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May 14 - August 24, 2019
He grounded one foot in patriotism, the other in ministry, and both in nonviolence.
his white superiors that local Klansmen vowed to kill the traveling preacher if he set foot again in his local church. This to Haynes was basic education in a county of unspoiled beauty and feudal cruelty, where a nerve of violence ran beneath tranquil scenes of egret flocks resting among pastured Angus cattle.
If Johnson really meant to secure the right of Negroes to vote, he must try to extend the reach of national government and trust posterity to judge whether the result enhanced freedom or tyranny.
No merchant in Lowndes County would sell Marlboro cigarettes or Falstaff beer, for instance, because of a report from the 1950s—unnoticed or long forgotten everywhere else—that the companies once made donations to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
urgently recommending nonviolence to combat what he called mankind’s three related scourges of racial injustice, poverty, and war.
They wore Confederate flag pins on white blouses, and one of them told a reporter she had taken special pains to be presentable on what figured to be an important day.
No one, including President Johnson, foresaw America’s first loss of a war, any more than the day’s tear gas victims pictured Selma as the last great thrust of a movement built on patriotic idealism. It was a turning point. The tide of confidence in equal citizenship had swelled over decades to confront segregation as well as the Nazis, and would roll forward still, but an opposing tide of resentment and disbelief rose to challenge the overall direction of American politics, contesting the language of freedom.
King’s worst fear was to lose everything—to march just short enough to lose momentum and cohesion within the movement, just far enough to break the injunction and lose any chance of federal alliance, just blindly enough to reap blame on all sides for getting mauled gratuitously in defeat. Such was the accustomed lot of Negroes as recounted by folk wisdom and brash comedians.
He preached seriously for a time on the danger of another “letdown” period in history, as after the Civil War. “You cannot legislate deals and go home without dealing with sicknesses in society,” Bevel shouted.
He drew a direct line from Reconstruction to the Selma march as twin crossroads in the patriotic history of freedom, a century apart, and warned by analogy of pitfalls in this second opportunity to “build a great society.” Inspiration and goodwill were not enough to stabilize new democracy born in traumatic sacrifice, because reactive fears would threaten not only empirical gains but the political vocabulary of self-government itself.
Movement comedian Dick Gregory paired the ill omen of Vietnam with California’s landslide approval for Proposition 14, which repealed the state’s new fair housing law starkly against the grain of the 1964 national election. “Which means,” Gregory shouted, “California ain’t nothing but Mississippi with palm trees!”
Barriers to freedom were “tumbling down,” Johnson told the audience of five thousand at Howard University. “But freedom is not enough.” He foresaw a new and “more profound stage” of battle ahead—to seek “not just freedom but opportunity…not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.” To frame a visionary future, Johnson confronted the past with sweeping metaphors from warfare and sports. “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains, and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race,” declared the President, “and then say,
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Chief among their discoveries in Vietnam was the monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who had sent King a letter on the meaning of self-immolation. The sensational fires were not acts of despair, suicide, or even violence, he argued. Mahayana Buddhism, while abhorring self-destruction, teaches that life is immortal.
“Don’t pay any attention to what the little shits on the campuses do,” he told George Ball. “The great beast is the reactionary elements in this country.”
An elastic conscription law allowed him to commandeer manpower for Vietnam by quiet executive decree, at the price of inevitable protest that no such autocratic power should compel young Americans to kill or be killed in the name of free government.
“Negroes better than anyone else are in a position to question the war,” Moses said softly through a bullhorn. “Not because they understand the war better, but because they better understand the United States.”
“All we want is jobs,” he yelled. “We get jobs, we don’t bother nobody. We don’t get no jobs, we’ll tear up Los Angeles, period.”
Parker and Yorty steadfastly denied the existence of prejudice anywhere in Los Angeles. When he cited to them the heavy local majority to repeal California’s fair housing laws, wrote Rustin, they insisted that Proposition 14 was a nonracial affirmation of personal choice in real estate.
the two principals addressed a history-making civil rights alliance that was menaced already on larger fronts, marked by skewed public attitudes about violence as sickness or cure. Each looked to the other for unlikely rescue, and neither betrayed hostility over rupture near at hand. Their skittish, intimate consultation left few clues that it would seal the last words on record between King and Lyndon Johnson. Unwittingly, they were saying goodbye.
Although the President said he only paraphrased King on the subject, he knew—and he knew King knew—that the filter of race would implicate Negroes broadly while sparing whites except for Klan extremists.
“For our cause is the liberation—the liberation of all of our citizens in all of our sections in all of our nation, through peaceful, nonviolent change,” he had declared. “And we shall overcome. And I am enlisted for the duration.”
He still worried that national wrath would steal the remaining energy of his Great Society, and he knew it was far easier to make new enemies than to transcend old ones.
For all Johnson’s personal discomfort with King, who to him was no congenial horse trader like Roy Wilkins, he was loath to break from the nonviolent phenomenon that King represented. Johnson’s presidential distress sprang from experience that inverted the conventional perspective on violence in politics. He needed military success ahead to govern, but already he knew better than to presume the triumph of superpower might even in obscure Vietnam. Looking back a decade, he appreciated more than anyone the marvel uniquely without arms that had broken the smug, snug world of his U.S. Senate under
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“I wish you new worlds and the vision to see them,” said Daniels. “I wish you the decency and the nobility of which you are capable.”
