Muhammad minimized the parallel defections of his youngest sons Wallace and Akbar, the latter of whom was studying orthodox Islam at Cario’s Al-Azhar University. “Other messengers, like Moses and King David, have had trouble with their sons,” he said. Akbar remained in Egypt with Malcolm, but Wallace openly challenged what he described as his father’s determination “to be the strongest black man on the face of the earth.” Two hundred Muslims from several cities answered his call to Philadelphia’s Venango Ballroom on Sunday, September 27. In Malcolm’s absence, his wife, Betty X, came with Benjamin 2X from New York, and Abyssinia Hayes arrived in a flowing white robe. They heard Wallace say he had come out of prison determined to teach no more lies, and solemnly announce that Muslims should forget everything Elijah Muhammad had taught them about Islam. He instructed them to stop applying for and using “X” names, for openers, although they could adopt African or Arab ones through the courts. By claiming authority to supersede the Nation of Islam, Wallace knowingly launched the active opposition that had brought his father’s sectarians swarming against Malcolm. All that protected him, other than his lingering status as the troublesome but designated heir in Elijah’s “royal” family, was Wallace’s reputation for straightforward candor about religion. He was perceived to be both genuine and dangerously weak. Wallace told the Venango audience that he abhorred violence, and therefore could not work wholly in concert with Malcolm because of his “violent image.”
Betty X rose from the floor to object that her husband had committed no crimes or retaliations against anyone. Wallace carefully replied that while he admired Malcolm for defying the Nation’s gangsters, and did not consider him to be violent by nature or performance, Malcolm nevertheless cultivated an aura of violence that could not be reconciled with true Islam or with the black man’s crusade against bigotry.
ONCE AGAIN, race served as the hidden midwife for far-flung, mysterious upheaval. It was, as Lincoln said in his own more terrible era, “somehow, the cause.” In early September, when sitting governor Endicott Peabody unexpectedly lost the Democratic primary in Massachusetts, pundits variously blamed his stiff manner and his mother’s arrest in St. Augustine, which either upstaged him as a hero or associated him with unpopular meddling. Opinion polls showed that heavy majorities in New York were deeply attached to the civil rights bill while also resentful of the civil rights movement for having “gone too far,” with a front-page Times survey story quoting whites bitter that Negroes expected “everything on a silver platter.”
President Johnson ventured north for his first major campaign trip into an unyielding sea of admirers that swallowed up his motorcade on the streets of Providence, Rhode Island. It was September 28—publication day for the Warren Commission report—and the near hysteria of the crowds alarmed Secret Service agents even before one of the overheated limousines exploded into flame, but an oblivious Johnson pulled as many as fifteen pedestrians at once into the convertible to share the overflow glory. A record one million people hailed him in person through the six New England states before dawn on Tuesday the twenty-ninth, and he ended with a hospital visit to young Edward Kennedy, still recuperating from his June plane crash. Johnson scarcely noticed his own hands bleeding from a press of flesh that left his White House touring car, the Queen Mary, with assorted dents and a buckled roof.
That Thursday morning, October 1, Berkeley students protested the shutdown of the Bancroft Strip by setting up a token three information tables on the steps of Sproul Hall. Jack Weinberg of CORE distributed literature on Chaney and Schwerner, the two CORE staff members murdered in Mississippi, but he refused to identify himself to an assistant dean, who decided to have Weinberg arrested. Rather than walk him through the gathering crowd, the arresting lieutenant summoned a squad car onto the broad plaza in front of Sproul Hall, but as Weinberg debated campus authorities through the window, students by the score sat all around the car, singing “We Shall Not Be Moved,” impervious to the revved engine and commands to make way.
