. And it sustained them. “
I know the drudgery, the dangers and the disappointments,” a college student wrote her worried parents. “I know what it’s like to be so exhausted you feel as though you will drop.… Yet I also know what it’s like to sing ‘We Shall
Overcome’ with two hundred others till you think the roof will explode off the church.” Wrote another volunteer: “
Finally we stood, everyone, crossed arms, clasped hands and sang ‘We Shall Overcome.’ Ending every meeting of more than a half dozen with it, we sang out all fatigue and fear, each connected by this bond of hands to each other.… Together we were an army.” Wrote another: “
And then
[we were] singing our freedom song, ‘We shall overcome, we shall overcome …’ We all joined hands and sang.… We sang with all our hearts—’Justice shall be done … we shall vote together … we shall live in freedom.…’ ”

And now, in March, 1965, the church song that had become the mighty battle hymn of the civil rights crusade had swelled to a new crescendo, for March, 1965, was the month of Selma, Alabama—of the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the long line of black men and women and children pledged to nonviolence marching toward the phalanx of troopers in gas masks and helmets, carrying guns and clubs, and, thanks to television, an entire nation had seen the swirling clouds of the
tear gas, and, through the tear gas, the billy clubs swinging, and thudding as they struck, and then the mounted deputies spurring their horses forward and uncoiling their bullwhips. An entire nation had heard the screaming begin—and, as loud as the screaming, the cheers from white onlookers. That had been on Sunday, March 7. Two days later, when a club had smashed in his skull, the Reverend James J. Reeb of Boston became the second man killed—Jimmie Lee Jackson had
been shot on February 18 in a nearby town—as a result of the Selma demonstrations. “
Rarely in history,”
Time
magazine reported, “has public opinion reacted so spontaneously and with such fury.” That week, when a Jewish synagogue in Boston held a memorial service for Reeb, the congregation softly hummed “We Shall Overcome” as the rabbi recited the Mourner’s Kaddish for the dead. The
hymn was sung in Detroit, where the Governor joined the Mayor and ten thousand
marchers, and in parades in scores of other Northern cities, and it was sung in Selma, by hundreds of white clergymen (“Black and white together / Black and white together / Black and white together some day …”) who had come from all across America in answer to Martin Luther King’s call for help. And, of course, it was sung—over and over, all
during that week—in Washington, in front of the White House, for if it was a hymn of demand and defiance, the demands the civil rights movement was making could, its leaders felt, ultimately be met only through the power and the leadership of the President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who, at the same time, was a target of their defiance.

During the sixteen months since he had taken the oath of office as thirty-sixth President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson had done much for civil rights—including pushing through to passage a civil rights bill in 1964—but, in the view of most of the movement, he hadn’t done nearly as much as he should have.

What were they asking for, after all, protesters felt, but the most basic right of citizenship under a constitutional government—the right to vote? It was ninety-five years since the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution had supposedly guaranteed that right, and they still didn’t have it. Of the five million blacks in the South old enough to vote, the overwhelming majority were still not registered. The figures in Selma were typical for a small Southern
town: out of 14,000 whites, 9,300 were registered; out of 15,000 blacks, 325. Despite the President’s promises of progress, little progress was being made. His Justice Department had filed lawsuits, as had the Justice Department of his predecessor, John F. Kennedy, but the suits had been drifting along at a painfully slow pace. That very week, as it happened, the protesters outside the White House, leafing through the
Washington Post
, read that thus far in 1965 three
out of every four blacks who had applied for voter registration in Selma had been turned down. For months after the passage of the 1964 law, even after its inadequacies had been demonstrated, President Johnson had let civil rights leaders know that he didn’t think it wise to press for another bill so soon. Now, with the violence raging in Alabama, Johnson had let them know he would address a special joint session of Congress on Monday, March 15, and had promised them that in
the address he would submit a voting-rights bill, a bill that would be stronger, but while some—a growing number, in fact—of the leaders who had met with the President personally were telling their colleagues that they believed in Lyndon Johnson’s commitment to their cause, this belief was not widespread.

