INTL101 Week 8

CHAPTER XIX

Selma: Crisis, Chaos, Opportunity

The Negro meets no resistance when on a downward course. It is only when he rises in wealth, intelligence and manly character that he brings on himself the heavy hand of perse- cution.

-Frederick Douglass

Looking back, 1965-66, Lowndes County, Alabama, was a turning point for me, and for SNCC.

As soon as the lawyers finished deposing our people and the state offi- cials in Mississippi for the Congressional Challenge, I figured it was time to move on. SNCC was in transition and I sensed it was time for me to try a somewhat different direction.

But leaving my people, old and young, in the Delta was harder than I'd foreseen. I hadn't honestly expected the outpouring of warmth and affection, I mean the extent, y'know, and so openly and emotionally expressed.

"Stokely, so long as I got me a roof over my head in this heah Missis- sippi, you got you a place to stay. An' if it ain't but two chicken wings in the pot, you know you got one," Mrs. Hamer said, and I heard variations on that everywhere I went. Even from a few places that I hadn't really expected. It would have been really hard had I been leaving the movement or even the South. But I was only going across the state line into Alabama.

Alabama. Whoa, boy, now that was a tough one. I'd been talking to Forman about setting up a project where I could implement certain ideas coming out of the MFDP experience. Where SNCC could use the things we'd been learning in the Delta. We decided I should check out Alabama.

I had one more SNCC national staff meeting. I'd been on my way to report for assignment to Silas Norman, the Alabama project director. I'm almost certain it was on the way to that meeting that I heard it. On the car radio.

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"Former Black Muslim leader Malcolm X has been shot and killed ... " I can't remember who all were in the car, but we listened to the report

in dead silence. Who had killed the brother? The report said the shooters were black. That one had been captured.Yeah, sure, I thought. How con- venient. I didn't for a moment believe that. It wasn't the whole or the true story. I knew that. Instinctively.

Then it began to hit me. Malcolm dead? How can that be? That warm, vital, truth-telling, strong-hearted, force-of-nature black man? Dead? They-whoever did it-made a bad mistake killing that brother. A real bad mistake. Then I wondered how far the thing stretched. Who else might be next?

Since his return from Africa, Malcolm, now free of the political and ideological constraints of the Nation, had been reaching out to movement leaders. There had been at least one high-level secret meeting. I knew that. Some of us had been talking about a role for him with SNCC. The vot- ing rights bill was coming. I knew we in SNCC would have to begin look- ing seriously to the ghettos in the North, for the kind of grassroots organizing we'd been doing in the South. Malcolm would be key. We weren't sure how it could work, or if such a thing was even possible, but it wasn't as strange as people seemed to think.

Malcolm had always, always, been respectful and supportive of us in SNCC. Of all the civil rights groups, I knew he felt closest to us, to the SNCC spirit. Hey, after a long talk with Malcolm, even John Lewis had come back from Africa sounding like a Pan-Africanist revolutionary. It had been SNCC who had invited Malcolm to Selma, when he spoke in the Brown Chapel. Sure his presence there had upset some people, but the grassroots Africans in Selma had been really responsive.*

Also, man, a month or so earlier, when Mrs. Hamer and a group of Delta teenagers had gone to Harlem, we'd arranged for the group to spend some time with the brother. He made a hell of an impression. The youth came back elated, just elated, talking about nothing but Malcolm. Even good Christian Mrs. Hamer had a crush. "Stokely, he so handsome

*I asked Ture about written accounts that local "Southern" blacks had been turned off by Malcolm's "Northern nationalism," that only the few "Northern" militants in SNCC had responded to Malcolm's message and posture. Ture's response: "I wasn't there. I was still in Mississippi. But of course I followed it thor- oughly. I followed the SNCC grapevine, and if you look at the films-they have films-the crowd went wild. They're lying, the films are there, they speak for them- selves. There's a film of Malcolm speaking in Selma and you can hear the crowds go wild. I studied that film. Even Malcolm would never forget. That's the speech where he said, 'I'm not telling you to do anything you wouldn't think of doing yourself, so I've not told you anything new.' And the Africans went wild. But anyway that's just trying to rewrite history.'' -EMT

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and so kind." Almost the same things she had said about Sekou Toure. Malcolm and Mrs. Hamer had spoken in a church where his introduction had been so clear and respectful, so lovingly respectful of Mrs. Hamer. He'd challenged a roomful of Harlem militants. "Y'all brothers always rapping about how bad you are. All that talk. Well, this little lady here's bad. She can teach you-all of us-about courage and struggle." Now they'd killed him. Like his friend Lumumba.

Though I can't recall who else was in the car, I distinctly remember saying that those killers would regret this. That killing Malcolm was a bad mistake. See, Malcolm was the only figure of that generation, the only one, who had the natural authority, the style, language, and charisma, to lead and discipline rank-and-file urban youth. The only one who commanded that kind of respect.

Over and over you saw it. Time and again. Many times you saw a crowd of angry Africans fixing to tear the place up, and the only person who could reason with them, cool them out, was Malcolm. That was because the masses knew and trusted him. Now they'd killed him. Bad mistake. Even though the media was saying that the shooters were black, I assumed that the government-New York police, FBI-which had him under watch 24/7, was at the heart of it. I still think that. There's entirely too much about that assassination that's never been satisfactorily explained.

[Peter Bailey: "I really started to follow Malcolm after that church bombing where the four

little girls were killed. There was a big rally in Harlem in front of the Hotel Theresa. Jackie Robinson, who had been a childhood hero of mine after he opened up the major leagues, had put it together. Malcolm spoke first. Then after about eight other prominent leaders spoke, Jackie Robinson thanked everyone for coming. 'The rally is over. Please go home.' The crowd, unsatisfied, started

want want Malcolm.' They wouldn't leave. They started getting belligerent, jumping on cars, stopping traffic. Brother Malcolm, who'd been just leaning up at the Chock full o' Nuts, got back on the platform. 'Brothers and sisters, let's don't do this,' he said. 'The rally was for a very impor- tant cause. 've had it. I think everyone should now go home.' Immediately, immediately the crowd quieted down ... just faded away ... called off the ruckus ... jumping ... screaming ... yelling ... stopped. Within minutes the air cleared. I never seen anything like that in my life. He had a certain integrity that people responded to." -Voices of Freedom}

I wanted to go to the funeral, but in the end I wasn't able to. The Selma staff who'd invited Malcolm a month before felt strongly that out of respect SNCC should send a delegation. All the Selma staff wanted to go. I wanted to go too, but I was now working under Silas Norman, and Silas and Jim Forman in effect ordered me to Selma to hold the fort. SCLC

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was already moving in and they needed someone experienced on the ground. I was it. Forman kept me briefly in Atlanta to discuss strategy, then sent me into Selma.

Jack Minnis, the director of SNCC research, had developed excellent, very detailed information on the Alabama power structure: which capi- talists owned what, their historical relationship to the terrorist network, and so on. I studied that and was well briefed. It was Jack [Courtland Cox once called him one of the most intelligent people in SNCC, which is saying a lot given the level of intelligence in the organization. -EMT] who would find the old Alabama law that would be key to how we organized in Lowndes County.

Alabama could have been Mississippi all over again, and in many ways it was. Enter Lowndes County and you back in the Mississippi Delta, Jack. Miles of cotton plantations, a huge black majority, an aging popu- lation, serious poverty, and serious, serious political and economic oppres- sion. The same Wild West ambience, whites in cowboy boots and Stetsons wearing handguns with rifle racks in the pickup trucks. No difference vis- ible to the naked eye.

But elsewhere there were important differences. Alabama had much larger cities and heavy industry, unheard of in Mississippi. The earth around Birmingham (the Pittsburgh of the South) had deposits of coal and iron ore. Pittsburgh, my tochis; what Birmingham at that time really reminded me of was Johannesburg, South Africa: black miners doing the most dangerous and dirty work for a fraction of the pay of white miners, many of whom were trained in explosives and racism; once militant and progressive unions now hopelessly compromised; a racist, capitalist establishment referred to locally as "the big mules"; a history of violent class warfare; and an instinctively violent police force, used in the thirties to break unions and bust workers' heads, now content to brutalize the black movement. Rigidly segregated, this was South African-style apartheid. P. W. Botha would have felt right at home.

Wonderful town, Birmingham. But that was not my destination. Selma was a different place. Very different. No less oppressive or bru-

tal, but so very different. For one thing, I really liked that African com- munity. See, ifl say that racism in Selma was as ruthless, the segregation as complete as any I yet seen, but that the black community was more together-psychologically and culturally a proud community-than many I'd seen, it must certainly sound like a contradiction. But that was the Lord's truth. Could be that the strength was a consequence of the severity of the racism, or that the oppression was so severe because of the cultural strength of the Africans. Or both?

Whatever the case, many movement people have said that Selma peo-

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ple were the "most African" blacks in the South. I could see exactly what they meant. The community was poor and economically oppressed, true. But it was also self-contained and self-sufficient with businesses (small but our own) and black professionals, and strong in black religion and culture, with even two tiny church-affiliated colleges, Lutheran College and Selma University.

On first entering Selma, my distinct impression was that I sho nuff was back in antebellum Dixie. The twentieth century seemed to have missed Selma, a small riverfront town/city on the Alabama River, almost com- pletely. Visually, it seemed to exist in its own time cocoon, a time warp. Eerie.

Jack Minnis's research explained some of what I was seeing. During slavery, Selma had been the commercial, merchandizing, and processing hub of the surrounding cotton belt, the Alabama delta. Hence the rows of huge, weathered, old, wooden warehouses with long wharves jutting out into the river. The only evidence of modern technology being the infa- mous Edmund Pettus Bridge across the river into Dallas County.

Of course, in primitive, antebellum capitalism, one of the most lucra- tive commodities was African bodies. A large part of Selma's commerce was the importation of Africans for the surrounding plantations. Shiploads of Africans passed through Selma, the area's largest slave market. The fea- tures and culture of Selma's black population (a little over 50 percent in my time) reflected that history.

