Pillar of Fire (22 page)

An offer to become CORR's first lawyer came to Jack Pratt, a new graduate of Columbia Law School, on a Long Island beach where he sunbathed pending the results of his bar examination. In the mid-1950s, distraught over the sudden death of his mother, Pratt had studied theology at Union Seminary, where he had come to know Spike and others destined for the national council's new venture, and now in August, within a week of Spike's proposition, Pratt visited Mississippi long enough to despair of finding professional help from any Mississippi counsel or bonding company. Back in New York, with a volunteer partner from the eminent Shearman & Sterling firm, he talked officials of a New York casualty company into writing bonds for CORR and agreed to minimize publicity about the company's Mississippi branch by calling it “Company X” wherever possible. With duly authorized bond applications, Pratt rushed back to Mississippi to discover that most of the information about nearly sixty lost prisoners was incorrect—names, ages, spellings, plantation addresses, trial dates, sentences. He bounced between court clerks, sheriffs, notaries, and the COFO office in Greenwood, guided by telephone advice from names new to him, such as Wiley Branton and James Forman.

On the morning of August 16, with acceptably amended bonds, Pratt finally led a four-car motorcade some two miles inside the main gate at Parchman Penitentiary to the death house. During delays for verification of papers, angry voices could be heard threatening to shoot the prisoners, but four guards with shotguns eventually marched thirteen blinking figures down the dusty road. When they approached Pratt's waiting caravan, one of the tower guards aimed his rifle so convincingly that the Negro drivers dived for cover under their cars. Pratt instinctively raised his arm. “Put that gun down!” he shouted. “I am an officer of the court!” This textbook command seemed to perplex those with shotguns or rifles, who froze until the warden arrived.

The ex-prisoners broke silence just outside the main gate, singing movement songs on the highway all the way back to a welcoming celebration at the Greenwood COFO office. Sam Block and Curtis Hayes presided along with Stokely Carmichael, a lanky, liquid-eyed Howard University student who swapped stories about the Parchman guards from his stretch there as a Freedom Rider in 1961. As was his habit, Carmichael subdued demons of fear beneath cooing, mocking bravado, telling the normally rotund Lawrence Guyot—now haggard and virtually unrecognizable after losing nearly a hundred pounds—that he looked much better skinny. The dashing heroics of the young white lawyer who had faced down old Charlie the tower guard drew admiring laughter, but Pratt already realized that his chirpy naïveté was gone. Trembling now, in a hurry to leave Mississippi, he went to gather up the other bond papers and present them after nightfall at the Leflore County Work Farm, where jail superintendent Arterbery greeted him with deputies, shotguns, and barking dogs, reinforced by several police squad cars.

Trouble came this time not so much from the guards as from the forty-four prisoners themselves, who were reluctant to accept release into the custody of a white stranger after dark. Called from their cells, the male prisoners pressed themselves around the walls of the jail entrance until the seventeen female prisoners appeared hesitantly at the top of the rickety staircase from the upper cell block. All the prisoners, including Itta Bena leader William McGee, deferred wordlessly to two frail women well into their seventies. They questioned Pratt, pondered his story and perhaps his accent, then announced a decision. “Praise God!” one of them called out. “The church has come and set us free!”

H
OLLIS
W
ATKINS
did not attend the great march itself. After the long bus trip to Washington, he joined Bob Moses and Curtis Hayes on a lonely picket line outside the Justice Department with offbeat placards—“Even the Federal Government Is a White Man.” Sight of them was a curiosity even for most of the arriving, early-bird marchers, while for Watkins this first trip to the capital and its monuments had the quality of a space journey. As in the Parchman death house, he led freedom songs in a clear, ringing tenor that made him a beacon of high morale for fellow prisoners and marchers alike, giving no hint that he was fighting a sense of being abandoned in prison by some of the same SNCC brethren who, in the chaos of last-minute infighting over the agenda for the march, protested that they were neglected in suffering and militancy by the higher Negroes bent on placating white people, especially the Kennedy administration. Telling himself that some things were best left unsaid, Watkins followed his SNCC friends into march headquarters at the Statler-Hilton Hotel to catch a glimpse of the magnetic sideshow in the mezzanine, where Malcolm X smiled, sparred, and bantered with a constant stream of spellbound onlookers—a phantom in flesh, a picket against the picketers.

Malcolm was not supposed to be there. Elijah Muhammad instructed his followers to avoid politics entirely—never to vote, march, petition, or otherwise implicate themselves in a system doomed to certain apocalypse—and Malcolm faithfully heaped invective on the foolish Negroes who wanted to “integrate into a burning house.” To an audience in Virginia on August 22, he dutifully recited the Nation's racial cosmology according to Muhammad. “The black man is the original man,” Malcolm declared. “The white man was dormant in the seed of the black. Yacob, a scientist…grafted out the white race from the black race and formed Abraham. When Yacob made the weaker race of whites, he knew they'd exist six thousand years. They are referred to in the Bible as devils…. In the last four hundred years they'd have in their clutches the lost tribes of God. At the end of that period there would be the coming of the son of man, Master Fard. His coming has given Elijah Muhammad the gospel of truth.” Malcolm denounced integration as contrary to the laws of nature, and branded the hopes of the march a naive deceit. “The whites will never accept the so-called Negroes and will always be hypocrites,” he said.

