At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  President Johnson seethed. The deadlocked racial summit annoyed him, as did the publicity about Moynihan, but he resented most the pinch from unruly civil rights leaders he found lacking in political trust for the long haul of a difficult cause. “They come right in and by God take their perch on the White House,” Johnson fumed to McGeorge Bundy, “and while they still got their hors d’oeuvres going, and whisky in one hand and a wienie sausage in the other, they’re just raisin’ unshirted hell and say it’s got to be a hundred billion.” The White House staff spread rumors during the conference that an irate President might abort the event in a fury over leaflets advertising that four delegates, including Martin Luther King, were listed as sponsors of a new march against the Vietnam War. Such warning inhibited use of the White House platform to criticize military priorities, chilling optimism along with dissent, and Johnson’s mood darkened with the ensuing news. On Wednesday, November 24, as he released a message of thanks to the armed forces (“A man does not inherit freedom as he inherits the land”), the Pentagon publicly confirmed 240 Americans killed and 470 wounded in the Ia Drang Valley. The understated toll tripled the previous weekly high, and hiked the number of deaths since 1961 to 1,300. Press Secretary Bill Moyers delivered what reporters called “a spontaneous and quite personal description” of Johnson’s anguish over the list, which led Thanksgiving Day news along with the miracle story of a lone soldier found wandering with multiple wounds seven days after the battle at Albany clearing. The hometown paper in Coward, South Carolina, retracted its obituary for Toby Braveboy, descended from Creek Indians, who lost most of a hand to gangrene but survived.

  ON SATURDAY, November 27, the rally of thirty thousand at the Washington Monument exposed the hazardous psychology of war protest. From Vietnam, the president of the Communist National Liberation Front (NLF) sent an advance telegram wishing the demonstration “brilliant success,” which further guaranteed a lack of mainstream American politicians. Martin Luther King commended the draft of Coretta’s address, but canceled plans to speak himself. (She exhorted the crowd never to forget that democratic commitment made America a historic great nation: “This is true in spite of the bombings in Alabama as well as in Vietnam.”) Organizers from the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy sought to project a moderate image with a dress code and a suggested list of seventeen cautious slogans, such as “Supervised Cease-Fire” and “Stop the Bombing.” Although a visible few defied prescription by marching under an NLF banner instead of the American flag, the New York Times perceived “more babies than beatniks, more family groups than folksong quartets,” and gently mocked a tameness in the mannerly crowd. Norman Thomas, nearly blind in old age, announced from the platform that he wanted to cleanse rather than burn the American flag. “I’d rather see America save her soul than her face,” he declared. Baby doctor Benjamin Spock said the war discredited the United States more than it hurt Communism.

  Rally organizers vetoed speakers considered too strident or ideological, including Nobel Prize chemist Linus Pauling and Bob Moses of SNCC, which caused infighting among the nascent antiwar groups over alleged “McCarthyite” loyalty tests. Moses, still in transition from his February breakdown, and still answering only to his middle name Parris, spoke privately with movement supporters who would listen. He told one interviewer that some white Southerners justified killing “gooks” in Vietnam for the same reason they condoned the murder of civil rights workers—as a threat to their civilization—yet most Americans justified the war for the very purpose that united them against the segregated South, to advance patriotic freedom. He said President Johnson blamed violence on isolated extremists, Klansmen and Communists, while himself defining the Vietnamese as inhuman, robotic infiltrators in their own land, to be met with massive violence. “What do you do when the whole country has a sickness?” Moses asked, wondering whether anything could “awaken this nation as the South is beginning to be awakened.” (The Mississippi Supreme Court, in a stab at fairness, had just overturned his 1961 criminal conviction from the first nonviolent march in McComb, when Moses submitted to mob beatings and then an Orwellian trial on charges of “violent, loud, offensive” conduct.) He sifted cruel paradox with the intensity that had driven him from New York to become SNCC’s solitary pioneer in Mississippi. “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.”

