At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  Morrisroe absorbed constant wonder. From a convention lecture by economist Leon Keyserling, he drove to Selma and on Friday into Lowndes County for the first time at speeds sometimes above a hundred miles an hour in a Plymouth Fury rented for Daniels by his Episcopal sponsor, ESCRU, after pursuers recently chased him to the Montgomery city limit. At Trickem, Morrisroe separated from Daniels to attend a nonpolitical revival service with the elderly farm couple, Will and Mary Jane Jackson, near the spot where they had been photographed when the great march entered Lowndes. The choir invited him to sing among them on a rough bench, then delivered him to bunk on the porch floor of the SNCC Freedom House. Morrisroe scarcely noticed hardship there because he was smitten by Gloria Larry, whom he pressed for details of her academic work on French literary antecedents in the Four Quartets of T. S. Eliot.

  Bulletins on gunshot fatalities were spreading nationwide from Los Angeles. After seventy-five people were injured on Thursday, a second lull had convinced authorities again that the riot was spent. Police units withdrew from the emergency perimeter at dawn Friday. Mayor Yorty and Lieutenant Governor Glenn Anderson flew to San Francisco for separate engagements even as angry crowds reconvened near Wednesday’s arrest site on Avalon, and an ominous entry appeared in the log at police headquarters: “10:00 A.M. Major looting became general.” Marauding bands leapfrogged from the twenty blocks previously sealed toward a peak riot area of 46.5 square miles. Arsonists torched emptied stores. Poet and columnist Langston Hughes reported the sight of a woman stopping obediently at red lights as she rolled a looted sofa down the street. Most of the press retreated because of assaults on white journalists, including a KABC-TV correspondent who was dragged off and was missing for two hours. For information that rioters had invented hand signals to identify and protect residents by neighorhood, office messenger Robert Richardson gained a kind of battlefield promotion as the first Negro reporter ever hired by the Los Angeles Times. By midday, California authorities summoned Governor Pat Brown from vacation in Greece, and mobilized 14,000 National Guard troops. Police units, amid rumors that commanders felt slighted by the call for help, moved ahead of them into the riot zone. At 6:30 P.M., LAPD officers shot Leon Posey standing unarmed outside a barber shop, in what would be ruled an accidental homicide. Half a dozen Negro deaths quickly followed this first official casualty—one shot in the back, one firing a gun, one carrying liquor and another shoes. Rioters harassed firefighters called in from a hundred different engine companies.

  Shortly before midnight in New York, FBI wiretap monitors came alive to an incoming call from King’s secretary, Dora McDonald. “The Negroes have broken into some gun stores,” she told Stanley Levison. “They have guns and those big Army knives, and are covering about a 140-block-square area.” She said King wanted Levison to draft a telephone statement for him to deliver over Los Angeles radio stations. “Also,” said McDonald, “a man from the New York Times called and has given me twelve questions that he would like Dr. King to answer.” She dictated them to Levison—“what is the text of the letter,” the mode of transmission to Ho Chi Minh, the names of intermediaries, the apportionment of blame for the war, and the specifics of King’s peace plan? Two questions asked how Bevel’s “more militant” stance could be reconciled with nonviolence, and whether King approved.

  Levison dictated suggested replies well after midnight to McDonald in Atlanta, for relay to King at his Miami stopover en route to address the Disciples of Christ convention in Puerto Rico. The Vietnam letter was still merely an idea. “Most reporters will try to draw him into going further, until they have a real story,” Levison told McDonald. “He hasn’t formulated specific proposals for ending the war, and hasn’t said he has.” The New York FBI office rushed a transcript by encoded Teletype to headquarters at 3:41 A.M. Saturday, and supervisors added to an edited text the sinister preface that a “long-time Communist” was influencing King on Vietnam. The classified report to the White House and Justice Department omitted entirely the intercepted remarks that Levison offered King for broadcast to the rioters in Watts: “I know you have grievances that are hard to live with. I know that any Negro can reach the end of his patience…but it is not courage nor militancy to strike out blindly…. Tonight the whole world is watching you. If you want all America to respect you, if you want the world to know that you are men, put down your weapons and your rocks…. Negroes in the South were not less oppressed than you, and we have run Jim Crow from thousands of places without using a rock or a bullet…. Come back to our ranks…where real and permanent victories have been won and will be won in the right way.”

