The Children

by David Halberstam

He knew the box Ben West was in, and he knew he could put the screws to him.

And in that instant she understood completely why she was doing this, that this country forced you to make decisions about color that you did not want to make. Suddenly, after all these years she knew how black she was. It was not her idea to judge people on color; it was America and Tennessee and Nashville which had decided to judge her on her color and the color of her friends. She gave them her fingerprints, and walked away from the desk more sure than ever of what she was doing and why she was doing it.

In that brief frightening moment Jim had managed to find a subject which they both shared and had used it in a way that made each of them more human in the eyes of the other.

It did not matter what the other person thought of you; it mattered only to do the right thing, to follow your conscience. In that split second of confrontation Jim Lawson had not only conquered his ego, he had forced his enemy in some basic way to try and see him as a man.

Too much time, he decided, was wasted in this country by people who worried how they looked to others, and too little time spent on simply trying to figure out what was the right thing to do. Christ had not worried about how he looked to others. If you did the right thing, he learned that day, it was all right to be misunderstood. He did not have to shout out that he was doing this as an act of courage, not an act of fear.

He had taught them what to expect, what the white cops were likely to do, even what kind of things would most likely be said to them at the police station. Most important of all, they had each other; there was strength not so much in their numbers, although that helped, but in their shared belief.

I had never had that much dignity before, he said years later. It was exhilarating—it was something I had earned, the sense of the independence that comes to a free person.

If they had a hierarchy, if only one or two people at the top were the acknowledged leaders upon whom all the others depended, it would have a number of negative effects: It might convince those at the top that they were more important than they actually were, thereby increasing conflicts over ego and personality; equally important, it might subtract from the sense of importance of many of the others and make them feel their strength came from their leaders and not from themselves; and finally it would convince their white opponents that all they had to do was arrest the leaders to close the protests down.

To be successful at this, Bevel believed, you could not consider the consequences of what you were doing. Instead, you had to believe that these actions you were taking were of themselves right and therefore, no matter what else, they were the future.

Curtis Murphy had come during the workshops to accept the most elemental concept which Jim Lawson was preaching—that things did not have to be the way they were. That of itself was the first radical thought he had ever entertained. He had always accepted the idea that things were the way they were because they had always been that way and it would be dangerous to try and change them. That he had decided to join a crusade against the status quo still surprised him.

“Where is he?” the man said, mocking him. “Is he still in the Nashville jail?” “Wherever he is, I am too,” Buck Murphy had answered,

Remember, Gloria, whatever you do in life, you must not do for the glory of man, for men and women, mere mortals, are fickle. Getting in the honor society is not that important. How well you have done in school is important and I am proud of you for that. All your friends are proud of you. But the things you do in life, you must do for the glory of God, because they are the right things to do. But never for the glory of man as this society offers that kind of glory.”

His first lessons for them had been that their numbers would not remain small because the power of their idea was not small.

while he respected the law, the purpose of the sit-ins had been to call the community’s attention to a profound (legally based) injustice. He did not and would not disavow what the students were doing. He would not disassociate himself from them; he was their teacher and he believed that they were acting in a noble way.

Lawson’s house to summon a statement of withdrawal was his first critical mistake, that both for moral and for procedural reasons what he was doing was wrong, and that he should have resigned at the board meeting. But he played the role assigned to him, one which he later bitterly regretted.

“Atlanta was a mercantile city, a business city where money always talked, so the activists instinctively tried to use economic power against the establishment, to nickel-dime segregation to death. Nashville, with those church schools, and all that teaching by Jim Lawson, they used nonviolence as their weapon—they were going to love segregation to its death.”1

tired of West behaving like a politician instead of a human being.

to make people who were nominally your opponents get outside of their normal vision and see the human dimension wrought by segregation.

But could that feeling be sustained—could those who were leading the Movement affect the national conscience in a way that would move the American political process forward on so broad a scale as to create a committed majority vision? That was the great question. Otherwise it was not an enviable political equation—10 percent of the population wanting to gain full citizenship, in a system run by geriatric reactionaries. That made the job of the activists both simple and dangerous—they had to lure the beast of segregation to the surface and show to ordinary Americans just exactly how it was that the leadership of the South maintained segregation, not as that leadership constantly claimed, by a genteel partnership with its black citizens, but by the exercise of raw and brutal police powers.