  At the Washington Monument, one sanctioned speaker wrestled his thoughts in hypnotic self-examination like Moses, wondering how a country of consistently progressive government since 1932 could flood Asia with 200,000 young soldiers to “kill and die in the most dubious of wars,” while straining decades to deploy the first hundred voter registrars in the South. “What do you make of it?” shouted SDS president Carl Oglesby, a thirty-one-year-old father of three, normally a technical writer for Bendix appliances in Michigan. Oglesby surveyed the background commitment in Vietnam from Truman and Kennedy to the current leaders “who study the maps, give the commands, push the buttons, and tally the dead,” naming Bundy, Goldberg, McNamara, Rusk, Lodge, and President Johnson. “They are not moral monsters,” he declared. “They are all honorable men. They are all liberals. And so, I’m sure, are many of us who are here today in protest.”

  Oglesby groped out loud for a vocabulary of fresh confession to indict liberalism at its zenith. He traced the fault perhaps to material corruption in a small American populace that consumed half the world’s goods: “How intolerable, to be born moral, but addicted to a stolen and maybe surplus luxury.” He suggested among alternatives a global case of the stunted perception that comforted the mind of segregation. “We have become a nation of young, bright-eyed, hard-hearted, slim-waisted, bullet-headed make-out artists,” Oglesby charged. “A nation—may I say it?—of beardless liberals.” Calling himself a radical instead, he acknowledged that bitter apprehensions on the war sounded “mighty anti-American,” then cried out: “Don’t blame me for that! Blame those who mouthed my liberal values and broke my American heart.” Oglesby soon trailed off and stepped politely from the microphone into sustained applause from a dissipating crowd. He looked surprised, then perplexed, when rally coordinator Sanford Gottlieb of SANE lifted his arm like a prizefighter’s in spontaneous tribute. Although news accounts overlooked Oglesby as an unknown speaker, activists marked a birth moment for the “New Left” identity associated with young whites moving from civil rights influence to an independent stance on Vietnam.

  Two days after the rally, facing a stateside VIP delegation inside a heavily restricted tent at the An Khe redoubt, Lieutenant Colonel Harold Moore bluntly recounted the battle of landing zone X-Ray against an enemy he termed disciplined to the verge of suicidal fanaticism. “Sir, that completes my presentation,” he said, and met dead silence instead of examination. Wordlessly, flanked by the Pacific Fleet commander and two of the four Joint Chiefs, Defense Secretary McNamara nodded, shook hands, and exited with confirmation of grit in the backward Vietnamese. General Westmoreland gave him a classified request for another 200,000 troops—to exploit the attrition ratio—beyond the 200,000 already committed but not yet deployed or provided for in the national budget, and McNamara took home what he called a “shattering blow.” No character dividend or surprise good fortune yet greeted the can-do American plunge. With the projected numbers now being harvested in flesh, McNamara told President Johnson that exposure to field commanders from the recent combat, “particularly the First Air Cavalry Division,” resulted in “my personal judgment that the situation is much more critical than at least I had realized.”

  In Washington, where partisans of the distant war retained confidence to address collateral issues, Joe Alsop’s column on the day of the An Khe briefing detected an “acute and rising anxiety about the next stage of the civil rights movement.�
�� He reported that White House officials, shocked by the cold reception for the Moynihan report, “found themselves hardly talking the same language as the movement’s leaders.” Alsop endorsed their view that Negro delegates had “no practicable program,” being mired in protest and unrealistic demands for federal initiative. “Injustice is the theme,” he observed, “not what can be done about it.” Similarly, columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak charged that “shrill cries of Negro militants” had dominated the workshops, “sweeping the problems posed by the Moynihan report under the table,” wasting months that “went into researching the Negro male’s loss of manhood, the dominance of the Negro female, the breakdown of family life and the acceleration of illegitimate births.” Their column, “Civil Rights Disaster,” declared the two-day event the most dismal failure in the “glittering two-year history” of the Johnson administration. “White intellectuals who had come to Washington to discuss Negro social disorganization were stunned by the demagoguery,” they concluded. “The question is why? Some disillusioned liberals hint darkly that radical white elements are at work, prodding Negroes to seek the unattainable.”

