At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  Only a student newspaper and one small socialist journal reported a tiny gush of black optimism for November’s general election. “We’re going to take power in Lowndes County and rule,” an ebullient Stokely Carmichael predicted on primary night. “We don’t even want to integrate…. Integration is a subterfuge for white supremacy.” Farmers intent cities were pulling off a miracle of civic organization to put their candidates on the ballot, argued Courtland Cox, and the Times “has a hell of a lot of nerve” to excoriate them for sacrificing a handful of anti-Wallace votes in the Democratic primary. “It’s not our job to get Wallace out of the party,” added Carmichael. “Did they ask the Jews to reform the Nazi Party?” He said the four-to-one black majority in Lowndes opened a new political phase of the movement. “Nonviolence is irrelevant,” he declared. “What King has working for him is a moral force, but we’re building a force to take power. We’re not a protest movement.”

  Alabama’s primary day raised three distinct waves of euphoria. The broad civil rights coalition celebrated one cliffhanger victory only after Justice Department lawyers beat back weeks of courthouse attempts to steal, impound, and disqualify ballot boxes from six minority precincts in the Dallas County sheriff’s race. To John Doar, the final, supervised count was the culmination of a career struggle in public service to establish voting rights and law in mutual support above the long, hard disillusionment of race—in this case by securing for Wilson Baker his fair margin of victory over the virulent segregationist Jim Clark. Separately, on the center stage of Alabama politics, Governor Wallace asserted his full hegemony by summoning both U.S. senators and all eight representatives to stand mute while he read a proclamation pledged to defy freedom-of-choice desegregation guidelines for the 1966–67 school year as a “totalitarian” blueprint “devised by socialists” in Washington, “which has as its objectives the capture and regimentation of our children and the destruction of our public education system.” Almost simultaneously, SNCC staff members rolled from Hayneville into Tennessee with a notion to treat all of America like Lowndes County.

  Jack Minnis lobbied quietly for Stokely Carmichael to unseat John Lewis as national chairman during SNCC’s annual meeting at a wooded church camp in Kingston Springs, near Nashville. Carmichael agreed to run, furious that Lewis had campaigned for Richmond Flowers without once coming to support the unique Lowndes gamble sanctioned by his own organization, but a powerful ethos of shared risk and camaraderie discouraged personal ambition. Leadership in SNCC was considered an accident or distraction never to be sought, and no one spoke openly of the contest. Instead, all through the second week in May, young movement veterans buried internal politics within their marathon strategy debates. They labored to remember and revise the founding assumptions of college students caught up in six years of upheaval since the 1960 sit-ins. “We assumed that we could forget history,” one confessed, “because we were different.” Charlie Cobb recalled a shared sense of responsibility to bring injustice into the healing light of government attention. As late as 1963, a mission “to free men’s minds” for equality had been accepted across the SNCC’s broad spectrum of personality, from skeptical power analyst Courtland Cox to Christian mystic Charles Sherrod. “We assumed that this country is really a democracy, which just isn’t working,” said Carmichael. “We had no concept of how brutal it could be if we started messing it up.”

  Ivanhoe Donaldson argued that “interracial democracy” had become too vague a purpose now that the whole country gave it lip service, and pushed for organizing targeted “pockets of power” like the Bond campaign in Atlanta. James Forman advocated a world perspective on colonialism. Ardent racialists objected that SNCC had nothing to learn from white men like Karl Marx. Shrewd dialecticians explored worlds of meaning inside the word “vote,” from the structure and process of raw politics to bonds of “consciousness” between citizens. Attacks on the forthcoming White House Conference indirectly struck at Lewis, who had attended the planning sessions, but Lewis had proved himself no stooge of President Johnson by his vehement opposition to the war in Vietnam. Conflict tore at Bob Mants among many others. He could not reconcile the Carmichael who “talked black” in Lowndes County with the loyalist who defended some forty white staff members from proposals to make SNCC an all-black vanguard. Mants pleaded with Carmichael not to abandon him for the tinsel glory of a national office. While angry with Lewis for ignoring their work in Lowndes, Mants still took comfort behind Lewis’s steadfast courage on Pettus Bridge. With talks exhausted toward midnight on May 13, Carmichael supporters made perfunctory, half-joking nomination speeches in the face of the chair’s heartfelt desire to stay on, and Lewis won reelection to a fourth term 60–22. Carmichael himself voted for the incumbent with a shrug.

