At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  One feud snapped over car keys, as Carmichael battled Bill Ware and separatist colleagues who had spearheaded votes to expel white staff members at December’s Peg Leg Bates conference. When Ware’s Atlanta project refused to surrender a Plymouth from the tiny SNCC fleet, Sellers tracked down and hot-wired the car for a trip to Mississippi, but Carmichael had a flat tire on the way, and, lacking a trunk key to reach the spare, had to flag down a passing motorist to borrow a jack so he could hitchhike with the damaged tire in search of repair. When Sellers filed a police report to recover a commandeered station wagon, Ware denounced him for stooping to “a racist henchman cop of the white master Allen of Atlanta to settle an internal dispute between the supposedly black people of SNCC.” Ware’s telegram to James Forman threatened retribution for “calculated conspiracy to destroy the black ideology”: “We have tapes and other information that could fall into black people’s hands across the country.” Carmichael sent the Atlanta project a one-sentence reply: “You have been fired from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.” Elsewhere, he suspended the North Carolina project, closed dysfunctional support groups in Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and confided that staff members were dodging eviction in Washington, where “most of the equipment has been stolen from the office.”

  Other strains snapped when the program secretary caught his live-in girlfriend repeatedly in trysts with staff member Hubert G. Brown. Sellers cursed and beat her in a savage outburst—for which he would offer public contrition—shrieking that such betrayals tore apart SNCC’s already frayed network of trust. Brown, who had met with President Johnson as a student leader during the Selma crisis, supervised Alabama registration projects since Carmichael left to become SNCC chairman. Late in March, he addressed the second anniversary meeting of the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights. Brown somberly discussed the two recent arsons at movement churches, but he brightened with sly speculation about a subsequent arson of white property. “Lightning hit over here at Good Hope Presbyterian,” he cried, relishing hope above murmurs and laughter that the amazing coincidence “straightened things out in white folks’ minds.” SNCC worker Scott B. Smith took the floor to make a blunt speech. “I have learned how to hate,” he said. “I know how to hate.” An old man waved his cane to object that their mission was to make everybody “be better people, both white and colored.” Black Panther leaders John Hulett and Sidney Logan already had rolled a trailer onto the ashes of the anti-poverty site to rebuild homemade furniture for job classes, but vigilante mystery stirred. Logan’s baby bull was found shot in the head. Twenty cattle owned by Probate Judge Harrell Hammonds were poisoned, prompting hushed debate about whether it was Klan punishment for letting Panther candidates on the 1966 ballot or a black warning not to trust white moderates. When gifts of fresh beef arrived for the refugees still living in the tent city on Highway 80, Scott B. Smith hinted that African butchers had been recruited in the night from Tuskegee’s veterinary school, and there were rumors of bull genitals hung from Klan mailboxes. “Burning churches and killing cows ain’t going to do it,” Panther candidate Robert Logan told a mass meeting. “Our movement is stronger than ever.” Still, upstarts adopted a refrain of sarcastic swagger: “Yeah, lightning.”

  Stokely Carmichael issued a statement on the church burnings—“Black people are now serving notice that we will fight back”—and ended public remarks about arson with a vow: “We’ll all worship in one church or we’ll all worship outside.” These cryptic references, like Carmichael’s mixed reception on black campuses, failed to make news. Some students at Miles College in Birmingham called him a reverse supremacist and a “damned fool” for advocating an all-black faculty, while Carmichael scolded them for accepting a lame curriculum—“You are all a bunch of parrots”—and needled them for bourgeois self-absorption. (“Why are you here?” he asked females enrolled at Morgan State. “So you can kick down a door in the middle of the night to look for a pair of shoes?”) What registered beyond the halls was his daredevil cry against white America. At Tougaloo, reported the Baltimore Afro-American, “Carmichael’s strong anti-Vietnam statements set off almost five minutes of chanting, ‘We ain’t going, hell no!’” At Miles, reported the New York Times, he exhorted students to repudiate American law. Quoting Frederick Douglass, that there could be no freedom while slaves obeyed their masters, he won thunderous acclaim for his updated maxim: “If you want to be free, you’ve got to say, ‘To hell with the laws of the United States!’” The Nashville Banner vainly urged Vanderbilt to forestall a riot by barring Carmichael, and on the night after his departure, an unruly customer at Fisk’s dinner club sparked three days of altercation that left ninety students arrested and fifty injured, three of them shot by the five hundred anti-riot police still massed on high alert. The Tennessee House of Representatives passed a resolution that Carmichael should be deported regardless of his U.S. citizenship. Shouts of vindicated alarm from all sides prompted a New York Times editorial, “‘Black Power’ in Nashville,” cautioning that “it is not easy to determine if these disturbances were touched off by Mr. Carmichael’s fiery words or by the preceding effort to silence him.” This aura enveloped SNCC’s chairman through the Mobilization rally down into federal court later in April, accompanied by Hubert Brown, to appeal his far-fetched conviction for inciting Selma’s black voters to riot before the November election.

