Tomorrow-Land (33 page)

31.

There is an amazing democracy about death.

—Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

 

Since the racial violence of Birmingham in the spring of 1963, Americans had witnessed an astounding amount of brutality perpetuated against their countrymen at the hands of their fellow citizens. The mauling of Birmingham's children by Bull Connor's police force, with their fire hoses and attack dogs, had been followed by the September church bombing that killed four little girls in their Sunday best. Two months later came the fateful bullets ringing out in the Dallas daylight, killing the nation's youthful president, and seven months after that, the cold-blooded murders of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner, the trio of civil rights workers left to decompose in the Mississippi mud for six weeks in the summer of 1964, a season that also saw bloody riots—some might say insurrections—in several Northern urban ghettos. Then, of course, there were the young Americans being sent home from Vietnam in body bags.

The early months of 1965 offered no respite. As Robert Moses waged war with his critics, leaving New Yorkers to wonder if the World's Fair would even have a second season, crime in the city continued to rise. Following
Fortune
's September 1964 cover story on the political and physical demise of New York—reissued and expanded into a 1965 book—the
Herald Tribune
launched a series of articles titled “A City in Crisis” detailing the myriad problems the crumbling metropolis and its citizens faced. With all the talk of civil rights for African Americans and other minorities in both the Southern Jim Crow states and the Northern cities, many non-minority Americans began to feel that they too needed new laws for protection. “We also need a great civil rights march in our city,” one New Yorker wrote to the
Herald Tribune,
“to insure to us the civil rights to live in our homes, to ride in our subways, to walk in our streets and parks at any hour without fear of being murdered, robbed and raped.”

Moses got a similar letter the same month the
Herald Tribune
launched its soul-searching series. Joseph A. Sweeney, age seventy-three, of Brooklyn wrote to the Master Builder, exhorting him not to feel bad if the World's Fair didn't open in 1965. It wasn't his fault, Sweeney said, it was New York's—“There are reasons for it, and it's the times we are living in now,” he explained. Recalling how he and his wife used to attend the 1939–40 World's Fair three or even four times a week, Sweeney said he had enjoyed the latest Flushing Meadow exhibition—finding it “instructively educational and entertaining”—but that they were too afraid to go out frequently. “Now the people are prisoners in their homes,” Sweeney wrote Moses. “Very few risk going out after dark with the muggings, rapings, robbery and pocket book snatching going on.” His wife was mugged one evening right in front of their Brooklyn apartment building, while Sweeney was robbed one early afternoon on Christmas Eve.

The violence touched everyone. For months, Malcolm X's wife, Betty Shabazz, had been receiving death threats, a campaign of harassing phone calls carried out by her husband's enemies. On Valentine's Day 1965, shortly after their returning to New York from a trip to Detroit, the house where the couple lived with their five daughters was firebombed. Although the frightened family escaped unscathed, Malcolm had to know that the members of the Nation of Islam, who for months had been threatening to kill him, now meant what they said.

A week later, at one of his regular Sunday talks at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, just as Malcolm X began speaking, a ruckus erupted in the audience. A young black man stood up and shouted, “Nigger, get your hand out of my pockets!” As Malcolm's bodyguards tried to restore order, three other young black men rushed the stage and shot the fiery orator to death in full view of four hundred people, including his wife, who rushed onstage to cradle her husband's bullet-ridden body. In one bloody instant, one of the most powerful voices in the struggle for black freedom was silenced.

Despite the passage of the historic Civil Rights Act the year before and the overwhelming victory by Lyndon Johnson's Democratic
Party, there was plenty of work to be done to further the cause of freedom for America's twenty-two million African Americans. The newest battleground was Selma, Alabama, a poor, rural area of the state whose leading politician had challenged President Johnson for the Democratic nomination.

Governor George C. Wallace might have talked like a folksy, country-­bred good ol' boy, but he was nobody's fool. He was already preparing to ride the anti–civil rights resentment of the South all the way to the White House. And to achieve his goal, he would only have to tweak his message to capture the Northern “white backlash” vote—all those white, ethnic, working-class rank-and-file Democrats—in America's crime-ridden big cities, the same ones who were now afraid to leave their homes or felt left out of Johnson's “Great Society.” Wallace was every bit the Democrat that Johnson was; it was his party, too, and he planned on stealing it right from under Johnson's bulbous Texan nose. But that would have to wait until the next presidential cycle in 1968; for now, Wallace was just biding his time.

Five days after Malcolm X's murder, a peaceful civil rights protest in Marion, Alabama, turned deadly. On February 26, Jimmie Lee Walker, his mother, his eighty-two-year-old grandfather, and others marched to a local jail where a civil rights protester was being held. As they sang and prayed, they were set upon by a group of Alabama state troopers, who dispersed the crowd, swinging nightsticks and brandishing guns. Walker and his family ran inside a local restaurant and were followed by the police, who clubbed the elderly grandfather until he collapsed on the floor. When Walker's mother tried to help, the state troopers turned on her. When Walker tried to shield his mother with his body, they pulled him away and shot him twice at point-blank range. He died shortly thereafter.
*

In response, on March 7 Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis organized six hundred activists from their two organizations, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), at the Brown Chapel African Methodist-Episcopal Church in Selma, Alabama. Their plan was to march peacefully, walking the entire fifty miles from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital, to protest Walker's death as well as the months of beatings and violence directed against local blacks who attempted to register to vote in Alabama.

As the marchers left Selma and walked across the steel arches of the Edmund Pettus Bridge—named for a Confederate general—and over the muddy banks of the Alabama River, they were confronted by state troopers. Also on hand was the sheriff of Dallas County, Jim Clark, who stood ready on horseback to use any means necessary to stop the protest. Sheriff Clark was every bit as unhinged and hate-filled as Connor, and known for his links to Ku Klux Klan groups.

