At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  Correspondents filed dispatches as if from a war zone. One for the Chicago Tribune said LAPD officers “stormed the fortified temple of the Negro race extremists,” and the Los Angeles Times called the raid a “shattering assault” on taboo space. “The fanatical Black Muslims never have permitted a white man to enter their mosque,” declared the Times, overlooking a more violent police altercation at the same mosque in 1962. Few Negroes in Los Angeles forgot that lethal episode, because Malcolm X had captivated mass meetings from the floor of prestigious Christian churches with electrifying oratory about Chief Parker’s force as a daily oppression for Negroes, Mexicans, and other minorities regardless of class or deportment. Even Roy Wilkins of the NAACP for once had made common cause with Malcolm, whose racial separatism he steadfastly deplored, against hard, segregated reality in the shadows of Hollywood. (The LAPD recently had expunged formal rules that barred its few Negroes—none in 1965 above the rank of sergeant—from riding with white partners; the California Highway Patrol claimed three Negroes among three thousand officers.) Malcolm X had commuted cross-country to mesmerize Negro Los Angeles through the 1963 show trial, restraining Muslims from the retaliation Malcolm himself had promised, secretly beginning his fateful break from the sectarian doctrines of the Nation of Islam’s founder and leader, Elijah Muhammad.

  Three Muslims freed after the 1962 raid were seized again* in Mosque Number 27, as though back from a minor preview, hours after Martin Luther King had arrived from the East. On Wednesday, King pushed through a crowd that engulfed the Westminster Neighborhood Association in the burned-out heart of Watts, and climbed on a small platform with Rustin a step behind, just above heads packed within reach of their chins. A man shouted, “Get out of here, Dr. King! We don’t want you.” A woman shouted at the man, “Get out, psycho.”

  Rustin pleaded with the crowd to hear King, who tried several times to begin. “All over America,” he said, “Negroes must join hands and—”

  “And burn!” shouted a young man near him.

  “And work together in a creative way,” King persisted.

  A young woman called out that “Parker and Yorty” should come themselves to “see how we’re living.” Another cried, “They’ll burn the most.” A third scoffed that big shots never would bring air-conditioned Cadillacs to Watts.

  King promised to do “all in my power” to persuade the police chief and mayor to talk with residents. “I know you will be courteous to them,” he said with a smile, which brought howls of laughter. He asked about living conditions, police relations, and details of the riots, then shouted out that he believed firmly in nonviolence. “So maybe some of you don’t quite agree with that,” said King. “I want you to be willing to say that.”

  “Sure, we like to be nonviolent,” called out one man, “but we up here in the Los Angeles area will not turn that other cheek.” He denounced local Negro leaders as absentees: “They’re selling us again, and we’re tired of being sold as slaves!”

  Over cheers and cross-talk, another man’s voice prevailed. “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.”

  King continued when the exchanges died down. “I’m here because at bottom we are brothers and sisters,” he said. “We all go up together or we go down together. We are not free in the South, and you are not free in the cities of the North.”

  This time he ignored interruptions. “The crowd hushed, though,” observed reporters for the Los Angeles Times, “as Dr. King began to speak in an emotion-charged voice.” A correspondent for the Negro weekly Jet agreed: “The jeering had stopped, and the cynics were drowned out by applause and cheers.” King preached on the suffering purpose of the movement to build freedom above hatred. “Don’t forget that when we marched from Selma to Montgomery,” he intoned, “it was a white woman who died.” He called the roll of white martyrs who had joined black ones, crying out that James Reeb had followed Jimmie Lee Jackson in Selma, as Schwerner and Goodman were lynched with James Chaney in Mississippi, the year after Medgar Evers was shot. “Elijah Muhammad is my brother, even though our methods are different,” King shouted to a thunderclap of surprise, and his peroration built hope on boundless redemption. “There will be a brighter tomorrow,” he cried. “White and black together, we shall overcome.”

