by Jon Meacham
There was some justification for the expectation. In the South, Negro leaders and Negro people fought for their civil liberties with the kind of courage, the kind of selflessness that white liberals were incapable of when the Cold War insanity, and its first agent, Joe McCarthy, clenched a fist around their civil liberties. Whites, the likes of me, looked at the Negro movement, Dr. King’s movement, once it had stirred hope within them, to do more than oppose the racial injustices of the South. What we came to expect was that Negroes, with their demonstrations, their new-found ability to force action by the offering of their bodies to the clubs of the cops and the murderousness of the unlicensed terrorists, would change American society, would right its wrongs, would correct the fatal malfunctions of its systems. Despite all that hopelessness I carried up there to Washington, I must have had some small hope left that the Movement, spread now to the poor of all races, still might just do it, might reactivate the conscience of society. This had been the ultimate delusion: that the least powerful, and then, even, the least able could do a job that may well not be accomplished even should it be tackled by the most powerful, the most able. At last, the delusion was dead.
I got my two drinks fetched as fast as tourist accommodations allow, and ignored my seat-mate, a young soldier, through most of the first one. But the soldier asked me for a cigarette (damn it, I seemed to be counting out my last hopes for the Movement in bummed cigarettes) and seemed as anxious as I was for the stewardess to bring the drinks. We got to talking. His voice was Southern, which sounded good to me. He had drunk, he said, the day before, a full quart of grain alcohol, and still hadn’t quite got over it. He said that the first drink just about burned out his whole mouth and throat and head.
“I took it straight,” he said.
“Should have cut it with grapefruit juice,” I said out of the vastness of my own military experience.
“Yeah, I did after that first one.”
He mentioned that he was a cook. Oh-oh, I thought, remembering that all the army cooks of my time had been certifiably insane.
A colored man, he said, had given him the grain alcohol as a going-away present for his leave. “He comes around every night and I give him all the food we have left over. His family needs it, other families. I don’t see any harm in that. We waste so damn much food.” I said I didn’t see any harm in it, either.
The soldier was from East Point, a suburb of Atlanta, a stronghold of the kind of people who believe in Lester Maddox. His daddy was a policeman. “Makes it rough,” he said. “I like to go to these bars, my favorite ones, and the cops come in and see me and first thing go tell my dad I was there.” I asked him what he planned to do when he got out. He said he would be a computer operator, an ambition entirely out of my generation’s experience, but sounding like a likely one.
“I still have to go back and finish high school; I got kicked out my senior year for dumping a whole big load of fireworks into a toilet in the boys’ restroom. It blew out all the plumbing.”
I laughed, but shouldn’t have. He didn’t, and I knew from my own son’s recent experience with authority, with the close-knittedness nowadays of school and police authority (the educators are cops; the cops educate), that this wasn’t a laughing matter anymore, that Huck Finn and Penrod are not tolerated in a society that is deadly serious, that he had felt the shiver of the threat of jail, of authoritarian power.
The army, he said, had matured him; he wouldn’t ever do a fool stunt like that again. He had been to Vietnam. I fought off the juxtaposition of images, the guilty criminal putting fireworks in the boys’ john and society’s hero wreaking unspeakable havoc with the explosives and other chemicals they use in Vietnam: I’d had enough ironic juxtapositions for one trip. He said he had been wounded—showing me a scar on his wrist—by a grenade. “I know,” he said (the plane was circling to land), “what we are fighting for over there.”
“Oh yeah,” I said, half-believing from the conviction in his voice that he did, that he would reveal a meaning in all this world of meaninglessness to me.
“They got my buddy,” he said, “the same attack. A mortar. He didn’t have a chance. And I said to myself right then, I’ll kill every goddamn gook I can get my hands on. That’s what this war is all about.”
It was hot in Atlanta when we got down. The cab driver complained of the unrelenting quality of the goddamned heat in that ageless, always surprised, equinox after equinox, complaint of the Southerner. The Movement is dead, I said to myself. And there is no hope that lasts. They have known that for some time in other places: in France they have embodied it now into a philosophy; in India, they have nurtured their religion on it. Negroes in the South have known it, through slavery and since then—existing, making do. How did the SNCC kids, with all their reading of Camus, miss that? Keeping on, those of them still at it, coining their rhetoric from the metal of hope, showing in all their hate-talk now only the other side of the love-talk, anything to avoid accepting hopelessness. Dr. King knew about that. Making do, as Southern Negroes always have done, with an irrelevant and irrational religion, he forged a world-view of staggering insight. Making do with the worst of his followers by drawing the best out of them, he built a movement that shook America, almost converted some of it, at the very least put an end to Southern institutionalization of racism. And then he had seen his philosophy and strategy of nonviolent change lose influence, had seen America steadily moving in the opposite direction from the one he sought. You get down to hopelessness, finally, his kind of hopelessness, and then you see that it is still possible to keep on, to find meaning in meaninglessness, like the Negroes with no food and no purpose, like the demonstrators in that driveway. “Keep on a-walking, children,” Dr. King used to say in the hot, fervent, sacred little churches of the Movement’s great days, “don’t you get weary. We are headed toward the promised land.”
