When Everything Changed (19 page)

“T
HAT WAS OUR UNIFORM
.”

Blackwell looked on what happened to her at the convention as a triumph, while the young civil rights organizers saw it as a terrible defeat, and proof that no matter how noble their cause and how much pain they endured, the white liberal Northerners they had counted on were not really going to respond. Perhaps it was the difference in expectations that allowed Blackwell to keep growing stronger throughout the tumultuous ’60s, while SNCC began to slide into an angry cynicism. “
I don’t think that anybody
envisioned the long years of struggle and violence and… anguish,” said Connie Curry, a white SNCC official. In 1960, when SNCC was formed, the students declared their commitment to the creed of nonviolence, vowing to remain “loving and forgiving even in the midst of hostility.” But by 1964 the students—many by then ex-students—were growing dubious about nonviolence and less willing to put their bodies on the line just in the hope that someone in power would notice and intervene. Being beaten and thrown into jail “and trying to love everybody while they did it to you… ,” Curry said, “was bound to mess you up.”

Dressing up for demonstrations was definitely over. The students who had worn their best clothes to sit-ins and jail were now in denim pants and work shirts. “That was our uniform,” said Joyce Ladner. “I had an overall skirt I wore. That was fashionable among the movement women. The guys wore overalls, and we wore the overall skirt.” The transition from dress-up to workers’ clothes did not come without controversy. While some argued that wearing jeans was a sign of solidarity with the working class, others thought it was a sign of disrespect.
Marian Wright Edelman said
she would never forget “the disappointed looks” of rural black Mississippians “who heard there was a Black lady lawyer in town… and who came to look for and at me. When they saw me in blue jeans and an old sweatshirt, they were crestfallen. I never wore jeans in public again in Mississippi.”
Back in Atlanta, Ruby
Doris Smith, who had taken over the day-to-day operations of SNCC, offered a compromise: “It isn’t so much what you wear but the condition of the clothes worn.” (Smith herself generally stuck to skirts and blouses.)

Carefully straightened hair gave way to natural Afros, some of them just a small halo around the head, others great explosions of hair. The new style created enormous generational conflicts, from Northern college towns to rural Mississippi.
Unita Blackwell was disturbed
when Muriel Tillinghast, the young SNCC organizer assigned to work with her on voter registration, arrived in town wearing a short Afro. “Me, I called it nappy-headed,” she recalled. “I had been straightening my hair for years, and all the other black women I knew had been, too. By the time I was 7 or 8 years old, my mother and grandmother were ‘warm-combing’ my hair to get the kinks out. As far as I knew, there was no such thing as a black woman not straightening her hair.” She found Muriel’s hair embarrassing—particularly since “all the women in church kind of sniggled about it”—and kept dropping hints about going down to the local hairdresser.

The idea of letting your hair “go natural” had begun with black artists and actresses in the 1950s, and in 1963, Cicely Tyson wore her hair in an Afro or in cornrows when she appeared in the TV series
East Side/West Side.
But the civil rights workers were the ones who brought the style into the college campuses and black neighborhoods around the country, much to the horror of their parents and teachers. When Emma Jordan got married in California, her mother made it clear that the ceremony would not go on unless the bride had her hair properly straightened. Jordan dutifully began her wedding day in compliance. Then at the last minute she went into the bathroom and put water in it, allowing it to revert to “the cutest little Afro.” Her mother burst into tears, Jordan said, “but there was nothing she could do.” Valerie Bradley, a black journalist, said that when she returned home to visit her family in Indianapolis, her mother refused to meet her Afro-wearing daughter at the airport.
At Spelman, Gwen
Robinson was already letting her hair grow natural in the early ’60s. She was called into the dean’s office and told she was a “disgrace” and had no hopes of finding a husband.

“The hair thing made a huge difference… ,” said Mary Helen Washington, who was a graduate student in Detroit when she let her hair go natural. “First of all it was a real power statement: I have all that hair walking around. But it was very freeing to have a style that white people couldn’t wear that made you look gorgeous.”

