Looking closer at the "valley moments" of history
After Selma and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, came the Meredith March, Chicago and Grenada, MS
This is my third post on At Canaan's Edge, Taylor Branch's book on Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement. The first post is here. The second post is here.
In April, I went through John Inazu's book Learning to Disagree.
In March, I went through Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave.
In February, I went through Nick Troiano’s The Primary Solution.
In January, I went through Michael Wear’s The Spirit of Our Politics.
The book of the month schedule is here.
Only a handful movies have been made about what happened after the Voting Rights Act of 1965, because it is the story of backlash and regression. It may not be so much that our storytellers don’t know what to do with the material, though that is undoubtedly partly true. The bigger problem may be that we turn to the movies for entertainment but not for art, so we do not reward those who venture into these darker and more troubling stories (witness the box office failure of Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit). Entertainment soothes and distracts. Art challenges, foments, and inspires. (Even our idea of inspiration has been sanded down into something easy and unthreatening by our entertainment industry complex).
Many of us have internalized a story of civil rights that has a traditional story arc, much of it through film. The suffering of brave activists and Southern blacks — and the death of a few — leads to triumph. And then the screen goes dark and we are back in the present, slightly detached, vaguely sated.
In real life, violence, terrorism and intimidation continued in the South, in response to voter registration efforts and school integration. But unlike after Selma, there was little in the way of a national response. The shock and outrage dissipated. The attention was elsewhere.
Last week's post explained the larger forces and and currents of history that caused the nation to turn away from civil rights. The Vietnam War took over the nation's consciousness. The war produced a more crazed American psyche, torn between those who hungered and thirsted for a victory that was virtually unattainable, at almost any cost, and those who reeled in horror from the vast expenditure of our own blood and treasure in the jungles of Vietnam, and from the killing and maiming of so many helpless, innocent civilians from our endless bombing runs. The number of Vietnamese civilians killed between 1965 and 1974 is estimated to have been between 405,000 and 627,000.
Meanwhile, as violence against blacks in the South ceased to provoke outrage, King's campaign for fair housing in Chicago was met with intense hatred and physical assault by mobs. And in response to both the ethos of Vietnam, and to the white backlash against civil rights gains of 1965, voices like Stokely Carmichael's and the Black Panthers rose to prominence with their rejection of non-violence and their embrace of militance, symbolized by the phrase "black power.”
We live now with consequences of this regression, and not just with the triumphs of the Civil Rights era. It’s both. But in addition, the progress that was made has in some ways been lost. The Civil Rights Act has been severely diminished in recent years. Our schools have become more and more segregated over the last 30 years, after a "golden age" of integration from the early 70's to the late 80's. Social attitudes are undoubtedly more accepting than they were fifty years ago, but the last several years have also seen more open racism peek its ugly head out into the open than I’d ever seen in my life.
The Meredith March
I want to zoom in a little on some of the details of the ways this played out. Be warned that some of this material is quite disturbing.
This photo here is of Martin Luther King Jr. standing right next to Stokely Carmichael. Carmichael was 25 years old in this photo, more than a decade younger than King, who was 37. Carmichael had been a committed movement activist in the deep South for five years by this time, since he was a very young man. He was one of the original Freedom Riders, and had trained with Gloria Richardson in Cambridge, Maryland. (I grew up going to the beach in Maryland, driving through Cambridge, and never knew anything about this until right now).
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdfc832bb-d881-43d1-9590-f467ee5b5b5d_1410x881.jpeg)
This photo shows King and Carmichael and others taking part in the Meredith March Against Fear. This march took place after James Meredith was shot on June 6, 1966 by a white man who filled him full of buckshot, wounding Meredith but not killing him. (Meredith, who is still alive and turned 90 years old last year, had already integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962, a trial enough for ten lifetimes).
King and Carmichael and others immediately took up Meredith's planned route, over 200 miles from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi. The days on the road provided King and Carmichael their "first prolonged company" together (478), Taylor Branch writes in At Canaan's Edge. But the purpose of the march was not sharply defined, and it was during rallies and meetings along the way that Meredith and others began to express more militant rhetoric, slowly breaking from King's commitment to non-violence.
While the Meredith March went on, the Mississippi legislature was in the middle of a "frenzied" special session, passing "thirteen major laws to dilute the potential effect" (483) of black voters registering for the first time after the Voting Rights Act the previous year.