  DISTANT ADMIRERS of the Lowndes County movement launched a spectacular debut on May 2, one day after Cleveland Sellers refused Army service. They created an icon for the era, offered in tribute, but they could scarcely have imagined better images to conceal their inspiration from rural Alabama. Commotion riveted the California Assembly when a wall of reporters and photographers banged backward through the doors, facing the bearers of shotguns and rifles who had asked directions to the second-floor chamber in Sacramento. Legislators gasped in mid-debate. Many of them scattered as two dozen young black men pressed forward with guns pointed toward the ceiling, several in leather jackets and black berets, accompanied by six unarmed black women. One intruder loudly proclaimed citizens’ protest of a gun control bill endorsed by “the racist Oakland police” as officers converged into standoff. Defenders risked grabbing some but not all the stone-faced men, and discovered their weapons to be fully loaded, before a deal permitted Bobby Seale to read aloud a founding manifesto that denounced “the racist power structure of America” for historical repression of nonwhite people from native Indians to the Vietnamese: “The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense believes that the time has come for Black people to arm themselves against this terror before it is too late.” Seale’s group then withdrew under an exit truce across the capitol lawn, past news cameras and gaping tourists, including an eighth-grade social studies class on a field trip with chaperones. A huge cruiser posse arrested twenty-six of the retreating demonstrators near a gas station four blocks away.

  Such was the “colossal event” conceived by manifesto author Huey P. Newton, a twenty-five-year-old emigrant from Louisiana named for its late flamboyant governor Huey P. “Kingfish” Long. To defend followers in their showcase criminal trial, Newton invested his first Black Panther speaking fee in a pound of marijuana, which he cut into “nickel bags” for sale from the back of his roving Volkswagen. Issuing strict orders for his small, militarized command to resist targeted stops by Oakland police—“We don’t give up our guns, we don’t give up our dope”—he set a pattern for clashes until his own murder for drug debts outside a crack cocaine house in 1989. By contrast, Newton’s instant fame spread romantic theories about revolutionary violence. One New York Times profile—“A Gun Is Power, Black Panther Says”—explained his rationale for storming the Assembly. A longer article, which introduced the poster photograph of Newton staring with scepter and carbine from a flared cane-back throne, explored his debt to the writings of Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Mao Zedong. A front-page survey on May 7—“The New Left Turns to Mood of Violence
in Place of Protest”—observed that the Argentine guerrilla Che Guevara gave burgeoning white activists across the country their own ethnic model in the mold of Malcolm X and Huey Newton. “When we have organized the white radicals, we can link up with the Negro radicals,” said Students for a Democratic Society leader Greg Calvert, who announced an active campaign to foment urban sedition. “We aren’t a bunch of liberal do-gooders,” claimed William Pepper of the more moderate Vietnam Summer coalition. “We are revolutionary.” The Times reporter noted parenthetically that New Leftists rejected liberal as “a dirty word.”

