Voices in Our Blood (61 page)

“I don't go along with this garbage that you can't hate, you gotta love. I don't go along with that at all. Man you
can,
you
do
hate. You don't forget that Mississippi experience. You don't get arrested twenty-seven times. You don't smile at that and say love thy white brother. You don't forget those beatings and, man, they were rough. Those mothers were out to get revenge. You don't forget. You don't forget those funerals. I knew Medgar Evers, I knew Willie Moore, I knew Mickey Schwerner, I knew Jonathan Daniels, I met Mrs. Liuzzo just before she was killed. You don't forget those funerals.”

The worst experience was what Stokely calls a two-day nervous breakdown just before the Selma-to-Montgomery march. “I was in the Ben Moore Hotel in Montgomery, getting ready to go downstairs, when they locked the doors. I couldn't get out. And downstairs were the marchers, and the cops began beating and using hoses. I couldn't stand it. I was by my window and I looked down and saw the cops beating and I couldn't get out. I was completely helpless. There was no release. I kept watching and then I began screaming and I didn't stop screaming. Some guys took me to the airport later and I kept screaming and I tried to kick in a couple of windows at the airport. Oh, man.”

He shakes his head slowly. “There have been people in the movement who have cracked. Like you can't help it. You always work on the assumption that the worst things will happen, you always work on the assumption that you're going to die. I used to say that the only way they'll stop me is if they kill me. I still think that's true. What bothers me now is if I live through all this I just hope I don't get tired or give up or sell out. That's what bothers me. We all have weaknesses. I don't know what mine are. But if they find out they'll try to destroy me. It's a question of them finding out what my weaknesses are—money, power, publicity, I don't know. And sometimes . . . sometimes . . . you just get so tired too.”

Stokely peers out the window at the clean, azure sky and shivers beneath the blanket. Within seconds, he is asleep.

Twenty minutes later the plane is landing at Albany Airport where Stokely will catch a plane for Glens Falls. He steps down the ramp and begins singing: “The empty-handed painter on your street is drawing crazy patterns on your sheet.”

He grins and walks into the terminal. “Man, that Dylan is a wild guy.”

With thirty minutes free before the next plane leaves, Stokely steps into the airport luncheonette and orders a vanilla ice cream soda. The waitress leaves and Stokely turns toward several persons at the counter reading newspapers. “Look at that, look at
that,
” he says, laughing, pointing to the sports page headline of The New York
Daily News:
“Operate on Whitey's Arm.”

“If they flipped that over and put it on the front page they'd sell a million copies,” he laughs.

Within the hour Stokely arrives in the small Glens Falls airport—three hours late. As soon as he climbs off the plane, a smiling, crew-cut youth waves and walks over and introduces himself. He is Frank Levy, a Ph. D. candidate in economics at Yale and a member of the camp's staff.

Stokely struggles into Levy's red MG and they drive off to the camp, about fifty miles away. Stokely asks Levy about the camp and is told that it's called the Shawnee Leadership Institute, an annual two-week summer camp for teen-agers who hold discussions on “issues” and listen to invited guest speakers. (The next day, Lord Caradon, the British Ambassador to the United Nations, was coming up.) There are about seventy campers and a staff of thirty, mostly college and graduate students.

Stokely likes Levy and they begin kidding about Vermont: “I wonder if everyone up here smokes pot.” The car crosses New York into Vermont on Route 4 and passes Deak's grocery and Frank's Taxidermist. “I've never been to Vermont before,” says Stokely.

The elms and pines are just starting to blaze with autumn colors and Stokely settles back and gazes silently at the countryside. He waves at farm boys—who wave back—and laughs as they ride past Crumley's grocery in Fort Ann. “A town like this and you go out of your mind,” he exclaims. “I read someplace that suicide rates are very high in Vermont—they must be sick of cutting all that grass.”

Just outside of Fort Ann, the car breaks down. Stokely moans and shakes his head and begins laughing. “This is my day,” he says. The fan belt is broken and Stokely and Levy struggle with the new belt. After twenty minutes they are off again.

As soon as Stokely arrives at the camp he appears startled, then amused. “Wow,” he says, as a half-dozen teen-age interracial couples, their arms around each other, surround the car, “Hey, like I had visions when I heard the name of the camp of old Protestant ladies sitting around campfires talking about love.” They shake his hand and escort him to the dining room.

Once inside, Stokely is greeted by an old friend, Julian Houston, who is president of the Student Government at Boston University. Stokely grins and gives Julian the “black” handshake and embraces him. “Man, you should be workin' down in Alabama,” cries Stokely.

With Houston and several other camp leaders, Stokely sits down at a wooden table while the campers, awestruck, watch him. Plates of ham and cheese and rolls are brought out and Stokely eats hungrily while a long-haired girl strums a guitar and sings “Ain't Gonna Study War No More.”

After the plates are cleared away, all the campers are called into the wooden dining room. Stokely removes his shoes and begins speaking quietly.

