Bobby Seale told reporters afterward: “Black people have begged, prayed, petitioned, demonstrated, and everything else to get the racist power structure of America to right the wrongs which have historically been perpetuated against black people. All of these efforts have been answered by more repression, deceit, and hypocrisy. As the aggression of the racist American government escalates in Vietnam, the police agencies of America escalate the oppression of black people throughout the ghettos of America. Vicious police dogs, cattle prods, and increased patrols have become familiar sights in black communities.”
Shortly after Seale finished speaking, police arrested the group on felony charges of conspiracy to disrupt a legislative session, charges which were eventually reduced to a misdemeanor.
Headlines around the country ran above evocative photos of armed black Panthers wearing berets, bomber jackets, and dark sunglasses, walking the halls of the California capitol building. In the underground press, the Panthers were front-page news. Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver were overnight counterculture celebrities, and in the black community they were fierce new role models of self-empowerment.
The Black Panther Party published a ten-point program on May 15, 1967, in the second issue of the Black Panther newspaper. Their demands included general goals such as full employment, an end to police brutality, and better education and housing, but also called for blacks to be exempt from the military draft and for all blacks to be released from federal, state, county, and city jails.
With typical hysterical hyperbole, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called the party “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country,” and he supervised an extensive program of surveillance, infiltration, and harassment designed to undermine Panther leadership, incriminate party members, discredit and criminalize the party, and drain the organization of resources and manpower. Many members of the Black Panthers were killed in police raids in various parts of the country.
Due to Huey P. Newton’s flair for the dramatic, a poster of him sitting on a wicker throne, wearing a beret and black leather jacket, holding a rifle in one hand and a spear in the other, soon appeared widely in head shops, college dorms, and in black communities.
On October 28, 1967, Newton was celebrating the end of probation from an assault charge when he was pulled over by Oakland policeman John Frey, and Frey was killed. Newton claimed that the officer was shot accidentally by another cop, but the Black Panther leader was arrested for murder. “Free Huey” quickly became a national slogan of the counterculture. He was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in September 1968, but the conviction was later reversed on appeal. Subsequent trials resulted in hung juries, so the charges were eventually dismissed.
The passage of decades has not fully dissipated the air of controversy that surrounded the Black Panthers. It is certain that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies targeted them wildly out of proportion to any possible threat they posed to society. It was politically driven and in some cases illegal. It is equally clear that the Panthers were not a monolithic group and that some members engaged in criminal behavior that had little or nothing to do with politics. Nonetheless, in the context of 1967, the image the Panthers projected of self-empowerment was a big deal.
Martin Luther King Jr.
In retrospect, it blows my mind how little Martin Luther King Jr.’s name was present in the underground press of the time. In 1967, Dr. King’s last full year of life, he remained America’s most sophisticated, progressive, spiritual, and intellectual leader. A large part of the explanation must be that he was thirty-eight years old at a moment when baby boomers of all races were convinced that they, and they alone, had some ineffable kind of authenticity.
Stokely Carmichael was not the only prominent African American who derided King’s commitment to nonviolence. Julius Lester wrote that King “was too Sunday school.” Adam Clayton Powell Jr. called him “Martin Loser King.” Many on the white new left, anxious to be au courant with black people of their generation, followed suit. In America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s, Michael Kazin and Maurice Isserman, both members of the SDS, wrote: “By the summer of 1967, most white new leftists would probably have agreed that the old interracial and nonviolent civil rights movement was not only over but was proven a failure.” I asked Kazin how it was that SDS paid so little attention to King at the time and he responded, “I respected Dr. King but he was older and he was a Christian preacher.”
Steve Wasserman, who first supported the Panthers when he was a Berkeley High School student, speculates, “Maybe it’s because he wore a suit and tie?” Although in recent decades I have come to regard King as both a saint and the preeminent American social change agent of my lifetime, I was not paying much conscious attention to him either, and yet it’s clear that King’s moral and political force was indispensable to the fragile balance of American political and spiritual thought in 1967.
As spring of 1967 loomed, while King was enduring contempt from some of the younger black activist world, he permanently shattered his relationship with many in the liberal and moderate worlds when he decided to publicly oppose the war in Vietnam.
King had long harbored grave doubts about the war, in part because of his ideological affinity with American pacifists, and also because he was inclined to support third world countries in conflict with European colonists. He identified with various African independence movements, particularly that of Kwame Nkrumah, who had become the first president of Ghana after the country’s nonviolent assertion of independence from Great Britain in 1957. Mahatma Gandhi’s successful effort to end the British colonization of India was also one of the defining examples of nonviolence that inspired King’s approach to the civil rights movement.
