At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  Clark Clifford, one of the Wise Men, disputed McNamara’s emphasis on ground forces. “We must fight the war where we are strongest,” he said, “and we are strongest in the air.” Vice President Humphrey stressed the political dangers of further delay, warning that “Congress will run all over the lot.” Johnson closed with a simple three-part conclusion. He was “not happy with Vietnam.” But “we cannot run out.” Therefore, the bombing must resume.

  THE ALABAMA movements wrestled with fear and political choice over the weekend. In Wilcox County, still traumatized from the Colson murder, Walter Calhoun hinted that he might run against Lummie Jenkins for sheriff—in the Democratic primary. This caused confusion, as many favored an independent county party instead, but Calhoun believed the simplest campaign would be hard enough for first-time voters and a pioneer candidate. (He would be ordered to vacate his grocery store as soon as he filed for office.) Mass meetings in Selma were split between independents who favored Negro candidates and pragmatists who believed their new votes could provide a victory margin for the “decent” segregationist Wilson Baker over Sheriff Jim Clark. Youth organizers in Macon County defied Tuskegee elders to leaflet for a February 6 caucus to begin a “black panther” organization in honor of Sammy Younge. The Greene County movement scraped together a tent city modeled on the one in Lowndes, where SNCC workers continued workshops on the strict legal requirements for a new local party.

  In Mississippi, a weekend Poor People’s Conference at Mount Beulah emphasized survival more than politics. On Saturday, January 29, seven hundred participants sent a telegram to President Johnson pleading for jobs and emergency housing to relieve conditions of abject peonage worsened by terror. The portion of crops harvested by machine had nearly doubled to 80 percent since 1960. Two sharecroppers had frozen to death Thursday night, and the Klan had burned fifty crosses across the state to continue a January offensive marked by the Dahmer firebombing in Hattiesburg. On Sunday, delegates sifted ideas to dramatize their plight, from petitions and a march on Jackson to guerrilla warfare. (The latter notion was floated by fringe rebels called “boppers,” mostly young whites who had drifted into the holdover excitement of Freedom Summer with Marxist terminology and trophy guns.) The conference dispatched scouts to the Yazoo National Wildlife Refuge, which they found unsuited to become a squatters’ site, but proposals to “occupy” another federal property steadily gained favor.

  Only a remnant of the seven hundred volunteered for a bold plan to caravan north one hundred miles through the night to the derelict Greenville Air Base. All admitted new fears about incurring the wrath of the U.S. Air Force. They included Art Thomas, a Methodist preacher and Duke economist who headed the two-year-old Delta Ministry project for the National Council of Churches, plus six members of his staff, a reporter from Copenhagen, and some forty sharecroppers. Many of the latter were recently evicted; some had never ventured beyond their county line. At dawn Monday, January 31, they drove past a startled guard and pried the rusty padlock from a ramshackle barracks, unused since 1960. Once inside with their few blankets and boxes, they elected a governing council led by Unita Blackwell of Issaquena. The council authorized a hand-lettered sign for the door: “This is our home. Please knock before entering.”

  A sleepless President Johnson called the White House Situation Room at 3:20, and again at 6:06, hoping for reports on the first raids over North Vietnam to end the bombing pause. The front pages of his Monday newspapers featured a large AP photograph of 1st AirCav medic Thomas Cole kneeling half-blind near Bong Son, his own damaged eye wrapped in a bandana as he cradled one wounded soldier with another prostrate just behind. Johnson obtained crisp after-action figures from McNamara after breakfast: 225 sorties aborted by bad weather, seventy-five completed, three aircraft lost, 312 enemy and sixty-eight U.S. killed in Operation Masher. He said the pilots reported heavier antiaircraft fire. Johnson asked, “Did we get much results in your judgment?”

  “No,” said McNamara. “My judgment is we accomplished practically nothing.”

