Voices in Our Blood

by Jon Meacham

  Dr. King and Mr. Wilkins joined also with A. Philip Randolph to sponsor the highly successful Washington Prayer Pilgrimage of 1957, during which Dr. King emerged, to quote editor James Hicks, of the Amsterdam News, “as the number-one Negro leader.” But the following year King and Wilkins ignored the sentiments of some five hundred Negro spokesmen, representing three hundred leadership organizations, at the Summit Meeting of Negro Leadership and gave their reluctant endorsement to the Senate’s watered-down civil-rights proposal. The Negro press reacted with shock.

  The criticism was even worse when, a few months later, King, Wilkins, and Randolph met with President Eisenhower to explain why Negroes were displeased with the first civil-rights bill to be passed in eighty-three years. The Afro-American’s Louis Lautier wrote: “Ike charmed the Negro leaders and neither of them uttered a word of criticism.”

  Little Rock kept the NAACP in the foreground, while a near-fatal stiletto wound at the hands of a crazed Harlem woman—and internal difficulties with his own Montgomery Association—rendered Dr. King almost inactive for some eighteen months. But this year, Dr. King moved to Atlanta and began to give the lion’s share of his time to the Southern Christian Leadership Council. Mr. Wilkins was on hand and the NAACP appeared as co-sponsor when the Council launched a South-wide voting drive on behalf of the Negro masses.

  In one sense it was 1958 all over again. Congress was locked in a civil-rights debate that we all knew would culminate in some kind of legislation. Both Dr. King and Mr. Wilkins were on hand backstage as liberal Congressmen planned their moves. But in another, perhaps more significant, sense the early months of this year were unlike 1958. Negroes, particularly the youth, were restless; they were tired of compromises, piecemeal legislation, and token integration which, as Martin Luther King phrased it, “is a new form of discrimination covered up with certain niceties and complexities.” A small but growing segment of the Negro population had joined a Muslim faith that preaches the superiority of the black man and the imminent destruction of the white man. Then there is the matter of Africa: hardly a week passes that that awakening giant’s cries for “Free DOOM” don’t ring out over the radio and television into the ears of American Negroes—ashamed, as they most certainly are, that they are still oppressed. The law, particularly in the South, was against them; but for the militant young people this was the time for all good Negroes to be in jail.

  Meanwhile the Negro leadership class—itself often guilty of rank, class, and color discrimination—was continuing to operate under a concept that begged the question of the dignity of the Negro individual. The literature of Negro progress is littered with such terms as “the talented tenth,” “the exceptional Negro,” “the new Negro,” “the break-through Negro,” and in recent years “the accepted” and “the assimilated Negro.” Sharing the outlook of the white liberals who finance them, and sincerely so, Negro leadership organizations have focused their attention, by and large, on matters that are of interest to the talented Negro rather than the Negro masses. By so doing the Negro leadership class ignored the basic problem of human dignity in favor of themselves and their white peers—a distinction which the segregationists refused to accept. Thus an impassable void has separated the leaders of both sides for the past decade; and the ordinary Negro has been in the no man’s land between.

  The lunch-counter demonstrations moved to the center of the void, and menaced both principals: the recalcitrant South, by striking closer to the heart of segregation than any other widespread local movements have ever struck before; the Negro leadership class, by exposing its impotence.

  The Negro leadership class, still torn by jealousy, dissension, and power struggles, rushed to the aid of the students and their mass supporters, and attempted to make complete recovery by “correlating” and “co-ordinating” the movements. But as one Southern NAACP branch president said to me, “How can I correlate something when I don’t know where and when it’s going to happen?”

  I found that established leaders don’t have the same fire in their stomachs that the students and the rallying Negro masses have. As the Southern Regional Council interim report on the demonstrations reflects, Southern leaders, Negro and white, are saying, “Before this happened we could have integrated lunch counters. Now it is almost impossible.” What the report does not explain is why the lunch counters were not already integrated. This, again, is black power talking to white power about something neither fully understands.

