After the Tall Timber

by Renata Adler

  After an invocation by a rabbi and speeches by the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, the crowd turned away from the Confederate and Alabama state flags flying from the capitol, faced its own American flags, and sang the national anthem. At its close, the Reverend Theodore Gill, president of the San Francisco Theological Seminary, looked before and behind him and said a simple prayer: “Forgive us our trespasses.” One marcher applauded, and was immediately hushed. Then there was the succession of speeches, most of them eloquent, some of them pacific (“Friends of freedom,” said Whitney Young, of the Urban League), others militant (“Fellow Freedom Fighters,” said John Lewis, of SNCC), and nearly all of them filled with taunts of Governor Wallace as the list of grievances, intimidations, and brutalities committed by the state piled up.

  “This march has become a rescue operation,” Charles Mauldin said quietly to a friend as the speeches continued. “Most of those Negroes along the way have joined us, and although this Wallace-baiting sounds like a little boy whose big brother has come home, standing outside a bully’s window to jeer, these Negroes are never going to be so afraid of the bully again. When the bill goes through, they’re going to vote, and the white men down here are going to think twice before they try to stop them. Big brothers have come down from the North and everywhere, and they’ve shown that they’re ready and willing to come down again. I don’t think they’re going to have to.”

  “It’s good that even a few of the civil-rights talkers have joined us,” said another marcher. “When those people feel they have to climb on the bandwagon, you know you’re on the way to victory.”

  As one speaker followed another, as Ralph Bunche, who had marched for two full days, and A. Philip Randolph spoke, the civil-rights leaders saluted one another and gave signs of patching up their differences. (Mr. Abernathy, second-in-command of SCLC, slipped once and said, “Now here’s James Peck, for James Farmer, to tell us whether CORE is with us.” Peck ignored the implications of the “whether” and spoke as eloquently as the rest.) The crowd applauded politely throughout but gave no sign of real enthusiasm. SCLC and SNCC leaders seemed to be equally popular, but the NAACP and the Urban League, more active in other states than in Alabama, seemed to require a little help from Mr. Abernathy (“Now let’s give a big hand to . . .”) to get their applause. Some of the marchers crawled forward under the press tables and went to sleep. A Japanese reporter, who had been taking notes in his own language, seized one of the marchers as he crawled under a table, “What do you think of all this?” the reporter asked. “I think it’s good,” the marcher said. Some fell asleep in their places on Dexter Avenue. (Perhaps remembering the mob scenes of the night before, the crowd left its members ample breathing space in front of the capitol.) A scuffle broke out between marchers and white bystanders in front of Klein’s Jewelry Store, but no one was seriously hurt. It rained a little, and Charles Mauldin said, “Wallace is seeing the clouds.”

  Albert Turner, of Marion, where Jimmie Lee Jackson was murdered, said from the platform, “I look worse than anybody else on this stage. That’s because I marched fifty miles.” Then he read the black voting statistics from Perry County. When he said, “We are not satisfied,” the crowd gave him a rousing cheer. He looked down at his orange jacket and smiled. Mrs. Amelia Boynton spoke; during the previous demonstrations, she had been kicked and beaten, and jailed, for what some members of the press have come to call “resisting assault.” She read the petition, mentioning the “psychotic climate” of the State of Alabama, that a delegation of marchers was seeking to present to Governor Wallace, and she was roundly applauded. Near the end of the ceremony, Rosa Parks, the “Mother of the Movement,” who had set off Dr. King’s first demonstration when she was jailed for refusing to yield her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, received the most enthusiastic cheers of all. “Tell it! Tell! Tell!” some of the marchers shouted. “Speak! Speak!” Finally, after an extravagant introduction by Mr. Abernathy, who referred to Dr. King as “conceived by God” (“This personality cult is getting out of hand,” said a college student, and, to judge by the apathetic reception of Mr. Abernathy’s words, the crowd agreed), Dr. King himself spoke. There were some enthusiastic yells of “Speak! Speak!” and “Yessir! Yessir!” from the older members of the audience when Dr. King’s speech began, but at first the younger members were subdued. Gradually, the whole crowd began to be stirred. By the time he reached his refrains—“Let us march on the ballot boxes . . . . We’re on the move now . . . . How long? Not long”—and the final ringing “Glory, glory, hallelujah!” the crowd was with him entirely.