The Afro was an early sign of a coming explosion of anger over the standards of beauty in the black community, which had long valued features, color, and hair that looked as “white” as possible. Those standards were particularly important at the elite black colleges. It was hard to avoid noticing that Spelman girls were not only extremely well-behaved; they were also, in general, extremely light-skinned. “
The best of all
possible worlds is that you are light as you can be, you have green eyes, or light brown, and you have long straight hair,” said Gwen Robinson, who was dark-skinned and who found that the male students from neighboring colleges were cruelly dismissive. “Some of the Morehouse guys were so nasty to a person who looked like myself. Overt, I mean, straight up.” Diane Nash was universally admired for her organizing skills, but virtually every description of her by colleagues in Nashville included a reference to the fact that she was very beautiful in that traditional way—so light-skinned that if the movement needed information on what was going on inside segregated waiting rooms or restaurants, she could walk in and pass for white. “
The first thing you have
to say about Diane—the first thing anyone who ever encountered her noticed, and there is no way
not
to notice—is that she was one of God’s beautiful creatures, just about the most gorgeous woman any of us had ever seen… ,” wrote John Lewis in his memoirs. “But none of this turned Diane’s head. She was dead serious about what we were doing each week, very calm, very deliberate, always straightforward and sincere. As time passed, she came to be seen more as our sister than as an object of lust.”

“T
HERE’S NO ANSWER, REALLY
.”

The small, tightly knit Beloved Community of SNCC was evolving into a large, nationally famous organization that could no longer be run by endless meetings in search of consensus. Ruby Doris Smith had taken over the central office in Atlanta—less because she was interested in the job than because she realized how desperately SNCC needed someone to impose order. “
She absolutely did not
tolerate any nonsense,” said Stanley Wise, who worked with her.

Ruby Doris, who was still just 22, had gotten married in the summer of 1963 to Clifford Robinson, whose brother had married her sister. Robinson, who had not been involved in the movement, wound up working as a mechanic for SNCC, and the people who knew them both would debate whether they made a good couple. Many believed Clifford was no match for Ruby Doris, but Smith herself always claimed that she had finally found a man who was stronger than she was.
What seemed clear
, as Joyce Ladner said, was that her new husband “absolutely adored Ruby. He would just sit and look at her.” Soon, she was pregnant, but she stayed on the job until she went into labor. In the hospital where her son was born, friends found her on the floor doing exercises a few hours after the delivery, intent on getting back to work.
Two weeks later, Ruby
Doris appeared on her sister Catherine’s doorstep with her infant. When Catherine protested that she had no experience taking care of children, Ruby Doris said, “You’ll find out,” put the baby in Catherine’s arms, and went to work.

Since twenty-first-century America has not yet figured out exactly how a woman can handle the duties of both career and family, it’s not surprising that the women in the civil rights movement of the 1960s had trouble balancing husband, children, and an all-consuming cause that burned out many single, unattached people. “
Well, I’ve found out
there’s no answer, really, for a woman who works in a career and has children,” Ruby Doris told Josephine Carson, a writer who was collecting stories of black women in the South. “Like: my baby knows who his mother is, I think, but it’s his grandmother who’s giving him the food and that means something very special. He’s getting more of her… uh… nature than he is of mine. He’s learning to live with
her,
not me.”

In 1961 Diane Nash had married James Bevel, a divinity student and SNCC leader who was, depending on who you were talking to, either one of the most charismatic or one of the most eccentric members of the organization. “
He’s crazy but he’s
a genius,” said Ivanhoe Donaldson, a SNCC organizer who accepted both theories. “He’s overwhelming, and I think he just overwhelmed Diane. And so she faded into his background while his star was out there shining.” Nash in fact kept working, particularly on a voting-rights campaign in Alabama. When she was pregnant with her first child, she was sentenced to two years in jail for “contributing to the delinquency of minors.” (She had taught techniques for nonviolent civil disobedience to high schoolers.) Nash tried, unsuccessfully, to have the judge order her to serve the whole sentence. “
Since my child
will be a black child born in Mississippi, whether I am in jail or not he will be born in prison,” she said. Released, she simply went back to working for the cause. But soon, she had a second child and a foundering marriage.
Bevel’s compulsive infidelity
doomed the relationship; he ultimately failed even to provide support for his children. By the end of the decade, Nash would be a single mother living in Chicago. She had once told a reporter that the civil rights movement was what she intended to be “doing for the rest of my life.” But earning a living and raising her son and daughter left her limited time for anything else.