  Worth Long of Arkansas, having arrived late from Mississippi with Julius Lester, a quick-witted SNCC worker from Fisk University, gained the floor to ask what just happened, and his awed response silenced the hall. “John Lewis?” Long frowned. “How’d y’all do that? You can’t do that.” Jack Minnis, who seldom spoke in meetings, vented his frustration that the candid objection came too late to do any good. “Sorry ’bout that, white boss,” retorted Long, who jumped from exposed personal ground to a procedural outburst: “I challenge this election!” He accused Forman of allowing the vote to proceed on sentimental regard for Lewis once half the staff members had slipped off to bed. In pandemonium, while some rushed to summon absentees and others fumbled for the bylaws, Minnis quickly devised a plan to revive Carmichael by turning SNCC culture in his favor. Accordingly, Cleveland Sellers resigned as national program secretary to make way for a clarifying revote, and Ruby Doris Robinson likewise relinquished her fresh mandate to replace Forman as executive secretary. When Lewis adamantly rejected pressure to follow suit, he broke the spell of deference. Previously sheepish voices said he hungered too much for office. Some confessed a tacit consensus that he had not represented SNCC’s evolving independence for at least two years. Wounded, Lewis soon lashed out at unjust conspirators, then pleaded that Carmichael was not a Southerner. Several articulate Northerners retorted that Lewis was a copy of his hero Martin Luther King, and wincing admirers wished he did not invite the comparison. Worth Long later asserted that Lewis “was finished” when he fell back on his commitment to nonviolence.

  By dawn on Saturday, May 14, Lewis stood painfully isolated among those who stripped him of reelection. Julian Bond, who avoided the endless staff sessions whenever possible, publicly announced the result from Atlanta as “just a normal organizational change,” and the shift in student leadership attracted modest press notice. One story found Lewis to be “obviously shaken by his defeat” at the hands of those who favored “third-party politics for Southern Negroes.” The National Guardian disclosed that Stokely Carmichael had acquired the nickname “Delta Devil” for his fast-driving getaways in Mississippi. A New York Times profile identified the new chairman as a twenty-four-year-old “organizer of Alabama’s all-Negro ‘Black Panther’ political party,” and characterized his philosophy on a spectrum reserved for civil rights figures: “Mr. Carmichael does not advocate violence, but neither does he believe in turning the other cheek.”

  MARTIN LUTHER King contained troubles through the week of the SNCC elections. Rivals from the Blackstone Rangers and East Side Disciples exchanged gunfire inside a Chicago YMCA just before he arrived for a speech on May 13. King defended as a setback what critics took as definitive proof of lunacy in James Bevel’s effort to convert the notorious street gangs into nonviolent brigades. Stanley Levison, visiting from New York, privately admired “the instinctive drama” of SCLC staff members who ran the gang workshops, and predicted that James Orange, the fearsome-looking teenager recruited from the 1963 Birmingham demonstrations, would become “a living legend” for his work in Chicago. Orange had taken nine beatings to prove his nonviolent discipline to gang members who respected his hulking three-hundred-pound frame and convincing street wisdom. “The peopl
e in the North are more beaten down,” Orange observed.