The only way they were going to be effective, they all realized from the start, was by risking their lives, and making the federal government respond to the cruelty which it was their job to reveal.

And then, Martin Luther King began to talk about what those in the Movement should do after he was killed. He spoke in the most fatalistic of voices: not if he was killed, but when he was killed. The room became even more quiet. It was as if his violent death was a given, and the only question was when it would happen.

Because they had been through so much together and had come to admire one another so much, human emotions and personal attachments were outweighing what was good for the cause. That was wrong, Lewis believed. We cannot listen to them anymore, he thought, and we cannot listen to them because they love us; it is the same reason that we have to turn away from the advice of our parents, though they too love us.

An intuitive philosophy of the students in the Movement was being born: The safer everything was, the less likely that anything important would take place. Changes would come only with risk; the greater the risk, the greater the change.

Our job is to dramatize this evil,

If the spirit was truly within them, Bevel thought, they would not be worrying so much about what Dr. King was doing, they would be thinking only of what was the right thing for them to do. The more certain a person was of the nonviolent spirit, Bevel believed, the less likely he was to politic with others. No one, he thought, had a right to push anyone else toward so dangerous a fate, particularly Martin Luther King, who lived every day with the threat of assassination hanging over him.

In Tennessee they had always had each other. Now she lacked the comfort of that special community. Soon the combination of her terrible sense of responsibility and the special loneliness began to wear her down. At the beginning she cried herself to sleep every night. All the people she loved and cared about were completely at risk.

Jail, Lafayette thought, jail is one thing we really know how to do well. We are experts at it. We know how to behave, how to be a community within jail, how to support each other. They think jail breaks us, but we have come to think jail strengthens us. Why shouldn’t we be happy in jail? he thought.

The question was whether going there was the right thing to do. It was all very simple, he had said. Of course it was unsafe, and because it was unsafe it was the right thing to do.

The key to his father’s own existence and survival, James Bevel said, was his own belief that no one was closer to God than anyone else—least of all someone who thought his skin color and his wealth promoted him to a higher level, and thereby allowed him to act in an ungodly way.

White people were both good and bad, like everybody else, he would say. The average white person, he told his boys, did not sit around all day thinking of how to suppress black folks. Most of them were just trying to get through their own hard little lives. They had their own problems too, their bills to be paid, their illnesses, their own fears and shortcomings. Most of them didn’t feel very secure or very powerful. Only a few of them, the really dangerous ones, thought much about keeping black people down. But most people, he told his sons, were reasonable, caught like everyone else in things too powerful for them.

“A man should live his life in a way that God will obey him,” the father answered.

he was supplanting, men who worked through the existing, old-fashioned, institutionally driven hierarchy, were not.

They were in the enemy stronghold, virtually without connections; they might just as well have been parachuted behind the lines in Russia and told to recruit dissidents for the CIA,

“Now look at Lafayette there,” Bevel would say; “he’s from Florida and so he can go home any time he wants if it doesn’t work out. All he has to do is get on a bus to Tampa. But you’re from Mississippi. They know you here. They’re going to come after you. If you come with us, your mother and father might lose their jobs. So you better know what you’re getting into.” Then he would tell them to sleep on it and come back in the morning.

Watching Bevel that morning, Lafayette had a sudden insight: In all racial and social situations Bevel instinctively probed for resistance, and the more resistance he found, the more confident he was that he was on the right track, and the more he pushed ahead. It was as if the resistance of the white people around him proved to him the truth of what he was trying to do. Therefore, the deeper they went into the heart of the segregationist South, the harder Bevel pushed and probed.

Mattresses were things, he had argued, one more way that the authorities retained power over them. If need be, you had to will yourself to overcome the dependency upon comforts. Lafayette had willed himself to find the contour of his body in the concrete of the jail cell, so that it would eventually feel comfortable, and finally it became true, he did create the contour of his body in concrete, at least in his mind. Though it was nothing more than an illusion, it had allowed him to sleep in Parchman.