  LOST TO obscurity beneath the Ia Drang battles and other national news, the first racially contested elections in modern Alabama selected local farmers to supervise programs for the U.S. Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service (ASCS). Movement hopes had dimmed in Greene County when five aspiring black voters were evicted and many received envelopes missing the official mail-in ballots. Only one farmer agreed to run in Hale County, none in Sumter. “Folks there are understandably jumpy,” reported a SNCC memo on these pioneer campaigns across five rural counties. Since an unexpected federal edict that any six farmers could put a nominee on the local ballot, which sustained the first Negro candidates, SNCC-sponsored workshops had sparked interest in the practical workings of ASCS crop loans and soil erosion payments. Poor farmers learned how the elected county committees also shaped price supports, distributed vital cotton allotments, and controlled indirect subsidies that could double their money-losing price of two and a half cents per pound for okra. In Lowndes County, where nearly two-thirds of the eligible farmers were black, optimism rose until ballots arrived listing seventy “extra” Negroes nominated by whites. Under deadline, lacking telephones, the unpracticed movement voters failed to sift out the last-minute decoys. The Lowndes County ASCS committee remained white, and a New Deal structure designed to foster citizen participation in governance (like the community agencies newly created for the War on Poverty) devolved again into the hands of the largest landowners. Stokely Carmichael decried the results announced on November 16. “We did it fair and square,” he told a mass meeting. “We believed in them, and they cheated us.”

  Solemn resentment gave way within hours to a sauciness reflected in the circulating SNCC bulletin for the day: “Mr. Stokely Carmichael (star of stage, screen, and television) feels that there is ‘something fishy.’” Out of natural verve, protective calm, and hard calculation, he advertised a bigger lesson that movement strategy had the ruling minority of Lowndes County “running scared” already, before the first Negro ever voted in a regular election. The next night, Carmichael drove to a twenty-first birthday party for Sammy Younge, one of the many Tuskegee students who had been drawn into demonstrations since the Selma march. Younge resisted further canvassing for the election workshops. Conflicted, he told Carmichael with droll sarcasm that he needed to “kick Snick” and look out for himself. Younge came from a light-skinned Tuskegee family of relative privilege, having attended boarding school in Massachusetts. The mother of another SNCC worker served as a maid in his household. He had lost a kidney to disease during Navy service, then abandoned schoolwork for the lure of civil rights. When he confided that friends put him down for retreating into a nice car and his favorite Pink Catawba wine, Carmichael soothed familiar movement stress by endorsing the personal retreat. “Makes me no never-mind,” he said lightly, adding that he would be glad to share wine with Younge.

  With the help of Younge’s friend Jimmy Rogers and other Tuskegee students, the Alabama SNCC staff carried roving schools on basic politics especially into Lowndes County, which supplied the bulk of some thirty farm-based activists for a trek to Atlanta at the beginning of December. They gathered at SNCC headquarters for all-day seminars, deciphering Alabama code books with the aid of charts and graphs prepared by the research staff. “The workshop spent one day on the electoral machinery,” wrote research director Jack Minnis, “and the rest of the time on the county governmental structure.” To nominate candidates for local offices in the 1966 elections, the participants learned strict statutory rules governing the establishment of independent political parties. If even one founding member participated simultaneously in an existing party, for instance, or cast a nominating ballot without verifiable proof of registration, a judge could disqualify the new party and all its nominees from the general election. By Alabama law, a new party also had to gain approval for a visible ballot symbol to aid voters of marginal literacy, meeting specifications of size and distinctiveness. The Lowndes County citizens reacted negatively to several proposed choices, finding a cotton boll sketch too vague, a dove too remote, clasped hands (modeled on SNCC’s own logo) too passive, and called instead for an active, farm-based symbol to compete with the Alabama Democratic Party’s official logo of a white bantam rooster topped with the motto, “White Supremacy for the Right.” Several suggested a cat as the best farm image. “Cats chase chickens,” said John Hulett, and Carmichael asked his volunteer artists to draw cats.

