At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  One of several opportunistic Klan plots to assassinate King played out in Natchez on Friday, June 10. Claude Fuller, James Jones, and Ernest Avants of the Cottonmouth Moccasin Gang picked up at random a sixty-five-year-old farm caretaker named Ben Chester White on the pretext of hiring him to do some chores. They nicknamed him “Pop” as a kind of sedative on their drive to a creek bridge out of town, where they pulled out a pistol, a carbine, and a shotgun. The plan was to lure King from his march in northern Mississippi down to Natchez with a spectacular lynching. “Oh, Lord,” pleaded White. “What have I done to deserve this?”

  CHAPTER 29

  Meredith March

  June 1966

  SYMBOLS of liberty began to change hands during the Meredith march. From California, Robert Kennedy’s political counselor Fred Dutton warned that novice candidate Ronald Reagan was discovering a talent to communicate both martial fervor for Vietnam and revolt against the liberal era within a sensibility of freedom. Nationwide application of that compound message “would result in ’66 and ’68 in the worst setback for the Democratic party since 1920,” Dutton wrote prophetically to President Johnson. The Reagan style mixed nostalgia with dogged optimism. At a primary debate before an assembly of California’s Negro Republicans in March, he had bristled when asked how he could oppose the new civil rights laws and still ask for black votes. “I resent the implication that there is any bigotry in my nature,” Reagan exploded, and flung a balled-up piece of paper at the audience as he stalked out. “Don’t let anyone ever imply that I lack integrity!” The incident raised doubts about the candidate’s composure until Reagan pressed reporters to make up their minds whether he was a “square” or a wild-eyed kook. “Fellows,” he said jovially, “you can’t have it both ways.” It became a smaller story when he erupted again on June 1. “I resent that,” he told the Negro Men of Tomorrow Club, dismissing a member who had questioned his breezy claim to be for equal rights and against the Voting Rights Act. “I answered fully. I gave a pretty sincere answer.”

  Reagan rose above stigma with tangled but forceful professions. “If I didn’t know personally that Barry Goldwater was not the very opposite of a racist,” he declared, “I could not have supported him.” His display of innocent sensitivity insulated him from discomforts widely shared. Reagan’s rebuttal to civil rights philosophy never called for the repeal of the laws, nor cultivated active resistance, and he generally avoided controversy over enforcement. While disputing Martin Luther King’s prescription for the body politic, he consoled the fearful and guilty with anesthesia potent enough to numb whole decades of adaptation to the broadening thrust of equal rights. Pat Brown, the incumbent Democratic governor, considered Reagan so naive, extremist, and “beatable” that he foolishly hired operatives to smear Reagan’s opponent in the Republican primary. When Reagan won by 800,000 votes on June 7, editors at the New York Times scolded the electorate with barely restrained shock: “The Republicans, against all counsels of common sense and political prudence, insisted upon nominating actor Ronald Reagan for Governor.”

  Former Vice President Richard Nixon nurtured the South’s fledgling Republican Party with a more calibrated version of the Reagan formula. He carefully supported the civil rights laws, and explained in private that the national party could not win by fighting them like Goldwater, nor compete with sectional demagogues like George Wallace. Nixon instead promoted two-party government by attacking national Democrats for domestic turmoil and foreign appeasement. In May, he told a full-throated rally of Birmingham Republicans that “thousands of American boys wouldn’t be dead today” if President Johnson had bombed Vietnam more and relied less on ground troops. In South Carolina, he absolved the Deep South’s pioneer Republican and foremost segregationist. “Strom is no racist,” Nixon declared of the manifestly grateful Senator Thurmond. “Strom is a man of courage and integrity.” In Mississippi, Nixon advised Republicans to neutralize civil rights by tucking the burden away as a settled embarrassment. “There is no future in the race issue for the South,” he told a fund-raiser in Jackson. “There is no future in the race issue for the Republican Party. There is no future in the race issue for the Democratic Party. This issue has hurt the South, as it has hurt the nation. And now it is time to go forward to the other great issues.”