Sight of the captured vehicle astonished Mario Savio on his arrival for a scheduled noon rally. Reinforcements of press and police ringed an expanding perimeter as Savio waded through to the center and stood on the roof of the squad car to be heard. Over the intermittent crackling of the police radio, he explained the arrest of Weinberg with a parable from Herodotus. His speech made the roof a platform for serial speakers from all sides, uncertain what to do next, and the student body president implored Savio to join him for negotiations with campus officials. “All right,” shouted Savio, “but I want it understood that until this person in this car is placed, you know, out of arrest, nobody will move from here!” The car, with Weinberg in it, remained trapped all afternoon and through the night. Students massed in numbers great enough to detach sit-in expeditions of five hundred.
A world away, Minister Louis X was reporting by phone to Elijah Muhammad on trial testimony in Boston. While repeating that his members had been provoked by the “hypocrite” Aubrey Barnette and his companion on Blue Hill Avenue, Louis X noted the day’s medical evidence on fractures and ruptured kidneys, plus eyewitnesses that “the Muslims pulled a car in front of them and pulled them out from the car and beat them.” The judge was an “original,” he added—the Nation’s term for black—and had remarked so favorably on the prosecution thus far that Louis X asked whether it might be wise to offer a guilty plea to lesser charges. Muhammad emphatically vetoed the suggestion on the ground that renegades were a threat to worship in the Nation. “They needed a severe beating and should have been killed,” he declared, telling Louis X he would rather his members serve time than pay a nickel for the medical bills of hypocrites. Accordingly, nine defendants, including Captain Clarence X, stood fast through trial to eventual conviction in January.
Elsewhere on Thursday, the FBI’s Deke DeLoach took a bulletin to the White House about McComb, Mississippi, where attention had concentrated in the week since President Johnson received its delegation of three women. The local white editor hazarded his first oblique community warning—“bombings cause tension”—which earned a firebomb through his office window and a burned cross in his yard. (An anonymous caller offered the editor a pinch of chivalrous regret about the burned cross, saying the Klan would not have struck that particular night “had we known of your mother’s death.”)
On Wednesday, Acting Attorney General Katzenbach reported confidentially to the President that McComb’s “local officials are publicly claiming that Negroes are bombing their own homes, and responded to the latest bombings by making a number of arrests of Negroes.” Four Episcopal ministers from the National Council of Churches made news that day over McComb’s refusal to allow visits with twenty-four jailed Negroes, including eight minors, and Governor Johnson ventured his first public doubt on the self-terror theory, saying, “Some were bombings by white people.” Historian John Dittmer later discounted any chance that President Johnson would have sent martial law troops before an election, but state officials used a torrent of such rumors to spur the emergency response DeLoach tracked on Thursday: the FBI and highway patrol jointly arrested off McComb’s streets three Klansmen who more or less admitted their klavern bombed weekly by drawing Negro names from a hat, and confiscated their automobile arsenal of one pistol, four high-powered rifles, eight wooden clubs, “a black leatherette hood and apron,” brass knuckles, an explosives box, and a deputy sheriff’s badge.
Hours after his annual address to the SCLC convention, Martin Luther King announced this news in Savannah to a Thursday evening mass rally of fifteen hundred inside Saint Paul CME Church, plus several hundred overflows standing outside in the rain. He praised the three arrests in McComb as an “indication that the nonviolent movement by its relentless exposure has finally penetrated the closed society of Mississippi.”
In Jackson, television station WLBT* was reporting that the bomb charges filed against the three McComb Klansmen carried “a possible death penalty,” but Mississippi judge William
Watkins soon released the three—and eight others who similarly pleaded guilty—to probation on suspended sentences, telling the defendants from the bench that because they were “unduly provoked” by outsiders of “low morality and unhygienic,” he had decided “to make your punishment light, and I hope you appreciate it.” Like the bombings themselves, his action both revealed and broke down Mississippi’s isolation. In a rare public attack on a conservative jurist, J. Edgar Hoover denounced Watkins for “blindness and indifference to outrageous acts.” When McComb police arrested thirteen COFO workers the day of the Watkins sentencing—on charges of sharing meals in the McComb Freedom House without a food license—syndicated columnist Drew Pearson sent bond money from Washington, and the Stanford Daily in California headlined two bail releases of McComb volunteer Dennis Sweeney over four days. Oliver Emmerich, the embattled local newspaper editor, published a revolutionary “Statement of Principles” in which 650 citizens of McComb endorsed “equal treatment under the law.”