“I
ASKED FOR VOLUNTEERS AND THEY SENT ME WHITE WOMEN
.”

In 1964 SNCC invited about a thousand students, most of them Northern whites, to come to Mississippi to work on voter-registration projects during their summer vacations. It was a controversial idea—while the exhausted organizers needed fresh manpower, many doubted that inexperienced outsiders were the answer. But the architects of the plan also hoped that white Northern America would pay more attention to the vicious resistance to black voter registration in the South if some of the people being brutalized were white. The summer had barely begun when three male civil rights workers—one of them a new white recruit from the North—were murdered.
By September, there had been eighty
beatings, thirty-five shootings, thirty-five church burnings, and thirty bombings. Many of the volunteers were targets, but SNCC’s local black supporters suffered the most. “It was a beautiful experience until the summer of ’64, when there were just too many funerals,” said Taitt-Magubane.

SNCC would wind up marginalized within a few years and out of business by the end of the decade. There were endless reasons for its decline and fall.
But the enormous influx
of volunteers—mostly white and about 40 percent female—strained the already-existing fault lines until they cracked. The tensions between black and white women were particularly acute.

The story line was easy for everybody to discern: young black men, who had always been taught to regard white women as a forbidden—and extraordinarily dangerous—fruit, suddenly found themselves fussed over by white coeds while the black women watched from the sidelines.
When Penny Patch, a longtime
white organizer who was romantically involved with a black man, began to notice that the black female veterans were treating her coldly, she decided that the real cause was neither jealousy on their part nor indiscretion on hers, but history. “As the nearest and safest white women, some of us became vessels into which black women, if they chose to, could pour their accumulated anger—anger they had borne for hundreds of years…. It is slavery and oppression that created the distance between black women and white women, not the fact that white women slept with black men during the civil rights movement.”

Patch was right about the history. While white and black women had worked together and forged friendships in America since the seventeenth century, the more common relationship was the uneasy one of employer-employee. Some of the black women in the movement had mothers who worked as domestics and had bitter memories of the way white women had treated them. But the sex part most definitely did matter. Black women who had already suffered because their features didn’t look sufficiently “white” could not possibly be thrilled when hundreds of white women arrived on the scene and started pairing off with black men. They had been putting their lives on the line, but many of their male comrades seemed to prefer the attention of the newcomers. “
Our skills and abilities
were recognized and respected, but that seemed to place us in some category other than female,” said Cynthia Washington, who was working as a project director in one of the most dangerous areas of the South.
Things weren’t helped
by the fact that SNCC’s executive secretary, James Forman, who was married to a black woman, was having an affair with a white staff member. “There is the movement. And everybody is, like, we are a family, we are together as brothers and sisters,” said Josie Bass, thinking about her days fighting for civil rights in Chicago. “But it was a fight in the back room every day about the brothers not being with the sisters while we were together in this movement. And that is the part that I don’t hear people talking about anymore, but it was
so real and raw.
”

The volunteers were all well-intentioned, and most bent over backward not to offend the black people they were working with. Nevertheless, some of the recruits had a Lady Bountiful attitude toward the people they were there to help.
Dr. Alvin Poussaint, who studied
the way white women adjusted to the demands of Freedom Summer, said one of them told him she felt like “the master’s child come to free the slaves.” Others failed to understand how easily they could put black men in danger.
Chuck McDew, a black
organizer, was being kept incommunicado in a Mississippi jail when one of the white female volunteers had the bright idea of getting in to see him by passing herself off as his wife. The guards, who had not been particularly antagonistic toward their prisoner, changed overnight and began beating him brutally, saying, “Son of a bitch, that’s what you get for marrying a white woman.” The badly injured McDew, when he got out, threatened to kill the volunteer himself.