Whites, of course, had their own peculiar sense of history. They never forgot that during the Civil War, the town had almost completely been razed by Union troops, a goodly number of whom were said to be black. And, especially galling, that during Reconstruction, their former slaves had sent an African to the U.S. Congress. And when I read that Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate icon, slave trader, terrorist, and founder of the KKK, had lived in Selma, much about white attitudes and actions in Selma became much clearer.

Selma's whites were obsessively determined-after the "humiliation" of Reconstruction-that black power would never again raise its nappy head amongst them. Period. So it didn't surprise me to find that they proudly claimed "Bull" Connor (of Birmingham infamy) as a native son. Or that they were equally proud that theirs had been the first Alabama town to establish a White Citizens Council.

Then there was Bull Connor's local imitator, Sheriff Jim Clark, whose contribution to modern crowd control was a mounted posse whose equipment of choice was the bullwhip and the cattle prod. This posse was said to include members of the landed gentry, no doubt combining fan- tasies of the Confederate cavalry with the slave patrollers. And I had thought Mississippi was crazy.

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The city was in Dallas County. In 1961 my old friend Reggie Robin- son from Baltimore had scouted Selma as a possible SNCC project. In 1962 we sent in the first field secretary, the Reverend Bernard Lafayette. The night Medgar Evers was murdered, the Klan sent an assassin after Bernard. Bernard maintains to this day that his nonviolent discipline and demeanor saved his life. I suspect that his nonviolence might have been aided considerably by the neighbor who ran out, shattering the silence with his shotgun. I was surprised to read that one of the things SNCC launched here was a bus boycott in 1964. A bus boycott in l 964?Well, a bus driver had shut the door on a pregnant African and dragged her to her death beneath the bus. But now the issue was the vote, and for rea- sons already stated, the Selma resistance was fierce.

The one thing SNCC did not have to do in Selma was identify and develop grassroots community leadership. As I said, this was a self- contained community, and its Dallas County Voters League had a mighty impressive group of leaders. Some proud, fearless black leaders who, against all odds, had never quit and never backed down. Nuff respect.

They were mostly professional people: ministers like the Reverend Mr. Lewis and the Reverend Mr. Reese; Dr. Jackson, who I believe was a den- tist; tough-talking, indefatigable attorney J. L. Chestnutt; and of course, the president, Mrs. Amelia Boynton, a former teacher and widely respected leader.

A word about that family. Mrs. Boynton was a gracious, elegantly spo- ken lady. A teacher deeply committed to her people's uplift, Mrs. Boyn- ton had been president of the Dallas County NAACP. When the NAACP was outlawed in Alabama, she didn't miss a beat. She merely led the mem- bership into the Voters League and became president of that. She was demure, highly "cultured," and quite unintimidatable.

The entire Boynton family were warriors. The plaintiff in the Supreme Court case Boynton vs. Virginia, which integrated interstate bus travel, was her son. Her husband also had been a highly respected leader, who managed-with the ingenuity of his widow-to continue the fight liter- ally from his grave.

When Mr. Boynton (peace be unto him) danced and joined the ances- tors, an injunction against the congregating of more than three Negroes {the language was "three persons," but it meant us -EMT] was in effect in Dallas County. No kidding. But crowds of people were certain to come pay their respects to the fallen leader. So the announcement of the memorial service for Mr. Sam Boynton said quite prominently, "Memo- rial Service, Voting Workshop and Rally."When my time comes, that's the kind of memorial service I'd like to have.

Stuck in their antebellum time capsule, Selma whites did not welcome the passage of the civil rights bill of 1964 any more than the ones in

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Greenwood had. In Selma, the immediate effect was to increase the intensity and meanness of their resistance.

This was the situation into which SCLC came. SCLC had always maintained that the local leadership invited them in "because SNCC was in over its head." That's self-serving nonsense. Over our heads, huh? The Selma black community had always celebrated a community holiday, the Emancipation Proclamation Day, which, of course, was not an event cel- ebrated by white Selma. Dr. King was invited to give this day's speech. I've always suspected that like the guest who was invited to dinner and hung around, SCLC solicited a longer visit. With their traditional hit-and- run tactic, they were always in need of a new arena, and which Southern black community could refuse Dr. King? Especially an embattled one, like Selma.

Now we would have had no problem working with SCLC had their approach been compatible with SNCC's values. Especially since the first organizers they sent in were Diane and Jim Bevel and Bernard Lafayette, all former SNCC folk, who ever since Parchman Farm during the Freedom Rides had been paying serious dues in struggle. We under- stood each other. The problem was in the SCLC approach of massive, temporary mobilization and press agentry as opposed to creating pow- erfully organized communities capable of sustaining political struggle. Organization vs. mobilization was always a serious problem, because every day-to-day tactical decision was affected by the strategic approach. Every one.

SNCC had steadily and purposefully been building on the base already in Selma. Yeah, the resistance had been crude and brutal, but that actually helped the growth of the organization. We were expanding the organized mass base. Something viable and ongoing.

Here comes SCLC talking about mobilizing another two-week cam- paign, using our base and the magic of Dr. King's name. They going bring in the cameras, the media, prominent people, politicians, rat-tat-tat, turn the place upside down, and split. Probably leaving most of the strongest people sitting in jail.

That was the issue, a real strategic and philosophical difference. Try explaining that to the press, eh? Good luck. Hey, our approach minimized their role, but SCLC's entire strategy centered around the media. So of course stories about "young SNCC organizers, jealous of Dr. King," began to appear nationwide. Which, as I'm told, are still being recycled by historians. Nonsense. Utter off-the-wall bull and nonsense. Nobody was "jealous" of Dr. King. We respected him. But we did have principled and tactical disagreements, that's all. And Dr. King understood and respected that. He never ran to the press with any of that nonsense. Oth- ers in SCLC may have. But Dr. King, never.

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Here's where the stuff hit the fan. We, jointly with the Dallas County Voters League, organized a freedom day (a large voter registration effort by numbers of people) at the courthouse.

Dependably, Sheriff Clark went nuts. He actually physically assaulted Mrs. Boynton. The story spread like wildfire in the community. Pictures on TV of Mrs. Boynton being thrown around and dragged by her neck. The idea, much less the sight, of this genteel, impeccably dignified lady whom everybody respected (she reminded me of Ms. Ella Baker in her manner) being manhandled by that redneck barbarian was the last straw. I mean folks were riled up, Jack.

The next day Clark pushed another black lady [Mrs.Annie Lee Cooper -EMT] on the line. The wrong black lady. She was big, strong, and mad. She refused to move, saying, "Ain't no one scared of you, Clark." He grabbed her, she hauled off and slugged him. I mean really slugged him. Some folks say more than one time. It took a bunch of deputies to hold her down while Clark busted her head with his nightstick.

The Selma teachers-you heard me, the teachers-took it on them- selves to march as a group on the courthouse a few days after that. In black Southern communities, the teachers are both "middle class" and vulnerable. None of us had ever seen a group of teachers, so identified, do something like that anywhere else. That's what I meant when I said Selma was a special community. All their students were thrilled. Just so proud of their teachers.

All of which suggested to SCLC that the perfect thing to do with all this community momentum and energy was to organize a march to Montgomery, some fifty miles through the most backward and violent country in Alabama. To do what? Petition the governor, a certain George Corley Wallace. Gimme a break, Jack. Y'know there is a saying among engineers: "If all you have is a hammer, the whole world will look like a nail to you." That was SCLC exactly. SNCC was moving in an entirely different direction. SCLC was depending on the federal government all over again, something we were over and done with. To us, that had gotten real tired. Then also, it involved SCLC's calling in Northern supporters to "march with Dr. King." Not only did that bypass the local organiza- tions, it was a provocation to violence. SNCC had already finished with that one too.

People think of the Selma to Montgomery March as being for voting rights, which, of course, in the larger sense it was. But the real catalyst, the immediate trigger, besides Clark's behavior in Selma, was the murder of a very decent young brother from a respected local family. Actually, imme- diately before the march, there had been two murders, both of young men active in the struggle: Sammy Younge Jr. and Jimmy Lee Jackson.

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The first murder was of Sammy Younge Jr. (peace be unto him) over in Tuskegee. Sammy was twenty-one years old, a navy veteran, and one of the Tuskegee students working with SNCC. The gas station attendant who, without any provocation at all, shot him down for attempting to use a "white" rest room, walked. I'm not even sure if he was ever charged with any crime.

It was then that SNCC issued its first antiwar, antidraft statement Gan- uary 1966). We also began to say publicly that until our lives were pro- tected and our rights respected at home, no Africans had any business fighting America's wars. Period. And that was even more true when they were clear-cut imperialist wars like Vietnam. No young Americans, Africans or no, should fight that kind of war. We should not, in Dr. Du Bois's famous words, "accept from America equal right to do wrong."

The next murder, the one that triggered the march, was that of a brother named Jimmy Lee Jackson (peace be unto him), in Perry County, neighbor of Dallas County. When SCLC joined us in the Selma cam- paign, the violence of the resistance hardened into a standoff in Dallas County. So Dr. King and them tried to spread the campaign out into the surrounding counties. Try as he might, though, one county Dr. King was never able to get into was Lowndes.

It was incredible, but SCLC could not find a black church in Lown- des County, not one, that would offer a pulpit to Dr. King. Can you believe that? Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., no pulpit? Actually, Bevel did tell me that there was one. But Dr. King never made it. On the day he was supposed to preach there, the pastor who'd extended the offer came into Selma, weeping, Bevel said, "living eyewater." He'd been run out of the county. By the Klan, right? No, Jack, by his deacon board. That's right, the deacons of his own church ran the reverend out. I've got to admit that when I heard that, it did cross my mind that Lowndes County might not exactly be the most strategically hospitable place for our next project. But of course it had been the terrorists. We later found out that the Klan had terrorized the deacons into running off their pastor.

SNCC had done some organizing in Perry County, where people trying to register had encountered the usual violence from the mob and the state. But Perry County people were strong, Jack. The most memo- rable was one old farmer, Mr. Cager Lee. He and his family were just stal- wart. One strong African family. Those people just kept on keeping right on going, back to the courthouse. Whenever a group went to register, there they were.