In Biloxi, Inspector Sullivan’s task force obtained sealed indictments from the grand jury at three o’clock Friday afternoon, October 2, and Justice Department lawyers generated national headlines suggesting imminent results in the triple murder case: “Judge Orders Secrecy on Identity Pending Arrests in Mississippi Deaths.”
In California, negotiations were consuming a second day with CORE’s Jack Weinberg still unmoved from the squad car at the center of a giant demonstration on the Sproul Hall plaza. Sheer numbers of exuberant young people magnified the event on the Berkeley campus, where enrollment was just shy of 30,000.* A campus dean had solicited the aid of fraternity students, and all Thursday night huge throngs of demonstrators and anti-demonstrators gathered from dormitories, pubs, and athletic halls to cheer competitively for the rights of Weinberg or the police car, with volatile scrums on the fringes. Choruses of “We Shall Overcome” echoed against derisive renditions of the Disney television jingle “M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E.” Late Friday, marching reinforcements from the California Highway Patrol raised police strength to five hundred. Some demonstrators melted away and others tensely passed conduct instructions for arrest (“remove sharp objects from pockets…”), before University President Clark Kerr signed a six-point truce agreement at 7:20 P.M. “Let us agree by acclamation to accept this document!” Savio cried ten minutes later. “I ask you to rise quietly and with dignity, and go home.” Beneath him, Weinberg submitted to arrest after thirty-two unbroken hours under the now-flattened car roof, and some four thousand students dispersed from an event that began to shift the student movement out of the Negro South.
On Saturday morning, FBI agents arrested Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, and three other Neshoba County officers on assorted charges of beating Negroes in their custody. Although newspapers with a hint of pique noted that the accusations concerned “Violence Not Linked to Triple Murder,” the jailing of such powerful local figures achieved the desired psychological effect within the besieged White Knights klaverns. Informants reported that several overwrought conspirators took flight beyond the region, where FBI agents enjoyed a rare advantage over the tight-knit Klan in tracking them down. They traced one to Louisiana and located Jimmy Jordan in the Mississippi coastal town of Gulfport, where he headed on Monday, October 5. Agents John Martin and Tom Van Riper found the thirty-eight-year-old Jordan a jumble of contradictions—fatalistic, saying he expected to have been caught long ago, yet remorseless, fitfully defiant of Klan retribution and the FBI alike. When three long, tantalyzing sessions yielded no breakthrough, John Proctor petitioned Inspector Sullivan for a crack at Jordan, one of Meridian’s binge-drinking drifters. “I know that son of a bitch,” said the agent who had found the burning COFO car in June. “If he did this, I can make him talk.”
INQUIRIES CLOSED on the enormity of Freedom Summer. While FBI agents pressed Klansmen for facts about its first night, movement participants sifted the aftermath. First in Atlanta, then in Hattiesburg and at a retreat in the town of Waveland not far from Jordan’s hideaway in Gulfport, the veterans and inheritors of the student Freedom Rides debated the issues that had brought their leaders home early from Africa: “affiliations, the black-white problem, who should be on staff, who should not,” and “Why do we organize…how are decisions made?” Some argued that the movement could not afford to sink into critical reflection, saying, “After the election, win or lose, the forces behind Goldwater will gain strength,” or, “Well, shit on your personal feelings!” Others protested executive tyranny (“Who made that decision?”), pleaded moral exhaustion (“I have begun to split up”), or vented frustrations of youth snatched from campus life to the edge of martyrdom: “One reason guys fight on projects is [they] feel others are using the girls they are bitching about during the day.” The internal contest was widely defined as a struggle between the power “hard-liners” of Forman and the “floater” existentialists of Moses, but Moses sat silent, refusing to use his own personal influence to rebut the power faction. A student took the floor with a silent pantomime of SNCC’s characteristic hand gestures, which earned applause for anguished expression and snickers for burned-out absurdity. Dov Green, one of many SNCC poets, composed a wry stanza on the crisis:
Moses is drinking.