  FIVE JOURNALISTS found more than twenty teenagers seated around Jimmy Rogers in the shaded area of a church lawn on Pollard Street, taking shelter from heat that already was thick by the appointed hour. The reporters were following a story tip from the SNCC office in Selma, where Silas Norman had supervised advance notice also to federal and state officials: “This Sat. Aug. 14 at 9 A.M. there will be a demonstration in Ft. Deposit, Lowndes Co. Ala. Klan is very active in area. We demand protection of demonstrators.” Ominous attention gathered as the young people hand-lettered picket signs such as “No More Back Doors,” debating which stores most deserved challenge for cruel habits of segregation aimed at them and their sharecropper parents. A sedan pulled up with two FBI agents to warn of hostile men milling nearby with clubs and shotguns. Cars cruised by slowly with “Open Season” bumper stickers, after a Klan slogan said to be popular locally since the hung jury in the Liuzzo trial. The rented Plymouth Fury arrived bearing Jonathan Daniels, Gloria Larry, Richard Morrisroe, and project director Stokely Carmichael, who conferred while scouts reconnoitered the grim scene only blocks away over the pine hill: a hundred Negroes waiting outside the tiny post office that housed the federal registrars, frozen under the glare of vigilantes who mingled in the street with uniformed officers and deputies. A ninety-three-year-old woman in line allowed that she had not ventured into town for fifty years. Several of the reporters were both shaken and puzzled to be threatened as “Freedom Riders,” an anachronism from 1961, by local men apparently enraged at the sight of white people speaking civilly with Negroes.

  The teenagers lettered another picket sign: “Wake Up! This Is Not Primitive Time.” None flinched when the FBI agents returned to urge cancellation in the face of mob violence or arrest. They grumbled instead against the agents’ standard disclaimer—that Bureau personnel were strictly observers, lacking enforcement powers to intervene—and lumped FBI intimidation with others they were itchy to confront. “I don’t want to scare the older people away from voter registration,” said one, “but we need this.” Negroes still had to slink around to back doors, said others, and only something drastic would plant the idea in both races that Fort Deposit was part of America. A spirited local girl added that she “sure would like to get one good whack at the Man,” which dissolved peers in howling approval but prompted another huddle among the SNCC staff.

  They agreed the demonstration was not their idea—most of them privately opposed it—and first asked Rogers to propose cancellation. When the teenagers demanded to go forward, some veterans favored deferring to local initiative even at the risk of an “open graveyard,” while others said they could not dodge responsibility behind a modest ideological pose. They reopened leadership issues that ranged, SNCC-style, as far as Carmichael’s reflections on the 1938 humanist novel Bread and Wine, by Ignazio Silone, in which he said an educated radical, disguised as a priest, wrestles with the subtle morality of inspiring damaged poor people to risk revolt against Mussolini. The standard for Carmichael was transparently shared risk. He argued that they could and should oppose any demonstration without a pledge of nonviolence, and told the teenagers that smacking the Man gained nothing but cheap regret. Daniels mimicked his extroverted pose of assurance for people in the grip of fear, until young John McMeans insisted that his friends give up commando notions or go home. “If that’s what you want to do,” said Carmich
ael, “don’t take anything they can call a weapon. Not even a pencil.” The teenagers reluctantly surrendered nail files and pocketknives. Daniels, Larry, Morrisroe, and Ruby Sales stepped forward to round out the escorts called veterans, although only Morrisroe among them had been arrested even once (with Al Raby in Chicago), and kept to himself among strangers. In soothing small talk, Carmichael learned that poet Gwendolyn Brooks was a member of Morrisroe’s Chicago parish, and remarked that a good friend at Howard had served as a Carmelite priest in Bolivia. SNCC staff members Jean Wiley and Martha Prescod compiled a family notification roster for bail.

