The Martin Duberman Reader (24 page)

At the height of the ongoing struggle, Howard, who'd been in and out of Albany since December 1960, got a phone call from the Southern Regional Council (SRC), an organization in Atlanta that specialized in gathering data on race relations. The SRC asked him
to go again to Albany and do a formal report on what was going on there. Howard immediately accepted the assignment. A number of SNCC organizers were already at work there and several of his students had been jailed; he hoped it would be possible to visit them, but as it would turn out, the authorities denied him access (refused the right of visitation, he stood outside the jail—a stone building topped with barbed wire—to shout up to students and friends who'd been arrested).

The day after Howard arrived in Albany, local officials and the Albany Movement reached a verbal agreement; but it in fact made few concessions to the black community and soon fell apart. Martin Luther King Jr. and his close associate in SCLC, Ralph Abernathy, were called back to Albany from Atlanta to stand trial for leading an earlier demonstration, were found guilty on July 10, 1962, and were sentenced to forty-five days in jail or the payment of a $178 fine. They chose jail.

The trial produced a sensation, even leading Burke Marshall, head of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department and previously resistant to intervention, to put in a number of strategic phone calls to Albany officials. As a result, King and Abernathy were released the following morning. Soon after, a number of high-powered lawyers, including William Kunstler of the American Civil Liberties Union, started to put together a series of court cases to challenge Albany's unbending defense of segregation.

Further marches, prayer meetings, and demonstrations—along with arrests and bloody beatings—followed. The Justice Department, besieged by delegations, letters, and telegrams, in August 1962 finally filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of the Albany Movement. Up to then the department and its head, Robert Kennedy, had, through their inaction, essentially been collaborators with the segregationists.

Howard continued to go back and forth between Albany and Atlanta, and in December 1961, the FBI, which had let Howard's file go dormant since the mid-1950s, picked up his trail again. Still referring to him as a “Communist,” one agent reported to J. Edgar
Hoover that Zinn had been critical of Robert Kennedy “for his failure to prosecute civil rights violations and to protect the negro against white violence.”

From the Bureau's point of view the foremost grievance against Howard was that he'd been denouncing the FBI itself for standing by and not protecting blacks when they were physically attacked. Going still further, Howard pointed out that one of the great problems the Albany Movement faced in getting FBI agents to take action in its behalf was that most of them were Southerners in origin and had been deeply influenced by the mores of their communities of origin. Whatever the reason, the FBI was no friend of the civil rights movement (the Bureau had no black agents). “Every time I saw FBI men in Albany,” Howard claimed, “they were with the local police force.” Yet in the presence of beatings and mistreatment, the FBI unquestionably had the constitutional right to intervene. But its agents, seemingly indifferent, at most wrote down complaints in a notebook—and then did nothing further about them. “Can you imagine,” Howard later said, “the FBI watching a bank robbery and taking notes?”

In February 1963, Judge J. Robert Elliott announced his ruling in Albany against the movement's appeal for desegregation. After the hearing, as if to atone for it, Howard drove out to Lee County, where the night before a number of black homes had been shot into from passing automobiles, and commiserated with the families involved. The Albany struggle sputtered on throughout 1963. Pritchett's police became increasingly violent, and the federal government continued to do little about it. In an article in the
Nation,
Howard put the blame squarely on the Kennedy administration and its timid Department of Justice. “The national government,” he wrote, has “failed again and again to defend the constitutional liberties of Negroes. . . .By restricting its activity to a few ineffective court appearances, the Department of Justice left the rights of Albany citizens in the hands of Police Chief Pritchett, who crushed them time after time.”

Without giving up its determination to desegregate interstate
facilities, SNCC, in coordination with CORE and the NAACP, added an additional goal to its agenda—voter registration—with the state of Mississippi a primary target and with the already-legendary Bob Moses as its lead organizer. Greenwood became the initial hot spot for the voter registration drive, and Howard and Roz were there during the height of the turmoil; he described SNCC headquarters as having “the eerie quality of a field hospital after a battle.” The NAACP leader Aaron Henry early on became the racists' victim of choice: an explosive device was thrown into his home, another ripped off part of his drugstore's roof, and bullets were shot directly into his house.

