Pillar of Fire (140 page)

*Similarly, prison psychiatrists during World War II had diagnosed Muhammad as a hard case of paranoid dementia with the mental capacity of an eleven-year-old child.

*Who successfully defended Martin Luther King in his Alabama criminal case of 1960.

*Seven years later, after King's death, Jackson would have the Olivet congregation spend upward of $50,000 to seal up the stone doors facing South Parkway and carve out another entrance around the corner, just so that the church address never would be listed on the street to be renamed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, after Jackson's nemesis.

*Slavery in American territory is generally dated from the sale of “Twenty Negars” from the Dutch ship
Jesus
at the Jamestown, Virginia, colony in August of 1619. The much earlier slave practice in Spanish Florida is almost universally discarded or overlooked, perhaps because it lacks the symbolic clarity of a first shipment, or because even self-conscious chronicles of cultural oppression customarily trace American history through the British settlers, as history's eventual winners.

*“The average so-called Negro today gets indignant if you call him black in English, will say call me Negro,” Malcolm X said in 1963. “And if you ask him what does Negro mean, he will say it means black in Spanish. In other words, don't call me black in English, call me black in Spanish. It makes him sound ridiculous.” Because “Negro” originated with the early Spanish and Portuguese slave traders, Muslims considered the term a grotesque legacy of slavery.

*Andrew Young became the second Negro staff member in 1957, and worked in the National Council's youth ministry until he went south to direct Martin Luther King's citizenship program in 1961. Oscar Lee, a pioneering Negro graduate of Yale Divinity School (1935), knew nearly all the preachers leading jail marches in the South, and had performed wedding ceremonies for the family of Bob Moses, the student registration leader in Mississippi. Before the Chicago conference in January, it was Lee who had carried on the truncated negotiations with the Negro Baptist leader J. H. Jackson, and who had become so disgusted with Jackson's reactionary views on race that he renounced his Baptist heritage to become a Presbyterian.

*“I have sworn to practice and maintain segregation in the Episcopal Church in Mississippi, and I am not alone,” Beckwith wrote in an open letter published by the
Jackson Daily News
in 1956. His purpose was to arouse Episcopalians against a young priest in Cleveland, Mississippi. “It should be the painful duty of the Right Rev. Bishop Duncan M. Gray to publicly rebuke his son, and all other priests in the Diocese of Mississippi preaching integration,” Beckwith declared. Denouncing what he saw as an attempt by false clergy to “maliciously defy the laws of God” and “crucify the white race on the black cross of the NAACP,” Beckwith prescribed that “each priest found guilty of advocating integration must be immediately stripped of all robes and vestments….” He committed himself to the dirty work of crusading zeal: “Let's get red-hot on the subject—if the race mixers don't resign and leave, I say, throw them out bodily, if necessary.”

*The reprieve for segregated road construction was a concession to private lobbying by politicians, principally from Louisiana. The President's briefing papers stressed the need for secrecy: “Of course, the less that is said about this in the newspapers, the better off everyone will be.”

†“They said their [sic] was innocent human beings being bit by dogs[,] slapped by men[,] knocked down with water hose[s,] and raped in the jail[,] and you was against them fighting back and protecting those innocent people,” wrote Rev. James Early, Sr. Malcolm X announced in Harlem that Muslims had not attacked King or anyone else, being trained strictly for self-defense, but he warmly endorsed the scorn of the egg throwers. “I think any effort by anyone to tell the people of Harlem to love their enemy or turn the other cheek will produce violence,” he said. “They think it comes from the lips of a traitor…. If white men have the right to defend themselves against attack, the black people have that right also.” In reply to Malcolm, King stated loftily that the “growing bitterness” fomented by a Muslim minority “gives me greater responsibility to help get rid of conditions that created such misguided and bitter individuals.”

*Parchman was built during the governorship of Greenwood's James K. Vardaman, who won office in 1903 on the slogan “A Vote for Vardaman Is a Vote for White Supremacy.” Famously vulgar, Vardaman composed verse the previous year to lampoon President Theodore Roosevelt for receiving Negro guests: “The coons smelt as loud as a musk rat's nest/ And Teddy licked his chops/And said it smelt the best.”

*Evidence of widespread handcuff-hanging and similar abuse at Parchman would be central to
Gates v. Collier
, a landmark prison reform case of 1972.

