The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  “Someday it won’t be that way any more,” Claude put in.

  “Man! I would live one thousand years to see that time come, man,” said McKinley.

  When John had rejoined us, and we were on our way to the church, I asked him if his parents had had anything special to say about his again participating in a protest.

  “ ‘Get your chores finished first, boy,’ they say, same as always. And then, ‘Be careful, Son,’ ” he replied.

  “Mine always say, ‘Remember, prayer is the most important thing,’ ” said Billy.

  · · ·

  It was now two o’clock. I was feeling a little tense, and said so. “You’re shaky because it’s the first time,” Billy told me comfortingly. “I was, too, my first time. But just a turn or two up and down the line and you feel all right again. What’s real hard, and you have to learn to do, is to accept inside of you all those things people do to you that you ordinarily wouldn’t take. They call you names. They throw ammonia on you. They even spit in your face—that’s the worst.”

  “Don’t the police make them stop?” I asked.

  “The police don’t see so good,” said Claude.

  “The police is nootral,” said John.

  “One time we felt real bad,” Billy said. “It was real cold, and a white man with a long scraggly beard and a raggedy coat came up to us on the line with a carton of hot coffee and cups, and wanted to treat us. We had to refuse him. We didn’t know what might be in that coffee, and we just couldn’t trust anybody we didn’t know.”

  On Fayetteville Street, the main artery of the Negro section, Claude stopped the car before St. Joseph’s Church, a large brick building with tall stained-glass windows. We all got out, and I followed the boys through the swirling snow into a windowless room in the basement of the parish house, which served as their headquarters. It contained rows of folding chairs facing a long table; a battered piano; a mantel with a tissue-paper rose stuck in a mirror over it; and a counter, behind which were an icebox and a stove. On the front wall, between a conventionalized pastel picture of Christ and an American flag, was a blackboard chalked with “Rules for Decorum Around the Church.” Against one wall stood three or four dozen hand-lettered signs. Claude began examining them. “These are the ones we used in the sit-ins,” he said. “We’ve changed a word here and there so we can use them again.” The other boys busied themselves at the long table. Billy and Ned, the white Duke student, who had just arrived, were trying to remember the exact wording of the oath the students had taken the previous year, before the sit-ins began, because they were to repeat it today. John was outlining the statements that he and Claude, as the group’s spokesmen, would make to reporters. Other problems were swiftly solved. It was decided that John, Billy, Claude, and Ned were to superintend the picketing, while Bruce was to stay at the church and move the shifts of pickets off to the theatres at the proper intervals. There was to be a maximum of around forty pickets at one time, divided between the two theatres, but this strength would probably not be reached until the college students joined in. “We’re going to have mostly young ladies at first, and it’s going to be pretty cold on those lines, so we’ll have to use half-hour shifts,” John said.

  The problem that now concerned the boys most was how to get the pickets from the church to the theatres, almost a mile away. Billy still had his heart set on the “solemn march” that the police had forbidden. “Not down the middle of the street,” he said, renewing his appeal, “but just two by two, quiet and serious and peaceful along the sidewalk. You couldn’t call that a parade.”

  “The police could,” said Claude.

  “Suppose we don’t have a parade,” someone said. “Suppose we just go over to the other side of town separately. If we don’t have a parade, we don’t get arrested.”

  “If we don’t do nothin’, we don’t get arrested, either,” said Billy. “Attorney McKissick says no matter how hard we try not to, we’ll probably have some arrests eventually. If a lot of people collect, there’s jostling, and then we can get arrested for obstructing the sidewalk.”

  “I don’t anticipate trouble or arrests at first,” said Ned. “Not till the news gets around.”

  “We don’t want arrests any time,” said John. “We got to be especially careful to keep moving and not block anybody when we change shifts—that’s the bad time.”

  Finally, it was agreed that the pickets would proceed to the theatres more or less as Billy had proposed—“quiet and serious and peaceful along the sidewalk,” but not in any formation the police could object to, and with no overt demonstrations.

