The implications of the Ia Drang fighting were bound to be great. At the time of the Camp David conference in July there had been just two North Vietnamese regiments in the South. Now MACV had confirmed the presence of six regiments from the North, with two more probable and another possible. Others were on their way; General Vo Nguyen Giap, Ho Chi Minh’s commander, was continuing to break up his battalions into companies and platoons and send them down the trail faster than the Americans could bring in transports.
Both sides rushed reinforcements into the valley, and although a 1st Cav battalion, flown in, was ambushed and badly chewed up, when it was all over Westmoreland and his deputy, General William Depuy, claimed a victory. The figures seemed to support them; the enemy, attacking in waves like the World War II Japanese and yelling in English, “Kill GI!,” had lost 1,200 to the Americans’ 200. But other observers, among them John Paul Vann, who had returned to Vietnam as a civilian, had reached a very different conclusion. The Communists were prepared to accept such losses indefinitely. (“It is,” one Viet Cong soldier wrote in his diary, “the duty of my generation to die for our country.”) But the U.S. toll in Ia Drang, although much smaller, was a record for Westmoreland’s troops; it put American casualties in the war at 1,335 dead and 6,131 wounded. While MACV believed that Westmoreland had found the strategic key to triumph and was eagerly planning more Ia Drangs, Giap took the Vann view. The North Vietnamese general was convinced, and events were to confirm him, that the American people would not accept such casualties in an open-ended commitment. Giap regarded the new phase of the war as a contest between his manpower and Westmoreland’s technology, with U.S. public opinion as the referee.
In December McNamara urged a bombing pause on Johnson. Objections came from Rusk, now one of the toughest of the hawks, but the President grounded the B-52s and sent out diplomatic scouts to key world capitals, spreading the word that Washington was ready for peace. Two Italian professors arrived in Hanoi to sound out Ho. At first negotiations seemed possible, but just as word reached Rusk that the Communists were in a conciliatory mood, Hanoi denounced the whole thing as “sheer, groundless fabrication.” The Americans were taken aback. After Ia Drang, they thought, it should be obvious to Ho that he faced defeat. The marines were reminded of the tagline of an old Corps joke: “There’s always some son-of-a-bitch who doesn’t get the word.”
***
In appealing to a joint session of Congress for the voting Rights Act of 1965, Lyndon Johnson concluded his speech with a phrase which had become hallowed by the blood and tears of a new generation of black Americans marching for justice. He said that their cause “must be our cause too. Because it’s not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”
That was fine liberal eloquence, but at times during the year it appeared to be a doubtful prediction. The eleventh anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education passed on May 17, and racism seemed stronger than ever. C. Vann Woodward, Sterling Professor of History at Yale, said, “Negroes now have less contact with whites in schools than they did a generation ago.” Between the middle of 1964 and the middle of 1965 the Ku Klux Klan made its greatest membership gains ever, including the Reconstruction era. In October of 1965 a Birmingham black reportedly bled to death because a white ambulance driver refused to take him to a hospital. An Alabama businessman, speaking of civil rights pickets, casually remarked to a New York Times correspondent, “The niggers are going to be in trouble around here when this is all over.” The racial climate was not much better in the northern cities; speaking in Marquette Park, on Chicago’s South Side, Martin Luther King Jr. said, “I have never seen such hate, not in Mississippi or Alabama, as I see here in Chicago.” The attitude of millions of whites seemed symbolized in a lapel pin worn by Dallas County Sheriff James G. Clark Jr. in Selma. It simply read, “Never.” Never, it appeared, would men like Clark, in the North as well as the South, accept Negroes as equals.
Confronted by this prejudice, the black mood continued to change. There was a splintering into various camps, many hostile to one another. The assassination of Malcolm X by fellow blacks in upper Manhattan’s Audubon Ballroom on February 21, 1965, just as he had reached the threshold of leadership, reflected the depth of the division among the black militants. A sign of Negro despair was the upsurge in groups advocating “repatriation”—a “return to the African homeland.” The Deacons for Defense were formed in some fifty Black Belt communities to combat the KKK. Others followed the preaching of Le Roi Jones, who told them that “The majority of American white men are evil”; and of James Forman, who issued a Black Manifesto demanding that white churches and synagogues (the very white institutions, ironically, which had been most ardent in support of the civil rights movement) pay Negroes 500 million dollars in “reparations.”
