by Leslie Brody
The Frantzes arrived early, expecting to walk through nearly empty halls and meet a few friends in the gallery. Instead, Marge was amazed by the presence of all the young college women dressed neatly in skirts and sweaters, the young men in ties. Even the beatniks were neatniks for the occasion. Writing about the constituency of the crowd for a later article, Decca mentioned the presence of some “children of radicals,” but most of the student participants came from households they described as “pro-Roosevelt.” It was a heterodox mix, which held “by no means uniform hostility toward the committee, or uniform sympathy for the subpoenaed witnesses.” Some among the crowd were surely there to “express opposition. But, many others came out of curiosity, attracted by the considerable publicity on campus and in the newspapers. Some were covering the event for the school paper; several British graduate students came as observers of the American way of life and political institutions.”
Eventually, a few students were permitted to sit in the unoccupied seats or stand in the back of the courtroom. The committee’s chief prosecutor, Richard Arens, started things off by calling a couple of friendly witnesses. His current hobgoblin was that Communist propaganda was being sent through the U.S. mail, and he lectured the jury on its widespread and pernicious influence. He then called Douglas Wachter, whom he planned to portray as the very picture of a young Communist dupe. Arens tried to associate Wachter’s poor judgment with postal propaganda, but he couldn’t get much traction. In his defense, the poised eighteen-year-old claimed both the First and Fifth Amendments.
From the start, the customary power balance was out of whack, and Arens, a typically agile prosecutor for whom hectoring tripped off the tongue, never hit his stride. From inside, Marge heard those still in line outside the courtroom chanting, “Let us in! Open the doors! Open the doors!” Labor organizer Archie Brown, slated to testify as an unfriendly, agitated from inside: “Let them in to see this travesty! What are you afraid of?” Brown demanded to know why the room had been packed with spectators sympathetic to the committee: “You gave all those people cards—why didn’t you give me some for my friends?” The students who had succeeded in gaining seats in the courtroom stood and began singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Outside in the corridor voices in the crowd joined in a rousing chorus of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Committee Chairman Francis Walter, stunned by the patriotic hootenanny, gaveled for silence, but the singers persevered. Then Walter ordered federal marshals to eject twelve of the singing students, and the courtroom exploded in partisan crosstalk. Inside the hearing room, it must have felt a little as if the ice floes had broken and spring come to Narnia. At various moments, the old threats seemed to dissolve like dandelion fluff.
Eventually, Arens stopped the proceedings, associating the protests outside with the Communist influence of the very propaganda they had come to investigate. It was all one grand conspiracy to Arens, and the Reds were behind it. When he went out on a balcony overlooking the demonstrations below, there began a chant that he had never heard before in all his years as a distinguished inquisitor: “Jump, jump,” the crowds admonished him. “Jump!”
ON FRIDAY MORNING, the Frantzes arrived early again. The previous day had been so unpredictable. After all the excitement, it had been all Marge could do to get the kids dinner and make a few phone calls before collapsing into bed herself. Laurent was scheduled to testify, and he’d stayed up perfecting his speech, which he fully expected to be gaveled down. From the top of the San Francisco City Hall steps, Marge looked out over Van Ness, San Francisco’s widest boulevard, and all the radiating streets that converged at City Center, and willed those students to return. She heard them say they’d come back again and bring their friends. But she knew from her own experience that it wasn’t easy to sustain a protest. On how many cold days in the past—at rallies and through telephone trees—had she tried to muster the veterans and new recruits? A successful protest was a living, breathing thing, dependent on a web of circumstances: the weather, health, communication. The weather today was perfect, those students robust; they were never off the telephone. She’d try not to feel disappointment. Still, looking down at the empty boulevard, she hoped they would come back. She didn’t want to go inside yet and waited another moment, though it seemed longer, when up the quiet boulevard, she saw a few pedestrians loping along the sidewalks. Then came a cluster, with their arms around one another. Then, as if out of Marge’s best dream, cresting the hill came what looked like a hundred people, and behind them, filling the road, contesting with the cars, at least a thousand more, marching toward City Hall.