Just one minute after instructing the protesters—men, women, children, and the elderly—to go home, the troopers rushed the crowd, tossing tear gas and swinging cattle prods, nightsticks, or makeshift weapons like a hose laced with barbed wire, attacking old and young alike. Some protesters ran, only to be chased down by one of Clark's mounted henchman; others were attacked as they kneeled silently and prayed for God's help.

“Get those god-damned niggers!” Clark shouted as he waded into the crowd, striking anyone in his path. It was a bloodbath. Dozens were sent to the hospital. The SNCC's Lewis was clubbed in the head; he thought he had finally reached the end. “People are going to die here,” the twenty-five-year-old civil rights leader recalled thinking as he was attacked. “I'm going to die here.” The events of “Bloody Sunday,” as it quickly became known, were captured by print and television journalists—some of whom were also attacked—and was broadcast across the country that night. More televised bloodshed for the living rooms of America.

Two days later there was another march, this time led by King. He stopped after crossing the bridge—as directed by a federal court order. Still, that march claimed another life: A Boston minister, the Reverend James Reeb, a married man with four children, was attacked by Klansmen that night, dying from his wounds a few days later.

On March 15 President Johnson addressed the nation and promised complete solidarity with the civil rights movement. He was now going to send an unprecedented
second
civil rights bill up to Capitol Hill to guarantee the right of all Americans to vote. Then, in a moment that shocked many, Johnson closed his speech by looking into the cameras and co-opting the words of the movement, sung and shouted by tens of thousands over the years, pausing momentarily between each word to allow the full weight of the moment to sink in: “And we shall overcome,” intoned the president.

Watching television at a friend's house that night, King later recalled, he wept tears of joys. On March 21 King led some three thousand protesters on a third march from Selma across the Edmund Pettus Bridge to Montgomery, protected the entire way by the Alabama National Guard, now under the direction and orders of the US government. Governor Wallace could do nothing but peek out at the victorious protesters, hiding his shameful face behind the curtains of the state capitol.

Exactly a month later, on April 21, the World's Fair opened for its second and final season, still proclaiming, despite the bloody events of the previous four months, a utopian standard of “Peace Through Understanding.” The message, by now, either seemed utterly meaningless or desperately needed to be said again and again. For this opening day, President Johnson sent Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey to address the thousands of VIPs—including Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr., and West Berlin's Mayor Willy Brandt, who also addressed the crowd—in the Fair's Singer Bowl. Afterward, the smiling Humphrey walked among the Fair faithful next to Chief Justice Earl Warren, taking in the sights and being followed everywhere he went.
Humphrey Stars as Show Reopens
, the
New York Times
exclaimed the next day.

If only the vice president had been that popular at the White House. Just two months before attending the Fair, Humphrey wrote a plaintive memo to Johnson, pleading with him to get out of Vietnam lest it rip apart the Democratic Party and damage support for his extensive domestic agenda. There would be no better time than the present: “1965
is the year of minimum political risk,” he argued; if they acted now, they cold repel any “political repercussions from the Republican Right.”

For his political honesty, the VP was shunned by the president, who did not seek his opinion on the matter for more than a year. Instead, Johnson heeded the voices of his generals and Secretary McNamara. On March 8, Johnson approved the use of US Marines in Vietnam. By April, Operation Rolling Thunder was carpet bombing North Vietnam, the precise targets picked by President Johnson himself, now convinced that such air warfare would bring a quick end to the conflict.

However, even as American troops were busy fighting in Vietnam—or occasionally being sent to Alabama to protect American citizens from the KKK—the World's Fair managed to hold a celebratory second season opening. There was another parade with Disney characters and dancers, Miss America, and special guest Olympic runner Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia, who carried with him a message from Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie as he ran from Manhattan to Flushing Meadow—a publicity stunt dreamed up by Moses personally to draw attention to the Fair's African republics and highlight the Fair's international attractions.

The second opening day also benefited from far sunnier weather than the year before, resulting in more than 150,000 visitors—60,000 more than the Fair's opening day a year earlier. Happily for Moses, another planned protest from a local CORE chapter failed to materialize on opening day. But four days later, a hundred peaceful protesters marched with signs denouncing Mayor Wagner, accusing him of doing nothing to fix the slums or schools or address police brutality in the ghettos. The protest, held in front of the New York City Pavilion, was quiet and peaceful and didn't interfere with Fairgoers—only 110,614 of whom showed up that day, a disappointing turnout for a weekend date and probably due to the chilly weather (and news of yet another protest march).

Real trouble began when a much smaller group of white teenagers from Brooklyn's East New York neighborhood, claiming to be part
of a organization called SPONGE—or the Society for the Prevention of Negroes Getting Everything—led a counterprotest against CORE. Although some carried signs proclaiming their support for Governor Wallace, it wasn't so much a protest as it was an opportunity for them to harass the civil rights activists.

George Schiffer, a lawyer for CORE, complained to the Fair's security chief, Stephen P. Kennedy, the former New York City police commissioner. He asked that the East New York group stage their protest in another area of the Fairgrounds. “I don't see any pickets,” Kennedy deadpanned. “I don't see any disorder. I just see people enjoying the fresh air and seeking peace through understanding.”

“I wouldn't be surprised if you sent them over here,” Schiffer shot back.

Not long after, a fight broke out between the groups, and a CORE picketer was punched in the face; only then did Kennedy's guards get involved. Although the melee was over shortly after it began, the incident was further proof that racism and ignorance were not confined to the states of the Old Confederacy; there was plenty of such sentiment to go around in New York City, even a melting pot like Queens.