Pillar of Fire (53 page)

From the bench, Judge Simpson himself questioned the logic of the state's position that only curfews and bans could protect Negroes from bloodshed, given the refusal of Sheriff Davis and Chief Stuart to say the opposing white crowds had been armed, hostile, or dangerous. “They were just a bunch of kids,” Stuart insisted on the witness stand. When Davis, under court order, read a list of his 169 supplementary deputies, Simpson bolted upright at the name “Holsted Manucy,” saying, “Why that man's a convicted felon in this court!” From a 1959 moonshine trial, the judge recognized “Hoss” Manucy as a rough-cut pig farmer and leader of the thousand-member Ancient City Hunting Club. Simpson asked whether the Hunting Club was a parallel Ku Klux Klan for Catholic St. Augustine, technically separate because the Klan proscribed Catholics along with Jews and Negroes, and did not seem satisfied with Sheriff Davis's bland denials. From these hints of judicial favor, movement leaders decided to accept Simpson's truce request in spite of the risk that he would rule against them or smother them with delay.

King left St. Augustine to deliver the baccalaureate address two days later at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, taking Coretta with him to calm the recent marital discord. They passed together through surreal acclaim. A young girl on campus amused King by asking persistently why he was not at least vice president of the United States. A well-meaning visitor called at the door of his faculty guest home with a pet Great Dane, causing a fright and then permanent banter between King and his traveling aide Bernard Lee over who had recoiled more ignominiously. In his college address, King spoke of a “long and difficult wilderness” between the Red Sea of liberation and the Promised Land of democracy. By the afternoon commencement, when Sargent Shriver exhorted Wesleyan graduates to help enact the Johnson poverty legislation,
*
King had moved on to New York as the first gentile to receive an honorary degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary, sponsored by Rabbi Heschel.

T
HAT SAME NIGHT
, Sunday, June 7, arsonists set fire to the St. Augustine beach cottage for the second time since the May 28 fusillade. King and his new Research Committee were discussing movement strategy in a New York hotel room, and nearby, Malcolm X was working the telephone to spread the story of Elijah Muhammad's sins, calling Muslim women for the most part, hoping they would use their networks to verify his accusations that Muhammad seduced at least five of his secretaries, plus his own niece. Malcolm told them that Muslim men were factionalized to the brink of gang war, and complained that Captain Joseph's men had swarmed angrily upon a street corner discussion just the day before in Harlem, with Malcolm's sympathizers escaping only when one of them pulled a shotgun from the trunk of a car. The Nation of Islam was threatening bloodshed in the hope of eliminating him before he could establish the ugly truth, Malcolm told one telephone confidant on a wiretapped telephone line.

“You think the Messenger is that ruthless?” she asked.

“Any man,” Malcolm replied, “who will go to bed with his brother's daughter and then turn and make five other women pregnant, and then accuse all these women of committing adultery, is a ruthless man.”

At the Audubon Ballroom later that Sunday night, Malcolm departed from his speech about the
hajj
and his hopes for the United Nations to tell 450 listeners about the concubines. “The Nation would even murder to keep this quiet,” he said. Word of his public revelation flashed across Harlem into the regular service at Temple No. 7, where loyalist members stayed late to hear lieutenants declare war in a closed emergency session.

At 9:08 the next morning, Malcolm's wife, Betty, received the first of many anonymous phone messages: “Just tell him he's as good as dead.” Before noon, without mentioning the threat, Malcolm patiently unfolded the scandal to CBS correspondent Mike Wallace, who, saying he was still digesting news reports of Malcolm's revised philosophy on white people, had some trouble adjusting to an avalanche of internal Muslim gossip. Nevertheless, on hearing that the story was being offered to other journalists, Wallace rushed him into a studio that day to film the allegations in meticulous detail. For verification, Malcolm produced the written and recorded statements of several accusing mistresses. He alerted friends to watch Wallace's New York news show the next day, saying that quick publicity could drain the potential for intra-Muslim violence in many cities.

