How much is that book in the window?
The one that says all the smart things.
How much is that book in the window?
I do hope to learn all it brings.
How much is that book in the window?
The one which my Popsy wrote.
How much is that book in the window?
You can buy it without signing a note.
As they conclude, the little girls shout: “ALPACA! Fifty Cents!”4
Hunt is listening and nodding his head, flecked with silky threads of white hair, in time to the tune. He has written the lyrics himself.
As people near him, they can see he came prepared for the winter weather. His white long johns peek out from beneath his blue suit. He is sporting a blue bow tie, blue suit, and blue socks. The girls are also dressed in blue. Hunt occasionally beams and turns his haunting eyes—the same color as his suit—to the customers approaching with copies of his book.
Hunt believes that Dallas is populated by well-meaning but ill-informed people who are very much like the children standing behind him: innocent, a bit naive, hopeful… and looking for someone or something that will give them a purpose in life.
He watches with quiet satisfaction as people pick up his book.
Alpaca is not Hunt’s first foray into educating Americans.
In the 1950s he poured millions of dollars into his nationally syndicated radio program, Facts Forum. He hired three of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s former aides and an ex-FBI agent living in Dallas to run it. Facts Forum reached millions of listeners every day, becoming the first wide-scale pro-conservative radio show in America.
Senator McCarthy was a guest on the show, as was Congressman Bruce Alger. During a Facts Forum debate on Social Security, Alger received ten minutes of airtime to attack the federal program. The speaker in favor got thirty seconds. Listeners were then invited to order books personally endorsed by Hunt: We Must Abolish the United Nations and Hitler Was a Liberal.
There were also persistent attacks on the plans to desegregate, by force if necessary, the schools in America: “Remember that the Negroes, when first brought to America, were not free people reduced to slavery. They were merely transferred from a barbaric enslavement by their own people in Africa to a relatively benign enslavement in the Western Hemisphere.”5
By 1958, Hunt shuttered Facts Forum in favor of a new program: Life Line, combining religion and politics. He hired a preacher who adopted Hunt’s preferred terms: Constructive for devout conservatives and Mistaken for those on the road to communism. Hunt’s Dallas-based show is aired on hundreds of radio stations across the nation. Now, a favorite target of Life Line is the United Nations and those internationalists—like Stanley Marcus—who support it: “We were sold the UN on a promise of peace. What we were not told and what we failed to realize was that this peace was to be on communist terms—in fact, it was to be a total victory for the international Mistaken conspiracy against free men.”6
Hunt’s program, like Dealey’s newspaper, is equally condemning of the Supreme Court. The justices in Washington seem part of a thickening conspiracy. “Majority rulings of the Supreme Court of the United States actually have had the effect of giving the green light to subversive and criminal elements in our country.”
Life Line issues a sharp warning: “Rulings of the Supreme Court are not, in reality, the supreme law of the land.”7
Ten million Americans tune in every single day to hear Hunt’s program, but no one is more devoted than its creator. Hunt puts LIFE LINE stickers on the bumper of his Pontiac and insists his employees do the same. His wife in Dallas wears Life Line earrings. Hunt installs a six-foot-high, twelve-foot-wide pink-and-blue sign in the front yard of his home: LIFE LINE, 6:15 P.M., DIAL 1090.
In his Dallas office he keeps a specially built AM radio that allows him to monitor broadcasts in a dozen different states. He makes his children listen to the program during dinner. Hunt’s grip on his radio empire is firm. Occasionally, however, his announcers will stray. Once, Hunt heard the host of Facts Forum describe democracy as “a political outgrowth of the teachings of Jesus Christ.” Hunt rushed to corner the man, yelling that America is a republic and not everyone should be able to vote:
“The American founding fathers knew, and Jefferson said in specific terms, that a democracy is the most evil kind of government possible… the handiwork of the devil himself… a phony liberal form of watered down communism.”8
When he was alone, Hunt sometimes marveled at his transcendent ability to see into the future. He knows which women are destined to bear his children. He can divine where the oil will come blasting up from the ground. Now a new vision is becoming clear, and it is alarming: Negroes will soon be allowed to vote in large numbers… people who have never contributed to America in my genetically superior way will be entitled to the same number of votes as me.