“We in a War—Or Haven’t Anybody Told You That?”
Report from Black America, 1969
PETER GOLDMAN
They roared on two wheels into Burma Road—Harlem’s unaffectionate nickname for its stretch of Lenox Avenue—and burned to a stop outside the Royal Flush Bar. The car belonged to Joe-Joe, a chunky ebony 20-year-old who earned it by sticking through high school and graduating into a job at the post office. But the dude who led everybody into the artificial midnight of the Royal Flush and popped for beers all around was just naturally J.B., a young man of obtrusive flash and dash in hip-hugging black gabardines, a crisp yellow shirt and a new stingy-brim straw hat. J.B. was 20, too, but he had quit high school early and got himself a hustle. He was a numbers runner, with a bankroll built out of Harlem’s dimes and quarters, and he had it made.
Outside, the streets cooked in the August sun; the bloods were idling on the corners and the stoops, slugging wine from bottles wrapped in brown paper bags; the talk, as it did every summer now, fastened mostly on the latest news of riot and retaliation in the ghettos of urban America. “The Man, he worried now,” J.B. was saying, “cause he know we ain’t takin’ no more his shit. Anybody come rollin’ into a city with tanks got to be afraid of somethin’. Anyplace you see a tank, you know there got to be a war goin’ on, right? And that’s what this is, baby—war!”
“That’s right, that’s right,” said Skeeter, a spindly kid who quite clearly neither expected nor demanded anything of life except a place at J.B.’s heels. Skeeter was 19 and nowhere, a jobless dropout living with an aunt and a sister. A fierce stammer helped shame him out of high school when he was 14, and he still wasn’t talking much. Except when J.B. said something; then Skeeter would say, “That’s right.”
Someone wondered what Rap Brown was into those days. “That’s my man!” J.B. exclaimed. “Ain’t nobody in the world gonna get nothin’ if he don’t fight for it. The black man’s been takin’ low too long.”
“That’s right,” Skeeter blurted. But Joe-Joe half disagreed—not on the necessity of making a fight but on what the fighting was real
ly about. “I used to watch ole Stokely up there on TV tellin’ off the white people,” he said. “I thought he was crazy, cause I thought he was gonna get hisself killed—like Malcolm. But you know, when a man says what all the time you been thinkin’, you wonder if maybe you ain’t crazy. I mean like if you feel inside knotted all the time, maybe it’s better if you make some noise.” He sipped at his beer. “Like the time I broke my big toe cuttin’ the fool [roughhousing] out at Coney Island. I went on limpin’ around grinnin’, not lettin’ on to nobody I was hurt. But I finally had to tell ’em cause I couldn’t stand it no more. And like, you know, these two cats crossed their arms and made like a seat and carried me to the beach clinic. Now supposin’ I hadn’t said nothin’?”
So Joe-Joe guessed that if Harlem ever rioted again he would join in. “Man,” he said, grinning broadly, “you know my sister wouldn’t let me in the street that last time. But I bet I’m goin’ to get somethin’ next time. I just might break me some windows, grab me some rags and throw me some bottles.”
J.B. didn’t know. “I wouldn’t mind knockin’ me some cracker heads together,” he said—but, like any budding entrepreneur, he worried that rioting might be bad for business. Still, in the end, he guessed he would join in, too. “I mean,” he said, “that’s where it’s at.”
“That’s right,” Skeeter said. “That’s right.”
White America had, by the end of the 1960s, accumulated a vast literature on rioting in the ghetto, some of it intelligent, some banal, some provocative, some pedantic—and hardly any of it quite so educational as an hour in any black slum in the nation. Joe-Joe had it right—the riots were the black man’s desperate cry to whites that he was hurting and that he couldn’t stand any more. But rioting is the most primitive form of communication; it evoked shock, fear, guilt, anger and finally a sort of numb acceptance of periodic violent insurrections in the casbah as an ordinary part of urban life. “What shocked me most,” said a Detroit matron in the midst of the devastating riot there, “was how normal it seemed to have those soldiers standing outside Hudson’s department store when I went shopping.” To be so inured to rioting was finally and tragically to miss the message of the rioters. For what Joe-Joe and J.B. and the kids on a thousand corners were trying to tell America was that, for them, life as their elders had lived it simply was no longer supportable. When a young man growing up in the suffocating emptiness of the ghetto reaches that unhappy pass, the issue is no longer whether or not riots are moral. The question becomes whether or not they will be useful—or at least be fun while they last.
It was a judgment on America that so many of the ghetto young came to that pass and acted on it in the middle and late 1960s. A “white racist” when the decade began was somebody who put a bedsheet over his head and said “nigguh” in public in a Southern accent. When the ’60s ended, America as a society had been pronounced racist by President Johnson’s impeccably responsible riot commission—a verdict which may or may not have accurately stated the nation’s collective intent but which most certainly described the results. That some white Americans finally asked themselves the question was no doubt a hopeful sign. That black Americans were able to raise it only at the most terrible cost—by resort to violence at a pitch and a frequency without precedent in the history of this violent land—may have been the sorriest fact of all.