  They moved out in three groups of ten at 11:30, more than two hours late, but demonstrations scarcely lasted a minute. Fifty armed men closed on the first signs raised outside McGough’s Grocery, and a deputy among them said the pickets were going to jail. “For what?” asked Jimmy Rogers, who briefly considered the halting reply—“for resisting arrest, and picketing to cause blood”—while enveloped in a posse quivering to be a mob, then numbly replied, “All right.” As the pickets were marched toward the other groups, clumps of local men fell upon the reporters in two cars nearby, banging, yanking at locked doors while impeding their getaway, and from Golson Motors ran Jack Golson, the county coroner with a shotgun and his brother Carl, the registrar, who smashed a passenger-side window and the windshield with a baseball bat before the car lurched away. A truckload of men chased another car whose driver, panicking when hemmed in, tried a U-turn and bumped into the pursuing truck. Stokely Carmichael, regretting that he had allowed SNCC staff member Chris Wylie to drive, stepped out proposing that gentlemen should let the authorities settle the incident, but both he and Wylie were in handcuffs by the time they reached the miniature Fort Deposit jail.

  The car with the shattered windshield drove up like a ghost, the reporters having doubled back in their own variations on the debate they had witnessed all morning—telling one another they could not abandon the story, or were crazy, or must distract the crowd from the young prisoners who bulged from a jail building no more than ten by fifteen feet. On the passenger’s side, blood ran from head cuts down the arm of Life correspondent Sanford Ungar, who had stared transfixed by the attack and wound up with shards of glass in his mouth. One bystander looking amazed into the car erupted in a convulsive rant about body paint, shaved heads, and “nigger wigs,” as ideas occurred to him for completing the reporters’ defection from the white race. Shortly afterward, driver David Gordon would record in an interview that he sat frozen with Ungar until the demonstrators were herded onto the rear of a flatbed truck used to collect the city’s garbage, and that amid menacing shouts about trash disposal, “I looked directly at Stokely and he had the most serene expression on his face I’ve ever seen.” Prisoners waved to stunned friends in the post office line before the truck pulled away. The reporters, blocked from following, managed to identify one of them as a Bessie Lee Caldwell, holding her new registration slip.

  That night SNCC worker Scott B. Smith slipped into the home of a Hayneville contact, and verified from the sound of freedom songs that the prisoners were held in the new county jail there, next door to the old one with the gallows. He crept across Highway 97, through an alley to a hidden observation spot behind the Lowndes County courthouse, drawn by revolving arrivals to a late conference in the sheriff’s office. Sporadic gunfire punctuated the night. Fearing that a lynch mob was being gathered, Smith kept watch until forced to retreat before dawn on Sunday. “Because of the dogs in the area [who] were barking,” he wrote in his report, “I went back to Mrs. Robinson’s house.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Watts and Hayneville

  August 14–31, 1965

  THE Watts crisis spread improvisation with awe. White House aides shared bulletins late Saturday that Governor Pat Brown had known of many fires and one fatality as he left the Greek islands. “When he got off the airplane, we told him that the death toll was up to seventeen,” said Lee White. “Boy, that really sobered him.” Jack Valenti interjected that the number went to eighteen minutes later with injuries climbing from 558. Joe Califano said his former colleagues at the Pentagon were virtually headless because Cyrus Vance and other top deputies had taken August leave, Secretary McNamara himself being secluded on Martha’s Vineyard along with Attorney General Katzenbach and speechwriter Richard Goodwin, who was sailing, unavailable to draft a presidential statement on the crisis. (“We ought to blow up that goddamned island,” growled President Johnson.) Califano, commandeering better space than his rookie office in the basement, retrieved LeRoy Collins from a fishing boat for emergency assignment to the Watts area, where a riot curfew forced Otis Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, to postpone the paper’s charity football exhibition between the Dallas Cowboys and Los Angeles Rams. Chandler’s newest reporter, his byline slugged “Robert Richardson, 24, a Negro,” made the front page with a story headlined “‘Get Whitey,’ Scream Blood-Hungry Mobs,” followed Sunday by an instant cultural icon: “‘Burn, Baby, Burn’ Slogan Used as Firebugs Put Area to Torch.” Saturday’s front-page editorial denounced the failure of “kid-glove measures.” Sunday’s mourned “the four ugliest days in our history,” with the death toll subsided at thirty-five, and called for universal prayer “to prevent forever the recurrence.”

