by Imani Perry
Less than two weeks after Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, Watts, a working-class black neighborhood in Los Angeles, was in flames. The conflagration began when a policeman pulled over a young black male driver, Marquette Frye. His brother, Ronald, who was riding in the car with Marquette, left the scene to get their mother from home two blocks away. Marquette argued as the officer tried to arrest him. It was a warm night, so people were outside, and they began to gather around Marquette and the police officer. Ronald returned with his mother. The officer was unsuccessful in getting Marquette to submit to arrest. A scuffle followed. Ronald and his mother tried to protect Marquette. The officer called for back up and the group arrested Marquette, Ronald, and their mother. As the crowd of onlookers, now numbering close to 300 gathered at the scene, their collective anger at police officers who routinely harassed, arrested, and brutalized them, bubbled up into outrage. This set off a six-day rebellion. Enraged citizens overturned and burned automobiles. They broke into grocery stores, liquor stores, department stores, and pawnshops. Over 14,000 California National Guard troops were mobilized to descend on South Los Angeles. Thirty-four people died, the majority of them black and at the hands of the National Guard and the Los Angeles Police Department. The casualties included 118 people shot and over 1,000 injured. There were approximately 4,000 arrests. This was Johnson’s beloved “law and order.” Voting had not solved the problems of black life in the West, and the problems of black life in the West were national problems. They beleaguered black people in the North, South, and Midwest as well. Police brutality, poverty, and systemic marginalization were the lot of black people all over the nation. Racial liberalism did not provide solutions for this.
The failure of racial liberalism was dramatically rendered at the 1964 World’s Fair. As with the 1939 fair, there was a nod to black contributions in the form of an art piece dedicated to “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” James Ira DeLoache had been commissioned by the NAACP to do a mural named and inspired by the words “Our New Day Begun.” This mural was selected for display at the World’s Fair. At 48 × 8 inches, it was an inspiring, flowing, and captivating twelve-section mural.29 The tableaux depicted the seizure of Africans as slaves, the slave system in operation, and the rise of King Cotton. The Underground Railroad; abolitionists John Brown, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass; the Negro flight to the Union during the Civil War; a lynching; the NAACP silent protest march on Fifth Avenue in 1917; the facade of the Supreme Court building; and the spirit of the contemporary “direct action” tactics were depicted chronologically from left to right. DeLoache, a graduate of Booker T. Washington High School in Norfolk, Virginia, went on to study at both Howard University and Cooper Union. His work was often historically based and concerned with the black freedom struggle. He had previously presented a painting of Harriet Tubman to President William Tubman of Liberia, and one of Crispus Attucks to President Sylvanus Olympio of Togo. The Brooklyn PTA had commissioned portraits of John Brown and Benjamin Banneker from him. DeLoache was thus an apt choice of artist to depict the “Negro in the World.” Our New Day Begun was finished in 1964 and hung at the New York World’s Fair in the Hall of Education. Later it would become part of the Schomburg Collection in the New York Public Library before being gifted to Dillard University in Louisiana in the 1980s.
The phrase “New Day Begun” suggests hopefulness. But given the national energy in the throes of the civil rights movement, “March on ‘til Victory Is Won” would have been a more appropriate title. The theme of that year’s World’s Fair was “peace through understanding.” And it was expected to bring a great deal of money to New York City during the two years the exhibition was to be up. It was also expected to bring good publicity to the city. Plans were made for portions of the opening ceremony to be televised, and President Johnson announced that he would attend the festivities to deliver the keynote address.
Black New Yorkers, however, did not seem to be particularly moved by the World’s Fair, and they paid little attention to DeLoache’s contribution to it. They were at best ambivalent, and many were outraged about the whole enterprise. The more than 1 million black people in the city suffered from racial inequality in every arena: substandard housing and schools, employment discrimination, and poverty were widespread. The Brooklyn branch of CORE planned a massive protest of the fair, which they considered too expensive and indulgent given the dire conditions under which black New Yorkers lived. CORE had been founded in 1942 by the Fellowship of Reconciliation. From the outset, it had embraced nonviolent direct action rather than the litigation and persuasion that the NAACP was known for. CORE had been a direct influence upon the SCLC. However, the organization had floundered as a result of red-baiting in the McCarthy era. In 1964 CORE had only recently been revived and revitalized by the model of the southern movement. The Brooklyn branch of CORE was more militant than most. The other New York branches of CORE discouraged plans to disrupt the World’s Fair. No matter. Brooklyn CORE announced a plan for a massive protest at the opening of the World’s Fair during a press conference held at the historic Hotel Theresa in Harlem, where the Johnson brothers, Malcolm X, and other black artists, intellectuals, and activists had traditionally gathered when they were in New York.30 At the press conference CORE boasted that 1,800 drivers pledged to stall on the roadways and would block bridges, subway cars, and all traffic going in and out of the fair on its opening day. In response to these plans, the mayor sent 1,000 police to guard the fair.