  · · ·

  It was now a little after three o’clock, and young people with schoolbooks under their arms were beginning to arrive. They stood around chatting in groups, or sat down on the straight chairs with sober expectancy. There were girls dressed in wool plaid skirts, gay sweaters, and warm, bright-colored coats, and others wearing much washed cotton frocks and thin, unlined raincoats. There were a few North Carolina College girls with stylish coiffures and costume jewelry, and junior-high-school students with braids and bobby socks. Boys wearing fur-lined gloves and sturdy new parkas greeted lads in frayed slacks and grimy pullovers. On one side of me, a tall, gangling youth in ill-fitting clothes was studying a chemistry book. On the other side, bouncing about on her chair in a high state of excitement, a plump teenager chattered with three companions. A young man with a large, handsome head and sad, staring eyes slowly pushed his way through the crowd, a white cane in his hand. He was guided to a seat in the row behind me by a spindly boy in glasses, who told me later that his friend had a beautiful singing voice, and also that he had learned at Durham Business College to take dictation on the typewriter at the rate of fifty words a minute. The blind boy, though he would not be able to join the picket line, stayed throughout the meeting, his head cocked to the discussion.

  A very young white girl with blond hair and a demure, animated face, framed by a little black hood, had come in, and now stood laughing with Claude and Billy. Presently, Claude led her over to me. She was the Durham High School girl who had originally made all the picket signs. I complimented her on her work, and asked her how she had happened to become interested in the desegregation activities. Last spring, she said, one of the Negro girls at her school had invited her to a meeting at which Roy Wilkins, the Executive Secretary of the N.A.A.C.P., had spoken. “I have awfully strong feelings about this,” she said. “I moved here from New Jersey, and there’s a lot of injustice back there, too, you know. Why, you can tell when you are in the Negro section of a town just by the condition of the sidewalks. Quite a few white kids at our school feel bad, too, but not enough to risk their popularity. I just feel much better when I’m doing something about it.”

  A dozen white students from Duke had arrived, in spite of a mimeographed appeal, which one of them showed me, issued by the predominantly anti-segregation Christian Action Commission of the university’s Methodist Student Center, suggesting that sympathetic students wait until after exams to picket, because “academic failure on the part of any student involved would enable the university legitimately to call the protests into question.” Among those from Duke was a lively, dark-eyed young woman who, I learned, was the co-chairman of a Human Relations Coordinating Committee made up of undergraduates from Duke and North Carolina College. She had taken part in both the picketing and the sit-ins of the past year, and she told me about the attention given to the Duke girls involved in the demonstrations. “People decided we were either riffraff or Communists,” she said. “The old ladies with pursed-up mouths were the worst. ‘She’s just trying to get men,’ they’d say, or, ‘Poor thing, I guess she doesn’t have a mother.’ Sometimes they’d even shout, ‘Who are you sleeping with?’ The times we were most apt to have serious trouble were Saturdays, when people from the back hills came to town. Still, you’d be surprised at the number of white women who whispered, ‘Keep it up. I’m for you!’ ” Though the Duke
girls had occasionally undergone some heckling at college from male students, and particularly from those who were members of the more fashionable fraternities, she went on, many Southern girls had expressed their regret that, out of loyalty to their parents—who were, after all, paying for their education—they could not join the movement. “But they’d do without Cokes or movies, and contribute that money to our fund,” she said. The police, she felt, had on the whole behaved correctly. “Of course, tempers got short sometimes when the weather was hot, and then there were little harassments. We were nagged to shorten or lengthen our lines, to slow up or speed up, and so on. Sometimes new policemen were a little rough. But we finally learned to report such incidents. We got results, too.”