  Travis Buckley failed to heed Nixon’s counsel for an election that coincided with Reagan’s victory on June 7, when Mississippi joined the last Southern states to organize a Republican primary. The new party was still fighting a century of anti-Lincoln culture across Dixie, not long after Senator John Tower of Texas lamented that “you practically had to hold a gun on somebody to get him to run as a Republican.” Against GOP rivals, who mustered for the debut contest in only one of Mississippi’s five congressional districts, Buckley campaigned on his notoriety as the Klan lawyer for eleven White Knights arrested so far in the firebomb murder of voter registration leader Vernon Dahmer. He lost the nomination to a candidate of more sober demeanor, who would lose in turn to the well-established segregationist Democrat G. V. “Sonny” Montgomery. “We’re not ever going to beat Sonny,” a Republican leader conceded, but he predicted accurately that his party would “get the district when he retires.” Incumbents and courthouse ties stretched out through the next political generation a wholesale partisan realignment of Southern white voters, marked from the Goldwater-Johnson divide of 1964. By 1996, when Charles “Chip” Pickering succeeded Montgomery, Southern Republicans not only supplanted the “solid” Democrats of the segregation era but also supplied most of the leaders for a national party molded after Ronald Reagan.

  Buckley handled juries better than voters. He successfully represented Ernest Avants, one of three Klansmen arrested in Natchez, days after the random execution of Ben Chester White on June 10, 1966. In spite of grisly physical evidence from the murder vehicle, and the haunted confession of driver James Jones that two jumpy accomplices had fired nineteen shots into the victim before he could move from the back seat, Buckley won acquittal with white supremacy rhetoric and the brazen claim that White must have been dead already from carbine bullets when Buckley’s client partially decapitated him with a shotgun. Jones and carbine shooter Claude Fuller handily evaded conviction for their lifetimes, but Avants survived long enough in a parallel evolution of the political climate to meet extraordinary justice. On proof from tenacious prosecutors that the killing site at Pretty Creek fell just inside Homochitto National Forest, the courts in 2003 allowed a federal trial for the separate charge of murder on U.S. property, and a Mississippi jury found Avants guilty almost thirty-seven years after his crime.

  Only a quarter of registered Negroes voted in Mississippi’s June 1966 primary elections. The low turnout disappointed movement leaders, but the legislature nevertheless continued frenzied special sessions through the Meredith march, galvanized by 100,000 black registrations that had raised the total fivefold since 1964, from a paltry 6.7 percent of eligible Negroes to better than a third. The all-white politicians passed thirteen major laws to dilute the potential effect. They redrew boundaries, raised filing fees, attached Negro districts to white ones, and mandated at-large elections where they could submerge local black majorities. They muffled racial terms in floor debate to conceal their purpose, until the coded manipulation of population statistics provoked legislators from white areas to warn plainly of obsession. “We get so concerned because some Negroes are voting in a few counties,” protested Senator Ben Hilbun of Oktibbeha County, “we are going to disrupt our entire institutions of government.”

  THE MEREDITH marchers approached Grenada on national Flag Day, June 14, over crude KKK notices painted on the surface of Highway 51: “Red [sic] nigger and run. If you can’t red run anyway.” Through rainstorms, confusion, blisters, and petty harassment, assorted volunteers had covered roughly half the planned 200-mile route to the Mississippi capital in Jackson. Vincent Young, a bus driver from Brooklyn, used his annual vacation to wear out a pair of shoes while he carr
ied a hand-lettered sign: “No Viet Cong Ever Called Me Nigger.” A seventy-one-year-old white sharecropper’s daughter from Georgia wore a quaint sunbonnet as she helped a young black nurse from Belzoni hand out salt tablets, and the morning New York Times chronicled roadside debates over a pistol sighted at the previous campsite. “The movement is no place for guns,” said an “astounded” Methodist minister from New Jersey, but AME Bishop Charles Tucker suggested that anyone who failed to protect himself with arms “ought to take off his pants and wear skirts.” Ernest Thomas defended a compromise that allowed his Deacons to patrol after the march hours reserved for nonviolent discipline, and the Times mischievously quoted a staff marshal pleading for discretion: “If you want to discuss violence and nonviolence, don’t talk around the press.” Rev. Edwin King, the civil rights veteran from Tougaloo College, complained privately that most reporters had turned hostile “even to Martin.” Journalist Paul Good noted that only the Times showed interest in the primitive conditions among sharecroppers encountered along the way, and cited an explicitly jaundiced dispatch from the bellwether UPI newswire: “This march has become part movement, part circus. Among the 350-odd marchers…are about 50 white youths who wear T-shirts and denims, sandals and weird cowboy hats adorned with Freedom buttons…. ‘This is a great assembly of kooks,’ said a Mississippi Highway Patrolman. Most newsmen agreed.”