  The director of the march, Hosea Williams, of SCLC, said some concluding words, remarking that there should be no lingering in Montgomery that night and exhorting the crowd to leave quietly and with dignity. There was a last rendition of “We Shall Overcome.” Within ten minutes, Dexter Avenue was cleared of all but the press and the troopers.

  A few hours later, the delegation and its petition were turned away by Governor Wallace. At the airport, where there had been some difficulty during the preceding days (an uncanny number of suitcases belonging to marchers were mislaid by the airlines), new flights had been scheduled to get the marchers out of Montgomery. Still, many marchers had to wait at the airport all night long. They rested on the floor, and on the lawn outside, and as often as the police cleared them away they reappeared and fell asleep again. Word came that Mrs. Viola Liuzzo had been shot. Some of the marchers went back to Selma at once. Others boarded planes for home. At the Montgomery airport exit was a permanent official sign reading “Glad You Could Come. Hurry Back.”

  The New Yorker

  April 10, 1965

  Originally titled “Letter from Selma”

  FLY TRANS-LOVE AIRWAYS

  ON A LITTLE patch of land just outside the city limits of Los Angeles, on that portion of Sunset Boulevard which is called Sunset Strip, there is a large billboard that advertises a casino in Las Vegas. Set on top of the billboard, dressed in red boots, long red gloves, and black-and-white striped panties attached across the midriff to a red bikini top, is an immense, pink plaster chorus girl. One of her arms is bent, hand slightly forward and upraised, at the elbow. Her other arm extends, fingers outstretched, behind. One of her knees is raised. The other leg is the one she stands and slowly, continuously rotates on. Diagonally southwest across the street from the girl, much nearer the ground, on a little pedestal, another figure in red gloves, striped panties, and red top rotates in a similar pose. It is Bullwinkle the Moose. Somewhere west of the girl and east of the moose, the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Police Department ends and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s territory begins. Since the Strip was for a good part of its history a center of gambling and prostitution, it has always remained part of the “county island” of West Hollywood, and resisted incorporation into the City of Los Angeles. For tax reasons, and perhaps because of rumors that the gambling, at least, will be allowed to return, it resists incorporation now. Very near this border outpost, on a recent Saturday night, a small band of Dickensian characters—two tall, pale women with thin, reddish hair; one short, stout, bustling brunette; and four men, rather unsteady on their feet—set up a portable loud-speaker system on the sidewalk and began to preach. Several boys and girls who had been sitting quietly on two of the benches that line the Strip at bus stops, and several others, who had been leaning against the white picket fence that surrounds a small pink-and-yellow café called Pandora’s Box—closed, like several other rock-’n’-roll and cherry-Coke establishments, by the police, on account of some recent disturbances—gathered around to watch. One of them wore a kind of harlequin cap with many floppy, green earlike appendages, from each of which there hung a silver bell. Another wore blue jeans, a suede jacket, an undershirt, a mauve tie, and a top hat. Two wore gray Confederate jackets. Several wore wooly vests over shirts with leather laces at the collar—open to reveal striped turtleneck jerseys underneath. Nearly all wore slacks cut quite low at the hip
s, and one wore a lumberjacket. Although the night was quite cold, three were barefoot, and one had on apparently homemade red-and-black slippers turned up at the toes. The rest wore boots. All of them stood in a loose but attentive cluster a bit to one side of the preaching band.

  “My happiest moment,” a man who was missing a front tooth was saying, with a practiced homiletic quaver, into the microphone, “was when I saw myself a sinner. I traded in my sins for Jesus, and, believe me, I got the best of the deal.” The teen-agers drifted a short way off, and the speaker raised his voice. “I know you young people,” he said. “You talk dirty and your minds are dirty. You don’t want no one to have a claim on you. You don’t want to be obligated. But you’re obligated, sinners, because there is a God above.”

  “How do you know?” asked the boy in the top hat.

  “Because I love God,” the man said hoarsely; and as he continued to preach, one of the tall, pale women went about nudging the teen-agers and offering them inspirational tracts—among them a green one entitled “7 Communists Go Singing Into Heaven.”