  The President talked briefly with Fortas, then announced the renewed bombing on national television from the White House theater at ten o’clock. Eleven hours ahead in Vietnam, dark closed on Monday’s battles around the hamlet of Anthai, which Colonel Moore described as “a rat’s nest of trenches and bunkers and spider holes” four miles north of Bong Son. One platoon quickly lost twenty-three of forty soldiers on a sand island surrounded by rice paddies, as described by a rare first-person dispatch to the New York Times. “I was a passenger on the first of these two choppers,” wrote correspondent R. W. Apple. The survivors endured a sudden, prolonged fusillade from the rear, which turned out to be an errant attack by South Vietnamese allies. “We could not move, we could not take cover for there was none,” wrote Apple. “We could not shoot back. We could not even tell who was shooting at us.”

  The President took a call late Monday from his Attorney General. “Mr. President,” asked Katzenbach, “have you seen on the ticker about Greenville, Mississippi, this group of Negroes that moved on this abandoned, surplus air base there?”

  “No, I haven’t,” replied Johnson. “No, I haven’t.”

  Katzenbach explained. Fifty squatters refused to move until the Office of Economic Opportunity met demands for job training, relocation, and food assistance. Local officials refused to help.

  “Did they do any damage?”

  “Well, they’ve broken in, and the danger mainly is fire,” the Attorney General replied. “You see, there’s no plumbing in there, uh, it’s cold.” The occupants were lighting fires in little potbellied stoves, and Katzenbach worried also about the precedent: “My concern with this group is that if they stay on there, we’ll have more.”

  When Johnson asked about getting a court order if negotiation failed, Katzenbach advised against it. “In fact, I’m not even sure we can get one,” he said. “I didn’t want to bring charges against them.” He said Cyrus Vance and the Pentagon were preparing to move them on military authority.

  The President suggested that perhaps Roy Wilkins and Martin Luther King could help explain history’s proven snare whenever Negroes relied on the U.S. military to settle political questions in the South. “If you go to moving in,” he prompted, “we go back to Reconstruction days, and we have a lot of unshirted hell, and they better move off.”

  A television crew landed in a Learjet to film the awkward standoff at Greenville Air Base. Federal negotiators offered freedom; occupants said they had no place to go. Negotiators said they should move for their own good, lacking heat and basic sanitation; occupants said they had never had any. “If that’s all you got to say,” Unita Blackwell told Major General R. W. Puryear, “I guess we’ll stay right here.” Puryear’s air police unit broke into the barracks with billy clubs Tuesday morning, February 1. About half Blackwell’s group consented to retreat under escort, while the others went limp and were dragged beyond the gates of federal property. Federal officials recommended a crash poverty program to alleviate suffering among “many thousands” of sharecroppers losing what little livelihood and shelter they had. “If we do not do this,” Katzenbach wrote Johnson, “there is a real possibility that Mississippi will be the Selma, Alabama of 1966.”

  In Vietnam, an intensified U.S. air campaign more than made up for the long January pause. Bombing runs over North Vietnam in 1966 tripled the heavy numbers of the sustained 1965 campaign, to 79,000 sorties. Southward infiltration of Ho Chi Minh’s soldiers increased substantially anyway, as McNamara and the CIA expected. For all the concussion to fall on North Vietnam, American pilots dropped more than triple that ordnance in air support for ground troops south of the border—eventually some four million tons, according to historian Christian Appy—to make South Vietnam the most bombed country since the invention of war.

  The President somberly anticipated the devastation if not the result. Joe Califano noticed that he gave up alcohol from the moment he unleashed the bombers again. Johnson al
so severely curtailed the use of his clandestine telephone recording system, as though he had preserved all the history he wanted to make.

  CHAPTER 27

  Break Points

  February–April 1966

  THE Alabama State Democratic Committee revised the official party emblem by striking the words “White Supremacy” from the banner above the crowing white rooster that had identified Democratic candidates on every ballot since 1904. One official emerged from Birmingham’s Tutwiler Hotel to denounce the reform as nothing short of blasphemy. “The white race is supreme in this world by the mandate of God Almighty,” Henry Sweet of Bessemer told reporters as he bemoaned the sight of “beautiful white ladies” cheering civic progress in the hotel lobby. “What we’re fighting for is womanhood,” Sweet ruefully explained. Another committee member, Sidney Smyer of Birmingham, excoriated all sides for concealing their intrigues behind unrecorded votes in a cowardly secret session. Moderates, including supporters of Attorney General Richmond Flowers, labored to appease some 100,000 newly registered Negroes while minimizing the wrath of white voters, and observers aired theories about why Governor Wallace allowed dominant segregationists to acquiesce behind closed doors.