  The Genius Behind It

  When I talked to the students and their mass supporters I heard them quote the Wall Street Journal, of all things, to show that they had hit the segregationists in the pocketbook. I also discovered that in March five Southern cities had already yielded to the demands of the demonstrators and were serving Negroes at lunch counters without incident. Eighteen other cities had interracial committees working to resolve the matter. In each case the students have made it plain that they will not accept segregation in any form.

  But neither the students nor their real supporters dwelt unduly on such practical results. For them, individually and as a group, the victory came when they mustered the courage to look the segregationists in the face and say, “I’m no longer afraid!”

  The genius of the demonstrations lies in their spirituality; in their ability to enlist every Negro, from the laborer to the leader, and inspire him to seek suffering as a badge of honor. By employing such valid symbols as singing, praying, reading Gandhi, quoting Thoreau, remembering Martin Luther King, preaching Christ, but most of all by suffering themselves—being hit by baseball bats, kicked, and sent to jail—the students set off an old-fashioned revival that has made integration an article of faith with the Negro masses who, like other masses, are apathetic toward voting and education.

  Now the cook, the maid, the butler, and the chauffeur are on fire with the new faith. For the first time since slavery the South is facing a mass revolt against segregation. There is no total explanation for what has happened. All I know is that as I talked with the participants I realized that people were weary of the very fact of segregation. They were no longer content “to let the NAACP do it”; they wanted to get into the fight and they chose the market place, the great center of American egalitarianism, not because it had any overwhelming significance for them but because it was there—accessible and segregated. Tomorrow—and they all believe there will be a tomorrow—their target will be something else.

  Few of the masses who have come to the support of these students realize that in attacking segregation under the banner of idealism they are fighting a battle they refused for five years to enter in the name of legalism. But there is a twinkle in the Southern Negro’s eye. One gets the feeling that he is proud, now that he has come to full stature and has struck out with one blow against both segregation and the stifling control of Negro leaders.

  In all truth, the Negro masses have never been flattered by the presence of these leaders, many of whom—justifiably or not—they suspected were Judas goats. The Negro masses will name leaders and will give them power and responsibility. But there will never again be another class of white-oriented leaders such as the one that has prevailed since 1900.

  What’s Left?

  For the Negro masses this is the laying down of a heavy burden. As the deep South is slowly learning, it faces a race of Negro individuals—any of whom, acting out of deep religious faith, may at any moment choose the most available evidence of segregation and stage a protest. And when he does the entire Negro community will close ranks about him.

  If Negro leadership organizations accept this verdict of change gracefully they can find a continuing usefulness as a reservoir of trained personnel to aid the local Negro in pressure techniques and legal battles. Indeed, within four weeks after the lunch-counter demonstrations began, just such a pattern was established. I have investigated the mechanics of the demonstrations in twenty-six cities and in each instance I found that the students and their local supporters moved
first on their own; CORE came in by invitation and provided classes in techniques of non-violence; and the NAACP provided lawyers and bondsmen for those who were arrested. If Negro leadership organizations don’t accept this state of affairs, they will be replaced, as they were in Montgomery.

  Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund have already set an excellent pattern which other leadership organizations will do well to study. As a symbol, Mr. Marshall inspires local citizens to act; when they do act, and at their request, Marshall brings the skill of his organization to their defense. Thurgood Marshall’s role as the inspiring servant of the masses accounts for much of what has been accomplished to date in and for the United States—including his appearance in London as counsel to the Kenya natives.