Meanwhile, the committee, delusionally believing it was to their benefit, had allowed loudspeakers to be set up outdoors. As Laurent Frantz’s name was called, he was applauded by the audience in the hearing room, by the people in the rotunda and mezzanine, and by the overflow crowd on the thirty wide marble steps to the street. This was now national news, and television crews were setting up their cameras just outside the courtroom as Laurent began to speak and the chairman gaveled him down. Outside the courtroom, the noisy, pumped-up crowd chanted, “Stop the committee,” “Go back to the South,” “How many lynchings have you investigated?” and “I like freedom—so sue me!” On the other floors of the courthouse, the protest was so noisy that at least one trial had to be postponed.
Again, the police ordered the students sitting on the floor of the rotunda and massed on the stairs to disperse, and this time when they refused, the police aimed their huge, high-powered fire hoses on the protesters. The TV cameras caught the faces of police officers in a kind of battle ecstasy. “You want this?” one cop bellowed as he aimed his water cannon. Anyone still standing was flushed down the stairs by the hoses. Those who could get a grip clung to the banisters. Others were lifted by the cascade and rode the plume of water to the street. Some knocked their heads, and a few lost consciousness. After the water attack, one hundred policemen and an added phalanx of steel-helmeted motorcycle police clubbed, kicked, and dragged the remaining protesters down the marble steps. One news camera caught a cop dragging a student down the stairs by her ponytail. Some students kept their balance for moments before sliding down the steep fall of water; some pulled police down with them. Photos and clips of the day show how high-schooler Danny Grossman, son of Decca’s friend Aubrey (slim as a wand in a neat white shirt and black pants) grasped a banister until two immense cops pried his hands off. He dragged both burly officers downstairs with him. That year, on Danny’s birthday, Decca paid him this tribute in verse:The son of Aubrey can
Fight like a hurricane
The shitty committee
That’s called Un-American.
The committee called it a Communist-inspired student riot. Some newspapers dubbed it Black Friday, for the black eye it gave San Francisco; but to the Frantzes and their friends, including Decca, it was the Battle of City Hall.
In the June 1960 issue of Frontier magazine, Ralph Tyler, a journalist, reflected on the protest and its consequences:What was new—wildly, unforeseeably new—was the thousands of student demonstrators from the University of California, Stanford and San Francisco State College, speaking out as if they had been doing it for years. The sudden appearance of an American generation nobody knew was there.
Looking back, Decca would give full credit to those early student protests for loosening HUAC’s grip and holding the abusers of power up to the ridicule they deserved.
CHAPTER 23
DECCA WANTED TO describe what life as a Communist had been like for her in 1950s America, but the subject was too unwieldy or still too close, and she couldn’t settle into it. Her interest, much like Dinky’s, was thoroughly arrested by the moment they were living. The newspapers were full of the stunning and dangerous, ever-expanding civil rights movement, and she had an idea for an article about how this movement was shaking up entrenched Southern customs. She planned a tour to record “how the southern psyche was faring in the aftermath of the victorious bus boyco
tt,” and was offered a two hundred dollar advance from Esquire against a six hundred dollar publication fee. She would title it after Nancy’s essay “U and Non-U” and call it “You-All and Non-You All.”
The chameleon capacity was a happy gift to a good journalist. Decca could claim retreat rights to suburbia when that helped her mission, and she could rely on her contacts and the superfluities of the U-class to open doors when it was expedient. If things worked out, she’d gather enough material to write a book about society in flux and classes in crisis. “Stress the accent,” Virginia Durr suggested, “and you’ll have the Southern aristocracy eating out of your hand.” Mainly, Decca wrote Dinky, she wanted it to be “funny, the moral to emerge by inference.”