“H. L. hated niggers,” one of his employees says. “It pissed him off that they could cancel out his vote.”9
As H. Rhett James, a tall, lean thirty-two-year-old preacher with an open face and black-framed glasses, drives to the nighttime meetings at the historic New Hope Baptist Church, he can see the buildings downtown and how they almost seem to cast a shadow over the old freedmen’s town zone—where the first freed slaves in the city lived, and where his church has its roots. Where some of the hidden graves of the slaves are being simply paved over as new Dallas highways are built.10
Almost since the minute he arrived two years ago to become pastor of New Hope—a house of worship founded by former slaves and where Booker T. Washington, Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others have come bravely to speak—James has been picking up the phone late at night, while his children are asleep, and hearing strangers hissing death threats. He tries to scare them back: The FBI is listening in on this conversation.11
He quickly joined and prodded the civil rights movement in the city. He also devoted himself to the John F. Kennedy for president committee in Dallas. And now people are branding him “an Outside Agitator.” It is part of the swirl, the dizzying mix: If you support Martin Luther King Jr., if you push for immediate integration, you are preaching social disorder, and socialism, and ultimately communism. The black newspaper—the only outlet in the city that regularly features stories about King—has been running headlines about James and his work: DALLAS BRANCH NAACP WEARY OF WAITING FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE.
James often implores the older black leaders in Dallas to come to meetings at New Hope—perhaps the first black church in Dallas, and one that has a long history of fighting against lynchings and the remaining, hidden elements of the KKK. He has learned a lot from them in his short time in the city: About the black families in South Dallas who tried to move into white neighborhoods but had their houses bombed. About the four hundred white men who invaded the small town outside of Dallas that federal officials had picked as the first place in the state to try to integrate a white school. The mob hung effigies of black figures and they waved signs: DEAD COONS ARE THE BEST COONS and $2 A DOZEN FOR NIGGER EARS. The governor dispatched the Texas Rangers to support the mob and make sure that integration did not occur.12
As James drives near downtown, he can spot an area most black residents call the Bottoms. It is a zone defined by dirt levees meant to contain the Trinity River, and dotted with clumps of tar-paper shacks that look like they are slouching toward oblivion. There is a Negro Park at the foot of a small hill that finally descends to the river—and at the top of the hill there is a collection of barely tended cemetery plots for the first white settlers in the city. In the graveyard are small six-by-six-inch blocks of limestone or granite; those smaller blocks mark where black servants have been buried at the feet of their white masters.
If James looks closely, there are unpaved dirt paths that drop from the hill, down to the river. At night, the black families in the miserable bungalows might pull their children inside when they see a car, sometimes a police car, bumping deeper i
nto the lowlands. It’s an open rumor that almost everyone has heard: There are hidden spots in the Bottoms where brutalizers still regularly mete out unsanctioned punishments to the unfortunate. And sometimes, the bodies of dead black men simply slip off the Trinity River banks as if those poor souls are being pulled by something intrinsic and unyielding. There are whispers about the men who committed “suicide”—by shooting themselves in the back, by beating the backs of their heads. Sometimes black families go to James or other preachers and plead for help: Please find out about my son. Can you find some justice? Can you talk to the police? Is there something you can do?
Sometimes they go elsewhere for answers:
There is an old lady who lives in the Bottoms who knows how to find the bodies consumed by the river. She is a seer, some people say, and she will ask a mother or father or wife to fetch a shirt that once belonged to their missing black man. Someone from the Bottoms rows her onto the water, she throws the shirt to the river, and when it stops, she tells people to dive in that spot—that’s where the dead black man will be found.