  King moved on to see Governor Brown, who was preoccupied with appointments to a riot inquiry modeled on the Warren Commission. They held a joint press conference of sober but vague cooperation, after which King let slip candor in a personal telegram: “I am very sorry that you see me only as a demonstrator.” The governor seemed benign, however, after a sequestered meeting with Mayor Yorty and Chief Parker on Thursday, August 19. King emerged shaken after nearly three hours and managed platitudes for reporters about an “in-depth, frank discussion,” conceding that the city leaders “didn’t agree with most of the things we said.” Pressed for examples, he cited their refusal to let him visit prisoners in the Lincoln Heights jail and their denial that poverty or police conduct contributed to the riots. Because virtually every local Negro had called for Parker’s resignation, King said, he had suggested that an independent review board could “do a lot to relieve tension” over specific charges of brutality. It would broaden the scope of judgment beyond police officials who might be partial to their own command.

  Mayor Yorty overheard the last of the press exchange. He stepped forward to declare King’s visit “a great disservice to the people of Los Angeles and to the nation.” To question police conduct after a riot was to “justify lawlessness,” he charged, and King “shouldn’t have come here.” As for reports that his was the only major city not receiving, nor diligently seeking, federal funds in the new War on Poverty, Yorty deflected blame to “changing dictates” from Washington that he said “certainly helped to incite the people in the poverty area.” He rejected any notion that Parker should be discharged or even permitted to resign. “Race relations would go to a low ebb,” said Yorty, “because the white community would not stand for it.”

  Reporters jumped to the spilled insults—“King Assailed by Yorty After Stormy Meeting”—and elicited confirming euphemisms on both sides. Yorty’s aides said the exchange had been “far from friendly.” Rustin told them King had endured “crude” language without losing his temper. Later, Rustin made notes that the session left him and King “completely nonplussed,” despite their experience with segregationist officials in the South, because 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.

  King publicly refined grievance into several levels of confession. “We as Negro leaders—and I include myself—have failed to take the civil rights movement to the masses of the people,” he said. He also said, however, that he could not find “any statesmanship and creative leadership” in Los Angeles, and pledged to offer his findings directly to President Johnson.

  JOYCE BAILEY, jailed Saturday on her nineteenth birthday, remained in a Hayneville cell that grew filthy into the week of King’s tour of Watts—an exposed, stopped-up toilet close under foot, shrieks for a mop ignored, clean water shut off sporadically from the sink. Her job in the Fort Deposit pajama factory was gone. Her father, a relatively independent railroad worker on the Louisville & Nashville line, brought her mother’s home-cooked food until the jailers turned away the bother of all visitors, including John Hulett’s intrepid well-wishers and civil rights doctors out of Selma. Her two companions lacked the comfort of home sympathy, and prayed instead that their families would never find out what happened. Gloria Larry knew her stepfather would thunder that he had plotted a whole career of Air Force postings from Bermuda to San Francisco just to keep her out of her native South. As the sophisticated elder at twenty-four, Larry struggled to m
aintain a composed example above primitive ordeals that included tears and frequent screams from the youngest cellmate, Ruby Sales, who lay doubled up from ulcers. Defying Deputy Sheriff Joe “Lux” Jackson, who threatened to have the Negro trusty beat them or worse for the noise, they sang freedom songs to assure the male prisoners on the second floor that their spirits were intact.

  Precocious at seventeen, Sales cajoled the trusty to prove a streak of independent humanity by smuggling her notes upstairs to Daniels, with whom she flirted about movement philosophy even though she still mocked his seminarian’s collar. Rebellion against middle-class piety had swept Sales from “high” Baptist to skeptic and from head cheerleader now to jail, beginning with the freshman day trip to Montgomery during the Selma march, when she and her Tuskegee professor wound up inside King’s former church all night. To her parents, whose ambition for Sales was such that they delivered her all through childhood to separate attendance at the elite First African Baptist of Columbus, Georgia, remaining content themselves in a missionary church, the signal shock of the movement was their daughter’s switch from Tuskegee heels and stockings to SNCC overalls. Unable to fathom why anyone would dress like the poorest, most vulnerable people—on purpose—they blamed the young professor, Jean Wiley, who also had joined SNCC. Sales had opposed letting Daniels into the Lowndes County movement, but he proved too charming and too smart about religion for her to maintain the standoffish posture that preachers were opiate-of-the-masses hypocrites above solidarity with black sharecroppers. Daniels had driven with Stokely Carmichael to Columbus to address her family’s worries in person, which impressed her father enough to plead with each of them to look out for her. If he learned of the Fort Deposit arrests, Sales feared he would yank her out of Alabama.