Then, on February 28, 1963, twenty-year-old James Travis, a native Mississippian and a SNCC field secretary, was driving along U.S. 82 about seven miles from Greenwood, along with Bob Moses and Randolph Blackwell (a field director of the Atlanta-based Voter Education Project), when three unidentified white men in a car without a license plate pulled up alongside them and let go with a blast of gunfire. Moses and Blackwell were unhurt, but Travis was hit in his shoulder and neck, where the bullet lodged behind his spine. The doctor who patched him up said that Travis would have died instantly if the bullet had entered his body with slightly more force.

The episode was part of a reign of terror. Eleven voter registration workers, including SNCC's executive secretary, James Forman, were arrested, charged with “inciting to riot,” and sentenced to four months in jail. The Greenwood police turned a dog loose on a group of blacks attempting to register. The SNCC office in Greenwood was set on fire, the phones ripped out of the walls, and all office equipment destroyed; the Greenwood police said they could find no evidence of arson. Four black-owned businesses were burnt to the ground just a block away from the SNCC office. And so it went: shootings, beatings, harassment, and burnings became commonplace. The climax came on June 12 with the murder of Medgar Evers in the driveway of his home.

Instead of being intimidated, still more volunteers, remarkably,
arrived—many from the NAACP and CORE—to supplement the SNCC workers already on the ground. And Mississippi's own black citizens, long subjected to white violence and humiliation, themselves slowly began to join the activists—among them the sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer. After trying to register to vote, Hamer was fired from her job, lost her home, and had to take refuge in a friend's bedroom—into which “someone” pumped sixteen bullets. Undaunted, Hamer next tried sitting down in a white waiting room at the bus terminal; she was thrown into jail and beaten all over her body with a blackjack.

When released, Hamer decided never to return to the life of a sharecropper. She became a field secretary for SNCC, joining a number of women—itself an affront to gender norms of the day—in leadership positions. In that, and in stressing maximum input from local black communities (what was beginning to be called “participatory democracy”), SNCC was providing a provocative alternate structure to the traditional one of middle- and upper-class white men monopolizing power and governing through top-down decisions.

When someone later praised Howard (they should have added Roz) for the courage he'd shown in putting himself on the front lines time after time, he responded, “It's not courage to me . . . I'm not going to be executed. I'm not even going to be given a long jail sentence. I may be thrown into jail for a day or two, and that has happened to me eight to nine times. I may be fired, I may get a salary decrease, but these are pitiful things compared to what happens to people in the world.”

Howard felt that the newspaper accounts of what conditions were like in Black Belt jails insufficiently conveyed their horror. He decided to tape-record several of the young activists, including Willie Rogers, who'd recently been released: “We stayed in the hot box two nights. It's a cell about six foot square. . . . Long as they don't turn the heat on—with three in there—you can make it. There's no openings for light or air . . . they had a little round hole in the floor which was a commode.”

Howard and Roz went with Bob Moses, Stokely Carmichael (a veteran of the sit-ins and Freedom Rides and soon to chair SNCC), and others to one of the more dangerous spots, the town of Itta Bena. “People came out of the cotton fields to meet in a dilapidated little church,” Howard wrote, “singing freedom songs with an overpowering spirit.” One of them was a fragile, tiny seventy-five-year-old woman who'd just spent two months on the county prison farm for trying to register to vote.

The conditions under which blacks lived in rural Mississippi—the grinding poverty and grisly brutality—could hardly be imagined by outsiders. Terrell County typified those conditions. Blacks were a majority of the population in Terrell in 1960, but only 51 out of 8,209 were registered to vote (in thirteen Mississippi counties no blacks at all were registered). Nothing had changed by 1963, yet forty brave people turned up for a registration meeting in a local Baptist church. Though several were arrested and a nearby black church burnt to the ground, the county's Judge Elliott refused to grant an injunction to prevent further intimidation of prospective voters, giving as his opinion that there was no evidence of any danger to those attempting to register.

