by Simon Schama
Their bodies would not be found for months. The governor of Mississippi protested at the fuss, saying for all he knew the three could be in Cuba. But the ominous disappearance of the Mississippi Summer Project workers was taken, as intended, as a declaration of war on the Civil Rights Act by the segregationist South, including Democratic senators like the plantation-owning James Eastland. Unreconciled to what the president, whom they now wrote off as a race traitor, had done, most of Mississippi’s Democrats declared their support for Goldwater. That defection gave civil-rights workers an opportunity to propose that the exclusively white delegation to the Democratic party convention in Atlantic City be replaced by delegates from a newly founded Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which, for the first time, would represent all the people of the state. At an impromptu convention in July, sixty-eight delegates were named, among them as vice chairman of the new party, Fannie Lou Hamer, a cotton picker from Ruleville, near Greenwood, the hub of the nascent civil-rights movement in the Delta. By the summer of 1964, she had already got used to the daily death threats made against her and her family for her temerity in getting blacks to the polls. Bullets came through her living-room windows. Forcibly sterilized without her knowledge when she was young, Fannie Lou’s body had been violated again in Winona, Mississippi, after she had attended a Voter Registration Workshop. “We’re going to make you wish you was dead,” the sheriff had said as Fannie Lou was savagely beaten. But though the slightly hooded eye we saw at Atlantic City was the result of one of these assaults, she never did wish that. Fannie Lou reckoned this was what Christians went through for the Lord’s cause. And she went right on singing and being a regular nuisance.
In the third week of August, Fannie Lou Hamer took the long bus ride from the Delta to Atlantic City. I made the much shorter bus trip from New York. My bus was air-conditioned; Fannie Lou’s was not. I could smell trouble, though, and dashed toward it. My friend and I were kitted out with press credentials: small blue plastic badges bearing, without a trace of irony (so we hoped), the legend CAMBRIDGE OPINION. How did we manage this? Through an Irish American political wizard, then assistant secretary of labor in the Johnson administration who also happened to be Daniel Patrick Moynihan. A Harvard sociologist (and, years later, senator for New York), Moynihan was an old friend of my Cambridge history professor, J. H. Plumb, who airily told me that if I really wanted to see the inside of American politics, then I should write “Pat” a letter. Sure, I thought, dismissing the possibility that two undergraduates would be taken seriously by the author of Beyond the Melting Pot, at the time the last word on the fate of America’s immigrant dream. But what did I have to lose? From the coziness of my great-uncle Joe Steinberg’s Brooklyn row house I wrote, “Dear Mr. Moynihan, do forgive the intrusion on your busy agenda but Professor Plumb wondered whether there was the slightest possibility that…” Faster than Road Runner, back came a heavy cream envelope summoning us to an audience in Washington.
It was one of those blistering D.C. days when you expect to see camels bearing tourists down the Mall rather than buses. Heatstroke was a possibility just from crossing Pennsylvania Avenue to the Department of Labor, one of the neoclassical masonry monsters built at the turn of the last century to give American government an air of paternalist inevitability: outside, scalding limestone; inside, polished granite and gloomily stained walnut. The Department of Labor, then under one Willard Wirtz, had assumed an unexpected air of fresh importance following LBJ’s declaration of a “war on poverty,” although an ominous conflict with North Vietnam was the immediate war on Washington’s mind after American ships had been fired on in the Gulf of Tonkin. In the vapor of patriotic fury that had predictably followed, Johnson had used the occasion to secure a resolution from Congress giving him unprecedentedly broad and undefined war powers. There was something fishy about the whole business. Exactly what were those American gunships doing there anyway? my friend and I wondered out loud in a room full of Georgetown students. This turned out to be a bad idea. The students declared themselves invested with similar war powers, and came within an inch of using them on us.