The Muslims became the most famous of the groups advocating separatism, and in Oakland the first tiny pack of Black Panthers emerged in 1966. Daniel Patrick Moynihan came forward in November 1965 with the Moynihan Report, a closely reasoned document which argued that realistic approaches to internal problems in the Negro community must first deal with the worst legacies of slavery: Negro welfare dependency, a divorce rate 40 percent higher than that of whites, and the appalling rate of illegitimacy, one black birth in four being out of wedlock. Moynihan’s facts were undisputed, but such was the Negro agony that year, and so shattering the impact of events on Negro pride, that blacks could not face them. Their leaders therefore branded the report racist propaganda and denounced its author as a “fascist.”
C. Vann Woodward wrote in 1965 that “insofar as federal laws are capable of coping” with segregation and prejudice, “Congress has just about fulfilled its role.” The capstone of such legislation was the voting act of that year. In January Martin Luther King called a press conference to point out that three million of the five million blacks in the South old enough to vote were not registered, and to announce that he was launching an all-out registration drive. It would open in Selma, Alabama, where 325 of 15,000 potential black voters were registered, as against 9,300 of 14,000 whites. Typically, Dr. King led the first group of Negroes ever to stay at Selma’s Hotel Albert, previously all-white, and typically he was punched and kicked by a white segregationist while signing the hotel register. His assailant was fined one hundred dollars and sentenced to sixty days in jail, which King thought was a good start toward respect for the law, but then the drive stalled. The blunt truth was that most of Selma’s Negroes were indifferent to the right to vote. Something dramatic was needed to arouse them. It was provided—again, this was characteristic—by rural whites who murdered a black would-be voter in nearby Perry County. Local civil rights leaders counted on that, on Sheriff Jim Clark’s short temper, and on Governor Wallace’s showboating to revive their campaign.
They declared that on March 7 they would stage a protest march. Negro and white sympathizers would hike from Selma to Montgomery, fifty-four miles away, moving straight down the middle of route 80, the Jefferson Davis Highway. Wallace promptly banned the demonstration as a menace to commerce and public safety and sent a hundred state troopers to reinforce Sheriff Clark, who gave a sign of his allegiance to the past by rounding up a mounted posse. On March 7—which would enter Alabama history and folklore as “Black Sunday”—six hundred Negroes and a few white partisans of their cause defiantly marched from the Brown’s Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, spanning the Alabama River. There they ran into Clark’s horsemen and troopers wearing gas masks. When they ignored a two-minute warning to disperse, possemen waded into them swinging billy clubs and wet bull-whips. Yellow clouds of tear gas belched from the ranks of the troopers. Routed, the blacks stumbled and crawled back to the church. Accompanying them were television cameramen, whose footage guaranteed that Selma would become overnight a symbol of oppression.
Dr. King had been preac
hing in Atlanta on Black Sunday. Dropping everything, he flew to Selma, announced that he would lead a second march on Tuesday, and called on clergymen of both races to join him. Over three hundred white ministers, priests, and rabbis responded. Sympathy demonstrations were held in all the great cities of the North. Black activists staged sit-ins at the Department of Justice and the White House, and President Johnson issued a statement blaming Alabama officials for “the brutality with which a number of Negro citizens were treated.” He sent John Doar and former Governor LeRoy Collins of Florida to Selma, and they succeeded in arranging a token march, back and forth across the bridge. Sheriff Clark and Dr. King agreed with many misgivings, which in King’s case were justified. Militant black youths from SNCC accused him of Uncle Tomism. Coming off the bridge, they mocked him by singing the civil rights song “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.”
King was turned around that same evening by the first of three murders arising from the Selma crisis, all of whites who sympathized with the civil rights movement. The Reverend James J. Reeb, a Boston Unitarian, was set upon by red-neck hoodlums as he left a Negro restaurant and beaten to death. James Forman of SNCC and five hundred of his followers then threatened to mutiny if Dr. King didn’t take a bolder line. An angry crowd of fifteen hundred blacks held a rally in Montgomery’s Beulah Baptist Church. King had encouraging news for them. A federal judge, Frank M. Johnson Jr. of Montgomery, had agreed to allow the march from Selma to Montgomery; although such a procession “reaches to the outer limits of what is constitutionally allowed,” he had ruled, the mistreatment of the demonstrators had obviously surpassed “the outer limits of what is constitutionally permissible.”