  Apart from her stomach, the sharpest pain arrived with a note that Carmichael and Chris Wylie posted separate bail on Wednesday, the fifth day, breaking a pact to resist the unjust charges as a united group. No longer could Carmichael be heard calling out for a song, or shouting, “John, it’s prayer time now,” to prompt a devotional from the devout young McMeans. The female prisoners did not believe a smuggled note that he was needed on the outside to raise money, having heard derisive scoffs at the same bail rationale for King, who at least did raise much of SCLC’s budget. To fight nagging suspicion that the SNCC veterans got priority rescue, they were relieved to confirm that Willie Vaughn of the Mississippi movement remained in a cell upstairs. Sales came to attribute the separate bail to the stress she had witnessed in Carmichael from the night she first met him in Montgomery, when she had folded her arms resolutely like his, vowing to resist Martin Luther King’s excuses for Bevel and his former trustees who refused to let SNCC run “second front” demonstrations from Dexter Avenue Baptist. In spite of themselves, they both wound up stomping and cheering King’s oratory on the larger purpose of the movement, and Sales remembered Carmichael’s unsparing description of his convulsive breakdown soon thereafter. Beneath the smooth exterior, she figured, Carmichael must be apprehensive of a second crack-up from his five years exposed on the line.

  Opposing pressures grew outside the jail. The SNCC treasury was nearly empty, and just then was collecting a solicited gift of $5,000 from SCLC to meet its subsistence payroll. Silas Norman and Bob Mants, suffering a confused obstruction about bail procedures, had trouble finding lawyers willing to go near Hayneville. Attorney Peter Hall of Birmingham went instead to Montgomery and filed a motion for removal of the Fort Deposit cases into Judge Frank Johnson’s federal court. Far greater legal jeopardy hit the Lowndes County courthouse with a triggering letter of intent, as required by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, specifying that the Justice Department was authorized to bring suit on “written complaint alleging a minor child is being deprived by a school board of the equal protection of the laws.” Although John Doar mistook the school superintendent for a man, his detailed grievance showed that the rejected Negro schoolchildren had gained hope of redress from Washington, which amplified fears in Alabama. Sheriff Jim Clark already warned by mass circular that the Justice Department would repeat the “criminal assassination” he said it had “planned, encouraged, executed, and helped” perpetrate on nearby Selma,* and Colonel Al Lingo of the state troopers issued a statewide bulletin during the uproar over Watts: “This department is now in receipt of certain reliable information that riots are scheduled for many major cities throughout the nation and in the south particularly.” Lingo’s alarm, which fell on the August 16 date of Doar’s letter to “Mr. Hulda Coleman,” urged sheriffs and police chiefs “to begin NOW to form sizeable reserves of auxiliary police, firemen, and deputies.” To buy riot gear, Coleman’s brother Tom made a trip into Montgomery on Friday morning, August 20.

  “Dearest Mum,” Daniels had written Tuesday on a scrap, apologizing for a “peculiar birthday card” that was barely legible (“This damned pencil is about an inch and a quarter long”), advising that he had been in jail since Saturday. “The food is vile and we aren’t allowed to bathe (whew!),” he added, “but otherwise we are okay. Should be out in 2–3 days and back to work. As you can imagine, I’ll have a tale or two to swap over our next martini.” Daniels was able to post the scrap homeward to New Hampshire in care of strangers who appealed the visitor ban late Wednesday, enduring a police stop and a traffic fine on the drive into Lowndes, persisting at the courthouse until Sheriff Frank Ryals, trembling with anger, granted permission.