James, a father of four, has accepted the fact that, for many, Dallas is inscrutable. But he tells the black lawyers and preachers who assemble at his church—many of whom have lived in Dallas for decades, far longer than James has been in town—that he is impatient. That he wants to finally force Dallas to integrate its public schools—to finally do what every other major city seems to be doing. He’ll start by running for the school board, to challenge an entrenched white incumbent. James has other announcements. He wants to aggressively ramp up the level of civil rights protests in Dallas—and he wants Dallas to be part “of the national movement.” He wants to bring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Dallas.
The other black leaders, particularly the preachers, have learned to study James carefully. There have been mild protests in Dallas before. They’ve almost always been rebuffed—and James is certainly not the first to try, though he is, without question, the boldest newcomer. If Stanley Marcus has an intellectual counterpart in black Dallas—which makes up a third of the city—it is James, one of eight children, and whose father was also a minister who preached courage and independence.
James quoted Aeschylus, Tolstoy, and Emerson. He immersed himself in studying Gandhian civil disobedience. He traveled the nation, pursuing several advanced academic degrees. And perhaps more than any other public figure in the city, he admired Dr. King—the very man Dealey, Alger, Criswell, Hunt, and so many others in Dallas equate with communism. King might be the one man most feared by the Dallas Citizens Council. King is the kind of activist who would be very bad for business.
The older men who listen to the firebrand James often exchange knowing glances. Many of them have lived in the city their whole lives. They know there are people, a handful, who really run the city. Not at City Hall, but in the hushed quiet of the boardrooms and private offices.
There are frightening reasons that someone like Martin Luther King Jr. hasn’t been invited—or allowed—in Dallas for years.
This winter, by now, James should know how Dallas really works.
MARCH
Juanita Craft, a bespectacled fifty-eight-year-old widow who lives in a small clapboard house not far from Stanley Marcus’s old family home, is taking her seat and guiding the young people who seem to follow her everywhere she goes. She has a legacy, and people in black Dallas know it: Her grandfather was a slave. Her mother died after she was refused treatment at an all-white hospital in Dallas. Craft was the first black woman to cast a vote in Dallas County.1
People greet the woman with the graying hair and stand to say hello. Craft asks about their children—and whether those children will be joining the NAACP. She has enrolled thousands of people in the NAACP, and she has helped create two hundred chapters by traveling around the state into places where black men and women are immobilized by fear. She has a few hundred young people in her youth brigades in Dallas, and she led them when they first tried to integrate the famous State Fair in Dallas five years ago.
Truth be told, she never thought she’d see this March day: Dallas’s Memorial Auditorium filling up with sixteen hundred people, from Floridians to Californians—most of them black. And she knows why NAACP leader Roy Wilkins has accepted the Reverend Rhett James’s invitation to come to Dallas—and why the NAACP has really selected Dallas for its regional meeting.
Maybe what is happening elsewhere in the South can finally happen in Dallas in 1960: A month earlier, four black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, staged a sit-in at a whites-only lunch counter inside a Woolworth drugstore. The students were refused service, but they stayed in their seats until the store closed. The next day they returned. By the fourth day, they were joined by three hundred other black supporters.
Craft hopes that maybe that kind of fire, the fire of change, can come to Dallas. Stanley Marcus’s restaurant inside Neiman Marcus is segregated. So are all the public schools. So are the movie theaters—and the downtown lunch counters. Dallas is remarkably segregated, perhaps the largest American city with such a widespread sense of apartheid. Maybe this NAACP convention will jump-start the movement in Dallas.
Ted Dealey, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, is less than welcoming to the NAACP, which he refers to as the National Association for the Agitation of the Colored People: “Any way you take it, NAACP means trouble. It means ill will. It means loss in Dallas of a cordial and friendly relationship between good white citizens and good colored.”2
From her seat in the auditorium, Craft watches as Wilkins, the NAACP’s national leader, takes the stage. Reverend James has wanted him to come to Dallas for a long time. The News calls him “Agitator Wilkins.” This is not his first time in Texas. A few years earlier he helped attorney Thurgood Marshall beat back an attempt by state officials to outlaw the NAACP.