  Wallace disdained any political threat from Flowers in the May primary. While barred from succeeding himself, he had arranged confidently to run his wife, Lurleen, for surrogate governor even though she was a shy political novice freshly diagnosed with terminal cancer of the uterus. Wallace himself already looked to the 1968 presidential race, and rumors flew of a tacit understanding with President Johnson. If Wallace quietly retired the “White Supremacy” banner, thereby making Alabama more palatable to national Democrats, Johnson might relax loyalty rules to accommodate a fellow Democrat’s run on a third-party ticket in 1968. The likely Wallace sweep of Deep South states would console Johnson by denying to any Republican nominee all the electoral votes Barry Goldwater had won outside his home in Arizona.

  On February 7, a panel of three federal judges ruled unanimously for Gardenia White and her fellow Lowndes County plaintiffs in White v. Crook, the lawsuit contesting “old-boy” juries as evidenced by the Liuzzo and Daniels murder trials. The judges ordered county officials to add registered Negro voters to jury selection panels. They also voided as unconstitutional the state law that excluded females of every race, and declared jury service “a responsibility and a right that should be shared by all citizens, regardless of sex.” The victorious plaintiffs’ legal team included seventy-eight-year-old Dorothy Kenyon, who had entered law practice from the suffrage movement in 1919. Her colleagues Charles Morgan and Pauli Murray anticipated leverage from White v. Crook to put women on juries far beyond Alabama. “The principle announced seems so obvious today,” Murray would write in a 1987 memoir, “that it is difficult to remember the dramatic break the court was making with scores of previous judicial decisions.”

  Analysts at the time widely discounted the impact. The lawyers had challenged the Alabama statute banning women jurors for tactical reasons—to get White v. Crook quickly into federal court, explained the New York Times—when their main goal was to attack the exclusion of Negroes by arbitrary practice rather than law. White v. Crook gave women “another windfall from the civil rights movement,” wrote legal correspondent Fred Graham, recalling that the amendment to outlaw employment discrimination by sex had been “received politely, but not seriously, on Capitol Hill” until Southerners embraced chivalry in a desperate ploy to kill the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Graham advised Times readers that enforcement of the new jury standard would nullify exclusion laws in South Carolina and Mississippi, and could oblige twenty-six other states to discard lesser restrictions on women. In Montgomery, where White v. Crook was announced, a newspaper survey found local leaders bemused by the sudden prospect of female jurors. “My first reaction to the ruling was laughter,” confessed a League of Women Voters president who said her chapter had been promoting other goals. The head of a Republican ladies club reflected gamely that while “women at times become a little emotional, they can learn to serve on juries.” The district attorney worried that “some of the language in court can be pretty rough.” The Montgomery Advertiser wondered whether Alabama could adopt limits practiced elsewhere: “Can pregnant women be exempted from jury service? Can school teachers be excused? Nurses?”

  Such dilemmas were remote to SNCC fieldworkers, who felt little assurance in mixed juries or reformed slogans. The judges delayed the effective date of their jury order, anyway, and movement veterans fully expected resourceful segregationists to strike Negroes from actual juries if the courts managed to get them on the selection panels. Few would be surprised ten months later when a jury of white men acquitted Marvin Segrest for the murder of Sammy Younge, causing student riots in Tuskegee. Judge Frank Johnson, protector of the Selma march and a member of the White v. Crook panel, issued a strong decision on February 11—“Lowndes Schools Ordered to End All Segregation”—but the resulting hardship was clearer than the benefit. Twenty-four of the twenty-seven dilapidated Negro schools were closed forthwith, which obliged the families to relocate, but freedom-of-choice integration remained too daunting for nearly everyone. Also in February, Judge Johnson dismissed the Justice Department’s lawsuit on persecution of sharecroppers for lack of proof that evictions were motivated specifically to punish voter registration. The available evidence showed that Cato Lee’s landlord had evicted him instead for his stated desire to send his children to white schools, Johnson ruled.