“Black people have not only been told that they are inferior, but the system maintains it. We are faced in this country with whether or not we want to be equal and let white people define equality for us on their terms as they've always done and thus lose our blackness or whether we should maintain our identity and still be equal. This is Black Power. The fight is whether black people should use their slogans without having white people say, ‘That's okay.' You have to deal with what white means in this country. When you say Black Power you mean the opposite of white and it forces this country to deal with its own racism. The 1954 school desegregation decision was handed down for several reasons. It was a political decision—and it was
not
based on humanitarianism, but was based on the fact that this country was going further into nonwhite countries and you could not espouse freedom and have second-class citizens in your own country. The area in which we move now is politics and within a political context. People kept saying that segregation and racism was wrong because it was immoral. But they still didn't come to grips with the two essential things: we are poor and we are black. You can pass 10,000 bills but you still haven't talked about economic security. When someone is poor, it's not because of cultural deprivation, it's not because they need to be uplifted and head-started. When someone is poor, it's because they have no money, that's all. That's all. They say it's our fault,
our fault
that we're poor when in fact it's the system that calculates and perpetuates poverty. They say black people don't know money, that they'll drink it away, they won't work. But we never had money, and it's presumptuous to tell us we won't be thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. You know who the biggest welfare group is in this country? You know who they are? You think it's the black people? Well, it's not. It's the farmers. They are the biggest welfare group in this country. But the difference between them and us is that they run their own programs, they control their own resources and they get something out of it. We must,
we must
take over and control our resources and our programs. And if we don't, the black people will wake up again tomorrow morning, still poor, still black, and still singing
We Shall Overcome.
”

The audience responds warmly and as soon as Stokely finishes, the questions begin. Stokely calls on a burly Negro youth who speaks in a thick drawl.

“Stokely, do you believe in God?”

Stokely stares at the youth. “That's a personal question.”

The youth smiles. “Oh.”

“Where you from?” Stokely asks.

“St. Augustine, Florida, Stokely.”

“What you do down there?”

“I worked in the field. Cotton, tobacco, you name it. I worked for $2 a day since I was so high. I worked for $2 a day until I heard Dr. King down there and then I knew I had to join the movement.”

“Right.” Stokely turns from the boy to the audience. “The reason I joined the movement was not out of love. It was out of hate. I hate white supremacy and I'm out to smash it.”

A pause. An older woman rises, a white woman. “Stokely,” she asks, a tremor in her voice, “What can we do? What can the whites do?”

“You must seek to tear down racism. You must seek to organize poor whites. You must stop crying ‘Black supremacy' or ‘Black nationalist' or ‘racism in reverse' and face certain facts: that this country is racist from top to bottom and one group is exploiting the other. You must face the fact that racism in this country is a white, not a black problem. And because of this, you,
you
must move into white communities to deal with the problem. We don't need kids from Berkeley to come down to Mississippi. We don't need white kids to come to black communities just because they want to be where the action is.

“Look,” says Stokely, leaning forward, speaking in a loud whisper. “Every white man in this country can announce that he is our friend. Every white man can make us his token, symbol, object, what have you. Every white man can say, ‘I am your friend.' Well from here on in we're going to decide who is our friend. We don't want to hear any words, we want to see what you're going to do. The price of being the black man's friend has gone up.

“And you must understand,” he says, his voice rising, “that as a person oppressed because of my blackness, I have common cause with other blacks who are oppressed because of
their
blackness. It must be to the oppressed that I address myself, not to members—even friends—of the oppressing group.”

The audience stirs. Stokely suggests they walk outside so he can get some good country air. Within minutes, the teen-agers sit in a semicircle beneath an evergreen, chatting quietly with Stokely who is lying on his side, his elbow dug into the grass, his chin in his hand. . . .

By dusk, with the apricot-colored sky streaked with violet, the campers implore Stokely to stay the night. He'd love to, he says, he needs the rest and this marvelous clean air, but there are meetings and speeches and appointments the next day.

With Julian Houston, Stokely climbs into a car driven by a Roman Catholic priest from Boston who is on the camp's staff.

“Stokely,” says the priest, driving quickly down the darkening road, “what should church people do?”

Stokely pauses. “They should start working on destroying the church and building more Christ-like communities. It's obvious, Reverend, that the church doesn't want Christ-like communities. Christ—he taught some revolutionary stuff, right? And the church is a counterrevolutionary force.”

The priest drives a moment in silence. “What should the priest's job be?”

“To administer, through his actions, the teachings of Jesus Christ,” says Stokely. “I would also make every church a plain building that could be used for other things, a building that will not be embellished.”

“What's next for you, Stokely?” asks the priest.

“Next?” Stokely smiles. “How does the victim move to equality with the executioner? That's what's next. We are the victims and we've got to move to equality with our executioners.” He pauses. “Camus never answers that question, does he? We are the victims, they are the executioners. Every real relationship is that—victim and executioner. Every relationship. Love, marriage, school, everything. This is the way this society sees love. You become a slave to somebody you love. You love me, you don't mess around with anyone else. One is the victim, the other the executioner. . . .”

It is dark now and chilly and Stokely begins shivering. He begins gossiping with Houston about old friends who have been lost to the poverty program, the Peace Corps, graduate schools.