Daniels and Morrisroe had set examples of solidarity to the last extreme, refusing bail, and yet the wider public reaction gravitated to their abstract purity rather than the urgent plight of black Alabama.
For Carmichael, as for Moses, leadership in cross-racial politics proved almost unbearable close to death. He seldom spoke of Daniels in public, and protectively came to remember that he had opposed whites in Lowndes as being too dangerous for them. “We ain’t going to resurrect Jon. We’re going to resurrect ourselves,” he told a mass meeting. “We’re going to tear this county up. We’re going to build it back until it’s a fit place for human beings.”
“The ultimate logic of racism is genocide,”
“The Creator has given us certain inviolable Rights.” He explained that “these immortal words” came from the American Declaration of 1776, then transposed its bill of grievance against British tyranny to indict the French colonial record. “They have built more prisons than schools,” he said. “They have mercilessly slain our patriots. They have…fleeced us to the marrow of our bones, reduced our people to darkest misery, and devastated our land.”
“Well, you know,” he said, “eight hundred million Chinese won’t disappear just because we refuse to admit their existence.”
The law of selective national quotas “violated the basic principle of our democracy,” he declared. It was “un-American in the highest sense…untrue to the faith that brought thousands to these shores even before we were a country.”
Johnson embraced this future. “America was built by a nation of strangers,” he said on Liberty Island. Its founding ideals, “fed from so many cultures and traditions and peoples,” shaped an outlook of unique experience. Americans “feel safer and stronger,” he asserted, “in a world as varied as the people who make it up.” By its visionary conception, and immense effect, the Immigration Reform Act of 1965 rightfully joined the two great civil rights laws as a third enduring pillar of the freedom movement.
Cleophus Hobbs and Annie Pearl Avery covered Hale County on foot.
No one could have foreseen that the year of the Voting Rights Act would conclude in lasting effusions over “Negro matriarchy” and Malcolm X. Both aimed to penetrate the broken heart of race without suggesting salves or remedies.
“No other nation hates its own cities,”
The editors of Life magazine prepared for December a double issue called “The U.S. City.”
Scholar Herbert Gans observed more than a decade later that the Life issue marked an abrupt end to media celebrations of urban vitality, which traditionally overlooked or romanticized desperado street wars among the poor.
His mercurial ways irritated many who agreed with him on specific issues, and enraged those who demanded consistency, but his zest for provoking elite white people delighted multitudes of constituents in Harlem.
“We intend to make the jury box, in both state and federal courts, the sacred domain of justice under law,”
The sheer scale of accepted tasks made the administration seem overmatched, which threatened its posture of sovereign control. Johnson abhorred intimations of frailty or doubt as the first symptom of failure in national politics.
“I want this country to be less sure of itself so that it can stop making war on other countries to export our system,” he said. “Another way of saying the same thing is that I want this country to be more sure of itself, so it can publicly admit it has real problems and must work to solve them.”
Reagan rebuked founder Robert Welch for “utterly reprehensible” statements that former President Dwight Eisenhower himself was a Communist, but carefully spared the organization and its sympathizers, citing assurance from J. Edgar Hoover that “the FBI has not investigated the Birch Society, because it only investigates subversive organizations.”
(Five unions shut down final construction on the monumental Gateway Arch project that same day in St. Louis, when a contractor hired the first Negro plumber under sustained pressure from the new U.S. Office of Federal Contract Compliance.)
“to make it clear that we love America…so much that we are going to stand up with all of our might to remind her when she is wrong. We are not newcomers here. We do not have to give our credentials of loyalty. For you see, we worked here and labored for two centuries without wages.”
By a combination of bureaucratic skills—patient cultivation of long-range advantage, sealed with masterful control of paperwork—FBI officials fastened Katzenbach to a bugging defense they had constructed from nothing.
Mrs. Alice Moore received 852 votes running unopposed for tax assessor (“Tax the rich to feed the poor, that’s my slogan”).
Asked whether the snub of Johnson meant desegregation was no longer a goal, Robinson replied that white people must initiate integration from now on. “We been head-lifted and upstarted into white societies all our lives, and we’re tired of that,” she said. “And what we need is black power.”
Reporters noticed that King was “conspicuously missing” from photograph sessions to begin the second day. He remained in his hotel room, hurt by Thurgood Marshall’s victory speech that championed law to the exclusion of nonviolent movements past or future: “I submit that the history of the Negro demonstrates the importance of getting rid of hostile laws, and seeking the security of new, friendly laws.” Though accustomed to much saltier private criticism from Marshall, who once called him “a boy on a man’s errand,” and who still disparaged his “missionary” marches as a nuisance, King sagged
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Observers called the violence “worse than Selma,” and Episcopal priest Robert Castle of New Jersey wondered out loud “if democracy in Mississippi and perhaps in the United States was dead.”
“We are faced now with a situation where conscience-less power meets powerless conscience,” declared the consortium of bishops and pastors, “threatening the very foundation of our nation.”
“Speaking in a gravelly alto from the depths of the large fur collar that trimmed her neat black suit, the ebullient author suggested that women today were ‘in relatively little position to influence or control major decisions. But,’ she added, leaning forward in the lilac velvet Victorian chair and punching the air as if it were something palpable, ‘what women do have is the vote.’”