But very few people—protesters or patrons—actually showed up. It was raining, and the threat of a conflict scared visitors away. Nevertheless, President Johnson delivered a speech at the opening and was directly confronted by young protesters who found his civil rights record wholly insufficient. They shouted “Jim Crow Must Go!” and “Freedom Now!” directly at the president. One sign read, “A World’s Fair Is a Luxury but a Fair World Is a Necessity,” while another invited attendees to “See New York’s Worse Fair—Segregated Schools for Negroes, Puerto Ricans and Rats.”31 Johnson was alarmed. He described his Great Society initiative to a crowd that included loud freedom movement hecklers.
Their sentiment was shared in many parts of black America. Before Watts there were the Harlem Riots, a six-day uprising that followed a police lieutenant’s killing of a black child. The years between 1964 and 1965 were not simply bloody for Selma and Birmingham: Harlem, Chicago, and Los Angeles also ached and roared against injustice. Black America was dissatisfied and rightly so, notwithstanding congressional acts that were necessary but also insufficient. The acts didn’t change economic disenfranchisement, police violence, deindustrialization, and underfunded schools. Black America also grieved the death toll of the struggle that had been waged. And then raged. Black power was coming, and it would reclaim one of its noblest inheritances: “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
Chapter Six. All Power, All Poetry, to the People
From “Negro” to “Black” National Anthem
There’s been so many things that’s held us down
But now it looks like things are finally coming around
I know we got, a long long way to go
And where we’ll end up, I don’t know
—GENE MCFADDEN and JOHN WHITEHEAD, “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now”
James Meredith began walking on June 6, 1966. He started in Memphis, Tennessee, and planned to go all the way to Jackson, Mississippi, on foot, a distance of 220 miles. Meredith was frustrated. Four years after he’d integrated Ole Miss, two years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and a year after the Voting Rights Act, little progress had been made to lift the heavy burden of racism on the backs of African Americans. In September 1962, he’d been escorted by federal marshals into his dorm room. In response, several thousand protesters attacked the marshals. President John F. Kennedy had to send 1,400 troops from Fort Dix to protect him by morning. Meredith knew firsthand how hysterical the commitment to white supremacy was and yet confronted it aga
in anyway.
On the second day of his Memphis to Jackson “March against Fear,” Meredith was shot by a white gunman. With Meredith recovering in the hospital, activists from various organizations committed to continue the walk in his stead. On the way they registered over 4,000 black people to vote in various counties. They were joined and celebrated at some places, yet also jeered and threatened. The marchers camped out each evening, usually at schools. But when they arrived at the Street Elementary School in Greenwood, Mississippi, where they planned to stay the night, Stokely Carmichael, the young SNCC leader, was arrested for trespassing on public property. After his release, he went to a park where the marchers had gathered. Carmichael took to a speaker’s platform that was set up and delivered his historic “Black Power” speech. Just a day before he had been encouraged by another young activist, Willie Ricks, to adopt the slogan. They’d gone back and forth in a call and response with one asking, “What do you want?” and the other responding, “Black Power!” Carmichael’s speech that night connected domestic racism to America’s imperialist foreign policy and demanded that his listeners hold themselves both accountable and worthy:
We have to talk about wars and soldiers and just what that means. A mercenary is a hired killer and any black man serving in this man’s army is a black mercenary, nothing else. A mercenary fights for a country for a price but does not enjoy the rights of the country for which he is fighting. A mercenary will go to Vietnam to fight for free elections for the Vietnamese but doesn’t have free elections in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Texas, Louisiana, South Carolina and Washington, D.C. A mercenary goes to Vietnam and gets shot fighting for his country and they won’t even bury him in his own hometown. He’s a mercenary, that’s all. We must find the strength so that when they start grabbing us to fight their war we say, “Hell no.”
Like Malcolm X, Carmichael preached self-love and community care in addition to radical and complete liberation.
There is a psychological war going on in this country and it’s whether or not black people are going to be able to use the terms they want about their movement without white people’s blessing. We have to tell them we are going to use the term “Black Power” and we are going to define it because Black Power speaks to us. We can’t let them project Black Power because they can only project it from white power and we know what white power has done to us. We have to organize ourselves to speak from a position of strength and stop begging people to look kindly upon us. We are going to build a movement in this country based on the color of our skins that is going to free us from our oppressors and we have to do that ourselves.1
The black power call was SNCC’s answer to Malcolm X, who had been murdered in February 1965. Malcolm was a leader many members of SNCC had embraced as the voice of a new radicalism, and they saw themselves continuing his work. A group of them had traveled across Africa with Malcolm in 1964 and, like earlier generations, had recognized that their struggle in the United States was tied to the liberation of African people globally. The rift between two ways of doing protest became clear during the Meredith march. King arrived in Mississippi on Friday. He came from Chicago, where he had faced a brutal white mob that responded to his Open Housing marches in ways that exceeded in both tenor and force much of the nastiness he’d experienced in the Deep South. Out from the Chicago mob a bottle flew and hit him in the head midstride, causing a stream of blood to pour down his face. Now in Mississippi, King and Carmichael walked alongside each other, debating. They were in tactical and ideological conflict but showed mutual care. Some SNCC marchers chanted “Black Power,” while SCLC members shouted their slogan “Freedom Now.” All of them were tear-gassed and attacked by the Mississippi state police, again, when they tried to camp on school grounds in Canton. Although the governor had promised to protect them, he didn’t. And federal forces were nowhere to be found, either. The marchers continued and finally were able to stop, rest, clean up, and replenish on the campus of the historically black Tougaloo College, outside of Jackson. The next day they entered the state capital. The crowd by then was massive. Among the roughly 15,000 people were celebrities, including James Brown, Dick Gregory, and Marlon Brando. A partially recovered James Meredith stood on the front lines with Martin Luther King Jr. Jackson-bred R&B performer Maybelle Smith sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
It was to be remembered as the last great march of the movement. There was dissension in the ranks for sure, but the spirit of the time was changing as well. Black organizers were battle-weary and fully awakened to the horrific depths of American racism. People began to reach even more deeply into the cultural repertoire to find what kept the enslaved and their spirits alive. Transcendence had already been appealed to, black people had attempted to rise above the veil by taking the moral high ground, and they were murdered and beaten in the process. Now the deepest recesses of resilience and resistance had to be called forward and championed. That process was called by many names: black power, black consciousness, black is beautiful, and soul.