Jimmy Lee Jackson was Mr. Lee's grandson. An SCLC preacher came to speak one night at a Perry County church, and when the people left the church after the speech, the state troopers ran amok, just chasing and whupping people everywhere. It was a police riot, pure and simple.

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When a trooper attacked his mother and Jimmy Lee stepped between them, the trooper just shot him, twice. Jimmy Lee Jackson died a few days later. Of course, there was no investigation of this murder either. It got cursory press attention nationally and, despite SNCC's efforts, no response from the federal government. To the media and the national government, the lives of "Southern negroes" Jimmy Lee Jackson and Sammy Younge Jr. were apparently expendable.

With the proposed march to Montgomery, we had predicted, and dreaded, chaos. A bunch of media hoopla and confusion. But truthfully, we expected nothing like what we ended up with.

In the end, we had not one march-but three. Or more accurately, "the march," after two abortive attempts all within two weeks. It was madness.

The first and last one are the ones in the history books, but the middle one had the greater political effect internally. That first attempt, "Bloody Sunday," lives in infamy in the video archives of the world. On that Sun- day afternoon, the gathering was pretty big but still a local affair. About what you'd expect for Jimmy Lee. People were still stirred up behind the murders and Jim Clark's violence to our women at the Selma courthouse.

Those present were the Selma leadership, people from the local African communities around Selma, and the local activists-mostly young, with a lot ofTuskegee students. And those SNCC organizers who felt they were morally bound to stand with the community.

All along, George Wallace had been issuing pronouncements, one after the other: he was not going to allow any "illegal" march in his state. Jim Clark and the Selma politicians were saying the same thing, while over in Lowndes County, the Klan had made it known that the march would enter their county at its own risk and anyone fool enough to come in would not leave alive.

The first question was whether the march would even be allowed to leave Selma, and if not, how exactly did the state and local cops plan to stop it? My real concern, though, was what would happen once it got into "bloody Lowndes." What security was SCLC planning for the peo- ple it was fixing to lead in there? Or, were they going to place their hopes on the intervention of the Good Lord and the federal government? Or perhaps in agape, the redemptive power of love?

No, sir, I did not support this move at all. Nor did SNCC nationally. Hey, trying to distinguish between the Alabama cops and the Klan

was, as we say in Africa, choosing between black dog and monkey. The security of our people was my concern. I did not see that being properly addressed. Which is why I could not support it and did not march.

John Lewis, representing, according to the press, SNCC, co-led this

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attempt. Of course we know what happened: "Bloody Sunday." On the Elmund Pettus Bridge the marchers were met with overwhelming force. Al Lingo's storm troopers (including no doubt Jimmy Lee Jackson's murderers) were as usual ruthless, but relatively disciplined. It was a con- trolled brutality, reminding me of Cambridge, Maryland. The massed state troopers first fired tear gas canisters into the marchers, who were tightly packed on the bridge. Then the troopers advanced in a solid phalanx, swinging nightsticks and ax handles, breaking heads and limbs, system- atically pushing the marchers back across the bridge and into Selma. The marchers' eyes streaming, some bleeding and dazed, they broke ranks and were trying only to escape, trying to get off the bridge. The march had been turned around. It was over. Period.

Had they left it at that, the State of Alabama might well have gotten away with their brutality one more time. But, as usual, racism is its own worst enemy. The racists found a way to rescue an ill-advised movement strategy that was on the verge of total failure. We can only suppose that Jim Clark and posse, not to be outdone by Lingo, and on their own turf, just had to claim their share of the "glory" and bragging rights.

Just when you thought the whole sad and distressing debacle was done, here came the Confederate cavalry charge. I mean just running over and into the people in full view of the TV cameras, rebel yells clearly audible, using their long clubs and bullwhips on defenseless black heads.

The gratuitous brutality and unconcealed racism in that footage, flashing across the nation and around the world, succeeded in embar- rassing even George Corley Wallace, let alone the administration in Washington. Even Southern segregationist congressmen found it neces- sary to appear in the media distancing themselves and "the decent, God-fearing people of my state" from "this deplorable behavior."

After everything I'd experienced, everything I'd learned in the move- ment, I'd considered myself beyond illusion. No longer capable of being surprised at anything racism might do. But this ... this atrocity surprised even me. Thirty years later I still find myself ... [quite obviously experi- encing deep anger. -EMT]

Naturally Bloody Sunday rendered, at least for a New York minute, all doctrinal and strategic differences moot. For many in SNCC it was deja vu all over again, the Freedom Rides revisited, the "violence-cannot-be- allowed-to-stop-the-movement" reflex.

That Sunday night the scene in Brown Chapel was like a wake in a MASH unit. Everywhere you could see dazed and bandaged people, but also a real undercurrent of determination, but mixed with a different kind of anger. Some folk seemed to embody the spirit of the song "We'll Never Turn Back":

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We have hung our heads and cried,

Cried for those like Lee who died,

But we'll never turn back ...

Others were, for the first time, talking openly of getting guns and taking lives. But there were also new people in the chapel. People who had never marched or demonstrated, and who had had no intention of doing either, now turned out. "This time we going to Montgomery. They sho cain't kill us all."

The next few days were true chaos, motion, excitement. SNCC staff started to come in with local folks from all over the South. So did media from what looked like all over the world. Dr. King pledged to personally lead the next march, set a date, and issued a national call to conscience for his fellow clergymen to join him on this "historic crusade of conscience." The clergy responded in numbers, Jack, black and white of all faiths and denominations.

Ever since Dr. King's letter to the American clergy from the Bir- mingham jail, an activist spirit had manifested itself in the national reli- gious community. People of faith began to pour into Selma. For two of them from Boston, a Unitarian minister and a young Episcopal semi- narian, this would be their last Christian witness, at least in this world. Secular Northerners also angered by the brutal images on the bridge answered the call.

Now there finally was federal intervention, though not the kind SCLC had envisioned. The State of Alabama, temporarily relinquishing its states' rights rhetoric and posture, went into the hated federal courts seek- ing an injunction against the march. Which they got. The court-naming Dr. King and other leaders-issued an order enjoining the movement from marching. Go figure.

The SCLC leadership, maintaining that the federal government was its ally, were reluctant to violate a federal court order. But the people they had invited and pledged to lead kept pouring into Selma by the hour. With their marching shoes on. It was a sho-nuff mess. SNCC folk-and many Northerners-were saying that neither Southern violence nor the federal courts must be allowed to stop the people's right to free and peaceful expression. Crisis of conscience time for SCLC.

On the actual day, the crowd was real large. Immense. Local folk in numbers, Jack, and the Northerners, mostly clergy in clerical dress, the church militant, and SNCC veterans-all formed up behind the leaders. Dr. King and a host of prominent figures led the line and they set out over

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that bridge one mo' time. On the other side a massive military formation of the state's police machinery, in what looked like battle dress.

Now what, Jack? Does the state dare brutalize these visiting dignitaries the way they did the local Africans? And will it be, this time, with the explicit mandate of a federal court order giving them color oflaw? Will the feds finally make an arrest in Selma, this time of Dr. King and the non- violent marchers? And, let us not forget, the whole world is watching or will be once this footage airs.

It was very different, but this march got no farther than the first. It got to the center of the bridge and turned back, nonviolently.

[Silas Norman, Director, SNCC Alabama Project: "Thu will remember the pictures ... John Lewis with a knapsack on his back

going down under the state troopers' batons. After that incident, I decided that I could no longer sit back and be philosophically opposed to the march. On the second march I emptied my pockets and prepared to offer my body as a living sacrifice. we started across the bridge for the second time. As we got to the end, state troopers lined up on every side. I noticed that they were not moving towards us this time.

''And I will remember that Dr. King-he was a row or two behind me- said, 'Let us pray.' And then the march proceeded to turn around. well, Jim For- man was close to me. we were all sort of baffied. Jim kept saying, 'What's going on? Let's go ahead.' There were hundreds of people asking, 'What's going on? What's happening?'we had no idea. we discovered later that there had been some agreement with Robert Kennedy, with the government, that the march was not to proceed. Personally, I did not participate in that march again. I felt we'd been betrayed and I no longer wanted to participate. I felt that I could bet- ter spend my energies working with people in the movement in small groups in Selma." -A Circle ofTrust]

So you know that was anticlimactic, Jack, for evrahbody. But the dis- appointment from the visitors-and even anger-was palpable and understandable. Here they had dropped everything at SCLC's urgent summons and rushed down. Hey, these were not movement folk, accus- tomed to a life of quick adjustments, suddenly changing plans and sur- prises.

Then too, for most of them this was the most daring and dangerous step they had ever taken. They wanted and deserved to be proud of themselves. It was also their first experience of the excitement and moral intensity of the movement and they wanted to contribute, even to risk something for a clear moral cause. They wanted confrontation.

So you know there had to be some serious letdown and conflicting feel- ings, Jack. First, inevitably a natural human relief at being spared a trampling under the horses' hooves, perhaps a broken head or worse. And

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then, of course, immediately followed by embarrassment at the relief they were feeling at having been spared the confrontation they had sought. Folks were confused, let down, and leaving. Dr. King had thanked them profusely and asked those who could to stand ready to return.

The Reverend James Reeb had just finished placing his bags in a car for the trip to the Montgomery airport. A couple of colleagues, reluctant to waste the trip, told him that they had arranged to stay over for a few days. Impulsively he retrieved his bags and joined them.

The group went to supper in a black cafe and, after eating, left the cafe and took a wrong turn into white Selma, a small but fatal error. Passing a bar [The Silver Moon Cafe], a known Klan hangout avoided by local Africans, they were attacked. The Reverend Mr. Reeb (peace be unto him), clubbed in the head, died in a car en route to a Montgomery hos- pital. Another good man's life taken senselessly. The tragic and ironic aspects of which, of course, were not lost on the media.

The media were also feeling cheated. They had had neither their march nor a repeat of Bloody Sunday, so where was the story? Well, the visitors' small mistake in direction gave them a story to pounce on. The media had their story and the movement another martyr.