In May, Decca set off from Washington, D.C.—where she’d been visiting friends—toward Alabama, where she would rendezvous with Virginia Durr. The Durrs now lived in Montgomery, where Cliff had a law practice. Decca’s route would take her through Georgia and Kentucky, her dates and destinations incidentally coincided with those of the Congress of Racial Equality’s (CORE) Freedom Rides, during which a group of young black and white civil rights activists defied segregationist laws by sitting together on interstate Trailways and Greyhound buses.
Decca viewed segregation as a direct continuation of the fascism she’d opposed since before World War II. What other word described the supremacist mind-set, the intolerance and dehumanization? Traveling across the South, she rubbed elbows with radicals, devotees of nonviolence, students, genteel lady observers (whose presence was presumed to lessen the threat of violence), and no-nonsense testers who followed up to make sure facilities, once integrated, stayed that way. She had gotten into the habit of studying global conflicts between the weak and strong, rich and poor. Now she wanted to track the contrasts between outsiders and insiders, urban and provincial, and the rivalries between enthusiasts—particularly those who sell and those who buy. She loved word games and dialects, could tell a great joke, and was by most accounts a wonderful listener. These last characteristics describe a universally desirable dinner guest, and when she turned on the charm, she penetrated the bastions and strongholds she planned to expose. At a Louisville country club, she wrote of meeting an affluent white couple:The conversation turned, as they say, to books, in honor of me I think. Mr. Byron said he hadn’t read my book because he is a slow reader, and consequently does not read any book unless it has been condensed for the Readers Digest. Mrs. Byron, on the other hand, jerst lerves to read, will go through as many as 3 or 4 books a week. Later, of course, the conversation turned to integration. Mr. B. is against it (although thinks it inevitable) because it will lead to the mongrelization of both races. Like most people in these parts, he knows a great deal about horse racing and breeding, and he drew rather at length on the parallel about breeding race horses and cart horses and the sad results of same. I asked him whether, in that case, he didn’t think it a bit inadvisable to breed slow readers with fast readers, a point that hadn’t occurred to him.
Decca went on to Alabama, as did the Freedom Riders, and followed the reports as their various buses were harassed and attacked. At every stop, the young civil rights workers were abused, assaulted, and taunted with threats of rape, torture, castration, and death. One bus was shot at and forced to the side of the road; another set on fire. When Decca asked the white Southerners she met on her journey how this barbaric conduct could still be happening in President Kennedy’s America, their rationalizations seemed by turns mystifying, insufficient, and repetitious. (A few brave souls who understood the significance of these events urged her to record them.) The police departments of the various Southern states through which the buses traveled were doing little to protect the protesters. Neither, at first, were the government agents who tracked their activity and took copious notes on little spiral pads. Nevertheless, the Freedom Riders’ bravery and persistence made international news. And as their buses approached Montgomery, Alabama, reporters from around the world, including Decca, were on hand to cover the story.
On May 20, 1961, as the Alabama state troopers were escorting the Freedom Riders’ bus to the Montgomery city limits, Decca’s host Virginia Durr believed there was bound to be a riot, and she pleaded with her friend to be careful. The local police were supposed to meet and protect the young riders from the gathering crowd, but there wasn’t a cop to be seen. Cliff Durr’s law office was in a building across the street and had a clear view of the bus station. From their window, Virginia and Cliff saw the buses arrive and the crowd erupt. “‘Go get the niggers! Go get the niggers.’ It was the most horrible thing that I have ever seen,” Virginia remembered.
One of the last riders off the bus was Lucretia Collins. All of the riders were overtired and sleep-deprived. Collins had fallen asleep just before their arrival in Montgomery, and she was still a little drowsy as she emerged. Her dreamlike impression of the bus station was of a clutch of people straining at the station door and a reporter with his arms spread as if to hold back the crowd.
John Lewis, the future congressional representative from Georgia, and one of the group leaders had stepped off the bus and begun talking to an NBC television reporter when “a hundred white men and women surged around the bus, swinging metal pipes, sticks, bats, and pocketbooks.” Virginia Durr saw people randomly attacked. From within the crowd, Decca saw Frederick and Anna Gach, two local white residents, arrested while trying to protect a black bystander from assault. The police arrived, but the assaults and humiliations continued until the U.S. Justice Department finally sent armed marshals into Montgomery to reestablish law and order.