As he peers at the audience, Wilkins notes several empty chairs. Plenty of people braved the racist outbacks of East Texas to arrive in Dallas for the convention. But where are all the Dallas people?
Looking down from the lectern, his voice drops an octave as he departs from his carefully prepared remarks: “I regret the spineless attitude of some Negroes who are afraid to stand up and be counted on the side of freedom… They ought to know that they can’t be free until they think they are free.”3
A skeptical Dallas Morning News reporter approaches “Agitator Wilkins” to ask if he really believes that the sit-ins will soon be coming to Dallas. He quickly replies:
“That depends on the young people of Dallas. And if I know them, the demonstrations will be here soon.”4
Downtown, in the boardrooms and pulpits, it is not merely a forecast… it is a warning.
After the rally, back at her home, Juanita Craft is often by herself. She misses her husband, Johnny. She likes to cook from the old family recipes, and she loves to look at her ever-growing collection of rocks. She finds things, buttons or pieces of glass that are thrown away, and tries to make them into little handicrafts that she can give to her “adopted children.” Johnny died before they could have their own children and now she has these hundreds of young people all over Texas who call her their aunt, their second mother, their cousin, their grandmother. They call themselves “Craft’s kids.”
She has a favorite chair, one where she reads and closes her eyes and summons things seared in her mind: When she worked as a maid at the Adolphus Hotel, she was ordered to clean a mess in a high-dollar suite. There was a gang of white men, hollering and laughing and drinking. A live pony was in the room with them. Sitting on the horse was a pretty young woman, completely naked except for a mask and a glittering ring.5
There was the time she met First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt at the hotel: When she entered her room, Roosevelt pulled her aside. She saw something in Craft. She told Craft to keep her head up, to not give up, that change was coming as long as people continued to push for it. Craft was quiet, it really wasn’t her place to tell the First Lady of th
e United States all that she knew about Dallas. That a black man had once been attacked by a mob, sexually mutilated, hung from a tree, and set on fire. That there were places along the fetid Trinity River, not far from the hotel, where black men were tied to trees and whipped. That the First Lady could walk out of the front door of the Adolphus and find a store where she could buy a postcard showing a black man lynched in the heart of downtown Dallas.
And most of all, Craft can summon the night she thought she was going to die because of the color of her skin: She was on a train coming back to Dallas, and as it approached the Texas border, the conductor told her to move to the back—to make way for white passengers. She refused. The conductor stared down at her, swaying with the rolling train, and said he would order her removed from the train and Texas justice would be served. She knew what that meant. There were men whipped, and probably worse, in the woods. Somehow, she got to Dallas without harm. She immediately asked the NAACP to launch an investigation into her terrifying Texas train ride. There was a flurry of urgent telegrams to the railroad from the national NAACP offices. Nothing ever came of it.
Now, at her bungalow in South Dallas, Craft can think about the way things are for black people in Dallas in March 1960: There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of families who live in dirt-floor shacks, who have no running water, who are exposed to cholera and other diseases. The forests of hackberry trees just outside the city limits are still tainted by the occasional bloody mystery—a body is found, no one knows what happened, the case is never solved. Some of the Dallas district attorneys have a name for it: TND—Typical Nigger Deal.6
She reaches into a box filled with letters she will never throw away. There is one in there from one of her kids—one of the young people she inspired to join the NAACP, to take to the streets in Dallas. She tried to get him enrolled in an all-white college outside of Dallas, but he was refused admission. He finally left home and found a school close to New Mexico that allowed blacks. From there, he watched Dallas and listened to Reverend Criswell howl against integration and the dirty, filthy race mixers in America.
Dallas 1963 Page 4