Still, Malcolm came alone to Washington a few days later, speaking neither of Yakub nor his private conflict in the Nation of Islam. Instead, he held court for passing demonstrators, mostly students, including Hollis Watkins, James Forman, and SNCC's newly elected chairman, John Lewis, who was consumed by an offstage controversy over the advance text of his speech to the Lincoln Memorial crowd. Malcolm relished his encounters with the movement students—their tentative, slack-jawed approach, their garrulous relief when the forbidding Muslim turned out to be full of smiles, taking them seriously. When Lewis stopped by the mezzanine again after delivering his address on national television and then meeting with President Kennedy, Malcolm congratulated him for an excellent speech. He offered the nonviolent Christians gentle criticism instead of firebrand ridicule. “I am not condemning or criticizing the march,” he said, “but it won't solve the problems of black people.”

 

T
HE MARCH ITSELF
reduced Malcolm X and Hollis Watkins to faceless dots in the crowd. Like other formative experiences of the mass communications era—the coronation of Britain's Queen Elizabeth in 1953, the presidential conventions, the dramas of astronauts rocketing from launchpad to splashdown—the Freedom March commanded national attention by preempting regularly scheduled television programs. Broadcast networks voluntarily surrendered their revenues, and gathered their most important news correspondents to preside over a transcendent ritual of American identity. As the first ceremony of such magnitude ever initiated and dominated by Negroes, the march also was the first to have its nature wholly misperceived in advance.

Dominant expectations ran from paternal apprehension to dread. On
Meet the Press
, television reporters grilled Roy Wilkins and Martin Luther King about widespread foreboding that “it would be impossible to bring more than 100,000 militant Negroes into Washington without incidents and possibly rioting.” In a preview article,
Life
magazine declared that the capital was suffering “its worst case of invasion jitters since the First Battle of Bull Run.” President Kennedy's advance man, Jerry Bruno, positioned himself to cut the power to the public address system if rally speeches proved incendiary. The Pentagon readied nineteen thousand troops in the suburbs; the city banned all sales of alcoholic beverages; hospitals made room for riot casualties by postponing elective surgery. More than 80 percent of the day's business revenue would be lost to closed and empty stores. Although D.C. Stadium stood nearly four miles from the Lincoln Memorial rally site, Major League Baseball
*
canceled in advance two night games between the Minnesota Twins and the last-place Senators. With nearly 1,700 extra correspondents supplementing the Washington press corps, the march drew a media assembly bigger than the Kennedy inauguration two years earlier. By way of advance scorn, a U.S. representative submitted for the
Congressional Record
the testimonial letter of a satisfied Virginia Negro who shunned the march
†
altogether.

Not all the apprehension was racial in origin. Washington was an insular city, slow to accept a new communications fact that the natural audience for political rallies was public opinion back home. Many Washingtonians, including politicians who supported civil disobedience in the South, assumed that the purpose of any demonstration must be some sort of mob coercion against them, like the Bonus Marchers of 1932. The Senate, with no pending business, stayed in session primarily to put on an unperturbed face of normalcy. Representatives ordered a quorum call at the exact moment the rally began at the Lincoln Memorial, so as to publish the names of some 340 members who were dutifully attending to the Railroad Arbitration Bill and the formalities of Save Your Vision Week.

The March on Washington earned the capital letters of a landmark event by the end of the afternoon. Beyond the record-breaking numbers—upward of a quarter million—and the stunning good order that turned all the riot troops and plasma reserves into stockpiles of paranoia, the march made history with dignified high spirits. News outlets gushed over scenes of harmony—“White legs and Negro legs dangle together in the reflecting pool”—and Roy Wilkins congratulated Negroes for passing what amounted to a character test: “I'm so proud of my people.” Police recorded only four march-related arrests, all of white people: one Nazi, two violent hecklers, and a health insurance computer
‡
who drove to work with a loaded shotgun. The outcome so embarrassed predictions that march organizer Bayard Rustin gained credit as a fresh wizard of social engineering, whose command of scheduling and portable toilets had worked a miracle on the races. Overnight, Rustin became if not a household name at least a quotable and respectable source for racial journalism, his former defects as a vagabond ex-Communist homosexual henceforth overlooked or forgiven.