  A Negro man sitting nearby, who, I learned, was a member of the North Carolina College Education Department and had accompanied his daughter to the church, began chatting with the Duke girl about the college students’ part in the movement. When the white girl remarked that she hoped to bring Duke and North Carolina College students together in greater numbers, he said, “Don’t do anything special. Let it come naturally. There’s been too much special done for too long.” The girl looked a little surprised, and he explained, “For two hundred years now, the American Negro has been assigned a special position. People do special things for us, pay us special attention. We don’t want special attention any more. All we ask is to be recognized as just Americans—free to be accepted or rejected on an individual basis, like other Americans, and not because we are part of a particular group.”

  · · ·

  Now John, sitting at the center of the long table, with Claude, Bruce, Billy, and Ned about him, raised his hand for silence. He looked very serious. First he asked everyone to recite the Lord’s Prayer, and then, when silence had fallen once more, he announced, “Mr. Ned Opton, Bruce Baines, Billy Thorpe, Claude Daniels, and myself will serve as your leaders until the college students’ exams are over. As you know, we have two social-action projects for this year—to break down the barriers of segregation in movie theatres, and to gain employment in private business and local, state, and national government. We’ll start the first project by picketing the Center and Carolina Theatres. Our purpose in doing it isn’t just to get to see a movie but to break down another barrier of segregation. How many of you have picketed with us before?” About seventy-five people, or three-fourths of the audience, raised their hands. “Good,” said John. “Now, how many of you would like to go right down to the theatres this afternoon and start picketing?”

  There were gasps of surprise and titters of nervous laughter. Eventually, almost everyone present raised his hand.

  “I need ten young ladies to leave immediately for the Carolina and Center Theatres as our scouts,” John said. “They are to try to buy tickets at the main entrances. If refused, they are to ask to see the manager. They are to be very polite to him, and say, ‘Good afternoon, we want to buy tickets at your main ticket booth and sit in the orchestra.’ If the young ladies don’t call us back in half an hour after leaving here, we’ll know they are sitting downstairs in the theatres.” The audience hooted at this supposition. If the managers refused, John continued, the girls were to call the church immediately, then gather on a designated corner between the theatres and wait for the pickets. John then selected the ten girls, including a well-dressed child in a red coat, sitting in front of me, who got up, the picture of frightened determination, and almost visibly forced herself to join the others as they left the room.

  John rapidly explained the picketing procedure. Since the group was not yet at its full strength, thirty pickets at a time would be divided between the two movie houses. The first group, accompanied by the four watchers, would leave for downtown, carrying the picket signs, as soon as the scouts phoned. Mondays through Thursdays, the picketing schedule would be from four o’clock in the afternoon to eight at night; on Fridays it would be from four to nine; and on Saturdays it would be from one to nine. It was especially important, John said, that on this first day the pickets be present for the start of the last show, at nine o’clock, and he asked everyone to stay for as many rounds of picketing as he could manage.

  “There’s a very important oath that you are asked to take. Brother Daniels here will explain it to you,” John said, introducing Claude.

  “This oath is to cover your conduct for the entire period of the movement, whenever you are participating in it,” Claude said. “First I’m going to read it. Then I ask you to stand and repeat it phrase by phrase after me, raising your right hand to God. Then I want you each to come and sign your name right here on the piece of paper the oath is written on.”

  The students fell into deep silence as Claude slowly read the oath. Then they raised their hands, and, in strong, clear tones that made the room reverberate, they echoed the phrases: “I do solemnly swear that while serving as a student protester I will demean myself in an orderly manner. I will refrain from taking any mental or physical action against anyone even to protect my person. I will not use profane language. I will not talk to anyone nor carry any sharp weapons while serving as a student protester. I will conduct myself in a Christian non-violent manner, and I will love all persons, even the ones I protest against. I do solemnly swear to uphold the above oath while I am a student protester, notwithstanding any circumstances that may occur. Amen.”