  The birth of Oakland’s Black Panthers resonated also in mainstream politics. It guaranteed passage of the bill Bobby Seale denounced before the Assembly, as Governor Reagan soon would sign new firearm restrictions with an extra provision banning weapons in public places, but Pyrrhic victory for gun control already had backfired on a grander scale. Less than a week after the sensational scare in California, officers of the National Rifle Association made front-page headlines—“Rifle Club Sees Guns As Riot Curb”—with a counterpoint study showing Negro involvement in nine of eleven selected mob actions, arguing without historical precedent that armed private citizens “could prove essential” to maintain public order. The NRA harvested fear across the color line while crusading for unfettered weaponry as vociferously as the Black Panthers, and Governor Reagan gained political stature from the specter of Huey Newton’s guns. Appearing on the traumatized capitol grounds just as Bobby Seale drove away, he reassured voters by keeping a picnic date with the social studies class. Poise in crisis elevated a battered new governor who was roiling his political base with the largest state tax increase in history and the first major law to permit “therapeutic” abortion. (“I had been led to believe there was a honeymoon period,” Reagan quipped, “but evidently I lost the license on the way to the church.”) Now he renewed attacks on “central casting anarchists” with the authority of a candidate who had vowed to clamp down on unruliness from Watts to Berkeley. On May 15, debating Robert Kennedy in a town forum televised from London, Reagan said protest undermined domestic hope and prolonged war abroad. While Kennedy defended difficult ground—disputing students who called U.S. intervention immoral, groping for peace talks and elections (“Can you deliver the North Vietnamese?”), confronting urgent complexity from “a heritage of 150 years we’ve been unjust to our minority groups”—Reagan said the problem “lies in the hearts of men,” and pictured welcome change since his early years in radio when “the rulebook called baseball ‘a game for Caucasian gentlemen.’” He imagined a bright future “if the Berlin Wall should disappear.” Surprised reviewers thought the disparaged rookie governor held his own with his simple story lines.

  ON MAY 12, at Paschal’s Motor Hotel in Atlanta, some colleagues rolled their eyes when Stokely Carmichael told a crowded press conference he was “stepping down” from tedious administrative duty to resume his preferred post as a grassroots field organizer. In truth he enjoyed little support for reelection to head SNCC, even from those who valued his charisma and agreed with his black power stand. Many thought he had subverted their brotherhood collective with showmanship, popularizing the derisive term “honky” for white people and mocking the politic piety that good Negroes looked to them only for friendship: “The white woman’s not queen of the world—she can be made like anything else.” SNCC women in particular thought Carmichael succumbed to shooting-star celebrity that mistook headlines and saucy clichés for a political program. Executive Secretary Ruby Doris Smith had upbraided him most directly, and was dearly missed at the gloomy Atlanta elections because she was dying swiftly at twenty-five of virulent lymphosarcoma. The new chairman, who emerged from the compromise between urban separatists and those who still pushed for electoral black power in the tattered rural projects, was introduced to the press as H. Rap Brown, having dampened the given name Hubert in favor of a movement nickname earned with rare talent to “rap” poetic in assorted dialects. (His spontaneous routines had supplied free entertainment for the Alabama wedding reception of Gloria Larry and Stuart House.) A first intelligence report on the new SNCC officers gleaned no prior FBI information about Brown. Reporters asked if the new chairman would generate publicity like Carmichael. “Hopefully not,” he replied.

  Rap Brown presided over a review of personnel that consumed two more days. The central committee sifted the status of dissenters, casualties, and slackers (“It was difficult to get her out of bed”), along with faint hopes to harness Carmichael’s world travel now that he dwarfed SNCC itself in the media. Late on May 14, when tension finally wore down avoidance, Bob Zellner was admitted to address the troublesome petition for him and his wife, Dorothy, to work in the white community under SNCC sponsorship. The question was whether a project of arm’s-length cooperation would accommodate the white exclusion policy set at the Peg Leg Bates conference. “I think I have gotten over the emotional stage,” Zellner nervously told a dozen peers seated before him. “I am not completely tied up emotionally, but I do want some things to be settled.”