So much of a story in fact that LBJ was moved to send a message of condolence to Mrs. Reeb, with a government plane to transport the widow and the corpse home. Which, of course, was no more or less than ought to have been expected from the leader of any halfway civilized coun- try. But the Reverend Mr. Reeb's tragic and senseless death had not been the first movement-related murder in the area in a matter of weeks. The march had been called, remember, in response to a local African man's murder. Where was LBJ's and the nation's response then?

[This quote from Carmichael in the press indicates the brother's feelings at the time: "Now, I'm not saying we shouldn't pay tribute to Reverend Reeb. W'hat I'm saying is, if we are going to pay tribute to one, we should also pay tribute to the other. I think we have to analyze why LBJ sent flowers to Mrs. Reeb and not to Mrs. Jackson." -EMT]

Editor's note: During this campaign in Alabama, the level of violence directed at clearly identified religious figures puzzled us for a number of reasons.

The first attack was, of course, on the clergymen in Selma that resulted in the Reverend Mr. Reeb 's death. This was followed, after the march, by the murder in Lowndes County of Mrs. Viola Liuzza, a devout Catholic laywoman, though she was not so identified by her killers, one of whom (Gary Francis Rowe) hap- pened to be in the employ of the FBI. Later that summer in Hayneville, two white clergymen were gunned down in the presence of witnesses. Immediately after firing, the gunman had reportedly put his weapon down, walked over to the courthouse, and placed a call to Colonel Lingo, head of the state police.

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"Al, best you git on up here," he announced, "I jes' shot me two damn priests."

At the trial, despite this admission and the testimony of eyewitnesses, after less than two hours of deliberation a jury returned a verdict of not guilty.

But even before this second incident, some things about the murder of the Reverend Mr. Reeb seemed culturally dissonant. In the Washington office we'd tried to puzzle this out. understood that the Selma march had a much larger, more highly visible and identifiable representation by white clergy than was usual in the movement. also understood that this contingent, conspicuously displaying vestments and insignia of the church, intended their presence to be seen as a Christian/moral/religious witness against local racial attitudes and social further understood that this public repudiation of the cher- ished "Southern way of life" by white officials of the church would be a severe shock to local sensibilities. In effect, a clerical rebuke to the Southern version of the natural moral order.

W'hat seemed dissonant to us was not merely the lethal violence directed against clergy, but the willingness of the public to condone and tolerate it. This from people accustomed to describing themselves as "honest, God-fearing Chris- tian folk" and referring to their region proudly as "the buckle on the Bible Belt." That was puzzling us until someone from the Alabama staff sent us a page from a local newspaper with a note. A revelation.

I can't remember which staffer had sent us the newspaper page, but the accompanying note said that it explained much of what the staff had been see- ing all during the march. For example, one of the most common signs waved by hecklers had been "Rent your priest suit here."

Thu know we gotta be some baad-ass nigrahs, Bro, the note said. To walk all damn day wet and cold in the rain, mess around all night, then be up at six to hit that road again. lt?ah, I wish.

The accompanying news story must have been seen locally as correcting the def a ult of the "Northern" press corps.

As I recall (I did not then have the foresight to save the page), it was a tabloid-sized center spread. I assumed it was from a small-town weekly some- where in the vicinity of the march, but it could just as well have been from the Sunday magazine of a local daily. It was presented--very dramatically-as the findings of a reporter who claimed to have infiltrated the march and was now exposing its inner workings.

Unshaven, scruffy, and sporting a civil rights button, our man nervously slipped among the marchers only to be surprised at the casual acceptance-even goodwill--with which he was received. Emboldened, he first worked his way close enough to a group of nuns so as to overhear and later join their conver- sation. His second surprise: the ladies' conversation did not display the gentle spirituality one would expect from brides of Christ.

In fact, he was horrified, as much by the demotic coarseness of their language

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as by the vulgarity, irreverence, and anti-Americanism it expressed. Much of which, he said, was not suitable for reproduction in a family newspaper. Soon the women revealed the obvious: they weren't really nuns at all, they confided proudly, but unemployed New lbrk (the adjective might have been "Greenwich Village'') actresses, hired to parade down the highway in religious regalia.

Next, as I recall, he walked with two jolly, avuncular, middle-aged priests who-no surprise-also turned out to be hired actors. Throughout the day he reported being constantly offended by the marchers' casual and uninhibited familiarity across lines of age, race, and sex. But alas,for the poor fellow, it was to get much worse.

That evening he entered a large tent where a hot meal awaited the group. After the meal, off came the costumes. Out came the playing cards, the whiskey, unspecified "drugs," and loud music of a decidedly unspiritual char- acter, which inspired sexually suggestive interracial dancing. What followed, led in general lasciviousness, exhibitionism, and looseness of language and behavior by the erstwhile nuns, could only be hinted at, being best left to the readers'imaginations. Not having the stomach to witness the debauchery that was clearly a-building to an orgy of some sort, our man sneaked away to file his report.

I truly regret not having saved that page since the foregoing has had to be reconstructed from memories now four decades old. But I can vouch for the accuracy, if not of every detail, then certainly of the broad plot and the pruri- ent tone and tenor of the piece. I certainly remember the outrage and despair I felt reading it. If they believe this, I thought, then there's nothing they might not do. ITTre I some hardscrabble,jundamentalist Christian segregationist, I could easily see myself feeling a moral duty to exterminate the kind of human vermin willing, at one fell swoop, to violate the purity of the race while dishonoring the symbols of the faith.

What I was amazed at was the calculated cynicism and cunning, the unerring precision with which the writer had targeted and exploited every last one of the most fundamental and primitive of local biases and sensitivities. I've since seen (in Jamaica) identical techniques utilized in the very same way. These teachings were described in a program called "Destabilization and Psy- chological WZlifare," developed by U.S. military intelligence.

Given subsequent disclosures of the FBI's disinformation campaign against the movement, which heavily involved the placement off ake "news stories" with cooperating editors, one has to wonder about the actual provenance and author- ship of this story. Whatever the source, I believe there can be little question about its brutal effect.

Then too, the rape unto death. Some reporters accompanying the march had been accosted by a group of local white youth. Why, the locals demanded angrily, wasn't the Northern press reporting the real story? What story? The young white woman everyone was talking about. The one who on the first night

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had been raped by so many blacks that she had fallen into a deep coma. Rushed secretly to a Selma hospital, the poor girl had died that morning. Why were they, as white men, conspiring with the march leadership to suppress that story? -EMT]

[I've since encountered another variant of this Southern folk tale. In this one, the comatose young woman is a prostitute, as evidenced by the thirty-six hundred dollars in small bills found tucked in her underwear. She was assumed to have worked herself into unconsciousness servicing the lust of black marchers. -EMT]

All this time we had a lot of discussions. I had definitely not been for hav- ing no march, bro. Too many serious contradictions. But I didn't think it politic for us to oppose it publicly either. We were between a rock and a hard place one more time.

At meetings, I had advocated my position, at first a minority of one. We should not get in a position of fighting Dr. King publicly, I said. We should try to see how best to use the situation. There is no way we can stop this march. Exactly what we dread, the chaos, disruption, is going to happen anyway. And when the marchers leave, as they will, we'll have trouble and a deflated community on our hands. Either we are capable of trying to create order out of that, or we leave Selma with them after the march. For those who stay, that will be our task. If you can't shoulder it, get out of the way. If you can, let's get it on. But there's nothing you can do about the march.

I said, the people looove Dr. King, don't oppose him. We need to figure out how best to use the march and to pick up the pieces afterward. Even- tually people began to take that position. Then confusion: Atlanta put out a statement that SNCC was not participating. Then they said that staff as individuals could follow their consciences. Then Jim Forman came to Montgomery and called for night marches-in effect competing with Dr. King for media attention. I strongly disagreed with that one also. All told, it was not our finest hour.

John Lewis, our chairman, was clear. He was going to march. Not as chairman of SNCC? people asked. Well, he said, he was also on the SCLC board. Folks wondered just what that meant.

One brother in the meeting, Bob Mams, had supported John's position on marching. But after that Sunday meeting where I was advocating my position vigorously, Bob began to approach me closer and closer. I kept advocating. This march is nonsense, but we can use it. Finally Bob asked me exactly how I proposed to do that. So we talked it out. And he too, after a while, said he wasn't going for that marching stuff either. Especially after that second one where hundreds, if not thousands, of people had ultimately felt confused and betrayed.

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I asked Bob what he was going to do. He said, "We going into Lown- des County together, bro, I'm with you."

I said, "All right," and that's what we did. Bob Mants and I worked that march, Jack. Me'n Bob were in it from the beginning. We organized Lown- des county together. We became real close during that entire campaign, shoulder to shoulder, like brothers. Closer than brothers. In fact, Bob's still there in Lowndes, an elected official.

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CHAPTER XX

Lowndes County: The Roar of the Panther

Ever since getting to Selma, I had been looking more and more closely at Lowndes County. It seemed more and more a logical place for the ideas that we were developing out of the MFDP experience.

Once you crossed the infamous Edmund Pettus (who he?)* bridge in ten miles, you were in Lowndes, and once you finish Lowndes, you in Montgomery. The precise march route. But as far as struggle was con- cerned, Lowndes was a wasteland, terra incognita. Hey, there had been strong, organized struggle in Montgomery. The bus boycott had "shocked the world" (like Bro Ali) and produced Martin Luther King Jr. Selma, mean as that place was, had seen serious struggle. But in Lown- des, nothing, nada, squat. And the way people talked about the place, you could understand why. So as far as movement was concerned, this was virgin territory, bro, with no organizational rivalries to deal with, precisely because it was a terrorist stronghold. Which, of course, was a problem, but also in a strange way, an advantage. Crisis equals opportunity. I asked Minnis for specific information on Lowndes. I discovered it was even worse than folks were saying.

One of the poorest counties in the nation, it was feudal, Jack. It actu- ally made the Mississippi Delta look advanced. About eighty families owned 90 percent of the land. Of a population of fifteen thousand, twelve thousand were Africans, not a one of whom could vote. Hear me, not one. Half of our people were below the poverty level, most of the other half at or barely above it. Mostly agricultural day laborers and share- croppers. Fully half of the women commuted to Montgomery for house- work at $4 a day. Many of the men also worked in Montgomery. Sounds like South Africa, huh? And talk about rural. The largest town was Fort Deposit, the Klan stronghold, with all of thirteen hundred people and the largest concentration of whites. I'd say almost fifty-fifty. The county seat, Hayneville, a place I'll never forget, was even smaller. We concluded,

*Actually, Confederate general Edmund Winston Pettus.