It had become increasingly clear by 1963 that court litigation alone would not solve the voting issue as long as segregationist judges like Elliott presided over such litigation. Frustrated at the lack of change, some members of SNCC began to question the tactics of nonviolence. They were tired of passively enduring white violence and of being accused by such “moderate” voices as the
Atlanta Constitution
of being “law-breakers” for engaging in nonviolent sit-ins or voter registration drives. And they were angry after President Kennedy finally got around to passing his modest Civil Rights Bill in 1963 that a number of prominent Southern white “liberals” resisted some of its provisions. Ralph McGill, for one, opposed the public accommodations provision as a violation of white property rights—as did the
Atlanta Constitution,
and on the same grounds. Even a few African American leaders expressed their ambivalence—their caution outraging those in SNCC.

At SNCC's annual conference on April 12 to 14, 1963, in Atlanta, three hundred young people (one-third of them white) gathered to plan for the future. Howard appeared as one of the principal speakers. As if to bolster everyone's spirits in the face of an essentially stalled voter drive in the Deep South, Howard—whose optimism was nearly always on call, as intrinsic to his person as his warmth—put the best face on it. After all, he declared, the answer to the ongoing problems of discrimination can't be solved by the ballot anyway: “People voting are coming into a basically undemocratic political structure. When Negroes vote, they will achieve as much power thereby as the rest of us have—which is very little.” The best hope of a solution was to create “centers of power,” such as SNCC itself, outside the formal federal structures, and to use those centers as channels for exerting pressure on both local and national governments. There was no guarantee of success of course, not as long as the present administration remained in power; the president had done just enough, Howard felt, “to keep his image from collapsing in the eyes of twenty million Negroes.” But no more than that.

Even today, one could make the case that racism is still deeply entrenched in the country—though the age cohort eighteen to twenty-five demonstrates far more progressive attitudes than its predecessors, and provides the chief grounds for being hopeful about the future. Still, the income distribution of black families hasn't changed much and the asset-ownership gap between blacks and whites is much greater than the income gap (and has become more so since the 2008 recession began). Nearly a third of African Americans have incomes below the poverty level; the rate hasn't fallen since 1970. Even those blacks who make it into the middle class often have very little financial cushion. For the poor of all colors, the least affluent households—the bottom fifth—no longer receive as much safety net support as they once did, their share of federal benefits falling from 54 percent in 1979 to 36 percent in 2007.

Though many more blacks are in college than previously, more than a quarter of all African Americans still lack even a high school
diploma. As Michelle Alexander discusses in
The New Jim Crow,
one out of four black men in their twenties are currently in jail, on probation or parole as a direct corollary of the War on Drugs—often for possession of a small amount of marijuana (and the proportion of blacks and whites who consume drugs is roughly the same).

Residential segregation in the North and West, moreover, remains nearly as powerful as ever, except in metropolitan areas with small black populations—like Tucson. Three-quarters of Americans live under highly segregated conditions: public schools are becoming steadily
re
segregated, and three-quarters of all African Americans are still housed in black
or
white neighborhoods, which in turn leads to segregated schools. Nor has our electoral process seen any marked changes. As of 2011, only two blacks have
ever
been elected governors of their states—and in the current Congress not a single senator is black. Yet liberal “gradualists” continue to argue that electoral politics is the best avenue to social change—though it's nearly impossible for blacks to win a majority of white votes (in 2008, Obama won with only 43 percent of the white electorate supporting him). As
The Economist
summed matters up in its issue of February 11, 2012, “the average black American is more likely to live in poorer neighborhoods, go to weaker schools, [is] less likely to find a job and less likely to own a home than the average white . . .”