In Greenwood, Mississippi, on June 16, Carmichael addressed a crowd a few hours after being arrested and released for what he said was the 27th time. That was his first use of the term "black power." "It's time we stand up and take over," Carmichael told the crowd. "Every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned down tomorrow" (486).
King was absent on the 16th but returned to the march the next day, and told reporters he would not use the term "black power," as Carmichael walked alongside him (487). King also put out a statement saying that "the term 'black power' is unfortunate because it tends to give the impression of black nationalism," according to David J. Garrow's Bearing the Cross (482).
King's arguments for non-violence were moral and ethical, but also pragmatic. "Somebody said tonight that we are in a majority," he told a mass meeting on June 21 in Yazoo City, after a white mob attacked the black marchers in Philadelphia, Miss., the previous day. "Don't fool yourself. We not a majority in a single state ... We are ten percent of the population of this nation, and it would be foolish of me to stand up and tell you we are going to get freedom by ourselves" (489).
King threatened to leave the march if Carmichael and others continued to use martial rhetoric. But on the night of June 23, in Canton, Mississippi, Highway patrol officers used tear gas on roughly 2,000 marchers who had assembled for a night meeting in a field, where they planned to spend the night in tents. "Nobody fight back. We're going to stand our ground," King called out. The troopers beat many of the "choking, vomiting people" who "ran blindly" away from the gas, kicking and clubbing them with the tear gas guns. The violence was "worse than Selma," one observer said (490).
Chicago
The Meredith March marked the rise of a more militant black movement. And soon, violence was spreading in Chicago, where King had launched a movement for fair housing practices earlier in 1966. Riots spread in mid-July across the city, touched off by a dispute between police and adults over children playing in water from a fire hydrant. After a few days, the National Guard was called in. Two people were killed in the violence, eighty were seriously injured, 500 were arrested, and there was $2 million in property damage (504).
King pressed ahead with a campaign to pressure real estate offices to stop discriminating against black home buyers. There were 23 firms that refused to show property to minorities.
A march of 250 people on July 30 was met with a crowd of white people in Marquette Park who shouted "N----- go home!" and threw eggs, bottles and rocks at the marchers, sending them scattering despite the presence of Chicago police who separated the two groups (507).
The next day, Sunday July 31, about 200 police guarded 550 marchers, but "neighborhood fury" was even more intense. "The previous day's rocks escalated to cherry bombs and bricks" (508).
"Sister Mary Angelica, a first-grade teacher at Sacred Heart School, went down unconscious and bleeding to cheers of 'We got another one' ... Older residents aimed special venom at 'white n------' — roughly half the marchers — and pelted the police escorts as traitors. Chants of 'white power' gave way to mob cries of 'Burn them like Jews!'" (508).
While the confused and battered marchers tried to find their way out of the terrifying scene, white teens sabotaged their vehicles. "Teenagers fanned out to slit tires, smash windows, and roll over vehicles bearing the telltale 'End Slums' stickers. Dodging officers in pursuit, they set a dozen cars ablaze with Molotov cocktails and pushed two others into a pond on the golf course."
On Friday, August 5, King — who was not in Chicago for the previous marches — led yet another march. He was struck by a "palm-sized rock" early on, which knocked him down to one knee. White mobs pulled Father George Clements, a black Catholic priest, from a car and "beat him until police intervened. A larger group of one hundred surrounded and pummeled six isolated officers until emergency help arrived" (511).
King assessed the situation this way: "I have never in my life seen such hate. Not in Mississippi or Alabama. This is a terrible thing" (511). But King also said: "I have to do this — to expose myself — to bring this hate into the open" (Garrow, 500).
Mayor Richard Daley soon acquired a court order restricting demonstrations to one per day, and only in the daylight hours. King and other leaders negotiated with Daley through August over reforms to city housing policies. The results were less than satisfying for King, but partly out of fatigue, he agreed to stop leading demonstrations for the moment.
Grenada, Mississippi
Not long after the Chicago violence, King was in Grenada, Mississippi. Last week's post showed him with two young girls, walking them to school, his face barely masking the exhaustion and depression that kept him in bed until Joan Baez arrived. This photo shows his depths even better.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd31c5b73-3210-4fcb-bae9-777ee5df8ccd_932x1399.jpeg)
A few days before King’s arrival, a mob had beaten black school children seeking to integrate John Rundle High and Lizzie Horn Elementary. Here's Branch's description of the first day of school in Grenada, roughly a week before King and Baez arrived to provide support.