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therefore, that "bloody Lowndes" afforded every opportunity we were looking for.

So with the march, how did we turn a negative into a positive, as Sekou Toure would always advise me later? Well, Highway 80 traversed the length of the county. We knew that there was no way the march could go through without the aid of local people strong enough to let them pitch their tents on their land. People brave enough to come out, cheer them on, offer a little food or some water, etc., etc. So what Bob Mants and I did, we trailed that march. Every time local folks came out, we'd sit and talk with them, get their names, find out where they lived, their address, what church, who their ministers were, like that. So all the information, everything, you'd need to organize, we got.

We told them we'd be back. I promised them the movement was coming to Lowndes. That Lowndes County was going to have its own movement. Of course they were skeptical. Didn't really think we'd be back, y'know? That's when we first met a brother named John Hulett. Another man was with him [Mr. R. L. Strickland, who would later emerge as a leader -EMT] didn't seem to believe us.

He wasn't at all convinced. He said, "Young fella, you one o'them non- violence folk, huh? An' you reckon on coming back? Wal, in this county, turn the other cheek and these here peckerwoods'll hand you back half of what you sitting on. If you do come back, you all gon' have to find a dif- ferent way to come in here, young fella."

I told him we were coming back, by any means necessary. He just looked at me and smiled.

When the march left Lowndes, so did we. Bob and I returned tem- porarily to Selma. March got close to Montgomery and all these preach- ers, politicians, and celebrities came streaming in to march into Montgomery on the last day. We missed all that. Many were well-meaning, conscientious people, strong movement supporters. But others were orga- nizational types who wanted to be able to say, "I marched to Montgomery with Dr. King." And they still be saying it today too, Jack. Every time I hear that I laugh. If everyone who claims that they'd "marched with Dr. King" had marched, the tail end of that march might just now be entering the city limits of Montgomery.

But when we went back into the county, people remembered us. We already had good contacts across the length and breadth of the county. You have any idea how long that would have taken as an organizer? With- out the march? Dr. King handed all that to us on a platter, and we took it. Hey, as soon as we arrived, we got a house. We just walked into a house. Here's where you will stay. Here's where you'll eat. These folk will look out for you. Here's the guns that will protect you. I'll never forget that.

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[There had in fact been a history of militant political activity on the part of blacks in the county. For example, the two elderly gentlemen who undertook to sit up nightly with their long rifles guarding the house where the SNCC work- ers slept. These two men were veterans of a sharecroppers union from the 1930s which had a history of armed self-defense. -EMT]

That's the reason Lowndes County went so fast. Within one year we had that county completely organized. In one year.

You know I never respond to lies. My father taught me that. Never respond to lies, he'd always say. "Something ain't true, Son, why you going waste your time with it?" So I don't. But one little myth I will refute. Peo- ple keep saying that they read how I went into the county. That I was dropped off late one night carrying only a list of names, a sleeping bag, and a snack. Some say a Bible. Gimme a break. That's romantic. It's also silly and as Fred, the brother they murdered in Chicago [Fred Hampton, chairman of the Chicago Black Panther Party, assassinated by the FBI -EMT], would say, "Custeristic."Well, Custer was a white man an' my momma didn't raise no fool. Had I been silly enough to try that, I prob- ably and deservedly wouldn't be here today. And if not the terrorists, the people-who are neither silly nor romantic-would likely have run me out themselves, period.

What did happen was that a few days after the march, four of us went in broad daylight to test the waters [Carmichael, Bob Mants,Judy Richard- son, and Scott B. Smithj. We wanted also to take advantage of whatever excitement the march had generated. We came to this little town called Whitehall, where we had some names to check out. As we came through, the high school-the black school-was letting out. But they didn't even dignify it with the name school, much less high. It was the Negro Training Center. We decided to seize the time, give the students some leaflets to take to their parents. The youth gathered around, all excited. Still excited about the recent march. Some accepted material, others were scared.

Then a young brother drove up in a school bus and asked for material to distribute. So you know we took his name. [The sixteen-year-old bus driver was John Jackson. Today he is, and has been for years, mayor of W'hite- hall, a progressive little town. -EMT] The cops pulled us over. Rah, rah, you under arrest. Against the law to distribute Communism near a school.

"School? We didn't see any school. Thought that was a training cen- ter." Anyway, they backed off and we left.

[BobMants: "This was the first and only time Carmichael probably ever used his head. were all there shaking, with perhaps the exception of Judy. had these two

radios in our car with long whip antennas. (Good ol' Sojourner Motor Fleet. -EMT) Carmichael picked up the two-way radio as if he were talking

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to the Selma base. Problem was we were out of range, but the police didn't know that. He told them-talking so that the sheriff and state troopers could hear every word-exactly what to do if we weren't back at a certain time, giving the cops' car number. That perhaps saved our lives, because they let us go.

" ... I still suspect very strongly that had it not been for that incident at the school, it would have been at least two, three,four months before we moved into Lowndes to organize. W'hat happened was, with the students and teachers get- ting out of school, the word had spread. Them civil rights workers were in here. The next morning when we rolled back in, people were waving. 'Thu all right? Y'all all right?' After that incident at the school, they knew we had to be bad.

back out there the next morning." -A Circle of Trust John Jackson: "I was sixteen years old and driving a school bus making fifty dollars a

month . ... I was crazy enough to stop my bus to take some of the leaflets. I went home and talked to my father. had an abandoned house which my brothers had just left, so I said to my father, 'Them boys are going to get killed trying to make it back to Selma. And George Wallace will hang them zf they try going into Montgomery. So they need a place to stay.' My father came with me to meet them, and I think he kinda liked those fellows, or like me he about half- crazy. So he said, 'Hey, boys, y'all could take this house over here, there's no one staying in it.'They were kinda glad because they used to have to get the hell out of Lowndes before dark." -A Circle ofTrust}

So, Jack. Population fifteen thousand, twelve thousand African. Not a sin- gle one registered. Check that, one was. Mr. Hulett, who would become chairman of the party, had succeeded in registering about a month before we got there. That tells you all you need to know about the county and about Bro John Hulett.

At this point, SNCC had been struggling around the vote issue going on five years, with what results you've seen. But that one we gonna win. That's clear. Then what? How should we, could we, how must we, move to maximize the effect of that victory? In the South? In the nation? How could we stretch and remake the electoral system to do justice to our inter- ests? Africans were and would always be a minority nationally. So what would this vote that people had sacrificed so much for, some even died for, really mean? Only a fool would think that winning the right to vote would automatically free anybody. Remember, Africans in Cambridge, Maryland, could vote and you saw how much good that by itself had done them.

Voting could be a new start. But only if we organized ourselves and used it skillfully and cleverly. And even that would have to be geared to different situations depending on local demographics. So, clearly, there could be no single or simple answer. No one-size-fits-all approach. The

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cultural attitudes of the majority were, and continue to be, against us. His- tory was against us so far as our position in the society was concerned. Our poverty was against us. Our numbers were against us so far as elec- toral politics were concerned. But clearly we had to go there to see how far electoral politics could take us. But what exactly should our (SNCC's) role be in this next stage? That was the question we faced.

Certainly in the South a potential 4 million new black votes had to be a powerful force for change. We could retire a few African-killing sheriffs. Vote out a particularly racist congressman or two. But was that to be all? Could there be a way to maximize the potential power of our people's votes? How? By being co-opted into either or both white national parties? I didn't think so. We'd seen that in Reconstruction and we all know what happened then.

So I thought, maybe in Lowndes County, with our overwhelming majority, SNCC could show a dramatic way ifthe local people were will- ing and brave enough. A way that could work all over the black belt in the South. Since none of the other organizations had any presence at all in Lowndes, we had a clear field. No time need be wasted on interorgani- zational foolishness. Here, at least in demographic terms anyway, was a possibility. If we were serious about advancing our people's struggle to improve their conditions, we had to explore it. This possibility would soon attract some of the best organizers SNCC had.

The recruiting of people and the setting up of a grassroots organizational structure went quickly. Mr. Hulett, our lone registered voter, was key. He had organized and became president of the Lowndes County Christian Movement (LCCM) for Human Rights. He was an interesting brother, intelligent, committed, with great personal integrity and courage. Married with seven children, he commuted daily to Montgomery to work. He may (at twenty-seven) have been too young to have been involved in the bus boycott, but he knew people who had been involved. He was familiar with organized protest there, but never in Lowndes. So he was ready, had been ready, to step out and provide serious leadership once we got there. In fact, he'd been agitating before we got there. I never did find out exactly how, in the climate we found there, he had, on his own, managed to reg- ister. Mah people, oh mah people.

[John Hulett: "Lowndes County was considered a total rural county. very poor. Bad

roads. The school system was very bad, the worst almost in the nation. There were no jobs available except farming and sharecropping. Most of the young peoples who finished school, they immediately left the South and went north, to try to live, and even to survive.

"Most black peoples had to live in fear. we had a sheriff during that time

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that I can never forget. At nighttime, the young men, if they walked the road and saw car lights coming, would just run in the bushes and hide until they come by. . . . Because they thought the sheriff was coming by and maybe would do something to them. During that time we had a new beginning. u;e decided ourselves what group we were going to work with. The people of this county chose Stokely Carmichael and his group. They helped us to organize and gave us a kind of leadership and the encouragement that we needed to go through with." -Voices of Freedom]

The organization grew steadily, but real political progress was slow. In six months we succeeded in registering only two hundred or so people. Though hundreds made the effort. This was the work I truly loved. The meetings in rural churches with people who seemed to step out of the pages of black history. The singing, the eloquence, the determination and hope in their faces, the spirit. People who carried so much vulnerability in their eyes, who knew exactly what they were risking by being there, but being there anyway, steadfast.

