Pillar of Fire (97 page)

 

I
N
1976, Bob Moses returned from Africa after a decade in exile. After his last SNCC meeting in February of 1965, as Bob Parris, he had drifted from Mississippi into Alabama following the marches from Selma to Montgomery, when Martin Luther King had brought Abraham Heschel down to stay with him at Sully Jackson's madhouse in Selma, with James Bevel sleeping in a bathtub and James Forman under the dining room table, and the rabbi surviving a garlanded march beside King, saying, “I felt like I was praying with my feet.” Sometimes movement friends came across Parris on rural farms, drinking corn whiskey out of a fruit jar, thinking about the war in Southeast Asia. He attended the first organized protest on April 17, 1965. “Use Mississippi not as a moral lightning rod,” he told a crowd of fifteen thousand at the Washington monument, “but if you use it at all, use it as your looking glass.” Likening Vietnam to Mississippi, he held up a news photo announcing the capture of a Communist rebel in Vietnam. “Now I looked at that picture,” he told a May rally in Berkeley, “and what I saw was a little colored boy standing against a wire fence with a big huge white Marine with a gun in his back. But what I knew was that the people in this country saw a Communist rebel. And that we travel in different realities.”

Parris sought out Al Lowenstein. Although relations between them were still strained from Freedom Summer, and movement radicals increasingly scorned Lowenstein as a red-baiting white liberal, the two men shared a feeling of helplessness about the war, as they had two years earlier about Mississippi. Lowenstein brought Parris to a summer conference of anti-war activists in New York. Where Lowenstein saw the root of the Vietnam conflict as a national hatred for Communist China, and advocated a reappraisal of foreign policy, Parris held to the language of nonviolence. Over the summer of 1965, he approached a number of national religious leaders who supported the civil rights movement, only to be told that black people should not jeopardize hard-earned gains by speaking out on Vietnam. Parris received such advice as an affront. “I got angry,” he recalled twenty years later. “Well, I didn't rant and rave.”

On August 9, 1965, three days after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, Parris led a march on the U.S. Capitol to “declare peace” in Vietnam. Uniformed American Nazis splattered red paint on him, pacifist Dave Dellinger, and radical professor Staughton Lynd, who had supervised the Freedom Schools in Mississippi. Then Parris accepted an invitation to Ghana for a conference of African nations, and stayed on through the autumn. The following spring, Parris helped organize a conference in New Orleans called “Roots,” on the meaning of African heritage. He could not bring himself to visit the Dahmers in Hattiesburg after the firebombing, but he did go to see Amzie Moore in the Delta. Moore had become an official in the federal War on Poverty. His house buzzed with movement people working in Head Start. The MFDP was running candidates that summer, and the new SNCC chairman, Stokely Carmichael, proclaimed a doctrine of black power on a march through Mississippi. Parris, feeling invisible, decided it was safe to become Moses again. His marriage collapsed, partly over his obsession with Vietnam, just before he received a military induction notice.

At thirty-one, beyond legal draft age, Moses interpreted the order as punishment for his statements against the war. He fled underground to Canada in August of 1966, speaking French, living under the assumed name Robinson through a hard winter into 1967. He worked odd jobs as a janitor, telephone salesman, and night watchman. Eventually, he obtained a Canadian identity card and found refuge with a West Indian family, adopted by the children as “Uncle Bob” Williams. By early 1968, still fearing capture, Moses applied for a Canadian passport under which he might reach safer exile in Africa, by way of England. As he waited, news bulletins announced that the FBI was screening Canadian passport files for the fugitive assassin of Martin Luther King. An “Eric Galt”—then a “George Sneyd”—was said to be arranging a Canadian identity for escape, possibly to Rhodesia. Moses panicked, fearing that the manhunt would expose his fraudulent passport papers. He stayed in hiding well after James Earl Ray was arrested in London.

When he reached Tanzania that summer, Moses turned in his false passport to the Tanzanian government, which granted him tacit asylum under his own name. He married Janet Jemmott, a SNCC worker he had met during Freedom Summer, and they had four children while teaching math and English, respectively, in a Tanzanian village school. Moses avoided the family he had left behind. Some among them feared he was dead until he sent home an African cane when he learned of his father's death in 1970. Had he contacted his father, Moses told himself, the FBI would have harassed the older man. Joe Rauh, locating Moses by rumor, sent a letter to him in care of the American embassy in Tanzania. Before he died, Rauh wrote, he wanted to convince Moses that he had never betrayed him or the MFDP in Atlantic City. Moses did not reply. He worried that Rauh's letter might alert the embassy.

After the Vietnam War ended, the Moses-Jemmott family returned to the United States and settled under the Jimmy Carter draft amnesty in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Janet Jemmott went to medical school and became a pediatrician. Moses taught high school and went back to graduate school at Harvard. He seemed disconnected from his past, even fearful of it. Some friends counted him among the many “movement casualties,” haunted or damaged to varying degrees. He avoided SNCC reunions at which some of the survivors came to terms. Diane Nash told her peers at one of them how, to her own amazement, the late 1960s had swept away her belief in nonviolence. “I felt that way for a few years until I noticed that I hadn't killed anybody,” she said. “I hadn't been to the rifle range. I hadn't blown up anything, and truly, I had done very little….” Nash had disengaged under cover of words, perhaps the better to raise children as a single mother.

In 1982, Moses returned to Mississippi for the first time in sixteen years, to attend Amzie Moore's funeral. He made a brief speech. He began to give interviews, and sometimes he asked for documents about himself as though discovering another person. He developed a new way of teaching algebra that blended in Freedom School methods. By the 1990s, his Algebra Project operated in school districts across the country. Moses spent more and more time in Mississippi, having recovered his past. Mastering first-year algebra is an equivalent of the right to vote in the 1960s, he said. It provides hope in the modern world.