  Marchers broke into a spirited, hand-clapping dance over the Yalobusha River Bridge, singing, “Walk for your children, brother, make them free!” Crowds of Negro residents watched the first living presence of the civil rights movement ever to reach Grenada—“Population 12,000, and Still Growing”—a town tightly segregated from schoolhouses to the library. Many stared or waved. Some made halfhearted promises to join, and more than a few could not resist. “I was just looking,” said Tessie McCain, “and all of a sudden I was marching.” Several dropped out again before local white people could recognize them, but one Highway Patrolman estimated “about a mile of niggers” behind the parade downtown along Pearl Street. Robert Green interrupted his speech at the Confederate Memorial to wedge a small American flag behind the medallion of Jefferson Davis. “We’re tired of Confederate flags,” he shouted to audible gasps. “Give me the flag of the United States, the flag of freedom!” Andrew Young recorded a stab of worry that his friend Green, a Michigan State professor on loan to SCLC, was suffering a fit of suicidal bravado to live down his staid academic persona.

  Cheers grew slowly with relief that Highway Patrol officers seemed resigned to prevent rather than lead hothead retribution. Floyd McKissick of CORE tested the meaning of strange new signs that changed the dual public restrooms for both sexes from “white” and “colored” to “No. 1” and “No. 2.” Pointing to the Grenada County courthouse, he cried, “We’re going over to the toilets marked ‘No. 1,’ and see if it ain’t a little better.” Long lines quickly spilled across the lawn unmolested. With festive spontaneity, extra lines made sure the “No. 2” facilities were not reserved for white people, and new lines formed outside the registrar’s office. Nearly two hundred registered to vote before a celebration packed New Hope Missionary Baptist Church that night. “You’ve never had this town before, and now you’ve taken it over in a day,” shouted a warm-up speaker. “That’s freedom. So sing about it.” Fannie Lou Hamer led freedom songs. Martin Luther King returned from negotiations with a stunning announcement that Grenada County officials agreed to deputize six respected Negro teachers as registrars. “This, my friends, is our great opportunity,” he said, and began to preach: “Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.” Overnight, the county’s Negro registration doubled from 697 in a miracle of punctured fear. By contrast, wrote Paul Good, federal registrars in adjacent Carroll County waited “four straight days without a single Negro applicant appearing.”

  Euphoria was brief. Leaving staff members in Grenada to help a local movement, the strategy committee turned the march west into the Mississippi Delta, off Meredith’s planned route, hoping to dramatize feudal oppression in the plantation region. King drove to registration rallies at Charleston in Tallahatchie County, and Winona in Montgomery, then broke away on June 15 to tend the Chicago campaign for two days. By the time he left, reports from Grenada soured official Mississippi on the experiment to minimize embarrassing incidents with a show of tolerance. The march was “turning into a voter registration campaign,” Governor Paul Johnson told a hurried news conference. He reduced the Highway Patrol protection detail from twenty cruisers to four, and instructed local jurisdictions to take charge: “We aren’t going to wet-nurse a bunch of showmen all over the country.” That afternoon, Grenada police arrested the first volunteers who tried to integrate a movie theater, and civilians beat movement workers on the street without interference. A Confederate flag replaced Green’s radioactive symbol of the Union. To a catalogue of flagrant exhibits for segregation, Justice Department lawyers in town added shattered windows and four slashed tires on their own rented car.