Then in August 1965 two things happened. First, the voting rights act became law. Soon as that happened, I asked Jack Minnis to check out the laws on independent parties in Alabama. Jack was good. In less than a week he called back. He'd found this old forgotten law enabling inde- pendent parties on the county level. We figured with their one-party state, the politicians, almost all Democrats, had forgotten it. There wasn't even a Republican opposition to speak of. So, to them it must have been unthinkable that anyone would think of trying to start an independent party in Alabama. Much less their "nigrahs." And in Lowndes County? Forget about it. So the process was actually quite simple.

All any group had to do before the primaries was hold a convention and nominate a slate of candidates. If your slate received more than 20 percent of the primary vote, you were in business. You could then call yourself a party, whose name and symbol would have to be on the ballot for the elec- tion which would then become necessary. The Democrats were arrogant and complacent. I'm not sure whether they had ever had to bother with an election after the Democratic primary, since there had been no organ- ized opposition since 1880. So technically it was surprisingly easy.

All right. There it was. The primary was next May. Ten months off. In Mississippi we'd had five months to organize an entire state. Here we had nearly a year to do a single county. We were psyched, Jack.

Next thing was that Lowndes County became the first county in the South where a federal registrar was assigned under the new law. Of course, this partly was because of the clear record of voting discrimination and resistance there, but probably more so because of the particularly brazen murder of a white worker less than a week after the passage of the bill.

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Once we got Jack's information, Mr. Hulett promptly resigned from the Christian Movement for Human Rights and became chair of the Lown- des County Voters League, later to be known as the Black Panther Party. That was an interesting discussion. Some people were clear right off: "Yeah, we going build our own political thing here, in our own party."

[Mr. Hulett: "Stokely Carmichael and Courtland Cox and others got together and told

us, according to Alabama law, if we didn't like what the Democratic party or the Republican party was doing in our county, we could form our own political organization, and it could become a political party . ... They asked me would I take over the political aspects and resign from the Lowndes County Christian Movement, and I did. And we were able to pull our people together to form our own political organization." -Voices of Freedom]

But many others had to be persuaded. For some interesting reasons, they didn't at first think an "all-black" party could be any good. For one thing, they automatically saw voting as inclusion. Hey, having been kept out so long, of course they wanted in. To them, a black party seemed like the same old segregation. That was natural.

The other reason was sad, a question of self-confidence. They had been so conditioned for so long to think that politics was "white folks' busi- ness," in which blacks were not allowed or competent. They assumed that the white folks who ran things had knowledge, experience, and education that their leaders lacked. So how could we do the job? However, once we showed them the educational background of most of the white local offi- cials, they realized what a hoax that was. And with the political education workshops, their confidence grew.

But what really did it was when someone said, "Hey, this ain't no 'all- black' party. Ain't nobody stopping white folks from joining if they want. You know any who want to join?" That cracked them up. Besides, all you had to do was show them the Democratic Party's slogan, "White Supremacy for the Right," and its symbol, that ol' white bantam rooster. Then they said, "Yeah, thems the same folk that's been doing all the shoot- ing and killings. Who would want to join up with them anyway?" Quickly they became excited at having their own thing, a party that really repre- sented them.

Later when we proposed the black panther as our ballot symbol, some thought it might seem too aggressive. I think it was Jennifer Lawson who came up with the design {others say it was Ruth Howard -EMT]. But then we explained to the folks that the panther was a powerful animal but reclusive. It avoided humans unless provoked. They liked that. "Yeah," they said, "and it sure can eat up any ol' white fowl too."

[John Hulett: "The black panther was a vicious animal who, if he was attacked, would not

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back up. It said that we would fight back if we had to do it. When we chose that symbol, many of the peoples in our county started saying we were a violent group who is going to start killing white folks. But it wasn't that, it was a polit- ical symbol that we was here to stay and we were going to do whatever needed to be done to survive.

"Those of us who carried guns carried them for our own protection, in case we were attacked by other peoples. That's what the purpose of that idea was. White peoples carried guns in this county and the law didn't do anything to them about it, so we started carrying our guns too. I think they felt that we was ready for war, but we wasn't violent. ITT wasn't violent people. But we were just some people who was going to protect ourselves in case we were attacked by indi- viduals." -Voices of Freed om]

Once the federal registrar came into the county, the plantation bosses got even meaner. It was like the Delta back in 1961, an attempt to drive out the African population before they became voters. African workers were run off the plantations for registering. Sharecropper families were run off the land, their crops abandoned in the fields. It was cruel to see. Most of the evicted people left the county, but some brave souls stayed. I wish more families had, because the tent city we set up really turned a nega- tive into a positive.

A black farmer volunteered some land and we moved the families into tents. Then we used all the techniques SNCC had developed in Missis- sippi. We set up freedom schools. We had literacy and political education classes. We played tapes of Malcolm. Taught African history. I remember we developed comic books to teach local politics. The role of the tax asses- sor, of the sheriff, and like that. These comics were very effective.

We, of course, didn't have the resources to bring in every family they evicted. And besides, many were afraid to stay. But I wish we could have kept every one in Tent City. Once the people were out from under the oppressive plantation system, they just blossomed and developed con- fidence. Every day you could see it growing. When night riders started driving by firing guns, the men and boys posted sentries along the road and returned fire. The night-riding stopped. The people organized them- selves, worked communally, and just ate up the education. It was beau- tiful to see. For a while, Tent City was a fine little community. But, of course, it could only be a temporary measure. Then, I guess, the planta- tion bosses and owners realized they needed their workers and tenants. They devised a different strategy and the evictions stopped. I always look back at that little Tent City with great pleasure and satisfaction. I only wish we could have taken in and serviced two hundred more families. The evictions would have backfired totally because in Tent City the people became really organized.

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[Josephine Mays: "My brother Willie registered to vote, and the man told him that he had to

leave. So he moved to Montgomery, and after that my mother, she moved to Montgomery too. And after I moved to Tent City I become a registered voter.

"It was a great experiment for me in Tent City . ... Now we could make a start for ourself, and get out and register to vote and help others become regis- tered voters. And to find (out about) the world for themselves . ... So much was going on. l% got involved with lots of activities to help black peoples to get jobs and learn how to do things for themselves. Like we bought land, and then after we got the land we built a house, something that we had never had before of our own.

"The white peoples would come round. They would pull up to the side of the road and they would call us hoodlums and niggers and things like that. They would shoot at us and try to scare us, but we wouldn't let them bother us. l% hung in there anyways." -Voices of Freedom]

I'd already learned in the Delta that what really challenged and satisfied me was organizing my people. That would be my job as long as my people were oppressed. I knew that. And here I was with my own project. Soon Lowndes County became a magnet for some of the best organizers in SNCC. I never set out to recruit them or raid other projects, but our momentum and direction attracted them. That was no accident.

A lot of folks from Mississippi had become frustrated with the Demo- cratic Party orientation of the MFDP, and by the prevailing atmosphere of uncertainty within the organization. So they began to look at Lowndes County and saw that we were disciplined and had a clear program that could use their talent. In a time of transition, it seemed like one of the few viable programs with a clear focus that SNCC had.

After Bob Mants, Judy Richardson, Scott B. Smith, and I first went in, Ruth Howard and Courtland Cox from NAG followed. Then Jennifer Lawson and Janet Jemmott [not NAG]. Then too, in neighboring coun- ties we had other NAG folks: H. Rap Brown in Wilcox County worked with us, and Cynthia Washington in Greene County, while ol' tough- talking, no-nonsense Annie Pearl Avery, still packing her pistol, came to Hale County. We were a close-knit staff, unified with a clear direction. A talented, tough-minded group of young people.

One night early that summer I went to a meeting in Brown Chapel in Selma to speak about our work in Lowndes. Some students from Cali- fornia were in Selma for the summer. After I spoke, this smart, articulate sister came up. This sister was together, bro, political, a grad student at Berkeley. I could see immediately that she was devoted to our people. And besides, she was beautiful. She had a vibrant spirit, a beautiful Afro, and a smile that could light up a huge room. A strong, beautiful black woman,

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you couldn't help loving the sister. At least I couldn't. I felt an immediate attraction.

[Apparently reciprocal. Gloria House: "I have a great deal of love) admiration) and respect for the people I came to

know and love in SNCC. I did then and still do. I still feel as if we are a beloved community even after all these years . ... The first night I was in Selma I went to a mass meeting . ... And who should be the main speaker but Kwame Ture. I was introduced to Kwame after the mass meeting and) of course, fell in love with him immediately." -A Circle ofTrust]

So this sister was all excited about the meeting, the spirit, the singing, the enthusiasm, and the unity. As I said, black culture was strong in Selma; the singing especially was always powerful. So I told Gloria she ought to come to some of the meetings in Lowndes if she really wanted to experi- ence black culture at its full power. That was the beginning of a close, lov- ing relationship. After the summer Gloria came back to work in Lowndes and we were lucky in each other there for a while, until the demands of the movement separated us. But we were lucky there for a while. Sometimes, rarely, in struggle, that can happen.

A few whites were working in Selma and some of the other counties, but not in Lowndes. This was not because we had any formal policy of excluding them, we simply did not encourage them. At that time, it really was like operating behind enemy lines. We discussed the question among ourselves. The general feeling was that we couldn't, on principle, exclude anyone who genuinely wanted to struggle against racism. On principle. But as a practical matter, under the objective conditions, we found it would have been foolhardy, even irresponsible, to bring in whites.

While I was inviting the new sister, Gloria, a white volunteer had joined us. He said he too was interested in experiencing a Lowndes County meeting. I knew and respected this guy Jonathan a lot. He'd been in Selma awhile and would always seek me out for serious discussions whenever I was there. I appreciated his intelligence and his seriousness. In this he was a little different from the usual white activists you met. He was somewhat more thoughtful and analytic. Tried to think things through, didn't trot out glib slogans but was looking for lasting solutions. We had some real good talks. He was shocked and pained by the racism, injustice, and poverty he was seeing. And he really seemed interested in black culture.

I remember we were almost the same age. I don't think he was a South- erner, but I knew he had graduated from some military school down South [Virginia Military Institute] and was an athlete. Now he was study- ing for the priesthood, I think in Boston, and I used to tell him, "Stay in the church, man. White America is going to need priests like you."