Governor Wallace, addressing a televised joint session of the Alabama legislature, condemned the imminent march as comparable to Communist “street warfare” that “ripped Cuba apart, that destroyed Diem in Vietnam, that raped China—that has torn civilization and established institutions of this world into bloody shreds.” The state couldn’t afford to protect all these outside agitators, he said, and he telegraphed the White House, calling upon the federal government to enforce the decision of the federal judge. That was exactly what Lyndon Johnson had been hoping he would do. The President now had an official request from Wallace to protect the demonstrators, and he complied by sending 1,863 federalized National Guardsmen, 250 U.S. marshals and FBI agents, two regular Army MP battalions, demolition experts to search the road and bridges ahead of those making the hike, and helicopters to hover overhead. In addition, the hikers were provided with huge tents for overnight stops, a 600-gallon water truck, latrine trucks, ambulances, trucks for rubbish, and scout cars to set up campsites in advance. Johnson was showing a little garter.
The march itself was a triumph. Veterans of the movement had become astute at providing TV cameramen with colorful material. Leading the procession were Dr. King, Ralph Bunche, a pretty coed, a sharecropper in overalls, a rabbi, a priest, a nun, and a one-legged marcher on crutches. (The white Alabamans along the way, hopelessly ignorant of how to cultivate a good image, made obscene gestures at the nun and guffawed while chanting, as a cadence for the man with one leg, “Left, left, left.”) Although the Alabama legislature indignantly—and unanimously—fulminated against “the evidence of much fornication at the marchers’ camps,” behavior along the route was peaceful and orderly, a remarkable achievement in light of the number of people involved. Leaving Selma on March 21 there had been 3,200 in the procession; arriving in Montgomery four days later there were 25,000. Dr. King spoke to them on the grounds of the statehouse, which a century ago had been the capital of the Confederacy. He ended by crying four times, “Glory hallelujah!” They disbanded and heavy traffic carried them back on route 80 to Selma. A sullen clump of Ku Klux Klansmen watched them go. As the stream of cars thinned the Klansmen moved in for the second murder.
The victim was Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a red-haired Detroit housewife and the mother of five. Mrs. Liuzzo had told her husband, an agent for the Teamsters Union, “This is something I must do,” and after the victorious rally on the statehouse lawn she volunteered to ferry Alabama marchers to their homes. On her last trip she was singing “We Shall Overcome” with her only passenger, a nineteen-year-old Negro barber, when a car full of Klansmen drew alongside on a lonely stretch of road. One of the white hoodlums, an auto mechanic, fired a 38-caliber pistol at her head. She collapsed with blood spurting from her temple; the car careened into a ditch; the terrified young barber hitchhiked into Selma for police help.
The third killing was of an Episcopalian seminarian from New Hampshire who was gunned down in a grocery. The killer, a part-time deputy sheriff, pleaded self-defense and was found innocent by a jury of twelve white Alabama men, though no weapon had been found on the seminarian and witnesses said there had been none. In the death of the Reverend Mr. Reeb, three men were charged a few hours after he had been battered to death. They, too, were acquitted; their jury deliberated just ninety-five minutes. The trial of Mrs. Liuzzo’s murderers was the most interesting of the three. One of the Klansmen in the death car had in fact been an undercover man for the FBI; he identified each of his companions, their weapons, and what they had done and said. They were defended in their first trial by Matt H. Murphy Jr., a third-generation Klansman. Murphy’s summation was one-hundred-proof racism: “When white people join up with them [blacks], they become white niggers…. God didn’t intend for us to mix with the black race, I don’t care what Lyndon Baines Johnson says.” The FBI man, Murphy said, was a violator of his Klan oath, “as treacherous as a rattlesnake… purporting himself to be a white man and worse than a white nigger.” That jury was hung (10 to 2 for conviction of manslaughter), but Murphy had made his last bow; he was killed in an auto accident during the interval before a second trial. A biased judge presided at those proceedings, which ended in an acquittal, but then the federal government stepped in and tried the Klansmen for violating Mrs. Liuzzo’s civil rights. That curious law, which had been the downfall of the Klan killers in Mississippi’s Freedom Summer and of the slayers of a Negro Army officer in Georgia, worked once more here with another jury of twelve southern men, and the judge sentenced the defendants to ten years, the maximum.