  The two Episcopal priests walked into a meal standoff along a fetid corridor of the upstairs cellblock, strewn with tins of pinto beans, fatback, and moldy cornbread that the hungry prisoners refused to eat or the jailers to clear away still untouched. Unnerved themselves, the priests were flummoxed to meet a prisoner as upbeat as his peculiar birthday card. Daniels, alone now that Carmichael and Wylie were gone, called for devotions from an end cell with a verve that was ambiguous to the priests. They could not tell whether he was deliberately or naively mindless of danger. His blithe mood was especially unsettling to Rev. Francis Walter, an Alabama native who had agreed late in July to consider taking up the religious mission in Selma when the seminarian returned to Cambridge. Daniels declined their offer of bail money from ESCRU, the Episcopal civil rights group, because it was insufficient to free all the prisoners.

  Richard Morrisroe also declined from two cells over, so weary that he did not pull himself up to confer through the bars. He took shifts sleeping upright on the floor, rotating four bunks between himself, Jimmy Rogers, and six young cousins from Fort Deposit who spent much energy reliving the longest journey of their lives to Birmingham for a performance by soul star James Brown. They reverted to fantasy reruns of their stifled demonstration, speculating that conquest alone could answer the hateful frenzy of the white men they knew, and these conversations engaged even visiting clergy to suggest revised tactics such as surprise, buildup, or more cameras to subpoena the national conscience, until Willie Vaughn erupted from the middle cell. “Reverend, have you ever stood in a picket line and looked into the faces of your adversaries,” he yelled, “and watched them soften?” He silenced the cellblock with fierce, hidden desire, as though desperate to recover something pure from Mississippi.

  Young John McMeans, who was a welder from the local trade school, told Morrisroe he had aspired to be a preacher. He shared a jail poem written in a small pocket notebook:

  I had a dream just last night,

  Where brave men fought a war for Rights.

  What a war this had to be,

  For blood ran like a raging sea.

  Men yelled out in a painful cry,

  Why do we all have to die?

  Out of the crowd a white man yelled,

  These niggers are giving us hell.

  I rather be buried in my grave,

  Than to be tortured like a slave.

  They passed the notebook back and forth so that Morrisroe could record occasional thoughts from his own “Kerry Irish bent,” mostly reveries. “My observations s
eem so to spin around me,” he wrote. “I sense little if anything that I have given to these my friends. I sense only what I have received. A year ago I knew a great deal.” Again: “Friday morning—a week in jail, a week chosen in a Saturday moment of Ft. Deposit bravado, a week unwanted, a vacation week wasted, spilled out…. Its elements will soon blend into a heroic memory. Bravado will return in recollection, in mass meetings and quiet starlit conversation, across pews, over tables, in beds.”

  Deputies banged open the cell doors with sudden news of freedom early Friday afternoon, August 20, and twenty celebrating prisoners scarcely noticed their crusted bodies as they reunited downstairs to sign their own appearance bonds. It was all Jimmy Rogers could do to hold them briefly at the desk when he realized that bail was not paid but mysteriously waived, and that no lawyer or movement caravan had come for them. Pushed outside, they huddled in the jailhouse yard until ordered to disperse by Deputy Lux Jackson from behind and by Hayneville officers who came along in a patrol car. Willie Vaughn argued for their right to stay by claiming an imaginary federal stake in the property, then vainly pleaded that the group should not “walk uptown integrated,” but they vacated under expulsion past the Hayneville cotton gin to the seed warehouse at the corner of Highway 97, a block from the courthouse square. Vaughn ducked off to find a friendly house and notify the Selma SNCC office forty miles away, there being no telephone at the Lowndes County Freedom House. Gathered around a mimosa tree, the remaining nineteen decided against trekking for White Hall or Fort Deposit. Several remarked on eerily deserted streets and wondered why no friends seemed even to know of their discharge. Still, jubilation floated on relief in open sunshine. Parched, eager to taste something cold while awaiting safe transport, clumps of them ventured a block downhill to the clapboard Cash Store, owned by the courteous Virginia Varner, where they had bought snacks on registration days at the Old Jail.