A sense of relief raised the goodwill of the march into heights of inspiration, as millions of television viewers, including President Kennedy, heard a complete King speech for the first and last time that day. The occasion introduced King's everyday pulpit rhetoric as a national hymn. Despair wrestled deep in his voice against belief in democratic justice, producing his distinctive orator's passion, but the passion itself went to the core of the American heritage. From his reassurance of a common political ideal, the address spilled over into fresh cultural optimism. Although King's peroration invited polyglot America—“
all
God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics”—to join in a spiritual song of African origin, most observers pictured integration in reverse as a journey made comfortable by the ability of Negroes to behave like white people.
Life's
review issue on the march, with Bayard Rustin on the cover and a text evoking “beatific calm” instead of Bull Run, presented a signature couple marching in crisp matching overalls, captioned “Negro Gothic…reminiscent of famous Grant Wood painting.”

 

T
ELEVISION STILL
was a youthful medium, transmitting black-and-white programs except for the few such as
Bonanza
and Johnny Carson's new
Tonight Show
—specially marked in newspaper listings with a “(c)” for color—and some executives expressed moral misgivings about the generalized projection of sensate luxury. “Beer drinkers especially seem to live in a world of huge delight…flashing smiles, toothy grins, and eyes popping with pleasure,” observed an advertising director who warned colleagues that “fun, status symbolism, and sex in their current usage are suspect, and should be watched.” Against lingering inhibition, a strong faction of network management believed that the industry was poised for an explosion of revenue in the maturing postwar economy. The key to competitive domination lay in network news programs—or so ran working theory since tandem hosts David Brinkley and Chet Huntley achieved a national popularity at the 1956 political conventions that carried over from their nightly news show to NBC's prime-time programs.

On the Monday following the march, rival CBS launched a calculated comeback by doubling regular news coverage with television's first half-hour newscast, featuring news-anchor Walter Cronkite. Two years in the making, the plan aimed to build the prestige of the Cronkite program toward the political conventions in the 1964 presidential election year. For the premiere, President Kennedy granted Cronkite an exclusive interview that opened with the President's concession that civil rights had cost him heavily in a number of states crucial to reelection, especially in the South,
*
and ended with a discussion of what President Kennedy called “a very important struggle” against a Communist-led insurgency in Vietnam, where forty-seven American soldiers had been killed. Reviewers called the Kennedy interview “leisurely.” While some critics welcomed the extra time for thoughtful or amusing “soft” stories (and complimented in particular Cronkite's segment on Japanese singers trying to master the English diction of “With a Little Bit of Luck” in the Tokyo production of
My Fair Lady)
, others doubted that CBS could fill a thirty-minute report every night.

NBC waited a week to match Cronkite
†
with an expanded version of the Huntley-Brinkley news. The network gambled heavily against the President Kennedy and Cronkite debut with a three-hour special on the race issue, entitled
American Revolution
'63. The entire program aired without commercial interruption, as regular sponsors declined to be associated with controversy, and the network itself showed signs of reluctance. Producers allowed no mention of segregated churches, or church activity on either side, for instance, and, to avoid hazarding any structural concept, they adopted the odd contrivance of segments presented alphabetically by the names of cities. An opening on protests in Albany, Georgia, gave way to a flashback on pre-Civil War abolitionists in Amherst, Massachusetts.

In rare lapses from professional aloofness, NBC narrators revealed the tension of a great personal leap, like trembling knees at a wedding. “There comes a time, there even comes a moment, in the affairs of men when they sense that their lives are being altered forever,” began correspondent Frank McGee. “…We are experiencing a revolution.” McGee told viewers that he had first sensed it years earlier as a local news director during the Montgomery bus boycott,
‡
and other voices cited the culminating impact of televised violence against children: “The outrage in Birmingham, the sparks from this fell on every state in the Union.”

Among numerous segregationists filmed expressly for the special, Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi argued that the national turmoil was a sinister illusion created by television itself. “You are witnessing one more chapter in what has been termed the television revolution,” Barnett declared. On the NBC screen, he introduced a pregnant new ideology rooted in the assertion that the news media were driven by a secret racial agenda, saying that the past year's coverage “publicized and dramatized the race issue far beyond its relative importance,” and that this deliberate media bias served as “a smoke screen to hide the biggest power grab in American history.” Barnett concluded that “the real goal of the conspiracy is the concentration of all effective power in the central government in Washington.”

The NBC documentary answered Barnett indirectly with a segment on Madison Avenue. “Outside this building there were pickets last week,” a correspondent soberly disclosed over previously unused footage in which NAACP pickets complained that Negroes were excluded not only from television and radio ads, and thus from consumer fantasy, but also from news and entertainment programs. Each of the three networks had hired its first Negro correspondent within the past year; most major newspapers had no Negro reporters at all; even the educational broadcast channels, which favored civil rights by reputation, employed less than 1 percent Negro talent; the first and only televised entertainment shows featuring Negroes had been the stereotype comedies
Beulah
and
Amos 'n' Andy
, both canceled at the end of the Korean War.