I thought Jon was an impressive guy, very responsible. Would have been

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an asset to most projects. But not in Lowndes County. He understood that, accepted it, but always wondered if that wasn't too much like allow- ing the terrorists to define our actions.

So when the three of us were talking, I may have said he could prob- ably come with Gloria and them to a meeting, but they'd have to return to Selma that same night. Or I may not have, I can't really remember exactly. But what I should have said very firmly was, please, stay the heck away from Lowndes. Hindsight again.

Just after the voting rights bill passed, some local youth planned a demonstration in Fort Deposit, which was a Klan stronghold. Some stores there had been abusive to local youth testing the new law, and the youth now wanted to do a picket. A few carloads of people came in from Selma. Among them were Jonathan and a Catholic priest [Father Richard Morrisroe] who had recently come into the state. After some discussion we decided they could come as observers. I was a little uneasy even about the picket itself, which would be, if memory serves, the first direct action not directly related to voting in the county. But, I thought, hey, a public demonstration in the middle of the day. The media will be there. What can happen?

[Ruby Sales: "One of the things that we were very conscious of is that, sometimes in that

kind of situation, white presence would incite local white people to violence. So there was some concern about what that meant ... to jeopardize the local black people. The other question was who should be in the forefront of the movement. People like myself thought it should be the people themselves in Lowndes County, the local black people, who should be in the forefront. I had some seri- ous concerns about what it meant to allow white people to come into the county and what kind of relationship that set up in an area where black peo- ple had historically deferred to white people, and whether or not that was in some real ways creating the very situation that we were struggling very hard to change. More fundamentally, I was very afraid of unleashing uncontrolled vio- lence because of Lowndes County's history ... and the fact that since I had been in the county I had encountered more than one violent incident ... but ulti- mately it was decided that the movement was an open place and should provide an opportunity for anyone who wanted to come and struggle against racism to be part of the struggle." -Voices of Freedom]

Well, it was a short demonstration. The Klan was waiting. We were immediately surrounded by a mob larger than the demonstration. That was one time I was not sorry to be arrested. A group of us were taken to the Hayneville jail-mostly local kids, a couple students from Tuskegee, a couple staff, along with Gloria and the two whites from Selma, who were especially singled out by the jailers for verbal abuse.

We were arrested on some trumped-up charges, but the bonds were

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steep. And the place was fetid, Jack. Unbelievably foul, even for a South- ern jail. I heard that some of the local people had come down to check on us but were threatened at gunpoint and turned away without any infor- mation on us. We were effectively incommunicado.

We figured we could bond out one maybe two people to go organize bond for the rest. Someone suggested the father. But he said he was more useful inside and probably better off, not knowing the territory and all. I agreed to bond out with Scott B. Smith. We were to come back with lawyers, bond money, and a community escort. I said two or three days, four at the most. Folks gave me messages for their families to tell them where they were, assure them they were well and in good spirits, etc., etc.

It took a few days longer. We'd just rounded up some lawyers. Attor- ney Chestnutt from Selma and SCLC was sending somebody from Montgomery. Atlanta SNCC was sending the bond. But we were a day too late. The day before we were to meet the lawyers to go to Hayneville, they were released. Now, the group had been defiant, keeping up their spirits by singing and refusing to Tom to the jailers. But this was not a sur- render by the jailers, it was an ambush, a stone setup just as in Neshoba County the previous summer.

[Ruby Sales: "The jailer told me that we were being released on our own recognizance.

That raised a red flag to me because it was just very incongruent with the blind- ness of their racism that they would release us on our word, when they didn't think we even had a word. The other thing that bothered me tremendously was that there was no one to meet us, because I knew enough about Stokely Carmichael and also the local people, like the Jacksons, that if we were being released from jail, their commitment was such that they would be there to meet us. So that was another red flag for me. But the deputy and the sheriff told us to stop asking questions and get out. So finally we left, but we just didn't feel comfortable because there was no one around. There was a kind of eerie feeling as if suddenly the streets were deserted, and we could not locate a black face any- where." -Voices of Freedom

Gloria House: "Of course we were suspicious of this. No one from SNCC had been in touch

with us. had not been told that bail had been raised; we had no information from anyone, and we thought, this doesn't sound right. But they forced us out of the jail at gunpoint. Being forced out of jail at gunpoint-you know some- thing worse might be waiting for you outside, so you sort of hang on to that jail.

we did. were standing around outside the jail and they forced us off the property onto the blacktop, one of the county roads, again at gunpoint.

"Since we had been in jail and really hadn't had anything fun to eat or drink--we had been eating pork rind and horrible biscuits and whatever- some of us thought, 'Let's walk to the little store here and get a drink, have some

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ice headed to a corner store. Just as we turned onto the main street of Hayneville, gunfire broke out, and we realized the gunfire was coming in our direction. The youngsters, of course, started running everywhere, and some of us just fell on the ground. Ruby Sales and I had been walking with Jonathan Daniels, and we fell there on the ground. Jonathan was hit and we think he must have died immediately. Father Richard Morrisroe, the only other white member of the group, was also hit. He did not die, but he moaned and groaned and moaned and groaned in a horrible way that none of us who were there will ever forget. It seemed to me it was hours before anyone appeared on this road in Hayneville. Everyone had been informed, of course, that something was going to happen, so this curiously deserted main road was silent because that's the way it was intended to be. thought we were all going to be killed." -A Circle of Trust]

There they were out on the street on foot in a strange town with no one to meet them. They were trying to reach the black community and a phone. Three or four of the sisters were approaching a store when a gun- man came out shooting. They say Jonathan and Father Morrisroe threw the sisters aside and took a full load of buckshot. I could see Jon doing something like that. When the shooting stopped, Jon was dead and Father Morrisroe seriously wounded. By the grace of God, he survived.

[Ruby Sales: "As we approached the store and began to go up the steps, suddenly standing

there was Tom Coleman. At that time I didn't know his name; I found that out later. I recognized that he had a shotgun, and I recognized that he was yelling something about black bitches. But ff!Y mind kind of blanked, and I wasn't pro- cessing all that was happening. Jonathan was behind me and I felt a tug. The next thing I knew there was this blast, and I had fall en down. I remember think- ing, God, this is what it feels like to be dead. I heard another shot go off and I looked down and I was covered with blood. I didn't realize that Jonathan had been shot at that point. I thought I was the one who had been shot. W'hen the sec- ond shot went ofj, I heard Morrisroe crying for water and I realized that he had been shot. I also thought that Joyce Bailey had been shot.And I made a decision that I would just lie there, and maybe if I lie there, then Coleman would think that I was dead and then I could get help for the other people. He walked over me and kicked me and in his blind rage he thought I was dead. Joyce Bailey had escaped and she ran back around the store to the side near an old abandoned car and she was calling out our names. 'Ruby, Jonathan, Ruby, Jonathan.' I heard her and I got up. I didn't stand up, I crawled, literally on my knees, to the side of the car where she was, and when I got to her, she picked me up and we began to run across the street, and Coleman realized that I wasn't dead.At that point, he started shooting and yelling things, and Joyce and I were running across the street for dear life and we were screaming and yelling and there was nobody." -Voices of Freedom]

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The gunman was a violent racist, brought in under Klan contract, so it was said, to target the two whites. Though from his actions, he clearly was seriously trying to kill the sisters too. That one was arrested after the Justice Department brought pressure. Same ol' same ol'. Some of us went back for his trial and watched him be acquitted by a jury of his peers. After that shooting, the black community saw that they had no choice, either quit or defend themselves. So they made the necessary preparations to do that.

Jon's murder grieved us. His wasn't the first death we'd experienced. But it was in some ways the one closest to me as an organizer. I'd thought they might have been gunning for me that night when they shot Silas McGhee in my car. That brother survived. But this one ... Now I knew the kind of pressure I'd watched Bob Moses endure. I don't mean I understood or sympathized. Everyone had understood. But, now I felt what Bob must have been feeling, the pressure, the weight of the respon- sibility, the sorrow.

But we couldn't let that stop the work. That's precisely what the killers intended. However, from then on, a little too late, the project staff took the strong position, nonnegotiable, that to allow whites in would be tantamount to inviting their deaths. That became our policy. And we armed ourselves.

[Mrs. Mabel Carmichael: "'Course I remember. I was still living in the Bronx then. My son came in

unexpectedly. I thought he was in Alabama, but he said he had a responsibil- ity, something he had to do for the movement. I had never seen my son like that. Silent, grim, like a heavy, heavy weight was pressing on him. Even when his father died, that had really hit him, but this was different.

"He said that as project director he had to go tell the young man's parents how their son had died. It was when he asked me to ride with him that I knew how hard it was on him. That's the only time he ever asked me to go with him on movement business. He told me the young man was his friend. That he'd told him not to come.

"I think it was somewhere upstate (actually Keene, New Hampshire). That entire trip I don't think he said two sentences. He didn't even play the radio. Thu know that's not like him. I think I've blocked a lot of this out. I don't know what he said to the parents. They seemed to be real good people. The three of them went into another room. I believe Stokely was crying. He never told me what was said. The trip back in the car was just as silent. I do think that this was the hardest thing my son ever had to do in the movement. At least that I ever saw." -EMT]

The Osageyfo used to tell me, "The only people who never make mistakes are people who never do anything." I've made mistakes and I'm sure I'll

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make some more 'cause I'm not finished working. We made a mistake with Jonathan. One that I always remember with regret.

But it sure backfired on the racists. Organizing the party became much easier after that. Now all of the people could see that the Demo- cratic Party-"Hey, them ain't nothing but some night-riding, cross- burning, no-count, low-life snakes"-was not for them.

Could be that I channeled my anger into work, but I became tireless, almost driven. I was determined that this evil system had to be destroyed, and that only the people themselves could do it.

With a federal registrar in the county and firm agreement on the party, the greatest problem we still had was the threat of terrorism. Which increased, especially as our registration grew and the primary approached. These terrorists put it out that no blacks were gonna vote in that county. They swore they'd shoot the entire place up before they'd let that happen. But our people simply refused to be run off. And, man, were they serious too. Serious as a heart attack. They made what preparations they could.