Worst of all, in the view of most civil rights protesters—most damaging proof of the President’s lack of sincerity—he wasn’t even protecting the marchers in Alabama. When Jimmie Lee Jackson had been murdered, Martin Luther King had said,
“He was murdered by the timidity of the
federal government that … cannot protect the rights of its own citizens seeking the right to
vote.” Now almost a month had passed since Jackson’s death, a month of beatings and savagery—and the federal government, Lyndon Johnson’s government, was still not protecting the marchers. Six days had passed now since Reverend Reeb had been killed, and there was still no one to protect the clergymen who had come to take Reeb’s place. For almost four months, since the first marches in Selma had begun, black leaders had been pleading with the
President to federalize the Alabama National Guard, or to send in regular Army troops—to do
something
to protect the demonstrators from the bullwhips and the clubs. Most of them had felt all along that Johnson wouldn’t help; that was why King had called for the clergy. As his assistant
Andrew Young had put it: “
We didn’t think they would send in the National Guard to protect black people. So we sent out a
call to people of good will.” And indeed Johnson hadn’t helped. On Saturday, Alabama’s Governor, George C. Wallace, had come to the White House to confer with him, and newspapers were reporting that the President had been very tough with Wallace—but the fact remained: the Alabama Guard was not federalized.

Not only did the protesters distrust his policies, many of them distrusted him. Although some civil rights leaders were now convinced of Lyndon Johnson’s good faith, others were not, for they remembered his record—not the short record but the long one. He had been a Congressman, beginning in 1937, for eleven years, and for eleven years he had voted against every civil rights bill—against not only legislation aimed at ending the poll tax and
segregation in the armed services but even against legislation aimed at ending lynching: a one hundred percent record. Running for the Senate in 1948, he had assailed President Truman’s entire civil rights program (“
an effort to set up a police state”). In the Senate, his maiden speech had been the lead-off address in a Southern
filibuster against an attempt to impose cloture on debate and thus make passage of civil rights
legislation possible. “
We of the South,” Lyndon Johnson had said, know that “cloture is the deadliest weapon” against the rights of a minority such as the South, and he, he had made clear, was part of that minority. At the conclusion of his eloquent, closely reasoned, ninety-minute-long defense of the filibuster, the Southern Senators, many aging now, had lined up at Lyndon Johnson’s desk to congratulate this new recruit to their
cause. The first person in line had been the Southerners’ patriarch and leader, Richard Brevard Russell of Georgia, who later told reporters that Johnson’s speech had been “
one of the ablest I ever heard on the subject.” Subsequently, the young Senator from Texas had been raised to the leadership of his party in that Senate by the Southern bloc, as the young hope of those aging men in their grim, last-ditch fight to preserve segregation.
Until 1957, in the Senate, as in the House, his reeord
—by that time a twenty-year record—against civil rights had been consistent. And although in that year he oversaw the passage of a civil rights bill, many liberals had felt the
compromises Johnson had engineered to get the bill through had gutted it of its effectiveness—a feeling that proved correct. And constantly reminding them of Johnson’s record, of
course, was Johnson’s accent, which was the slow drawl of the South; when Lyndon Johnson said “Negroes,” for example, it came out, despite all that speech coaches could do, as “Nigroes,” close to “niggers.” And if, nonetheless, some of the leaders who had recently met with Lyndon Johnson were convinced he had changed, this feeling had not spread to the ranks: no matter how strong his words, most of the marchers outside the White House
didn’t believe he meant them; in the view of many, his actions—or lack of action—during this past terrible month had
proven
he didn’t mean them. If, after years of opposition, he was in alliance with them now, they believed the alliance was reluctant, grudging. Very few of the tens of thousands—hundreds of thousands—of men and women, black and white, in the American civil rights movement believed Lyndon Johnson was wholeheartedly on
their side. So now, on Monday, March 15, 1965, pickets had been marching in front of the White House for the eight days since the Edmund Pettus Bridge, walking in a long oval formation along the sidewalk outside the tall black wrought-iron fence that guarded the broad lawn that led to the Executive Mansion, carrying signs demanding that Lyndon Johnson take action, and singing. And the previous day, a Sunday on which churches across the country held services in memory of Reverend
Reeb, fifteen thousand protesters had held a rally in Lafayette Park, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, to protest “federal inaction”—Johnson’s inaction, ultimately—“in the Alabama racial crisis.” The rally ended with the singing of “We Shall Overcome.” On the White House lawn, 350 Washington policemen formed a human wall reinforcing the wrought-iron wall, with White House guards and Secret Service men
deployed behind them, but the mighty hymn could be heard clearly inside the White House, as could the words of a chant the protesters had adopted: “LBJ, just you wait / See what happens in ’68.” Speakers at the rally assailed his promises—“
President Johnson’s words are good, but they remain just that: words,” one said—and his performance. His Administration, another speaker said, “has told the
same old story in the Selma crisis. The minute there’s violence, the Administration announces it’s powerless to deal with it.” There was little feeling in that crowd that Lyndon Johnson had any deeper commitment to its cause than he had shown in the past, so that the words “We shall overcome,” sung outside the White House, were saying, in effect, that the cause would manage to win even without him. And now, on the evening the
limousines
were pulling away from the White House, the pickets were singing “We Shall Overcome.”