The Durrs’ office had become the central meeting point for witnesses and people escaping the riot. When Bob Zellner, a young friend of the Durrs, arrived, Virginia said that Decca was out there somewhere. Zellner gallantly agreed to bring her back safely. As he recalls, he found hercool as a cucumber, taking notes on the corner right outside the office. I was relieved but it turned out she wasn’t as calm as she looked. When I clumsily approached her asking, “Are you Jessica Mitford?” a look of pure terror came over her.
“Why do you want to know? Who told you that?” she asked, backing away from me. I finally stammered that Virginia had sent me to get her, frantically pointing over my shoulder in the general direction of the law office. With a great deal of relief, regaining the British jut of her aristocratic chin, she replied, “Well, carry on, we’ll go see Virginia and see what we can get into next.”
Despite her courtesy to Zellner, Decca was “furious” with Virginia for meddling. She hadn’t wanted to be rescued and resented the implication that she had needed to be.
Later Saturday afternoon, once traffic was moving again, Cliff, Virginia, and Decca returned to the Durrs’ home on the outskirts of town. Although Virginia, a native Alabamian, urged caution and predicted worse things to come, their guest was impatient to get back to where the action was. The Durrs didn’t have a telephone, and Decca wanted at least to phone her press contacts and try to sell the story. More than anything, she was determined to attend the meeting to be held that night at the First Baptist Church. “This is absurd—to be so scared,” she told Virginia.
The Durrs lent Decca their old Buick for the night, and she drove to the church with Peter Ackerberg, a white student from Antioch College. Virginia remembers how Decca dressed for the meeting in her “Southern costume—a lovely sort of fluffy green hat with chiffon on it, and pearls around her neck and white gloves and a green chiffon dress.”
Outside the church, Decca saw outraged segregationists, freelance hoodlums, vigilantes, and snarling drunks (dressed in their summer riot clothes: men in dirty T-shirts and dungarees, women in sleeveless cotton dresses). They were circling the church to harass the thin line of deputy marshals protecting the church occupants. There were no city police officers, no state guards. Decca had planned to park blocks away and enter the church through a back way, but in the chaos, she had simply parked as near as she could and then wit
h Ackerberg had stridden through the front doors of the church. They were just inside when the mob torched the Durrs’ car, down to its frame. Decca and Ackerberg wouldn’t learn this until later.
Inside the packed church, it was stifling. The congregation, a cross-section of the African American community—ministers, students, army veterans, teachers, farmers, owners of small businesses, lawyers, church elders, and schoolchildren—had been singing for hours, since the first black families in their church clothes had arrived around 5:00 P.M. Outside, the marshals had thrown tear gas at the increasingly hostile crowd, and the fumes had begun to float into the church just slightly. It stung the eyes, had a terrible sour smell, and made everything even more claustrophobic. All night, people urged one another to keep singing: “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” “We Shall Overcome,” “This Little Light of Mine.” Though there were only half as many people inside as out, every pew was full. There were pockets of chaos inside, but no panic as people rushed to the sinks to rinse their eyes and to the basement and closets to cover and protect their children. Church deacons closed any window still open, which cut down on the ventilation and spiked up the heat even more. Help will come, the deacons counseled.
Martin Luther King Jr. arrived from Atlanta to address the meeting. He assured the congregation that the marshals were still in place, but he couldn’t guarantee that their line would hold. This was Decca’s first encounter with the Reverend King, and she was impressed by his sangfroid under pressure. Her companions in the church, particularly those who knew King or had heard him preach, had more than respect—they loved him and had no doubt he’d rescue them. She wanted to interview him, but King was surrounded by an entourage of bodyguards, advisers, politicians, and ministers, and the crisis point was close.