So it was good to be welcomed by the outstretched hand of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. His face was the color of a summer carnation, in the middle of which was planted a roguish grin. He had been born in Oklahoma but had grown up in Hell’s Kitchen in New York, where he shined shoes for quarters while his mother kept a four-ale bar. With his flashing dark eyes and cupid’s bow lips, Pat looked every bit the fallen cherub who liked a nip now and then. (When he was ambassador in New Delhi legends spread of his breakfast treble Scotches followed by a freshening dip in the embassy pool, after which the Moynihan wits were razor sharp for business.) The voice matched everything else: a merry lilt that was so rolling and rounded it seemed to come from a mouth permanently filled with humbugs. We made our little speeches to him as he beamed back at us, our new uncle in the wily world of Washington, and then he told us that he was arranging for our press credentials to the convention, but perhaps it would be a good idea to go to the platform hearings of the party, then in full swing in a Washington hotel. What were those? we wondered. “Oh,” said Pat, “that’s where interested [he drawled this last word ironically] organizations make their views known to the party on whatever ails or inspires them, and then, from the fruit of such deliberations, a committee writes the party platform for the convention.” This seemed like a good idea. We were grateful, duly attended, listened to speeches on race relations and civil rights, education, labor conditions and reported back to our mentor. “How did you find it all?” he asked. Informative, we said, omitting the qualifier “numbingly” lest it seem ungrateful. I noticed a thick white document sitting on his desk bearing DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONVENTION 1964 on the cover page. “Is that a document I should read before the convention?” I cheekily asked our mentor. “Oh I suppose so,” he replied, flashing one of his most impish smiles, “it’s the party platform.” Confused, I began the sentence “But I thought you said…” and never got to the end. The Killarney grin from the assistant secretary of labor assumed Cheshire cat dimensions.
In Atlantic City, I met Liz Moynihan, Pat’s wife and managerial minder, a Texan, and thus a crucial link between the Kennedy-Irish connection and Johnson’s Austin crowd. The importance of that bridge between two hostile camps became more evident when Pat got me into a reception that was ostensibly a fund-raiser for the Kennedy Memorial Library that was planned in Boston, but to anyone with eyes and ears, was Camelot at cocktails. There was the court historian Arthur Schlesinger, dapper in the usual bow tie; there were Bobby and Teddy not talking. The long wake for the fallen hero was still going on. People choked up in front of the photo of JFK and John-John on the beach. But between the hors d’oeuvres the air was also thick with plans for Act Two, to be launched with Bobby’s campaign for the Senate. Pat, obviously signed up as spearbearer, was deep in conclave mode, surrounded by estranged courtiers. But then, while nodding vigorously and beginning one of his full-cheeked colloquies, he spotted me, paused, and gave me a conspiratorial wink.
I left the party heady with precocious insider wisdom. Strolling back along the boardwalk, past the entrance to the convention hall, I heard, for the first time, that voice. “We Shall Overcome” it was singing, and around it a chorus of great majesty had transpired; as if Mahalia Jackson and Aretha and Odetta and pretty much every voice that had ever been raised in painful hope had somehow gathered for rehearsal in Atlantic City. The Beatles were due in after the convention had left town, and I was shamelessly riding the craze. “Do you know Lennon?” I’d be asked. “Loike a bruhther,” I’d reply, my voice as glottal as I could get it. But now they could keep “A Hard Day’s Night.” This was the music I wanted to hear.
But who were the bad guys? A crowd was gathered around the shell of a blue Ford that had been trucked from Mississippi all the way to the boardwalk. The car was burned out, Naugahyde seats still acrid with scorch. This was what the Klan had done; what
the Freedom Democrats were up against. They were also up against the power of the presidency. For Johnson—who thought he had already stuck his neck out enough for the civil-rights people—was incensed by the challenge of the Freedom Democrats. Fannie Lou, their most unstoppably vocal champion, had made it clear she would make the case public to the Credentials Committee, and if she secured just eleven of their votes, would have enough to take it to the Convention Floor. Each state delegation would then be asked to give their vote on whether the Freedom Democrats should replace the regular Mississippi delegation. The embarrassment such a scenario would present to Lyndon Johnson’s claim to embody a post-traumatic American Coming Together was a nightmare. What had been planned as coronation might turn into chaotic farce.