 

I
N
W
ASHINGTON
, at the National Theater on Pennsylvania Avenue, Bob Moses introduced witnesses for a citizens' hearing on Mississippi that lasted through Monday, June 8. “It cannot be stated too many times,” declared an invitation to members of Congress, “that our basic goal is to obtain Federal preventative action
before
any more names are added to the list of civil rights martyrs.” Lawrence Guyot testified about labors to maintain Mississippi's first picket line since the Hattiesburg Freedom Day in January, and a halting Elizabeth Allen told how her husband, Louis, had tried to survive after witnessing the daylight murder of pioneer registration worker Herbert Lee. (“That is why [Louis] went to Jackson when the police broke his jawbone,” she said. “He asked the FBI for protection, and they tell him different ones would help him, because he has a fear in himself. They took his credit from him. He had stood good in Mississippi, but after he tried to raise himself, and he, a man that wasn't just anything, they took his credit from him and which he got killed the 31st of January….”) Hartman Turnbow testified about the retributions against him as the first Holmes County Negro of the century to present himself as a voter (“I attempted to register, and they bombed my house and shot in it…. So every little thing they can get on me, they still do”), and Fannie Lou Hamer told of her troubles in the movement since being beaten a year earlier in the Winona jail. “Not only have I been harassed by the police,” Hamer said, “I had a call from the telephone operator after I qualified to run as congresswoman. She told me, ‘Fannie Lou, honey, you are having a lot of different callers on your telephone. I want to know do you have any outsiders in your house? You called somebody today in Texas. Who was you calling, and where are you going? You had a mighty big bill.'”

While the hearing was under way in Washington, five young SNCC workers piled into a car and headed from Greenwood to Atlanta for the final staff meeting before Freedom Summer. They included Hamer's campaign manager, Charles McLaurin, and Sam Block, who had accompanied Hartman Turnbow to the Holmes County courthouse. A Highway Patrol officer stopped them outside Starkville, Mississippi, and, upon discovering campaign leaflets for Fannie Lou Hamer in the trunk, transported the prisoners to the Lowndes County jail for a night of interrogation and violence, with each slapped by fist or blackjack until he admitted that he was a nigger rather than a Negro. Released the next morning on payment of assorted fines, the Greenwood contingent made it safely through Alabama to the Atlanta office of Dr. James D. Palmer for treatment before they brought their bruises into the basement of Frazier's Lounge.

Some thirty SNCC workers converged there with tales and emergencies from several states, but Mississippi eclipsed the others. Reports filtered in of another beating the previous day outside McComb, where a roadside posse had ambushed three white magazine writers researching local plans for Freedom Summer. Arriving with Moses from Washington, James Forman reported that orchestrated plans for a White House audience had dwindled to hopes for a congressional hearing and finally, at great sacrifice, to a self-generated production at National Theater, and that while novelist Joseph Heller and other sponsors were sending President Johnson a renewed petition for help, SNCC's apprehensions went generally unregarded. Roy Wilkins was candidly criticizing the Mississippi summer project as pointless suffering that might embarrass President Johnson, said Forman, and corrosive doubt was spreading within SNCC itself. Staff members from the state headquarters in Jackson had reached Atlanta wincing over the fresh counsel of a jail volunteer from India who told them gently they lived too much in the present, without history or plans of long scope, vacillating unstably between suicidal hopelessness and an expectation of fixing Mississippi right away. “Oh, but you are all so American,” said the wizened companion of Gandhi, who measured his own jail time in years instead of weeks.

James Forman told the SNCC gathering that he had watched Martin Luther King defend student initiatives to skeptical senior colleagues from the national civil rights leadership. King had praised the Mississippi summer project as “the most creative idea in the movement,” Forman reported. His generous tone surprised listeners accustomed to Forman's trademark competitive edge toward King, but he could not dispel tensions that ran much deeper than the usual organizational rivalries.

On June 9, beginning a three-day marathon at Frazier's Lounge, complaints erupted that SNCC had lost the intimate kinship of the sit-ins and Freedom Rides. “There used to be a bond among us,” lamented Marion Barry. Others replied that SNCC was no longer a student movement, that the staff had grown fivefold in the past year, and that SNCC needed adult political discipline to replace its naive dormitory methods.When Prathia Hall rose to say that these arguments glossed over unspoken doubts about nonviolence and the compatability of blacks and whites in the movement, Charles McLaurin disclosed that Negroes around Greenwood were collecting arms to defend themselves during the summer project. Willie Peacock, another of those just released from the Lowndes County jail, confessed that he had brought guns into the Greenwood SNCC office. Hollis Watkins said that most supporting farmers kept guns in their houses; the SNCC staff had been able to create a covering atmosphere of nonviolence around movement activities, he added, but no more. Young SNCC workers blurted out that the Mississippi staff was “totally demoralized” just days before the first eager hordes of college volunteers were to present themselves for duty.