The more immune the people are to the pressure of the white community in the early organizational days, the better. If you handle it right in the beginning with just five or six people, in time they would bring their friends.

Lafayette was to talk at first not so much about voting rights as about citizenship, and then, gradually, about constitutional rights, and why people in the black community had to move ahead, not just for themselves, but on behalf of those who were to come after, Lewis said. He was to talk about their children’s lives—to remind them that they had an obligation on behalf of the young. If Lafayette did this well, and did not bluster, if he listened to them as much as he talked to them, then, said Lewis, at each meeting there would almost surely be two and perhaps three people who would be willing to become involved. They would thereupon be willing to hold comparable meetings at their homes, and use their influence with their friends. That way his influence would constantly be expanding, and in that way as well, he would be quietly growing roots into the community without the danger of a mass meeting, which might backfire and trigger a violent backlash among the whites. In addition he would subtly be blending into the landscape; he would bear less and less the taint of someone from the outside, who might disappear whenever it suited him.

Bernard, Rufus Lewis emphasized, had to create an atmosphere where the local people felt free to unburden themselves of all the anger which was stored up in them. That rage, no matter how deeply and carefully suppressed, would be his greatest asset. The more they spoke out in front of their friends, then the more, however unconsciously, they would be committing themselves to his cause. If they did this, came forward and po...

It was very important for Lafayette to get a feel for these people, for their hopes, and above all their fears, for fear was what governed their lives, more than hope. He was to try and comprehend the limits of their lives, and he had to make t...

“I’m tired of that kind of courage,” he had said, “courage in the dark. All the cowards in the world have courage in the dark. All these white hoodlums, all they have is courage in the dark. You’re going to be just like them. Why don’t you show your courage in the light of day? Why don’t you take your courage—if you’re that brave—and join me and fight segregation? Come and sit in with us. That takes courage, and we’ll do it downtown in the middle of the day when all the cops are watching. Or does that take too much courage for you?”

“There’s nothing wrong with using the word masses, and there’s nothing wrong with using the word revolution,” Randolph said. “I use them myself sometimes.”

By obeying his father and dropping out of the Movement, he had lost his sense of purpose.

There was no school for former activists or revolutionaries where they told you how to get on with the rest of your life, and taught you how to become middle class again, he thought. As the years passed and he heard about some of his friends from those days who had come on hard times, he was sure he knew what had happened—it had been a very difficult experience to come down from. He had been among the first, he realized, who had to return to so ordinary a life, the first to learn how hard it was to be middle class.

Beyond the sheer lack of morality of what he was doing, some of his colleagues were worried by what it showed about him emotionally, as if the need for sex was a reflection not of strength within, not of a certain macho quality, as some people in those days seemed to think, but was rather behavior born of insecurity and incompleteness, reflecting a need to be constantly, if only momentarily, validated and, at the very least, a total lack of discipline. What, they wondered, was so desperately missing in him as a person that he put so much energy into his womanizing and took so much affirmation from it?

Race, not patriotism, in modern America had become on both sides of the color line the last refuge of the scoundrel.

That made King, in Smith’s words, “a martyred prophet who was killed for doing what prophets do. He was not simply working for human rights and against the efforts of oppression, the struggle was against evil. ...It was against sin. ...The message of Martin Luther King must be underscored: the effort to abolish oppression is a work of God, and those who do it are truly God’s people.”2

In the Movement, when they had all been at their best, the drive and the purpose had always been communal. But politics was a new and very different game, the members of the Movement who were entering it were beginning to learn, and in order to work for the same larger goals, you had to think only of what was good for you at the moment, and to be brutal, if need be, in your treatment of old colleagues. It was a lesson whites had learned long ago.

“Man is a creature whose substance is faith. What his faith is, he is.”

“The problem with your husband,” one member of the old guard told Kate Lafayette, “is that he was too successful too quickly and he scared a lot of people.”