  The caravan to Atlanta had passed Montgomery, where federal prosecutors weathered secret drama at the third trial of the Klansmen charged with the bushwhack murder of Viola Liuzzo in Lowndes County. Given the two prior failures in state court, their optimism sagged with the notice that star informant Gary Thomas Rowe refused to testify anymore, complaining of stress and isolation as the sequestered target of angry Klan associates. When FBI director Hoover discouraged measures to compel his cooperation, Attorney General Katzenbach himself enticed Rowe with a secret promise of relocation under a new identity. “I am prepared to help you obtain suitable employment either with the federal government or elsewhere,” he wrote. “This is not contingent on the performance of any further services or assistance that you may give to the United States at any time in the future.” Reluctantly, Katzenbach also sent Assistant Attorney General John Doar to argue the case before U.S. District Judge Frank Johnson—risking a higher government profile for a chance to end the string of abject humiliations in racial hate cases. Doar prepared hastily in the face of restrictions that had chafed Alabama attorney general Richmond Flowers before the state trials. FBI handlers, who never left Rowe’s side, severely curtailed acquaintance with the reluctant witness. They instructed Rowe not to answer questions about his background, especially his five previous years as a Klan informant, and forbade inquiry beyond “what happened in the car.” Unfamiliarity made for awkward examination, but did limit the scope of a wobbly performance on the stand. Rowe testified that Klan orders for the night of Liuzzo’s murder were to preserve white supremacy “by any means necessary, whether bullets or ballots,” in an unlikely paraphrase of the late Malcolm X.

  FBI director Hoover startled Katzenbach on December 3 with word that the all-white, all-male jury returned verdicts of guilty, and that Judge Johnson promptly sentenced all three Klansmen to the ten-year maximum under a federal civil rights statute. (By coincidence, a second Alabama jury returned a breakthrough verdict almost simultaneously in a trial of less notoriety.*) Katzenbach rejoiced. Congratulating Hoover, he said the prosecution strategy had emphasized the FBI’s reputation this time to support the evidence, which he believed swayed the jury. In Montgomery, on his forty-fourth birthday, Doar lapsed briefly from stoic reserve to tell reporters that the case made him proud to be an American. Katzenbach called Texas with news vindicating the arrests announced from the White House on the day after the Selma
march. “Really, it was quite a trial,” he told Johnson. The President, still recuperating from gall bladder surgery, issued a statement that “the whole nation can take heart” from the outcome.

  Barely nodding at the trial news, the Atlanta workshops sank into the mechanics of Alabama government for long hours through the weekend into Monday, December 6. Presenters shared legal research to make plain the duties of elected officers from tax assessor to probate judge. “During the discussions,” recorded an internal memo, “it became clear to everyone that the mysterious deaths of Negroes in the South could never have gone uninvestigated and unpunished without the connivance or the collusion of the county coroner.” Research director Jack Minnis taught that field organizers and citizens alike could glean a working knowledge of “who’s pulling the levers of power.” Familiarity reduced exalted positions to specific tasks. “We went into the concept of the posse comitatus of the sheriff, quoting statutes all the way,” he wrote a friend, “and showing how, theoretically at least, most anything could be done with the other offices if the sheriff chose to enforce what they did.” New awareness seeded the first imaginings of actual candidates among the participants themselves, who took home a skeletal plan for legal steps required to field an independent slate drawn from their own first-time voters. “News about the new freedom organization travels fast in Lowndes County,” observed SNCC’s South-wide circular.