Charles Morgan Jr., a white lawyer who was on the board of the SCLC, is quoted in Michael Ezra’s Muhammad Ali: The Making of an Icon as saying that King was deeply affected by the boxer’s courage in refusing induction. “Martin had opposed the war for a long time but his hands were tied by our Board. Then Ali spoke out publicly, he took the consequences, and I believe it had an influence on Martin. Here was somebody who had a lot to lose and was willing to risk it all to say what he believed.” (When SCLC finally opposed the war, it was Morgan, by then one of Ali’s lawyers, who wrote their position paper.)
King’s feelings about Vietnam were also influenced by Thich Nhat Hanh, a young Vietnamese Buddhist monk who had first written to him in 1965. Hanh was an anti-Communist, but he objected to Western domination of Vietnam and to the American-backed Catholic government, which was discriminating against roughly 80 percent of the Vietnamese population who were Buddhists. At the request of A.J. Muste, whose teachings on nonviolence had so deeply influenced King and many of his colleagues, King met with Hanh in person in Chicago in the spring of 1966.
After that first meeting, King equated the Vietnamese monks’ struggle with the civil rights movement. Hanh fasted with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and radical Catholic priest Father Daniel Berrigan, and meditated with Thomas Merton. He was eventually granted a three-minute private meeting with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Hanh published his first book, Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire, in 1967. On January 25 of that year, King wrote to the Nobel committee recommending the monk for the Peace Prize. Two weeks later, on February 11, 1967, Muste died at the age of eighty-two. King said that without him, “The American Negro might never have caught the meaning of true love or humanity.”
Some of King’s closest advisers urged him to stay out of the public debate about the war. They felt it would burden the civil rights agenda with a position unpopular with many current allies, and would certainly alienate President Johnson, who had masterfully orchestrated the passage of civil rights and antipoverty legislation. Even pacifists such as Bayard Rustin and Andrew Young were opposed to the idea of King participating in a massive peace march scheduled in New York for April 15. King’s most loyal theological allies, Rabbi Heschel and John Bennett of the Union
Theological Seminary, were avoiding the march, which was expected to be particularly radical in tone.
Reverend James Bevel, who was passionate in opposing the war, helped to finally persuade King to join the march. Once that decision was made, King’s advisers all agreed that he should make a speech in advance to carefully lay out his thinking, rather than have his views commingled with the cacophony of voices that always resounded at peace demonstrations. (Their concerns were well founded. Much of the press coverage of the march focused on fringe activities such as the display of Communist flags and the burning of an American flag.)
Dr. King’s speech on April 4 at Riverside Church in New York turned out to be one of the most thoughtful and compelling antiwar speeches of the entire movement. He began with a simple statement: “I come to this great, magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice.” He then proceeded to lay out his reasons for opposing the war.
King said that “America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube.” He also pointed out that African Americans were disproportionately serving, and consequently being wounded and killed in the war.
King had spent hours urging frustrated young black people not to be violent—to eschew Molotov cocktails and rioting due to tactical concerns, but also as a moral issue. How, he rhetorically asked, could he urge them to be nonviolent in American slums, but to be violent in a foreign country? King also felt a special obligation as a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. As he had done within the civil rights movement, he questioned his fellow Christian leaders: “Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved His enemies so fully that He died for them?”
King also restated the antiwar arguments that had surfaced at the teach-ins. Vietnam was not a “domino” in the Cold War but an independent society. The US had supported Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic dictator who persecuted the Buddhist majority. After Diem was deposed, the US propped up a series of military leaders, none of whom exhibited any commitment to democracy. The current US ally was General Nguyen Cao Ky, who had expressed his admiration for Adolph Hitler in a recent interview. On February 25, 1967, King said, “I see our country today intervening in what is basically a civil war, destroying hundreds and thousands of Vietnamese children with napalm.” King separately observed: “Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken—the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.”
King concluded with specific proposals: end the bombing in North and South Vietnam, a universal cease-fire, curtailment of the military buildup in neighboring Thailand and Laos, inclusion of the Communist National Liberation Front in a future Vietnamese government, and a firm date for removal of all foreign troops.
This was a radical speech, considerably to the left of liberal Democrats such as Robert Kennedy, and consistent with the positions of the black and white countercultures, who were nonetheless largely ignoring him at the time. Afterward King told reporters, “Like Muhammad Ali puts it, we are all, black and brown and poor, victims of the same system of oppression.”
On April 15, King joined pacifist leader Dave Dellinger, Harry Belafonte, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Stokely Carmichael, and a quarter of a million others in New York City’s Central Park. More than two hundred draft cards were burned and then the vast crowd marched to the United Nations.
The next day, President Johnson ominously said in an interview that the FBI was “watching” the antiwar movement. Meanwhile, most of the American public still clung to the hope that their government was on the right track. Polls showed that 80 percent of Americans thought that bombing petroleum facilities near Hanoi would end the war.