Prathia Hall rose again. “No one can be rational about death,” she said. “What is happening now is that for the first time as a staff we are coming to grips with the fact that this may be
it
.” All their fears and heartache were valid, she cried out, but no matter how primal the urge to strike back or how pure the grievance, violence could gain nothing. “If you kill an attacker outside the window, you lose your home anyway,” she said, “because the townsmen will come to the defense of the attacker and take everything from you.” In a fit of Freedom Ride spirit, Hall declared her purpose to “bring our blood to the White House door. If we die here, it's the whole society which has pulled the trigger by its silence.”

Ruby Doris Smith chastised Hall and others for pretending to be surprised. “There is no one in this room who thought of this project as not involving bloodshed,” she said with fierce determination, but then Smith, too, was wrenched in the other direction. “What does it mean to say we will bring our blood to the doorstep of the White House?” she asked. “Let's face it. When the four children were killed in the church bombing in Birmingham last year, there were no thousands of volunteers to take their place.” Lawrence Guyot, brushing close to his own private wounds, said they could not blame all the silence on the outside world, as no movement friends had rallied on behalf of him and Hollis Watkins and Willie Peacock and the others chained inside Parchman Penitentiary the previous summer. Still, Guyot argued against taking up arms. “Don't you see?” he shouted. “They'll shoot us quicker if we're armed!”

Debate broke loose from the usual factional and personal alignments. Purists berated themselves for leading lambs to slaughter, while more worldly strategists spoke up for the hard practical merit of nonviolence. “To the extent that we think of our own lives, we are politically immobilized,” said Courtland Cox. Robert Moses proposed to focus upon what he called “the controllable things.” They might not persuade Negro farmers to stray too far from their rifles, he said, and segregationists would pick their own victims, but the movement itself could resolve that neither staff nor summer volunteers would carry guns. Weary sighs of acclamation eventually drowned out quibbles, and Moses later sent Stokely Carmichael to rid the Greenwood SNCC office of weapons.

 

O
N
J
UNE
9, Malcolm X was devastated to learn that Mike Wallace had broadcast on television only his premonition of murder—“I am probably a dead man already”—without any of his careful accusations. Wallace vaguely told viewers that Malcolm felt endangered because he possessed “certain information” about Elijah Muhammad. Malcolm, concluding that the legal departments of all three networks had vetoed airing the sex charges for fear of libel suits, then set out to obtain formal paternity complaints by the mistresses. He hoped that courtroom documents would provide enough protective cover for news outlets, and that the stories in turn would relieve sectarian hostilities building in the Muslim world.

Six Muslims were jailed and two hospitalized after a brawl outside the Philadelphia mosque on Monday. Seven young men went to the extreme of seeking refuge in the Chicago FBI office after beatings, claiming that Supreme Captain Raymond Sharrieff's enforcement squads were lumping together dues delinquents with potential dissenters as “hypocrite” followers of Malcolm. In Chicago, FBI wiretaps picked up reverberations among the women of Elijah Muhammad's extended household. Wallace Muhammad's wife unburdened herself to her mother-in-law, Elijah's wife, Clara, saying that Wallace's own brother had brought squads to their home threatening to kill him. Wallace's sister Ethel, wife of Raymond Sharrieff, promptly denounced her for upsetting her mother with talk of “that junk,” while another sister bemoaned the hurtful intrigues within the family. “If we don't stop clowning,” she said, “I am going to be ashamed of being a Muslim.”

 

I
N
A
TLANTA
, Andrew Young took much of June 9 to compose a searching personal letter about “the direction which my life should take.” Young sought pastoral counsel from Truman Douglass and Wesley Hotchkiss, two senior officials of the United Church of Christ who, in parallel roles with the National Council of Churches, had created historic initiatives for Mississippi. Aside from underwriting the training of Freedom Summer volunteers, the council had just voted formally to recruit and pay clergy for a long-term interracial project called the Delta Ministry. Young expressed gratitude for interest in him as its potential first director, but he wrestled in his letter with two other choices: staying on as administrator of the Citizenship Education Program, or succeeding Wyatt Walker as Martin Luther King's chief assistant. Mindful of his privileged legacy from the missionary Congregationalists who had educated his forebears since the Civil War, he wrote Douglass and Hotchkiss that he keenly felt the “guilt that I incurred as I watched those so educated filling their own coffers, with little concern for the needs of their less fortunate brethren.” With apologies for restless imprecision (“At times my passion for these problems gets the best of my ability to communicate”), Young groped for an administrative role to join the nonviolent street masses with “talented tenth” church bureaucrats. “I have considered myself a link between these movements,” he wrote.