And Forman’s in bed.
Now the whole world is thinking
That SNCC has gone red.
Well, we’ve lost our picket lines,
FDP has gone right,
We’re all showing signs
Of losing this fight.
N double A’s a-gambling
That our next breath will be our last.
Now the whole world is crumbling
And I’m sitting on mah ass.
“We’ve got to stop being Muslims during the day and integrationists at night,” declared a staff worker in Hattiesburg. “Rivals are not enemies,” warned another. One memo writer focused upon governance within SNCC: “If we assign a quota on whites, or even eliminate ‘them’ entirely, what will we prove?” Another asked whether “we really believe what the white man tells us, that the Negro is really too stupid to vote. You know there are some Negroes in SNCC who believe that.” A movement conceived in biracial sacrifice toward voting rights warred over the internal franchise. Dissenters asked why Freedom School teachers of both races were not invited to the deliberations at all, and a prophetic paper, written anonymously for fear of ridicule, raised by racial analogy an intercutting issue of gender: “Assumptions of male superiority are as widespread and deep-rooted and every much as crippling to the woman as the assumptions of white supremacy are to the Negro.”
Student shock troops who had helped punch their stupefied country out of segregation confronted the perennial snares of democratic practice. If binding popular rule carried inside SNCC, it threatened to swamp the Negro pioneers with white votes, and all of the veterans with newer faces (“The new people are naive…I cannot really be honest with them…”). Voting came to suggest either dead rules and parliamentary tricks, which made Atlantic City loom as decisive betrayal, or classical “mobocracy” in the form of Mississippi’s broadly representative white rule. “I was sure that we were closer to the truth than anyone else,” wrote a staff member from Atlanta headquarters. Privately Dennis Sweeney and others took up a curdling slogan about the ballot itself—“the best way to keep someone a slave is to give him the vote and call him free”—while still declaring in public that elected authority must “be made to come forward with some sort of answer to all of this.”
During the October emergency meeting in Atlanta, controversy spread from the rare—some said unprecedented—demand for a binding vote on whether to grant voting status to post-summer volunteers. It was rejected as smacking of bourgeois liberalism, which “tried to give equal weight to all shades of opinion when there were two hundred people in a room.” In a harbinger of future decades, insiders glossed over racial implications to develop the word “liberal” as an epithet for shallow understa
nding and preoccupation with democratic norms. Al Lowenstein emerged as the prototype bad liberal only a year after bringing some of the original ideas for the summer project to Mississippi from South Africa. Bayard Rustin, Joseph Rauh, and Roy Wilkins joined Lowenstein in categories of scorn that shaved kinship into smaller circles of trusted allies—radicals, pacifists, nationalists, Marxists. Paradoxically, social forces on the brink of militant explosion reverted to preoccupation with enemies and niches. SNCC’s Waveland meeting, wrote James Forman, “finally broke down on the question of firing people.” About that time, asked whether Mississippi had reached a “pre-revolutionary situation,” Bob Moses told a Stanford audience that any revolution most likely would break out in the North instead, where “the cities are our jungles.”
In Gulfport, FBI agent Proctor patiently visited Jimmy Jordan every few days through October. Jordan neither disputed nor confirmed reports that he had talked to friends about “shooting a nigger.” Full of hardship, he expressed feelings of abandonment against the Klan, which Proctor cultivated on the FBI’s tavern tab. The agent kept up his matter-of-fact warning that one day he would bring an arrest warrant, and when Jordan began to mention the likelihood of doing some prison time, Proctor assured him that the Bureau could arrange for him beforehand to visit his dying father in Georgia.
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