King’s decision to oppose the president drew attacks from many in both the black and white liberal communities to whom he had previously been a hero. The NAACP board voted sixty to zero to condemn him. The New York Times headline read, “NAACP Decries Stand of Dr. King on Vietnam: Calls It a ‘Serious Tactical Mistake’ to Merge Rights and Peace Drive.” (King had suggested no such thing.) Some argued that the war was actually good for the civil rights movement because of its integrated battalions. King was also criticized by Dr. Ralph Bunche, the other black American who had won a Nobel Peace Prize, and by Carl Rowan, who as the ambassador to Finland and director of the United States Information Agency had been the highest-ranking African American in the Kennedy administration. In his masterpiece At Canaan’s Edge, Taylor Branch wrote that Rowan “angrily told King that millions of their fellow black people would suffer for his insults against the greatest civil rights president in American history.”
A highly critical Washington Post editorial said of King, “He has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, and to his people.” A New York Times’ editorial was headlined, “Dr. King’s Error,” and called his position “wasteful and self-defeating” and “a fusing of two public problems that are distinct and separate.”
King bitterly rebuked his liberal critics. “There’s something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say, ‘Be nonviolent toward [racist Alabama sheriff] Jim Clark,’ but will curse and damn you when you say, ‘Be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children.’” He concluded, “And I don’t know about you, I ain’t gonna study war no more.”
By the end of April, Alabama’s segregationist governor George Wallace announced that he would run for president on a platform of “victory” in Vietnam and hoped to win by securing the “white backlash” vote. Wallace denied being a racist, although he chanted, “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” in a 1963 speech. King said, “The white backlash is merely a new name for an old phenomenon,” and described Wallace in an interview as “perhaps the most dangerous racist in America today.”
The riots made it obvious that de facto segregation and bias in the North were almost as corrosive as legal Jim Crow had been in the South. As the unprecedented wave of urban violence was finally dying down, on August 16, 1967, at the peak of the media focus on Black Power, King addressed over one hundred attendees in Atlanta on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the founding of SCLC. While he proudly listed the accomplishments of the civil rights movement in the previous decade (SCLC had voter registration teams in seventy-nine Southern counties at the time), King acknowledged that in America, blacks on average still had half of the average wealth of whites, and double the unemployment and infant mortality rates.
For some time, the supposedly “moderate” King had been saying that it didn’t mean all that much to get people the right to sit at a lunch counter if they didn’t have the money to pay for a meal. In 1962, King had started “Operation Breadbasket” to deploy the tactics of the civil rights movement to address racial economic imbalances. A key tactic of the organization was to foster “selective buying” (boycotts) as a means to pressure white businesses to hire African Americans and purchase goods and services from black contractors.
In 1966, King expanded Operation Breadbasket and chose twenty-five-year-old Jesse Jackson to run the Chicago chapter. Six feet three inches tall, with a prodigious Afro and a compelling oratorical talent, Jackson quickly became SCLC’s most visible Northern leader.
Operation Breadbasket helped create 2,200 new black jobs in Chicago, “bringing new income to the Negro community of about $18 million,” according to an October 1967 interview with King in the Detroit Free Press. They had pressured the mass retailer Hi-Lo into depositing enough money into local, black-owned banks to double their assets within a year, and to increase advertising in black-owned community newspapers.
And despite criticism from all sides, King continued to spread his message. In his speech at the SCLC convention in Atlanta in August 1967, he urg
ed, “The Negro must rise up with an affirmation of his own Olympian manhood.” Noting the appeal of the phrase “Black Power,” King insisted that true power meant the ability to affect social and political change. “What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless . . . and that love without power is sentimental and anemic.”
In that same speech in Atlanta, King called for a guaranteed annual income for all Americans, a proposal which would still be radical fifty years later.
King remained committed to nonviolence. He mocked those who suggested that the Watts riot had been a meaningful form of activism, reminding his audience that it had produced scant results other than a few more water sprinklers. He pointed out that it was a practical impossibility for black violence to accomplish anything meaningful given the predominance of whites in political, military, and police power structures. But King’s most powerful argument was the cosmic one: “Darkness cannot put out darkness; only light can do that.”
Meanwhile, at the same time, in the same country, the hippies were still trying to make the world a brighter place.
CHAPTER 6
flower power
In the wake of the Be-Ins, there was a period in 1967 when it seemed to many in the hip world that the force of agape was sufficient to overcome society’s obstacles and that a utopian vision could meaningfully change mass culture for the better.
The dramatic growth in the population of acidheads, pot smokers, meditators, activists, and others who wanted a more joyous, caring society than the one they’d grown up in, made it seem like something better was imminent. At the same time, the more thoughtful members of the hip community were well aware that new structures and ideas were necessary to deal with the explosion of interest in their culture. Many meetings focused on the possibility of building a brave new world and the avoidance of perils in attempting to do so. Not surprisingly, among the first of these took place in Northern California.
In Search of the Lost Chord Page 16