  A Los Angeles patrol car, containing two helmeted policemen staring straight ahead, cruised by.

  “Why don’t they ask these hypocrites to move along?” a barefoot girl in a shaggy sweater, slacks, and yachting cap said, in a bitter voice. “They’re blocking the sidewalk. They’re trying to incite us to riot. They’re obviously winos. How come The Man never hassles anyone but the longhairs?”

  “I want to listen to this,” said a short, plump girl beside her. “I haven’t had such a treat in years.” Suddenly, she slung her large leather purse over her shoulder, pulled a few strands of hair over one eye, and, raising the other eyebrow, began to walk slowly and suggestively back and forth in front of the speaker, who turned sideways.

  “This bearded sinner tells me he is Jewish,” the speaker said, pointing to a young man wearing black slacks and a black shirt, with a pair of what appeared to be calipers hung on a string around his neck. “Well, I want to tell you about the greatest Jew that ever walked the earth . . . .”

  “Yodel, Billy,” the barefoot girl in the yachting cap said to the young man in black. He began to yodel. The gap-toothed man continued to preach. The tall, pale woman continued to distribute pamphlets. The short, plump girl continued to walk back and forth. A bus pulled up in front of the benches, and a gray-haired, stolid-looking couple, evidently tourists, got laboriously out.

  “O Lord, O Lord, O Lord, here they are, Henry, will you look at them,” the lady said, smoothing down the skirt of her dress and looking directly at the girl in the yachting cap. “I’m glad I raised mine right.”

  “What are you looking at, you old bag?” the short, plump girl asked, standing still for a moment.

  The couple began to walk away.

  “It’s Sonny and Cher,” the boy in the top hat said as they passed him. “I’d know them anywhere.”

  The gap-toothed man had leaned away from his microphone and was now addressing the group in a rather intimate tone about “your dirty, filthy sins and your unclean habits.”

  The boy in the lumberjacket, who had been looking for some time at the girl in the yachting cap, suddenly walked over and took her hand. He led her wordlessly to a point directly in front of the man who was speaking, and kissed her. When, after several minutes, they looked up, the gap-toothed man (although he watched them with apparent fascination) was still preaching, so they kissed again and remained in each other’s arms until the sound of a guitar farther down the street—in front of a café called the Fifth Estate—caused the teen-age group to disperse and drift toward the music.

  “Before you go to bed this very night . . .” the speaker was saying, as the young longhairs walked away. And several of them tried—with such phrases as “turn on,” “freak out,” and “take the pill”—to complete his sentence for him.

  What seems to have brought the Strip to its present impasse—it is practically deserted but for these little evangelical bands of elderly squares and young longhairs, bent on mutual conversion—was an economic battle with, and over, teen-agers; and what apparently drew the teen-agers to the Strip in the first place was a musical development. In the late fifties and early sixties, by all accounts, the Strip was dull. The old, expensive restaurants, left over from the golden days of Hollywood, were in a steep decline. Near the middle of the Strip, there was (and still is) an attractive stretch of clothing and antique shops called Sunset Plaza, but the rest was lined (and is) with hot-dog stands, car-rental agencies, and billboards—changed with the rapidity of flash cards—advertising casinos, airlines, films, and mortuaries.

  Then, in 1963, a southern California surf-rock group, the Beach Boys, acquired a national reputation, and, beginning in 1964, the Los Angeles area—with Sonny and Cher, the Byrds, the Mamas and the Papas, the Lovin’ Spoonful, and such indigenous and locally popular groups as Love, the Seeds, Iron Butterfly, and Buffalo Springfield—became a center for all kinds of rock. Phil Spector, the record producer, set up offices on the Strip; a huge teen dance hall called the Hullabaloo opened down the boulevard; and a number of night clubs on the Strip went rock. This drew—in addition to the teen-age clientele—some established, serious longhairs from the two-car bohemia in the canyons above the boulevard, more serious longhairs from the less affluent bohemias of Venice and Long Beach, and some motorcycle groups. The motorcycle groups were soon dispersed; a hint from a Sunset Plaza merchants’ association caused red no-parking lines to be painted all along the curb where the motorcyclists were accustomed to park, and a hot-dog stand called the Plush Pup put up a sign announcing that complaints from neighbors had made it impossible for the place to welcome guests on motorcycles. The serious longhairs were soon made uncomfortable, too; some of their favorite haunts, like the Trip and the Action, were closed for various reasons, and the Strip itself became a very difficult place for the marijuana, drug, or LSD users among them to make a connection.