It only got worse when Fannie Lou made the case in public before the Credentials Committee. The moving ruckus on the boardwalk; the split in the civil-rights movement, much to LBJ’s chagrin, had got media traction. When she rose to speak, giving her name and address and pointedly adding the name of Mississippi senator James Eastland who had defected to Goldwater, every network camera was trained on her. The big beautiful voice was sternly resolute, tragically impassioned, as she told her life story. “If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated today, I question America,” she said. “Is this America where we have to sleep with the phone off the hook because we be threatened daily, just ’cause we want to register to vote to be first-class citizens?”
Beside himself, LBJ called an impromptu press conference on an inconsequential matter, just to get the cameras off the woman (he described her more coarsely) who had now become not so much an inconvenience as a personal nemesis. Minions were sent to Atlantic City to sway the MFDP into being Reasonable. An offer was made. Under no circumstances would the party leadership consider a full MFDP delegation, but two black members could join loyalist white regulars. Senator Hubert Humphrey, a champion of civil rights since 1948 and one of the favorites to join LBJ on the ticket, put the offer to Fannie Lou. She wouldn’t hear of such a thing. Had all the work, the danger, the suffering been for so meager a crumb? Exasperated, little Humpty Hubert, his egg-like dome glowing pale, asked the big black woman from Ruleville, “What is it you want, Mrs. Hamer?” “Why, Mr. Humphrey,” she said, looking sweetly back at Humpty, “don’t you know? The Kingdom of Jesus; that’s what I want.”
Fannie Lou didn’t get it. LBJ did some more heavy leaning; threatened the zero-funding of a poverty program here, a school’s budget there, and lo and behold, the numbers on the Credentials Committee sympathetic to the Freedom Party began to waste away. Martin Luther King was disinclined to be seen in their company. Could you blame him? There was an enemy to be fought, and its name was Goldwater. If everyone just behave there would be a Voting Rights Act on the books the year after the election. Why rock the boat? The obligations of pragmatism hung ominously over the boardwalk. The famous Atlantic City numbers game began to be a count of those singing along with Fannie Lou. One morning she showed up and the massed choir had become a chamber ensemble. Pressed once more to be reasonable, she stubbornly persisted in her rejection of so demeaning a proposal. That was it; offer withdrawn. The coronation could now proceed. On nomination night, Johnson, hitherto concealed from public view like a mysteriously veiled bride, ascended by hydraulic lift to the stage to be hailed by the roars of conventioneers while tiny plastic cowboys on parachutes rained from the ceiling. A week later in the Convention Center, the Fab Four sang “I Should Have Known Better” in front of orgasmically shrieking multitudes, while, an hour’s drive away, North Philadelphia burned in the first ghetto riot of the year. Fannie Lou went back to Ruleville to see how Jesus was doing.
14. Saved
Hubert the Happy Warrior may have been thunderstruck or entertained by the naiveté of Fannie Lou’s answer to his presidential offer, but she was in deadly earnest. She did want the Kingdom of Jesus in America. Did people not talk that way in Humphrey’s home state of Minnesota? (Actually, they did out on the prairie.) And they certainly talked that way in the Deep South when wrongs had to be righted. There were, to be sure, young militants of the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) like Stokely Carmichael whose disenchantment with the Democrats after Atlantic City led not to Jesus but to Malcolm X and to the Black Panthers. But the core of the civil-rights movement still thought of itself as a ministry. Take away the preaching from Martin Luther King, and you can have no idea of the might of his eloquence to shame America into living up to the precepts on which the country had been founded. If the unfulfilled promise of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” was routinely invoked against segregation and racism, so was St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (3:28) in which the apostle pronounced that “there is no Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” It was precisely because the black churches dared to insist on color-blind Christian fellowship that their sanctuaries had become targets of arson and bombing. The reason for the selection of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner as murder victims was that they had been snooping around the burned-out ruins of the Mount Zion Methodist Church near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the place that had been designated a center of civil-rights education and voter registration by the Summer Project. Getting niggers all riled up about things they ought not to be bothered with was not what churches were for, the Klan thought. Hell, those preachers were all communists in dog collars anyway.