  Levison huddled in King’s Hamlin Avenue tenement rooms over launch delays for the Chicago demonstrations. King had abandoned the slum “trusteeship” under legal pressure, in part because his Chicago lawyer, Chauncey Eskridge, turned out to own substandard ghetto property himself. Levison pushed for consolidation of SCLC to avert a deficit he projected at $450,000 for 1966 in spite of the windfall from Europe. This was five times his most recent estimate and nearly half SCLC’s annual budget. Levison detected a sudden adverse shift in the country. “The Vietnamese War is increasingly seizing the emotions of people,” he advised. “The impression that people gained [is] that the civil rights struggle is over…. Finally, the recent stock market decline has an effect.” (The Dow Jones Industrial Average would not recover its April 1966 peak of 995.15 for sixteen years, until 1982.) His warning of massive layoffs or swift bankruptcy was firm—“Dear Martin…. The publicity that would ensue would be a disaster for both the organization and you personally”—and King resolved to take drastic action by the end of the month. King said other groups fared even worse, confiding that CORE had just begged him for a $28,000 loan to forestall government seizure of its office furniture for delinquent payroll taxes. Publicly, King renewed his commitment to begin a new march soon. “If anywhere,” he declared, “it is in Chicago that the grapes of wrath are stored.”

  The new SNCC chairman, Stokely Carmichael, presented a novel guest speaker in Berkeley on May 21, then again in Los Angeles the next day. John Hulett, on his first trip west, took it as a calming sign that the sun poked through dark clouds the moment he faced a giant rally of the Vietnam Day Committee. “There was something in Alabama a few months ago they called fear,” he said. He introduced Lowndes County in simple sentences, ending with a detailed story of the May 3 primary. To answer curiosity about the local party emblem, he described the black panther as a creature who retreats “backwards, backwards, and backwards into his corner, and then he comes out to destroy everything that’s before him. Negroes in Lowndes County have been pushed back through the years,” said Hulett. “We have been deprived of our rights to speak, to move, and to do whatever we want to do at all times. And now we are going to start moving.”

  Hulett’s panther speeches created a stir within California movement circles, but Ruby Doris Robinson made national news from Atlanta by rejecting President Johnson’s invitation to Washington for June 1. Her press statement on May 23 called the grand White House Conference on civil rights a “useless endeavor” and pronounced the federal government “not serious about insuring constitutional rights to black Americans,” then stated that SNCC invitees “cannot in good conscience meet with the chief policy maker of the Vietnam War to discuss human rights in this country when he flagrantly violates the human rights of colored people in Vietnam.” Asked whether the snub of Johnson meant desegregation was no longer a goal, Robinson replied that white people must initiate integration from now on. “We been head-lifted and upstarted into white societies all our lives, and we’re tired of that,” she said. “And what we need is black power.” She presented Lowndes County as the model of an independent black movement. (In her crossfire with scandalized reporters, the unfamiliar name came out variously as “Loudon” and “Lawson.”) Columnists Evans and Novak cut through press interpretations with a May 25 attack on “the extreme black racists” led by Carmichael.

  Questions about SNCC’s attitude chased King to Chicago, overwhelming his formal announcement on May 27 that a protest coalition of some 163 organizations had agreed to begin the “action phase” of the movement against slums, “which we hope will dramatize the problems and call forth a solution.” He tried to buffer any threatened turn from integration as the inevitable sign of “discontent and even despair,” and patiently explained that separatist strategies never had attracted more than token support among the mass of American Negroes. King outlined the schedule for a “mammoth” first march down State Street on June 26 to present goals and demands whether Mayor Daley accepted them or not, “if I have to tack them on the door.”

  King shuttled between Chicago and Washington. “I always hate to talk about violence,” he said on the May 29 broadcast of Face the Nation as reporters pressed him exclusively on that subject. Did he accept predictions of summer riots worse than Watts, “and what do you intend to do about it?” Did he agree with “the most militant of the civil rights organizations” that “integration is irrelevant,” or feel eclipsed by SNCC’s intention to “take the battle for civil rights into the streets” and “be a lot more militant than leaders like you wish to be?” Did he still believe in the face of widespread criticism “that your position on our getting out of Vietnam is necessary for you to take?” King resisted on all fronts the implication that “militancy” carried stronger conviction or a more powerful effect than nonviolence: “Well, I hate to put it like that…. We must be militantly nonviolent.” He repeated his opposition to war as an engine of hatred: “I know that where your heart is there your money will go, and the heart of many people in the Administration and others happens to be in Vietnam.”