  The serious longhairs returned—temporarily, at least—to their beaches and canyons; the teen-agers, however, remained awhile. The notorious sprawl of Los Angeles—where, for example, it may take a maid two and a half hours to make her way by bus from Watts to Beverly Hills—leaves the city at night diffused and lifeless. The Strip became a kind of Main Street where the young (who drove or hitched a ride from the surrounding area) could spend their time. They soon came in such numbers that they brought traffic nearly to a halt. Restaurant proprietors on the Strip, who saw their business dwindling even further, took steps. All last summer, invoking an old city-and-county curfew law that prohibits people under eighteen from lingering on the street after 10 P.M., the sheriff’s men were stopping people with long hair or wearing unusual clothes to demand identification (draft cards, driver’s licenses), as proof of age. In addition, a number of ad-hoc ordinances were put into effect. Twenty-one is the legal drinking age in California, but people eighteen and over had for years been welcome to dance at rock establishments with liquor licenses, where the minors got Cokes, while drinks were served to their elders; under a new ordinance, no one under twenty-one was permitted to dance in a place where liquor was served.

  The Whisky a Go Go, once an important center for West Coast rock and one of the few places on the Strip to survive this legal maneuver, tried several solutions, in series. First, it continued serving liquor and put minors on benches in the balcony, but the young customers, who wanted to dance, went elsewhere. Then it stopped serving liquor and raised its admission price from two dollars to three; the minors came back, but the attractive liquor profits were lost. A few weeks ago, the Whisky enlarged its stage to occupy the entire dance floor, which means that there is no room to dance while a live performance is on. It also raised the price of admission to three-fifty, started serving liquor again, and required guests between eighteen and twenty-one to have their hands marked with an ultraviolet stamp, so that they would be easily identifiable as below drinking and dancing age. At the same time, the Whisky’s ent
ertainment went Motown—a change that the teen-agers, for complicated reasons of their own, associate with the return of the Mafia and Las Vegas interests to the Strip. (Young longhairs are almost unanimous in their conviction that they were cleared off the Strip to make room for more serious, less conspicuous forms of vice than lingering after curfew.) In any case, the Whisky’s action could only make teen-agers feel less welcome there. Throughout the spring and summer, licenses permitting minors to be served anything at all were revoked at one place after another; several of these places reluctantly went adult and topless—a change that seemed to cause the authorities no distress. Gradually, the campaign worked. Few but the hardiest or most lost teen-agers cared to risk the “hassle” that awaited them on the Strip.

  Then, just before Halloween, two high-school students mimeographed a hundred leaflets announcing a “demonstration” for the evening of November 12, 1966, in front of Pandora’s Box, to protest “Police Mistreatment of Youth,” and Al Mitchell, a former seaman in the merchant marine who runs the Fifth Estate, gave them the money to print a few thousand more. Mitchell, a moderate-looking man in his middle forties, had shot a film about the striking grape pickers of California, and he was preparing Blue Fascism, a documentary about the Los Angeles Police Department, at the time the leaflets were put out. On November 12, a crowd of thousands—high-school students, dropouts, New Left university students, parolees from a nearby reform school, serious longhairs, squares, runaways, sympathizers, passersby, and the merely curious—gathered in front of Pandora’s Box, and Mitchell got more footage than he had anticipated. The crowd, through its sheer size, stopped traffic for a considerable period, and a few of its members caused a total of a hundred and fifty-eight dollars’ worth of damage to a bus and a liquor store. (In a demonstration some weeks before, several UCLA football fans—disappointed that USC rather than their own team had been invited to the Rose Bowl—stopped every single car on the San Diego Freeway, ostensibly to see whether there were any USC students inside; the UCLA fans probably caused more damage, and certainly caused less outrage, than the crowd outside Pandora’s Box.)