  Hard experience left young movement veterans doubtful that democratic norms would reach Lowndes County, where local officials blatantly adjusted the election process to maintain control. They hiked filing fees tenfold in February—from $50 to $500 to run for sheriff as a Democrat in the May primary—which added a crushing disincentive for any aspiring Negro candidate. They reduced the number of polling places for the vast area to eight, which discouraged voters who lacked cars, and put all but the courthouse location in white businesses or homes. Organizers and friends of the Lowndes County movement expected little countervailing fairness from state or federal government, and had grown jaundiced even about the bedrock contribution of the Voting Rights Act. It was part of the “fraud and deceit behind which the Lyndon gang operates its Empire,” wrote SNCC research director Jack Minnis in the final issue of Life with Lyndon in the Great Society. Through the tumultuous peak year of domestic suffering and achievement, the tone of his weekly newsletter had sunk from skeptical satire on LBJ’s jumbo persona into cheerless hostility, corroded by Vietnam. With optimism for national politics all but expired, SNCC leaders declined to spend any more precious mimeograph paper on the President.

  From Atlanta, Minnis supported the Alabama staff in wide-ranging research after the daylight canvassing hours. Bob Moses, back in Birmingham from a trip to Africa, circulated study material for an informal New Orleans “roots” conference to strengthen awareness of black heritage. Tina Harris wrote a paper on the Bible and anthropologist Louis Leakey. (“So whether you believe that Man descended from the Ape, or that God created Man, the fact is that Adam was born in Africa.”) With Harris and Bob Mants, Stokely Carmichael analyzed General William T. Sherman’s ill-fated Field Order No. 15 on land distribution, which had resulted from a Civil War press scandal during Sherman’s March to the Sea through Georgia. After a subordinate Union commander pulled up pontoon bridges from Ebenezer Creek to rid his army of black fugitives teeming along behind, leaving them to drown or be reenslaved by pursuing Confederate cavalry, Sherman, instructed to make amends, grumpily consulted twenty slave preachers in Savannah on January 12, 1865. “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn in and till it by our labor,” Rev. Garrison Frazier advised, by the War Department’s record of the “colloquy.” Sherman’s ensuing special order distributed a mule and forty acres per family of new Freedmen, but President Andrew Johnson rescinded it shortly after the Lincoln assassination in order to restore confiscated and ab
andoned plantations to former Confederate owners.

  For Carmichael, the “far-reaching step” of Field Order No. 15 all too briefly had matched a national will for restitution with skills of the oppressed, and the swift reversal set a pattern for blasted hopes. Still, Carmichael applied for a “self-help housing grant” to finance a “Poor People’s Land Corporation” in Lowndes County. He received promises of “triple-A priority” consideration by the new Office of Economic Opportunity poverty agency in Washington. The proposal might be a century late, Carmichael recognized in the study paper on Sherman, because harsh agricultural economics made homestead designs a “Pandora’s Box” for the Black Belt. “But somehow,” he wrote, “the plantation to Ghettoes treadmill has got to be stopped.”

  The Lowndes County movement invested greater hope locally to transform the landscape for politics and business alike. By Alabama law, a newly organized county party could set filing fees as low as zero to attract candidates. While no one yet agreed to stand for office—not even the intrepid John Hulett—Lowndes County drew crowds well into the hundreds each Sunday night to promote an independent “black panther” ticket, whereas similar rallies were lucky to attract twenty people in Wilcox, Sumter, or Greene. On February 19, scouring for stories to raise money from distant contributors, SNCC’s James Forman recorded an interview about how the project had survived the notorious fear in Lowndes County. Carmichael traced its spark to the impulsive display of suicidal contempt outside the Negro high school after Viola Liuzzo’s murder. “Whenever we went canvassing,” he said, “people would always say, ‘Are you those civil rights fighters that cussed the cops out?’” SNCC worker George Greene, remarking that primitive conditions demanded constant choice between stoicism and daredevil risk, said there were now only four staff cars for all of rural Alabama. “I spent a couple of nights in the tents,” he told Forman. “I found it to be a very trying experience.”