In May 1964, two years prior to Meredith’s March against Fear, Sargeant Gerald Westbrook published an article in Negro Digest that sought to capture “The Essence of Soul”: “The dictionary gives several definitions for this particular essence,” Westbrook writes, “history identifies those who possessed it; the bible reveals from whence it came. The song that begins ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ portrays it. Violent death often takes he who displays it—Medgar Evers he conveyed it. Many more died, but the essence lives on and on.”2
Westbrook goes on to describe the manifestation of soul in James Meredith’s fight against Ole Miss, pianist Mary Lou Williams’s compositions, and at the March on Washington: “Soul combines strength and a feeling of helplessness, faith and a feeling of hopelessness, an awareness of living and suffering, a love for loving, an urge for laughing, and the need to cry. Soul is to each of us what it is unto itself, a reflection of life’s miseries and a mirror for its joys. We have caught that reflection, we have looked into that mirror. Such is Soul, the essence we feel.”3 From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, soul was foregrounded alongside black power, and together, along with Pan-Africanism, these sensibilities birthed the cultural and social movements known as black power, black consciousness, and black arts.
In the February 1965 issue of Negro Digest, an article by Donald Henderson, then a faculty member in the Sociology Department at the University of Akron, titled “Negro Militancy Is Not New: A History of Protest in America,” gave context to the growing sense of militancy among young black Americans that would be on display in Watts, Newark, and Jackson in the near future: “The rather general belief that the Negro passively accepted his position as slave and later as second-class citizen is hardly the case.”4 Henderson gives an account of slave insurrections, maroon colonies, Garveyism, and the New Negro–era NAACP. Among his examples of militancy in literature are James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy,” and Langston Hughes’s “Song for My People,” as well as James Weldon Johnson’s Negro National Anthem, and Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die.”
The reference to “Lift Every Voice and Sing” in both discussions of militancy and soul is much more than an invocation of the song’s once-powerful influence. In the mid-1960s the emotional energy of the battle-weary movement’s foot soldiers became bolder, and freedom fighters embraced blackness, both literally and figuratively. Evidence was all around that the aspiration to integration would fail. Black people in northern cities were caught in ghettoes. The white South had resisted and murdered black people with every step they took closer to full citizenship.
Acquiring property and the control of institutions had always been elusive for northern and midwestern African Americans, particularly because of the history of redlining and restrictive covenants. Although blacks in some of these cities lived without de jure segregation, and could always vote, black people in the North experienced pervasive disenfranchisement and had fewer ci
vic institutions than those in the segregated South. The new black nationalist organizations and movements that sprung up in the late 1960s were deliberately institution building. They imagined revolution and independence, at home and abroad. In parallel to postcolonial nations in Africa and the Caribbean, they envisioned new economic systems and political structures, and they built intentional communities. These included programs for children that provided both after-school and before-school care, and even schools in some places. Cooperative living arrangements cropped up, and black college students on predominantly white campuses protested to gain their own black living spaces, while those at historically black colleges protested the conservative rules of administrations and boards. In some ways, this was also an effort to reimagine black associational life. It couldn’t be the same as it once was. Television, the social and sexual revolutions, and increased options, opportunities, and mobility for educated black young adults meant that even the most passionate activists were unlikely to find a world as highly networked as that of their parents’ generation. That said, the imagination of young people about what they could do, and how they might live, and the various ways they could fashion their futures, expanded beautifully. In these spaces, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which just a few years earlier was dying on the vine of “We Shall Overcome,” came roaring back. Artist Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence, a native of Barbados who migrated to New York, first encountered the song in the 1960s in Harlem in the midst of the freedom movement. “It was very moving to find yourself in a massive audience of hundreds or even thousands and have them rise about you as one body when the introductory strands of the song were played. The music was so compelling! Then, as their voices were lifted in song, the words seemed to be their very own, and were uplifting powerful and strong.”5