 

I
N
S
ELMA
, Martin Luther King confronted furies ahead. In order to win the vote, movement spirits in many small places would have to lift politics into history. Beyond the vote lay Vietnam, which would spoil the celebrations of freedoms that had been set in train over the past two years. King's inner course was fixed downward toward the sanitation workers of Memphis. It was his course, but it was getting lonely. Neither King nor the movement could turn America into a mass meeting, but for three more years they could look to a distant one, at Canaan's edge.

M
Y EDITOR
, Alice Mayhew, has inspired, nurtured, and driven this project for fifteen years of her remarkable career. I am grateful to her foremost among the many people at Simon & Schuster who helped produce this book. Most of them made contributions out of an author's sight, but I want to thank by name those standing closest through the whirlwind of production: Roger Labrie, Lydia Buechler, and Fred Chase, along with Kerri Kennedy, Victoria Meyer, Emily Remes, Liz Stein, and Lisa Weisman. Natalie Goldstein diligently tracked down photographs for this book as well as the previous one. I thank Carolyn Reidy for the warm support of the company, and for her formative suggestion that we had enough material to publish a second volume.

My family and I appreciate two generous foundations, Lyndhurst of Chattanooga and MacArthur of Chicago, for grants that allowed me to broaden my research and helped to sustain us. The Ford Foundation provided a research grant in 1993-94, which made possible the excellent library and computer work of Susanne Trowbridge. Jennifer Bard, Frank Drumwright, and Tracy Wallace offered short-term research assistance, as did my mother, Jane Branch. Jonah Edelman conducted a skillful research mission in Los Angeles.

This volume rests on the source foundation begun for
Parting the Waters
. I acknowledge those people and institutions again here, without repeating all the names. Among the employees of the libraries and archives cited in the notes for this volume, I am especially indebted to the following: Linda Evans, Archie Motley, Ralph Pugh, and Corey Seeman of the Chicago Historical Society; Ginger Cain and Ellen Nemhauser of the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University in Atlanta; Kelly Baker, Kirk E. Cromer, Armaria Fleming, Emil Moschella, Helen Ann Near, and Robert Opher of the FBI's Records Management Division in Washington; Robert Colasacco and Sharon Laist of the Ford Foundation Archives in New York; Keven Proffitt of the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati; Helen Ritter of the American Jewish Committee in New York; Claudia Anderson, Michael Gillette, Regina Greenwell, Linda Hanson, Tina Houston, Mary Knill, and Harry Middleton of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin; Susan D'Entremont of the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston; Iris Bethea, Bruce Keys, Cynthia Lewis, and Diana Ware of the King Library and Archives in Atlanta; Philip Runkel of the Marquette University Archives in Milwaukee; Dan Den Bleyker of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson; Judy Edelhoff, Mary Roonan, and Steven D. Tilly of the National Archives in Washington; Richard Shrader and John White of the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill; Martin Harris, Pat Priest, Worth McDonald, and Barry Sherman of the Peabody Awards Film Collection at the University of Georgia in Athens; Kristin Gleeson of the Presbyterian Office of History in Philadelphia; Diana Edwards, Page Edwards, and David Nolan of the St. Augustine Historical Society; Howard Dodson, James Turner, Berlina Robinson, and Mary Yearwood of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York; Clayborne Carson of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project at Stanford University; Kathy Borkowski and Harold Miller of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in Madison.

Among the authors whose pioneering works inform these pages, I owe a special debt to Steven Barboza, Seth Cagin and Philip Dray, David Colburn, David Garrow, Peter Goldman, and Elizabeth Sutherland. Of the firsthand memoirs, I found special value in those by Charles Fager and Paul Good, along with the book of childhood recollection by Sheyann Webb and Rachel West.

Pillar of Fire
relies heavily on interviews with those who made, observed, and studied this history. I am grateful to them for sharing their time and knowledge. For advice and encouragement beyond the contributions cited in the notes, I extend thanks to the following people: Ikhlas Bilal, David Chalmers, Jack Chatfield, Connie Curry, Jonathan Demme, Jed Dietz, Lawrence Elswit, Michael V. Gannon, Charles Guggenheim, Lawrence and Monica Guyot, Henry Hampton, Lawrence Hanks, Abdul Karim Hasan, Gerald Horne, Pam Horowitz, Martha Hunt Huie, Ray Jenkins, Teresa Johanson, June Johnson, Vernon Jordan, Benjamin Karim, Stetson Kennedy, Shira Lander, Lawrence W. Lichty, Arthur Magida, Charles Marsh, Richard I. McKinney, Julia McMillan, Michael Middleton, Michael Miller, Peggy Obrecht, Gerald O'Grady, Becky Okrent, Bruce Perry, Anna Hamilton Phelan, Frank M. Reid, Ray Rickman, Phil Alden Robinson, Ed Saxon, Joel and Myrna Schwartz, Ronald Shaheed, Joe Sinsheimer, Jack Sisson, Frank and Sandy Soracco, Henry Thomas, and Jerry Thornbery.

During nine years' work on this volume, I have leaned heavily at times on a few special friends, including Harry Belafonte, Agieb Bilal, Julian Bond, Marian Wright Edelman, and Dan Okrent. Christy and I have watched our children, Macy and Franklin, pass from lower school to the brink of college. They have brought us joy that surpasses for me even the absorbing wonder of the King years.