But that was exactly what the churches were for. Getting African Americans in the South, in fact all over the United States, to raise their voices, to brave things they had long been too reluctant or too intimidated to dare: sitting on the wrong side of lunch counters, riding in the wrong seats of the bus. But putting their lives on the line to do all this was inconceivable without the exhortation of the ministry. When another of the band of reverends, Fred Shuttlesworth, whose house had been dynamited by the Klan, was advised to get out of Birmingham, Alabama, as quickly as he could, he responded typically, “I wasn’t saved to run.” Neither were others of the ministry—King himself of course but also Ralph Abernathy and Joseph Lowery, also Alabamians. When they resolved to be staunch for freedom, they saw themselves as the inheritors of the long history of the black churches, from the clandestine converts of the slave plantations, to the itinerant preachers of the antebellum South and North; the militant abolitionists who called America to a Christian accounting with the original sin of the Republic; and the churches that had provided succor and solidarity through almost a century of Jim Crow segregation.
Which is why, when Barack Obama found himself under fire for associating with the confrontational Jeremiah Wright, his longtime pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, his immediate response was historical rather than polemical. In a speech delivered in Philadelphia, refusing to run away from the issue, Obama attempted an explanation of the union of race and religion in America; of the place of unseemly passion in the black church. When he first experienced the shouts and clapping of black worship, he remembered, it was a reclamation of “a moment we didn’t need to feel shame about”; the recovery of “trials and triumph, at once unique and universal, black and more than black.” The anger embedded in those memories, he said, was real even if often unproductive. “To wish it away…without understanding its roots only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.” And suddenly the moment in American history seemed bigger than a political adjustment; and more like a call to reestablish moral community in the United States. Taking religion seriously, Obama seems to say, is not something that ought to divide the country more deeply but something that might actually bring it together; something white America could feel as intensely as black America. And then he went on to address sympathetically what he knew to be white anger. Put the two passions together, and a transformation might happen, he says.
But white rage isn’t much in evidence at Woodstock, no not that Woodstock, t
he one about thirty miles northwest of Atlanta, surrounded by lovingly tended fairways. First Baptist Church sits at the end of a long driveway and is approximately the size of your average provincial airport terminal, only much better appointed. And if your idea of a house of worship involves damply smelling limestone and worn prayer hassocks, you had better go home to Barchester. For First Baptist is fragrant. Fresh-cut flowers stand at the Welcome Desk; the floors are polished tile and stone. Soaring glass walls are tinted subtly enough to let in light without heat. Escalators silently convey congregants (and there are 7,000 of them at this morning’s “traditional” Sunday service) toward discreetly chiseled gold wall inscriptions attesting to the merciful love of God.
And why not? Pastor Johnny Hunt explains to me that just as people these days want a choice of mall, they are going to shop for their church. “That’s just the way it is,” he says through his honeyed baritone, an unapologetic smile flashing from the dazzling orthodontics. We’re at Bible class before the main event, and it’s filling up fast with tall men in chinos and Ralph Lauren golf shirts and perfectly groomed women in pastel suede and cashmere. The scent that hangs over discussions of Micah is Chanel, not incense. Pastor Johnny, gamecock zesty, with wavy silver hair, a lime-green tie, and that sock-it-to-you smile knows exactly what he is doing. He is a full-service provider. First Baptist Woodstock is, in fact, a small town that works. Its revenues are secure, its accounting transparent, its mission clear, its outreach benign, and its spirits buoyant. What corporation or for that matter medium-size sovereign state could make the same claims? First Baptist is the government the well-heeled of Greater Atlanta thought they didn’t want or need. It comes complete with schools, a college, medical services, social workers; entertainment (Christian rock is a multimillion-dollar business), retirement facility, and mortician. What Pastor Johnny understands is that for all the blowhard professions of rugged individualism you hear on right-wing talk radio, middle-class Americans are lonely; heartsick at the loss of community. Even if their parents and grandparents couldn’t wait to hightail it out of the immigrant districts into the verdant suburbs, they were surprised to discover that what they needed, even more than the 8,000 square feet of McMansion, the four-car garage, the life membership of the country club, and the Viking Range kitchen, was fellowship, a laying on of hands; the comfort of social connection in a headset universe. They want this whether they have been busting their buns at the gym or busting their balls at the office. And they want this so much more than they want an evangelical at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, devoted, insofar as the Supreme Court and the Constitution will allow, to banning abortion and gay marriage.