  From Grenada, John Doar managed to file a U.S. lawsuit charging that officials had repulsed Negro voters illegally on June 7 at the polls in nearby Greenwood. The march columns were headed there, and Carmichael continued to receive favorable scouting reports on the two-day, thirty-mile trek down Highway 7. “They’re going wild for it,” said Willie Ricks, of the calculated message Carmichael used to win over his own central committee. Against strong SNCC sentiment to shun the Meredith march as another celebrity-driven “big show,” he proposed to make Mississippi’s poor black enclaves into a showcase for independent politics on the Lowndes County model, which he called “people relating to the concept of Black Power.” Hoping to borrow rather than fight or deny King’s mass appeal this time, Carmichael had persuaded a June 10 emergency session of the central committee to keep Forman in Atlanta, and he cross-examined colleagues nightly about their field tests of a new SNCC slogan, still doubting he could count on the response Ricks claimed for crowd-building speeches in familiar cotton fields and churches ahead. Greenwood had been a movement foothold since Bob Moses dared to enter the Delta in 1962. Carmichael himself had lived and gone to jail there as regional director for the 1964 Freedom Summer project. He knew the police chief, “Buff” Hammond, as a relative moderate, but their schoolyard encounter swiftly deteriorated on Thursday afternoon, June 16. Carmichael said police must be blocking the advance tent crews by mistake, as weary marchers had to camp at the only public space available to Negroes; Hammond said any assembly on the grounds of Stone Street Negro School required a permit from the all-white school board, which was closed. “We’ll put them up anyway,” Carmichael protested. Officers handcuffed him and two others.

  A historical moment teetered for six hours. By supper, King issued a statement from Chicago on the Mississippi crackdown. FBI wiretappers forwarded from New York to Washington Stanley Levison’s judgment that political pressure was hardening Governor Johnson, along with King’s comment that he “had expected something like this” because the “the police were too polite” and the march “just did not feel like Mississippi.” In Greenwood, where the morning Commonwealth warned against King as a hate-monger “who can be compared to Josef Stalin and Mao Tze Tung,” local officials thought better of dispersing his hordes. They reversed themselves to allow the school campsite, which added jolts of vindication to the mass meeting that night. Willie Ricks guided Carmichael to the speaker’s platform when he made bail, saying most of the locals remembered him fondly. “Drop it now!” he urged. “The people are ready.”

  Carmichael faced an agitated crowd of six hundred. “This is the 27th time I have been arrested,” he began, “and I ain’t going to jail no more!” He said Negroes should stay home from Vietnam and fight for black power in Greenwood. “We want black power!” he shouted five times, jabbing his forefinger downward in the air. “That’s right. That’s what we want, black power. We don’t have to be ashamed of it. We have stayed here. We have begged the president. We’ve begged
the federal government—that’s all we’ve been doing, begging and begging. It’s time we stand up and take over. Every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned down tomorrow to get rid of the dirt and the mess. From now on, when they ask you what you want, you know what to tell ’em. What do you want?”

  The crowd shouted, “Black power!” Willie Ricks sprang up to help lead thunderous rounds of call and response: “What do you want?” “Black power!”

  KING RETURNED to a movement flickering starkly in its public face. At the mass meeting on Friday, June 17, after a tense march to the Leflore County courthouse, Willie Ricks dueled Hosea Williams in alternate chants of “Black Power!” versus “Freedom!” On Saturday’s march past the tiny hamlet of Itta Bena—James Bevel’s hometown, three years after sharecroppers there had braved their first civil rights ceremony to mourn the assassination of Medgar Evers, only to be hauled from church by way of Greenwood jail to Parchman Penitentiary, where some were suspended by handcuffs from cell bars in the death house—King and Carmichael faced persistent interviews in motion down Highway 7 toward Belzoni. “What do you mean,” asked a broadcast reporter, “when you shout black power to these people back here?”

  “I mean,” Carmichael replied, “that the only way that black people in Mississippi will create an attitude where they will not be shot down like pigs, where they will not be shot down like dogs, is when they get the power where they constitute a majority in counties to institute justice.”

  “I feel, however,” King interjected, “that while believing firmly that power is necessary, that it would be difficult for me to use the phrase black power because of the connotative meaning that it has for many people.” Carmichael walked alongside, hands clasped behind his back with beguiling pleasantry. Both wore sunglasses.