  Nationally, battle news from Vietnam echoed Watts, and the Beatles performed hits from their new album Help! at New York’s Shea Stadium, breaking the attendance record for a pop concert. King aborted a Puerto Rico rest trip but stalled the same Sunday in Miami. Bayard Rustin urged him to avoid the certain embarrassment of a visit to Los Angeles, warning that he would be called an Uncle Tom if he helped quell the riots and a failure or worse if they broke out again. King reproached himself for hiding. “I think I ought to be out there,” he told colleagues in the Los Angeles clergy, but they equivocated. The riots were beyond any trauma they had foreseen as hosts of King’s rescheduled tour in July, and their ally Governor Brown was lobbying to keep King out of California. King held off until he saw news that Mayor Yorty and a visiting evangelist flew above Watts, with the latter announcing that he perceived the riots as a “dress rehearsal” by “sinister and evil forces…whose ultimate objective is the overthrow of the American government.” The phone rang again for Rev. Thomas Kilgore, head of SCLC’s Los Angeles chapter. “Tom,” said King, “if Billy Graham can ride over them in a helicopter, why can’t I come out there and talk to those young people?”

  King persuaded Bayard Rustin to meet him in Los Angeles Tuesday afternoon, August 17. The rendezvous was personally awkward for Rustin, as Los Angeles had been the site of his arrest in 1953 for “perversion,” which led to a break with his fatherly employer in pacifist work, A. J. Muste, and Rev. Kilgore had served as intercessor during Adam Clayton Powell’s hushed political threat in 1960, when King banished Rustin to avoid public accusation that he associated with a homosexual. Now Kilgore led a reception committee that included Norman Houston, president of the local NAACP, and Rev. H. H. Brookins, pastor of the huge middle-class congregation at First AME. Rustin joined them as King made a brief statement to reporters at the airport gate, deploring violence, pledging to minister and listen. He ducked questions about Governor Brown’s charge that his visit was “untimely,” reported the Los Angeles Times, “and was hustled off to an undisclosed location,” where he and the Californians pondered options on Tuesday night in a climate of poisonous blame.

  Republican Jack Shell, who had lost the last gubernatorial nomination to Richard Nixon, announced that the riots carried “amazing political implications” favoring his bid to unseat Governor Brown in 1966, and Brown withdrew most of the riot troops on Tuesday in an assertion of normalcy restored. “I don’t know what the governor is doing,” snapped Mayor Yorty, a Democratic rival, who denounced as “the big lie” any fault laid to the city. “He’s too busy with press relations.” Chief Parker, having said Negro leaders gave him the idea to pull out of the riot zone for two days, and then de
nied that he paid any attention to them, switched to a straightforward cry of victory. “We’re on top, and they’re on the bottom,” he proclaimed, declaring that only fear of police secured order in the riot areas. Parker dismissed critics who perceived racial overtones in his analysis, but he did narrow his postmortem diagnosis of the riot’s cause to an Islamic sect among Negroes. From police intelligence reports, he accused “the Black Muslims” of fomenting general insurrection from a spark of disorder.

  The smallest Los Angeles crowd since the dawn of professional football turned out Tuesday night for the postponed Rams-Cowboys game, leaving two-thirds of the giant Coliseum empty. With the curfew lifted, members of the Nation of Islam regathered at Muhammad’s Mosque of Islam No. 27 on South Broadway, west of Watts, where, shortly after midnight, a surrounding phalanx of one hundred police officers fired by their count one thousand rounds into the structure, shattering every window and splintering doors with shotguns at close range. A coordinated charge turned up three small fires burning inside and “19 men sprawled on the bloodstained floor,” according to the Los Angeles Times, nine cut by flying glass. Police arrested them for conspiracy to commit arson on their own building and to murder the officers, then arrested forty Muslims for obstruction as they arrived on summons to “defend the Temple.” In the aftermath, undercover police took one trusted reporter through the demolished auditorium into a small kitchen where the reporter saw that “tables were broken, utensils lay on the floor, eggs had been splattered, cupboard doors had been ripped from their hinges, apparently in the police search for Muslim gunmen and their weapons.” Outside, officers dropped tear gas grenades down storm drains in a last futile effort to locate suspects with guns or riot plans, while from a distance the mosque leader challenged the press to verify official claims of self-defense: “Do you see any bullet marks on this side of the street?”