At Canaan's Edge
Page 144
“No American is without responsibility,” King’s wire declared. “All are involved in the sorrow that rises from Selma to contaminate every crevice of our national life. The people of Selma will struggle on for the soul of the nation, but it is fitting that all Americans help to bear the burden. I call, therefore, on clergy of all faiths, representatives of every part of the country, to join me for a ministers’ march to Montgomery on Tuesday morning, March 9th. In this way all America will testify to the fact that the struggle in Selma is for the survival of democracy everywhere in our land.”
In the fifth Chicago settlement for SCLC’s Operation Breadbasket, Jesse Jackson reached agreement with the Bowman Dairy on July 22 to hire forty-five black workers in previously white positions.
The New York counsel for Avis Corporation described one of the rented vehicles for which Williams demanded an emergency replacement: “A subsequent close examination of the Ford indicated, in addition to extensive rear-end damage, that the front door locks had been jimmied, the glove compartment lock had been almost completely removed, the radio antenna had been removed, the radio was disconnected and was almost wholly removed from its place, the spare tire and jack were missing, the upholstery was extensively soiled and stained, and the interior filled with debris, papers, old clothes, and empty liquor bottles.”
The Vatican newspaper accepted Lennon’s apology in the simmering scandal, but apartheid South Africa banned Beatles music for blasphemy. In New York, police arrested two young women for threatening to jump from the twenty-second floor of the Americana Hotel unless granted a personal audience with their idols.
Carmichael expected H. Rap Brown to be SNCC’s only Alabama fieldworker after the 1966 election. Silas Norman had been drafted into the Army. Bob Moses, though nine years beyond draft age, fled conscription in August, and his future wife, Janet Jemmott, left Lowndes County eventually to join him for a decade of exile in Tanzania. Bob Mants also left, though he later settled in Lowndes. Newlywed Gloria Larry House went to Detroit with co-worker Stuart House on medical advice that their unborn baby would not survive her meager diet at the SNCC Freedom House. She became a Wayne State University professor.
The New York Times account conveyed skepticism about King’s linguistic goal: “He offered no explanation as to how this could be done.”
“Israel’s right to exist as a state in security is incontestable,” King wrote Morris Abram, president of the American Jewish Committee. “At the same time the great powers have the obligation to recognize that the Arab world is in a state of imposed poverty and backwardness that must threaten peace and harmony.”
* Joseph L. Searles. King’s lawyer Clarence Jones was an allied member through his partnership in a NYSE firm. Muriel Siebert became the first female member in 1967. Beneath the ownership level, Merrill Lynch had hired three black men in 1965 to integrate its sales force of 2,250 stockbrokers.
*Abernathy wrote King on January 18 from Saigon’s Hotel Caravelle, “I feel so empty away from you and our struggle for the freedom of our people,” adding a self-conscious superscript to his letter: “Please keep for the sake of history.”
* Moynihan complained to Bundy of “near demented Black militants,” who dominated a conference “so suffused with near madness as to begin to wonder whether I had not slipped my own moorings as well.”
Hampton, the first black executive hired by the Unitarian Universalist Association, later became creator and executive producer of Eyes on the Prize, an acclaimed television documentary series about the civil rights movement that aired on the Public Broadcasting System beginning in 1986.
Including Lester McKinney of SNCC, William Higgs of the MFDP, Rev. Jefferson Rogers of SCLC, and Hubert (Rap) Brown of the Nonviolent Action Group at Howard University.
McNamara here contradicted prevailing judgment. At Little Rock in 1957, and more so at Ole Miss in 1962, most of the violence occurred before rather than after the deployment of U.S. Army troops.
“Before saying any more about this,” Lippmann wrote that week, “let me say at once that this does not mean that we can or should withdraw our troops, abandon our clients in Saigon, retire from the theater and give up the effort to safeguard the independence of the Indochinese states.”
Johnson referred to the laws of 1957, 1960, and 1964, which ended a drought in civil rights acts since Reconstruction. He supported the first two as Senate Majority Leader, and signed the third as President.