"High school students Dorothy Allen and Poindexter Harbie crawled screaming through a gauntlet, struck by a man with a tree limb and kicked bloody in the face. A woman tripped twelve-year old Richard Sigh with her umbrella, whereupon men with pipes broke Sigh's leg hear the hip and chases him away in a frantic hop ... Memphis reporter Charles Goodman noticed a woman draw back, cover her mouth, and repeat to no one as she watched a swirling clump of men whip a pigtailed girl: 'How can they laugh when they are doing it?'" (528)
More from Branch: "Grenada marked a convergence of what King called 'valley moments.' On September 19, the day he arrived there, the Civil Rights Act of 1966 failed in the U.S. Senate ... No longer did calculated sacrifice from Birmingham or Selma catapult issues to a transforming national stage. With attitudes hardening for Vietnam, vanguard movements receded to local stature" (529, 530).
Soon after, CBS News reporter Mike Wallace asked King: "Don't you find that the American people are getting a little bit tired, truly, of the whole civil rights struggle?" (531)
What to Make of This
This is a lot to take in. What do we do with this extravagant display of man's capacity for savagery toward his fellow man?
For myself, I am left awestruck by the the courage of the activists and marchers, and King himself. King himself is one of America's great martyrs, alongside President Lincoln.
King was only 39 when he was struck down, still a young man. At a certain point in his career, his life was no longer his. It became subsumed into the movement. There are times in this book when he expresses a desire to return to the simple vocation of pastoring a single church, tending to a humble flock week in and week out. Instead, he was thrust into the vortex of national passions that brought him into the Oval Office for meetings with the president, but also into the front lines of marches and demonstrations where he stood face to face with hateful malice, and made him a target for endless death threats.
King's 1968 recounting of his "two scariest memories" included those marches in Chicago "through that narrow street' in Chicago as thousands of screaming people threw rocks even from the trees" and another moment in Philadelphia, Mississippi "when voices growled that the killers of the three young civil rights workers were standing close behind" (696).
I was also struck that even among some of his own close advisers, King was rather alone in his fierce commitment to non-violence. "It may look like we can't get out of this thing now. It may appear that non-violence has failed, and the nation will not respond to it," King said two months or so before his death at Vermont Avenue Baptist Church in D.C. "But don't give up yet. Wait until the next morning" (691).
King was so worn down in these later years, by the constant onslaught of new challenges, setbacks, and opposition. So too were many in the civil rights movement. It raises a crucial point: as much as King is an inspiring figure, he was just one of many ordinary men and women who risked their physical safety and even their lives to march into settings of mob danger and raw hatred that most of us would cower from. This rich tapestry of brave humanity is humbling to behold.
"The movement made Martin rather than Martin making the movement," Ella Baker told David J. Garrow. And Diane Nash added this: "If people think that it was Martin Luther King's movement, then today they — young people — are more likely to say, 'Gosh, I wish we had a Martin Luther King here today to lead us.' ... If people knew how that movement started, then the question they would ask themselves is, 'What can I do?'" (Garrow, 625)
And then second, reading this account brings home the promise and shortcomings of our national project, this United States of America. The gathering together here of every race, creed and faith together has been marked by many dark days, but what we have is rare in human history, which is more often dominated by tribalism and fear. These stories demonstrate, in some ways, how fear erupts into anger and violence when one group's status, superiority or wealthy is perceived to be under threat. And yet, for all our warts and shortcomings and failures, America has endured and continues to stumble forward. We're still here, seeking a more perfect union.
Lastly, MLK’s life, his work, his commitment to non-violence, and his sacrifices were all connected to his Christian faith. I will explore that more in next week’s post.
"The cross we bear precedes the crown we wear. To be a Christian one must take up his cross, with all of its difficulties and agonizing and tension-packed content and carry it until that very cross leaves its mark upon us and redeems us to that more excellent way which comes only through suffering."
— MLK, January 17, 1963, National Conference on Religion and Race, Chicago
The King/Carmichael distinction is a useful lens for understanding Christian Nationalism and its milder cousins. “Christians are under attack”, they say and look to take power in ways not unlike Stokley. The MLK version of working with a pluralistic vision fades into the background.