  Negro leadership organizations know what the revolt means and are about reconciled to being servants rather than catalysts—at least I think so. I cannot say the same for the Negro leadership class as a whole. My month-long investigation unearthed a good deal of foot-dragging by moneyed Negroes in high places. They are not too pleased to see young Negro students sit down at the conference table with Southern white city officials. Some Negro college presidents are set to execute strange maneuvers. I would not be surprised, for example, if some of the student demonstrators who are studying under grants from foundations suddenly find their scholarships have been canceled on recommendation from their college presidents . . . for “poor scholarship.” But nobody noticed their scholarship until they sat down at a previously all-white lunch counter.

  The student demonstrators have no illusions. They know the segregationists are not their only enemies. But the students told me they are not prejudiced—they are willing to stand up to their enemies, Negro and white alike.

  It is not premature, then, to write this epitaph to the Negro leader while at the same time announcing the birth of the Negro individual. The christening has already begun; the funeral is yet a few days off. This is as it should be, America being committed, as it most certainly is, to orderly social transition. But there is no reason whatsoever to doubt that both events will come off on schedule.

  III

  The Mountaintop

  For a moment—a brief one, running roughly from the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, to the signing of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965—the movement hit its peak. In retrospect, King’s stirring sermon at the March is one of the high notes of the American Century. As James Reston (1909–1995) and Russell Baker (1925– ) pointed out in the next day’s New York Times, white Washington had been braced for the worst, and there were complications ahead as the politicians tried to figure out where to go from here. Reston was the newspaper’s Washington bureau chief, and Baker had just become a columnist but was writing a feature for the front page—and he started the day in a helicopter. “There was great fear there would be rioting,” Baker recalls, “so the Times chartered a chopper. But it was so quiet that I had the pilot go over my house and I checked out the roof. Finally I had him land at National Airport and went to the Lincoln Memorial.”

  The Civil Rights Act passed in 1964; the next goal was federal voting rights legislation. The bill would be passed in Washington, but the forces that produced the law met far from the capital, on a bridge in Alabama. In an excerpt from his memoirs, John Lewis (1940– ), the young activist who had conquered a childhood stutter by preaching to chickens on his Alabama farm and whose Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had been at the forefront of the movement, recalls the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march, and the televised beatings he endured when white officers assaulted him and his comrades on the Pettus Bridge. The images from that attack galvanized the nation, and the Voting Rights Act was not far behind.

  Walker Percy (1916–1990), physician and novelist, explains how the death of the Southern white moderate fueled the anarchy that afflicted Mississippi in the early and mid-1960s, concluding on a note of hope: “Someday a white Mississippian is going to go to New York, make the usual detour through Harlem, and see it for the foul cheerless warren that it is; and instead of making him happy as it does now, it is going to make him unhappy. Then the long paranoia, this damnable sectional insanity, will be one important step closer to being over.” William Styron (1925– ) details his discovery of Nat Turner, the leader of the slave rebellion. Willie Morris of Harper’s had written Styron around 1964 and asked if he would do something for the magazine. Styron declined the first time, but when Morris contacted him again and asked for a piece to include in a special issue of the magazine marking the centennial of the end of the Civil War, Styron, who had been at work on The Confessions of Nat Turner, offered what became This Quiet Dust. Two years later, Harper’s would publish a 45,000-word excerpt of Styron’s novel.

  As the sixties wore on, temperatures rose. Stanley Crouch (1945– ) was working as a speechwriter for an antipoverty program in Los Angeles in 1965, the summer Watts burned. “I went up because there had been some static,” Crouch says. “I wanted to check it out, and then all hell broke loose. The Malcolm X rhetoric was beginning to affect how people thought—you know, ‘You can’t love your enemy.’ ” More than 2,000 National Guardsmen were called in, and by the time it was over, there had been 3,934 arrests and 37 people were dead. Crouch recalled the scene for Rolling Stone years later, and the novelist and critic Elizabeth Hardwick (1916– ) analyzed “Violence in the City—An End or a Beginning? A Report by the Governor’s Commission on the Los Angeles Riots,” when it came out the spring after the violence.