One thing I'll never forget. On election day, Bob Mants and I were cruising the polls. Now there was some law about bringing firearms within-I forget-one hundred, two hundred yards of a polling place? We had stressed that in all the meetings. Up comes this old lady. I mean she had to be eighty years old, Jack, all proud and determined-looking, dressed for church and going to vote for the first time in her life. And she was going to vote for the Panther, then go home. I mean, that ol' lady came up to us, went into her bag, and produced this enormous, rusty, Civil War-looking old pistol.

"Best you ho!' this for me, son. I'ma go cast my vote now. I'ma vote for the Panther an' go home." Yes, sir. 1-es, sir. They would come, these old church sisters, bring out their pistols and stuff, put it right there, and step on up to the polls, yes, sir.

The people had no choice but to take the threats seriously. Just the week before the primary, we were scheduled to hold our nominating con- vention in the Hayneville courthouse. The sheriff, who must have been implicated in Jonathan's murder said, "No way. No [expletive] nigger con- vention is gonna happen in my courthouse." He deputized what must have been every Klansman in the county and some from outside. We said, "Well, we coming. It's our legal right, by any means necessary."

[One source puts the figure at 550 deputized white men. At his trial, Cole- man, the assassin, had been described as a ''part-time deputy sheriff," so he may well, almost certainly, have been among them. This was a common practice. I can recall having been horrified by a report from Mississippi the previous year, where a local sheriff was reported going into bars and deputizing and arming whites who had been drinking all afternoon. -EMT]

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It seemed like a real crisis was looming. Of course we were con- cerned. But you know the people would not back up an inch.

About a week before the primary one of those Justice Department men had come by. Luckily-for him-Bob Mants wasn't there. So the guy comes up to me.

"You know there's likely to be a lot of violence out here with that con- vention."

I said, "Yeah. Looks that way." So he comes up with the same old line: "Well, don't you think you

people ought to go slow?" So I told him to go tell the racists to go slow. Here the federal government just passed this voting rights act. Here I

am organizing my people to exercise their democratic rights, and this rep- resentative of that same government comes to tell us "to go slow."What's that "go slow" mean, we shouldn't exercise our rights? I asked him that. Also I reminded him that we weren't the ones who'd started any violence. Not once. I told him, you should go tell the terrorists to go slow.You best cool out the whites, we ain't chilling nothing, Jack. Tell them, we going straight ahead.

He looked at me like I was crazy. "But there's apt to be a lot of blood- shed."

"Yeah, but this time it won't just be our blood." "Don't you have any responsibility here? What responsibility do you

have?" "The responsibility I have is to tell you to tell your people, they get the

first shot. That's all they get. The first shot. After that I promise you, when we finish with this county ... "

He stood gaping at me as though I were speaking Swahili. So I repeated, "You understand now-they get the first shot." Then I

just walked away. Actually I was polite as always, y'know, but I wasn't going to let him waste any more of my time. I said, "Thank you very much for coming. But I have to go now. I've got to go organize my people for war." So we just went on and organized. There wasn't one shot fired that day. We held our convention in Hayneville, but we did move it to a local Baptist church.

[According to other sources, federal and state authorities intervened to pro- pose the compromise location acceptable to both sides. The First Baptist Church of Hayneville, where the convention was held, was a few blocks from where Jonathan Daniels was slain. -EMT]

In the primary vote we qualified easily, so that on the election day we had a slate of candidates led by Mr. Hulett and Mr. Strickland. None were elected. What we discovered on election day was that the plantation bosses had completely reversed their tactic. They had quietly registered

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numbers of their captive workers. A few months earlier they had been running them off the plantation for registering, now they were running them off if they didn't. Go figure.

On election day, they trucked their field hands in to vote against the Panthers. But of the two thousand newly registered blacks, over nine hun- dred withstood the threats and cast their votes for the Panthers. The peo- ples had them a party of their own, bro.

Five years after that convention, Bro Hulett, an African who in 1965 could not vote, and who could remember having to duck "like a deer" into the bushes when the sheriff's car approached, was elected sheriff of Lowndes County. Brother Charles Smith became a county commis- sioner. In the next election, Messrs. Hulett and Smith headed a slate of eight Africans. They won every seat they contested. Today John Jackson is mayor ofWhitehall. Mission accomplished, at least partly anyway.

People often ask me, "So whatever happened to the original Black Panther Party?"

I tell them that it demonstrated exactly everything I would later argue in my book Black Power on the question of premature coalitions. See, after years of independent organization and growth in numbers and confi- dence, the party voted to affiliate with a completely new, reconstructed Alabama Democratic Party. The Klan element in Alabama having fol- lowed David Duke {and the Louisiana Klan] into the Republican fold.

Didn't I feel/take any responsibility? Gimme a break. The incredible chutzpah of that Justice Department gofer. What about the government's responsibility? I'm sure he left thinking that that Carmichael Negro is crazy and bloodthirsty. Probably reported that to his bosses in Washing- ton too. Well, tough. I didn't mind if they thought that. Wanted them to, in fact.

"Go slow"? Gimme a break. How could we possibly go any slower? We'd broken absolutely no laws. We'd initiated no violence. None. So why come demanding that-one more time-we should give up our funda- mental rights as citizens and human beings. No way, Jack. I hoped he'd go back and report, "Those blacks ain't cooperating. They're giving up nothing. We better lean seriously on the people creating the violence." Which, as it turned out, was more or less what went down. Not a shot was fired.

But what if the government hadn't moved? If once more they had failed to exert federal authority? If those peckerwood terrorists had taken the first shot?

You'd better believe we'd been concerned about that long before that Justice Department man showed up. We'd spent a lot of time arguing it out. Our people were determined, brave, but they sure weren't soldiers.

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Many were old, and the majority in most meetings were, as always, women. The county demographics were just like the Delta. Most young adults had been driven out in search of work or less oppressive conditions. We were left with a lot of older folks-valiant old folks to be sure-but old folks nonetheless, young teenagers, kids, and some adult men like Bros Hulett and Strickland.

So it would be unconscionable to leave them exposed to Klan violence or to expect them to go to war. Who knew what the Klan and the police would bring up against them? So if the government wouldn't enforce the laws, to protect them, we figured we had to. And find people who'd help us do that. That was clear.

We heard about a group of veterans from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the hometown of Ed and Rap Brown, called the Deacons for Defense and Justice. I think it was Rap Brown who told me about them. Those broth- ers were organized, trained, and had some serious firepower. Their mis- sion was defending black communities from the Louisiana Klan. We made contact. Once they heard what was going down in Lowndes, they said, "Yeah, we coming." That was the start.

Then we explained the situation to SNCC and proposed that they allow us to take a delegation into the big Northern cities. To talk with brothers and sisters willing to come down to help defend the population. SNCC, after surprisingly little argument, approved. I was chosen to go.

We went to New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philly, the Bay Area, etc., etc. Most of the big cities. We spoke with the militant, nationalist ele- ments. Also at that time these cities had many clandestine formations. We spoke to as many as we could find. We even contacted gangs, as well as regular groups like the Nation with trained units, like the Fruit oflslam. Every city sent a contingent, every one, however small. Paid for it. Brought their own arms too. Got quietly into the county. All in all, you could say thirty to fifty people. Maybe more.

Those who came, came to fight, not just as security. I'd say most had military training. Some had served in Vietnam and had brought back their weapons. We didn't parade them, of course. But we introduced them at the mass meetings, had them greet the community and say a few words of solidarity. You know black Southern communities are very for- mal, with a certain etiquette just like in African villages. "Brothers and sisters, you ain't alone in this. We bring greetings from the brothers and sisters in Detroit. We came prepared to do whatever is necessary." The people loved that. They just went wild at the meetings. And it was known to the whites that we'd brought in reinforcements. But they had no idea how many.

Bob Mants and I were in charge of deployment 'cause we knew- more or less-the terrorist strongholds. So what we did was secretly post

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our fighters as close to these places as we could hide them. With instruc- tions. Not to act until acted upon.

We had this slogan among ourselves: "The white folks get the first shot. After that, it's ours." Of course, no one has any idea what would or might have gone down. But give praise and thanks, the terrorists didn't take that first shot. It would have been grim, Jack.

But this is important historically. I think we had six, seven fighters out of California. That delegation was led by an impressive brother named Mark Comfort, who I think was a Vietnam vet. He was a serious brother, low-key and dedicated. Before they returned home, they asked for a meet- ing. Not just Mark's California delegation, but groups from New York, Philly, Detroit. In essence, they said, we like this Black Panther Party idea. We want to take it back and try to spread it. We said, it's the people's. We ain't got a patent. Feel free. If local conditions indicate, go for it.

But when Comfort got back to the West Coast and brought the idea up, there sprang up, I don't know, maybe ten, twelve different groups all claiming the name. So they asked that SNCC send out someone to help resolve the issue. I was sent by SNCC to investigate and try to resolve the situation. And, its being SNCC, to do some fund-raising while I was there. I wanted Bob Mants to come too since he also knew some of the groups, but SNCC said both of us shouldn't be out of Lowndes at one time.

My thought was to try to bring all these groups together into a unified Black Panther organization and to discuss exactly what political program they were going to organize around. Never happened. My brother, the contradictions out there were rough. Uh-uh, I mean rough, Jack. We sat and we discussed and discussed. Discussed with them collectively. With them in groups and individually. But no way. No way. It became clear real quick that no one coming in from the outside could hope to solve these contradictions. It was just impossible. Histories went back years between these groups. Members once of the same group had split into factions and these were competitive, if not openly hostile.

Two brothers from Oakland were representing, far as I could see, no established group. They were together so I guess they represented them- selves. They were militant and political and one of them, Huey, seemed very serious. When I first met them, he was the one that impressed me. He didn't say much, whereas his partner, Bobby Seale, rarely stopped. He be steady running this rap. But when Huey P. Newton said anything, you could see that it was something that had been carefully thought out. Something he'd reflected over, something relevant to the discussion. So you could see that he was listening seriously to what was going down. Also, the brother was unassuming, almost humble in his manner. And, very important, he had a good sense of humor and smiled easily. I liked

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