  Disputes surfaced about whether the central committee possessed authority to revise what had been decided by the hazy votes in New York. Some questioned Zellner about the evolution of SNCC’s purpose, and most who favored the project itself wobbled on his incorporated request to affirm SNCC membership. When Bill Hall of Tuskegee tried to separate the issues, wondering if white workers might be retained on the staff but excluded from policy meetings, Zellner asked to speak before being excused for the vote. “We don’t have to go into the history of my relationship,” he said, boiling down a statement his wife had submitted for them, “but I feel and have always felt that SNCC was as much a part of me as anybody else, and that I was SNCC and will always be SNCC…. I will not accept any sort of restrictions or special categories because of race. We do not expect other people to do that in this country, and I will not accept it for myself.”

  With Zellner waiting again outside, Rap Brown opened debate “in the light of our hope to become a revolutionary force and also in light of the fact that this may occur again and again.” Tortured clashes echoed segregationist dynamics. While defending the exclusion policy as necessary, one speaker criticized implementation thus far as “very sloppy and kind of barbaric.” Bill Hall, drawing analogies to the anti-colonial war in Algeria, said the question was not Zellner’s race but whether he could subordinate his identity to be used “as a technician” in the event of armed black struggle. Fay Bellamy considered it “very unfair of Bob Zellner” to bring sentiment and personal history into a political question, saying he should recognize the public disadvantage of having even one white person on a committee devoted to black power. “Now it shouldn’t make any difference,” she conceded, “but it does.” Ralph Featherstone, newly elected to replace Cleveland Sellers, agreed with Hall but cautioned that Zellner had more than nostalgia on his side. “In principle, Bob is right,” he said. “When we say that whites should not make policy about black communities, that is a two-way street.” Stanley Wise, newly elected to replace Ruby Doris Smith, quoted Frederick Douglass on gaining the upper hand—“it is absolutely crucial that we strike the first blow”—proposing to look past unfortunate regrets to build the capacity for all-black decisions, “but, as Fay said, understanding that there is no racism involved.”

  James Forman, visibly agitated, said, “I think we are confusing some things. Bob is my best friend.” When a voice above the hubbub taunted, “You said the same thing about Fay the other day,” Forman’s explosion silenced the room: “That is right, goddammit! I have two best friends!” He thundered that Zellner had every right to be emotional, evoking his long service since police in the primitive McComb of 1961 had beaten Zellner into jail with Bob Moses and SNCC chairman Charles McDew, but Forman calmed to recommend that the membership question be deferred until the next meeting of the full staff. Bill Ware moved instead to offer everything except a staff vote, but others denounced another “shuckin
g and jiving proposal” they felt would expose SNCC to Zellner’s rejection of second-class citizenship. Speakers wrestled with contradictions until they collapsed behind a countermotion to sever membership entirely. Before Zellner was resummoned, Forman browbeat his colleagues to clarify that the vote applied to all white people and not merely the one “who had the guts to come before this body.” Rap Brown prefaced a terse verdict by quoting to Zellner his own promise that SNCC bonds could not be broken, then added: “The only thing that is being cut is your privilege as a staff member.”

  “I think it is a mistake, but that is among us,” Zellner replied. Promising silence to the press, he asked only for the recorded transcript of his words to assure his wife that he had stood firm through what she would call the worst experience of her life. SNCC’s leaders veered from searing fatigue with their original principles toward uncertain new revolution, and soon would lose the remaining black members, too.

  A RAW egg splattered Dr. Benjamin Spock outside the White House on May 17. Police hauled away one counterdemonstrator who called him a traitor, and Spock kept vigil for three days among two hundred Mobilization supporters. James Bevel and Coretta King stood with him jammed against locked gates, trying to deliver an unanswered appeal for President Johnson to meet with the leadership of the April 15 protests. Coretta represented her husband, who was promoting the voter registration drive in Cleveland. Bevel had talked his way into Washington’s St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Secret Service officials privately advised, where undercover agents observed that a rector favored for worship services by President Johnson “actively participated” in strategy sessions as “Bevel made numerous inflammatory remarks.” The Mobilization leaders scheduled a follow-up national protest for October 21, centered in Washington. On May 19, a polling analysis assured the President that 70 percent of Americans and nearly half of Negroes disagreed with King on Vietnam. The study issued a caveat, however, based on “sketchy data” about his brief antiwar push since April: “Dr. King may well have within his power a capability of influencing between a third to one half of all Negro voters behind a candidate he might endorse for President in 1968.”