  King rushed back to Chicago for two days of movement sessions interrupted by an audience that consumed much of May 31. Pacifist leader A. J. Muste had arranged for him to meet the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who had written King a year earlier about the Buddhist concept of nonviolent self-immolation. They conferred privately on religion and the latest crises in South Vietnam. (Five more monks burned themselves in protest of lethal raids on Buddhist pagodas by the military government, and angry students were destroying the American consulate in Hue.) Afterward, they held an impromptu press conference at the Sheraton-Chicago Hotel that attracted perplexed notice in the Tribune: “King Equates Rights Fight with Monks.” The two men flew to Washington on separate missions—King for the White House Conference and Thich Nhat Hanh for a tour of witness against war.

  The new Vietnamese exile fasted with Rabbi Abraham Heschel and Father Daniel Berrigan. He meditated with the Trappist author Thomas Merton, who became convinced that the Buddhist was “more my brother than many who are nearer to me by race and nationality, because he and I see things exactly the same way.” He met privately with Secretary McNamara for thirty-three minutes, generating a small Washington Post story that began as follows: “The purple-robed Buddhist monk, a small, delicate Vietnamese poet, faced a group of American reporters dressed in gray and brown business suits at the Mayflower yesterday.” Thich Nhat Hanh identified himself as an anti-Communist who mourned destruction by 300,000 “dollar-making people” at war in his country of peasants, 80 percent of them Buddhist. “Now the U.S. has become too afraid of the communists to allow a peaceful confrontation with them to take place,” he wrote, “and when you are afraid, you cannot win.”

  THE WHITE House Conference, “To Fulfill These Rights,” was born a living anachronism on the first two days in June. A year’s gestation made it too awkward to celebrate and too big to hide, full of new burdens turned heavy while ancient ones retained stubborn vigor. Many of the 2,400 delegates arrived at Washington’s Sheraton-Park Hotel touched by the apt parable of a Vietnam casualty just refused burial in his home state. “My son was not a shoeshine boy like his father,” nurse Annie Mae Williams had complained. “He was a soldier, a paratrooper in the Green Berets.” Neither the Justice Department nor the Third Army’s funeral assistance unit could secure a plot in the hometown cemetery of Wetumpka, Alabama, where Mayor Demp Thrash said the Negro section was full, and the flag-draped coffin sat for a week in limbo until federal authorities made space for Private First Class Jimmy Williams far across the Georgia line on May 30, among Union graves at the notorious Confederate prison in Andersonville. “Negro G.I.’s Burial Placates Mother,” noted the Times. Elsewhere, the Mississippi Senate narrowly defeated a bill to disperse Negroes into other states, and Virginia’s Supreme Court unanimously upheld the criminal sentence of Mildred and Richard Loving for marital �
��corruption of the blood.” The latter decision opened to federal appeal the statutes in sixteen states that flatly outlawed interracial marriage, along with subtler “family purity” laws in several others.*

  Outside the Sheraton-Park, SNCC supporters and New York activists carried protest signs—“Save Us from Our Negro Leaders,” “Uncle Toms!” Derisive cries of “Black Jesus!” singled out King in the throng of entering delegates, and several white students who tried to join the all-black picket line told reporters they were not offended to be turned away. White House aides exchanged calls and messages about the dangers of revolt, updating Harry McPherson’s memo of worry that “the conference might be demoralized by dissent, by angry radical factions, or by a sense of futility on the part of the Negro participants.” On calmer soundings, a motorcade ventured from the White House at 9:40 P.M. on the night of June 1. First sight of the unscheduled entrance brought the guests to their feet in a continuous shout of “LBJ! LBJ!” as the President shook hands in the great banquet hall, lingering briefly with King, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and conference chairman Ben Heineman, a railroad executive from Chicago.