“Awe is more than an emotion,” Heschel told the Stanford students. “It is a way of understanding, insight into a meaning greater than ourselves. The beginning of awe is wonder, and the beginning of wisdom is awe…. Man may forfeit his sense of the ineffable. To be alive is a commonplace; the sense of radical amazement is gone…. Deprived of the ability to praise, modern man is forced to look for entertainment; entertainment is becoming compulsory.”

*Two days before he was shot, Medgar Evers and a small group of worshippers were turned away from Galloway Church in Jackson. To protest segregation within his own church, Dr. W. B. Selah resigned his pulpit of eighteen years, making public an internal conflict that consumed Mississippi's largest Methodist congregation.

*Twenty-five years later, film director John Waters adapted the Gwynn Oak controversy into a whimsical romance called
Hairspray
.

*By comparison, the National Football League would play its full schedule of games on the weekend of the Kennedy assassination. To guard against potentially riotous anger toward the murder site, the league did require public address announcers to identify one team only as “the Cowboys,” forbidding mention of the word “Dallas.”

†But for slavery, Zeak Crumpton purportedly wrote, “I would walk around in my bare feet with a metal ring in my nose. On holidays we would feast on elephants' toes, roasted grasshoppers, and the milk of a coconut. I get on my knees each night and thank God for permitting my ancestors to come to America as slaves.” The
Richmond Times-Dispatch
published the letter with an editorial saluting Crumpton as “a credit to his race.”

‡In 1963, a dozen years before the dawn of the microcomputer industry, the word “computer” popularly referred not to a machine but to a person who made computations.

*“We are trying to do something much more difficult than any other country has ever done,” President Kennedy told Cronkite, reacting to criticisms of the administration's policies on race. “A good many people who have advised us so generously abroad have no comprehension of what a difficult task it is that faces the American people in the '60s.”

†ABC stayed with a fifteen-minute program until 1967.

‡Montgomery “was not an evil city,” McGee said, speaking over footage of the boycott. “We didn't realize Negroes demanding better treatment could no longer be treated as teenagers demanding to stay out after 9:30.”

*Enrolled the day after the Birmingham church bombing, Sam Jerry Oni waited three years before trying to attend the Tattnall Square Baptist Church, just off campus. Deacons repulsed Oni with force on September 26, 1966, and the congregation voted that same day to fire all three of its ministers who tried to welcome Oni, an African educated at Baptist mission schools in his native Nigeria.

*James Bevel had been teasing Henderson for months about how much danger he was willing to face as an ordinary Negro before invoking his official status. Arrested three times since the Roy Wilkins demonstration in June, Henderson had endured a cutting blow to the hand and one trip to a Mississippi jail, where vomit on the cell floor made him pull out his Justice Department credentials.

*The frontier electronics demanded by two massive anti-Soviet programs—the Minute-man missile and the mission to the moon—created a takeoff market for the microchip, and in effect produced the computer revolution as a “spinoff.” Far less happily, the arms race also spun off mountains of plutonium waste so toxic and indestructible that experts hatched Aesopian schemes to rocket the stuff into the sun, bury it in salt caverns, or pay Indians and pauper countries to store it.

*Including African National Congress leaders Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu.

*Both Burke Marshall and J. Edgar Hoover privately reported to Attorney General Kennedy that Alabama officials effectively sabotaged the federal investigation. The church bombing case remained dormant for fourteen years, until Alabama convicted Klansman Robert Chambliss in 1977. He died in prison.

*Robert Kennedy proposed to tell Senator Russell that “some time ago” the administration had ordered the FBI to intensify its guard against subversion within civil rights groups, but Hoover rejected the sentence. “We didn't need to be told to intensify our efforts,” headquarters sniffed. “We had already done so.”

*Because Hayling “was the prime mover in the desegregation campaign,” the NAACP's director of branches instructed Florida to get rid of him “carefully and slowly,” taking care “not to be accused of making him the scapegoat.”

*Earlier in November, unbeknownst to Heller, strategists for the 1964 campaign had warned President Kennedy that a commitment against poverty would gain him no votes among poor people, who were for him already, and that the election would be decided in the new suburbs.

†“[The children] never seemed to know why people disliked them,” Johnson would declare in his voting rights speech of March 1965. “…Somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child.”