The cost was devastating indeed. The fire this time flared first in Harlem in 1964, burned high in Watts in 1965 and roared to a crescendo in the ten months between July 1967 (when Newark and Detroit exploded) and April 1968 (when Martin Luther King’s assassination set off what amounted to a single coast-to-coast rebellion). The statistics of those five years were unreliable and in the last analysis nearly meaningless. It was enough to record that more than 200 people, most of them blacks, died in the streets; that at least 10,000 were injured and 60,000 arrested; that whole streets were plundered, whole blocks laid waste by fire; that the occupation of American cities by soldiers armed for war became an everyday spectacle of summer; that, by the end of the decade, hardly a city or a town with a black enclave big enough to be called a ghetto had escaped at least a brush with catastrophe. The epidemic touched not only such acknowledged urban disaster areas as Newark but such progressively run “model” cities as Detroit and New Haven—a spread that suggested how little such distinctions mean to black people as against the everyday desperation of ghetto life.
Desperation was precisely the point of the riots; they were important not so much for the physical damage they wreaked as for the social and the psychic damage they revealed. Harlem began it all but Watts was the watershed—the revolt of the colonials in a sun-washed, palm-shaded paradise a continent’s distance from the stifling tenements of black Manhattan. The ashes there were still warm when Martin Luther King ventured in to try to make peace, and his first speaking stop in the ghetto told everything about the way the currents were running. “We must join hands—” he began. “And burn!” a black kid whooped, and everybody laughed. King struggled through his speech, but he canceled the rest of his schedule in Watts and soon left town. Neither he nor The Movement was ever quite the same again. A whole ideology of rioting flowered in the ghetto after Watts; Rap Brown and SNCC proposed celebrating August 18, the anniversary of the uprising, as Independence Day—the day when the blacks “stopped moaning ‘We Shall Overcome’ and started swinging to ‘Burn, Baby, Burn.’ ”*6 And where the ideology didn’t take, the fever did. Whites were recurringly shocked not only by the fury of the riots but by the unbridled joy of the rioters. “It’s like laughing at a funeral,” said New Jersey’s Governor Richard Hughes, haggard and hollow-eyed after a pre-dawn riot tour of Newark’s Central Ward. Not quite. “The chronic riot of their day-to-day lives is, as far as they’re concerned, no better than the acute riots,” Kenneth Clark, the black psychologist, observed. “They don’t have anything to lose, including their lives. It’s not just desperation—it’s what-the-hell.”
The riots were all the more ominous for the very fact that they flared in a community so heavily inclined to nonviolence as a strategy of protest—and so stubbornly hopeful that nonviolence would carry the day. Nearly two-thirds of the Negroes in the Newsweek Poll believed that the blacks had more to lose than to gain by resorting to violence and that, in any event, they could win their rights without it. This faith, for all the devastation of the latter ’60s, was as strong at the end of the decade as it had been at the beginning. “You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar,” a 42-year-old Pittsburgh housewife told a Gallup interviewer. “We have nothing to fight with,” said a Denver printer, 41 years old. “Violence,” a 29-year-old steel-mill worker in Kansas City offered, “will only get a lot of people killed without winning anything. We are winning without violence.”
Yet there was peril in taking too much comfort in the great sentiment for nonviolence. It ought to surprise no one that black people, like everybody else, preferred war to peace; the far more stunning figure was that fully a fifth of all Negroes—and more than a third of the Northern ghetto young—simply did not believe that their struggle could be won by peaceful means. They remained a minority within a minority—but there are quite enough of them, in James Baldwin’s phrase, to ring down the curtain on the American dream. “We aren’t going to get anything unless we take it,” said a 21-year-old student in Baltimore. “The white man has no reason to give us anything when he can keep us where we are.” A college freshman in Pittsburgh: “It’s gonna be three eyes for an eye.” A machine operator in Philadelphia, 42 years old: “There’s a time for everything. Sometimes a brick must be thrown.” A Pittsburgh housewife: “We got to get to all white people, and some of them, honey, only listen to violence.” A waitress of 39 in Kansas City: “I used to feel that nonviolence was the way. But I’m changing and I don’t know why. I think violence may be the only thing they understand.”
There was, moreover, a painful ambivalence in black America’s view of the rioting of the summe
rs just past. Negroes on balance shared the white man’s abhorrence of the burning, the thieving and the killing. But they parted company on what those acts meant. Lyndon Johnson probably spoke for the white American consensus when, in a stricken TV report to the nation on the Detroit riot, he said, “First—let there be no mistake about it—the looting, arson, plunder and pillage which have occurred are not part of a civil-rights protest. That is crime—and crime must be dealt with forcefully, swiftly, certainly . . .” Black people were by no means so certain. They agreed that the actions of the rioters were criminal, but they tended to see the rioting very much as a political act—an outcry at the just and widely shared grievances of the Negro community. So, for them, the riots in fact were continuous with the civil-rights protest of the 1950s and ’60s. And so the fire and the blood were not simple criminality run rampant; they were, for many blacks, the more or less regrettable excesses of a righteous struggle toward freedom.