Selma inspired the voting rights act—Johnson said as much in asking Congress for it on March 15—and the country credited it to Dr. King. It proved to be the peak of his reputation. The events of the previous year in Mississippi having created the first serious doubts about nonviolence, the Alabama murders confirmed the suspicions of the new generation of black activists. These skeptics left Selma convinced that King had nothing more to teach them. The vast majority of the Negro people disagreed; in a subsequent CBS public opinion poll where anonymity was preserved, only 4 percent said they would give active support to Stokely Carmichael, 2 percent to the more militant H. Rap Brown, and 1 percent to Ron Karenga, the most militant of the three, while 40 percent backed the ideals of Dr. King. Nevertheless, the activists had correctly gauged a change in mood. The majority yearned for peace—a majority has always wanted it—but the country was entering a new period, and one of its most striking qualities would be an affinity for violence. In retrospect the death of President Kennedy and the murder of his assassin now seemed to have been omens. Once more a gear had shifted somewhere in the universe. Search and destroy, emerging in Vietnam during the same months in 1965, was one expression of the emerging mood, the Selma murders were another; still others would crowd upon one another in the succeeding months and years as Negro rage and frustration which had been repressed for a century now erupted.
***
The new inner city temper emerged in Los Angeles on Wednesday, August 11, 1965, in a shabby Negro district of low, faded stucco houses, suggestive of certain poor areas in Puerto Rico, which lay under the approaches to Los Angeles International Airport. Trash never seemed to be properly collected there. There was litter everywhere—broken glass, rusty cans, rotting chicken bones, empty Tokay bottles—and the
quality of life was further diminished by the typical white policeman, also known locally as The Man, who had a way of stopping black citizens and demanding, “Let’s see your I.D.”
That August evening Lee Minikus, an officer of the California Highway Patrol, wanted a look at the I.D. of a young Negro named Marquette Frye; he intended to take him in on suspicion of drunken driving. A knot of people, gathering around, kidded both Minikus and his suspect. It all seemed low-key and harmless, but beneath the surface tension was building. Los Angeles was in the fourth day of a brutal heat wave. People were outdoors, ready to assemble quickly at the promise of excitement. The arrest was taking place at the corner of Avalon Boulevard and Imperial Highway, a busy L.A. intersection through which passed a constant stream of white drivers, often behind the wheels of expensive cars. Most inauspicious of all was the neighborhood. It was 98 percent black, with a population density of 27.3 people per acre (the figure was 7.4 for Los Angeles County as a whole). Negro immigrants had been arriving here in massive numbers since the early 1940s, when an average of 2,000 each month came to work in war industries. Now 420,000 of the 2,731,000 inhabitants of the city were black. Yet in this ghetto there were just five blacks on the 205-man police force. And every month in 1965 another 1,000 Negroes poured into these swarming warrens, often looking for jobs that no longer existed. The temptations of drugs and alcohol awaited their children, and when the children went wrong The Man came after them. These snares, not the inhabitants, were the real transgressors in this district, a region known locally as Watts.
***
At 7:45 P.M. that Wednesday, California Highway Patrolman Minikus took the Frye youth into custody. Almost immediately he was in trouble. Among those attracted by the winking red light of his squad car was the prisoner’s mother. At first she rebuked her son. Then she turned on the police officer. As her manner became distraught and the murmurs of the spectators less good-humored, Minikus nervously radioed for reinforcements. Then he made two mistakes. He attempted to force Frye into the squad car and he turned his back on Frye’s mother. She jumped on it. As other officers arrived they pried her loose, and when the crowd began to mutter indignantly they held it at bay with shotguns. Minikus got away with his man, but the price had been exorbitant. Already the use of force was beginning to inspire distorted accounts of what had happened, and with each passing hour the stories grew taller. Two versions were widespread. One had it that a cop had struck a pregnant woman in the belly with his club. In the other, a cop had pushed a woman against the patrol car and tried to choke her. Aroused, the crowd pelted policemen with stones and bottles. By 10 P.M. the spectators had been transformed into a mob which set upon passersby, overturned cars, and smashed shop display windows. The familiar stages of riot escalation now appeared. Police sealed off eight blocks at 11 P.M. Two hours later the rioters burst free and roved Watts, two thousand strong, waylaying strangers, breaking everything fragile, and looting the stores.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 159