  As the national riots of the mid-1960s—after Watts came Detroit, Newark, and many others—unfolded, the Black Power movement began to gather force. Arguing that the time had come for confrontation, not compromise, Stokely Carmichael wrested control of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee from John Lewis. Bernard Weinraub (1938– ) was a young New York Times reporter when Esquire called and asked him to do a freelance piece on Carmichael. Weinraub’s profile of the Black Panther’s frenetic life on the road, “The Brilliancy of Black,” was one of the first major looks at this rising figure. “I think he was a bit flattered that someone from Esquire would want to follow him around,” Weinraub recalls. “He was accustomed to news coverage, but not magazine pieces.” Carmichael’s rise, and the appeal of Panther-like tactics, were forcing King and his nonviolent lieutenants to the margins of the movement. Charlayne Hunter-Gault (1942– ), who had integrated the University of Georgia and then moved to New York to work for The New Yorker, caught up with Julian Bond, one of the key strategists of the movement’s glory days and by then a Georgia state representative. In a “Talk of the Town” (the editorial “we” was standard style for that section of the magazine for years), Hunter-Gault asked what Bond made of the future. “[F]or the Movement,” Bond told Hunter-Gault, “lack of interest is more killing than lack of money.”

  David Halberstam (1934– ), just back from overseas duty with The New York Times, sensed the same thing. As a young reporter in Mississippi and Tennessee in the fifties and very early sixties, Halberstam had covered the first civil rights days. After tours for the Times in Vietnam, Africa, and Eastern Europe, he came home in the spring of 1967 and soon moved to Harper’s Magazine. The movement he saw now was different from the one he had known. For his first Harper’s piece, Halberstam caught up with King as the minister—still improbably young—turned his attention from segregation to the poor and Vietnam. “I spent about two weeks with him,” Halberstam recalls, “and it was clear that Martin was about to hit a wall. As he came North, everybody wanted something from him, and you could feel the burden he was carrying on his shoulders.”

  Halberstam’s article was published in August 1967. Eight months later, in Memphis, James Earl Ray killed King on the balcony outside Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel. Garry Wills (1934– ) was living in Baltimore at the time. “The minute I heard King had been shot,” he says, “I got one of the last seats on the plane to Memphis.” Once Wills landed, he headed for the funeral h
ome where King had been taken; there were only three journalists—Wills, a Detroit Free Press reporter, and a photographer from Life—inside the building when the undertakers emerged with King’s body. Wills had been writing regularly for Esquire and called the magazine’s editor, Harold Hayes, the day after he got to Tennessee and asked if Hayes wanted a piece. “Absolutely,” the editor replied.

  “I Have a Dream . . .”

  The New York Times, August 29, 1963

  JAMES RESTON

  Abraham Lincoln, who presided in his stone temple today above the children of the slaves he emancipated, may have used just the right words to sum up the general reaction to the Negro’s massive march on Washington. “I think,” he wrote to Gov. Andrew G. Curtin of Pennsylvania in 1861, “the necessity of being ready increases. Look to it.” Washington may not have changed a vote today, but it is a little more conscious tonight of the necessity of being ready for freedom. It may not “look to it” at once, since it is looking to so many things, but it will be a long time before it forgets the melodious and melancholy voice of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. crying out his dreams to the multitude.

  It was Dr. King who, near the end of the day, touched the vast audience. Until then the pilgrimage was merely a great spectacle. Only those marchers from the embattled towns in the Old Confederacy had anything like the old crusading zeal. For many the day seemed an adventure, a long outing in the late summer sun—part liberation from home, part Sunday School picnic, part political convention, and part fish-fry.

  But Dr. King brought them alive in the late afternoon with a peroration that was an anguished echo from all the old American reformers. Roger Williams calling for religious liberty, Sam Adams calling for political liberty, old man Thoreau denouncing coercion, William Lloyd Garrison demanding emancipation, and Eugene V. Debs crying for economic equality—Dr. King echoed them all.