  Before Claude administered the oath, mimeographed sheets of regulations for pickets had been passed out, and now Ned rose to ask that everyone read them attentively and be careful to observe them. The first rule was “There shall be no violence displayed in any way, physically, mentally, or morally, within the Protest Movement.” A number of the succeeding rules arose from this basic precept: “Carry no type of object, sharp or otherwise, that can be used for a weapon,” “Do not take advantage of a situation or a person,” and “Assume a respectful and sympathetic attitude toward the opinions, beliefs, shortcomings, and mistakes of others.” Some regulations concerned general conduct, which was to be that of “young ladies and young men” at all times: “Do not tell questionable jokes,” “There should be no petty grievances among the group. If some should arise, please contact your leaders at once, privately,” “Refrain from showing discord with leaders publicly,” and “Please do not walk in the street or public places eating and smoking.”

  Now Billy issued final instructions. No one was to go downtown to join the protest until he had checked with Bruce. Since a parade permit had been denied, the members of each shift leaving the church must be careful to walk close to the curb and remain well separated, so as not to obstruct pedestrian traffic. “Once on the theatre line, keep five feet apart and close to the curb, but not close enough for a car to run into you,” he warned. “At each theatre, the two lines will walk toward each other, pivot at a spot we will show you, and then walk away from each other. Don’t ever stop moving, even after leaving the line. The sidewalk is public, and if we follow these rules we can have the use of it. We won’t go into any part of the theatre itself—not even near its walls for shelter from the weather, or into its doorway to get warm. Remember, too, not to jaywalk or break any other minor regulations. People will be watching to tell the police on us.” Finally, he said, “When the first shift goes downtown, only the two students at the head of the column are to hold up their picket signs.”

  McKissick had been standing at the back of the room, and now John asked him to say a few words. The lawyer briefly outlined the kind of conduct that might lead to arrests, then said he knew that no one in the movement would be guilty of behavior that could lead to arrests for disorderly conduct or the use of obscene language. “You’ll be all right if you remember always to conduct yourself, both within and without, in a Christian, gentle, and loving manner,” he finished. “What you are doing is far-reaching in effect. Whether you know it or not, when you carry that picket sign you are carrying it for every black man who walks the face of the earth, whether in the Congo, in Johannesburg, or in New O
rleans. If a man happens to spit on you, remember that what you are doing is far more important than what he is doing. If we speak quietly and act quietly, God will be with us. Nothing can hurt us if we march with dignity, hold our heads high, and remember our oath. God bless you!”

  There was a second of silence, and then the young people, their faces aglow, broke into applause. Through it came the ring of a telephone. John hurried off to answer it, and returned a moment later to report that the scouts had been refused admission to the orchestra seats of the theatres. He swiftly chose thirty boys and girls for the first shift, and in a few minutes, outside in the cold wind and still swirling snow, they formed into pairs, tucked their signs under their arms, and, with the four leaders consulting lists and giving instructions as they kept alongside them, started the long walk downtown.

  · · ·

  At the head of the column, which was strung out for half a block, two boys carried signs reading, “Don’t Attend Segregated Theatres,” and “Segregation Is the Negroes’ Burden and America’s Shame.—M. L. King.” As I walked along, keeping beside or behind the pickets, I watched both their young, solemn faces and the faces of the people they passed on the crumbling, uneven sidewalks of the Negro part of town. Upon the approach of the column, people stopped, with almost comic abruptness, whatever it was they were doing to stare for a second or two; then their faces broke into expressions of emotion. Most often, the first emotion was amazement. Then, usually, came pleasure. A gaunt, bespectacled Negro man with white hair took off his hat and flourished it. “Here come the kids again!” he cried exultantly. A woman called up to a friend gaping out of a second-story window, “It’s the theatres they’re after now! Whee!” Half a mile away, near the railroad tracks, as we hurried through a shabby district where knots of people were lounging in front of stores and bars, a large black woman smelling heavily of beer stomped out of a saloon and for a while walked beside me at the end of the line. “Good for them! God, if I was only that young again to join them,” she kept mumbling.