At the airport in Burlington, Stokely is told that the plane to New York has been delayed an hour. He shakes his head—“It's my day”—and walks around with Houston. He then has two sandwiches and two glasses of milk and averts the stares of several men at the bar who recognize him.

The plane finally arrives. Stokely shakes hands with the priest and Houston and walks wearily up the ramp. He is cold and tired and sleeps listlessly on the trip to New York.

Shortly before eleven the plane lands at Kennedy Airport. Stokely has a date downtown in Manhattan but decides, instead, just to return to the Bronx and go to sleep. By now he is exhausted. The lack of sleep, the missed and delayed flights, the car trips, the questions, sandwiches on the run, the pressures have taken their toll. He walks through the terminal, breathing heavily, peering blankly through his dark glasses. Once outside, he decides to take a taxi and starts walking to the first cab in line. The driver, who is white, stares at Stokely—dungarees, dark glasses, carrying a paper bag of ham sandwiches, looking vaguely ominous—and drives past him to pick up a laughing white couple who carry cardboard cases of tax-free liquor. Stokely tenses, clenches his fist and takes a deep breath and turns toward the second cabdriver in line. This driver, who is a young Negro, has watched Stokely and is now smiling faintly. Stokely walks over, looks at the cabdriver and begins smiling too. He then opens the door and climbs into the cab and returns home for just a brief rest.

Representative

The New Yorker,
April 1, 1967

C
HARLAYNE
H
UNTER-
G
AULT

Julian Bond, the twenty-seven-year-old Negro whom the Georgia legislature twice refused to seat last year, because he supported draft-card burners (“I would not burn my own draft card, but I admire the courage of those who do”), was seated in January by the United States Supreme Court and has just completed the first half of a two-year term of office. When we learned that he was to give a speech at a banquet on behalf of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (S.C.E.F.) at the Roosevelt Hotel the other night, we walked over there to hear what he had to say. We paused in the lobby long enough to pull out our program and read that S.C.E.F. is “the oldest interracial organization at work in the South to end all forms of segregation, discrimination, and injustice,” and that it now feels itself challenged by events “to undertake anew the task of changing the mind-set of the white community and organizing at the grassroots level that coalition of black and white which will have the strength to bring about a truly democratic society.” Then we took the stairs to the ballroom, on the mezzanine, where the banquet was being held, and as soon as we entered we spotted the tall young legislator standing in a pool of light and looking handsome and a trifle bored as several men adjusted floodlights for a television news interview. We introduced ourself, and Mr. Bond stepped from behind the lights and told us that this would be his third talk of the day. He said that he had spoken at Cheyney State College, near Philadelphia, and then had appeared on a Philadelphia television program, and that after the S.C.E.F. speech he was going straight to bed, because he had to make a speech in Rhode Island the next day.

“Every weekend has been like this,” Mr. Bond said, in a quiet, even voice that had traces of a Southern accent. “My wife, Alice, and our three kids—a girl of four and two boys, one three and the other ten months—haven't been very happy about the trips I've had to take, but I've spoken in cities and towns from Georgia to California.”

We asked Mr. Bond if his speeches fell into different categories.

“Two,” he answered, with a smile. “That is, I have only two speeches that I give. The one that I give less frequently is about the two movements in this country—civil rights and peace—and how they ought to learn from each other. The other speech is a history of the Movement, which I usually call ‘What Next for the Negro?' or ‘Civil Rights—1960 to the Present Day,' or something that conveys that general idea.”

“What next for the Movement?” we asked.

“The 1965 Civil Rights Bill changed the Movement,” Mr. Bond said, without hesitation. “Many people who had previously supported the Movement thought that the passage of that bill meant the job was done. Others did not like the involvement of S.N.C.C., C.O.R.E., S.C.E.F., and S.C.L.C. in the anti-war protests. Then Black Power led to the final falling away. And for the Movement lack of interest is more killing than lack of money.”

Mr. Bond paused long enough to light a cigarette, and continued, “On the other hand, the Movement people are more interested now in local programs, which don't necessarily make front-page splashes, the way the sit-ins did—things like backing candidates for the Board of Supervisors of Sunflower County, in Mississippi, and getting federal registrars to go there. That's Eastland's county, you know, and there is not one single federal registrar anywhere in it. The Movement used to spend most of its time trying to get federal legislation on housing, voting, and public accommodations. It has come to realize now that laws by themselves are never going to change the face of the country, since even the laws that exist today are not being enforced. That is why the emphasis now is on more local thrust—more contained thrust, if you will.”

We asked Mr. Bond about his first session in the Georgia House of Representatives.

“Well, fortunately for me, several of my friends from Fulton County had been seated the year before, and since we are seated according to counties, we were all together,” he said. “They kept me filled in. I had campaigned on a promise to introduce a minimum-wage bill for domestic workers, and when I was prevented from taking my seat, Ben Brown, an old friend from the sit-in days, and John Hood, another colleague, introduced it, but it didn't get out of committee. In fact, it barely got into committee. I myself introduced three privileged resolutions, the most radical of which was for official recognition of Negro History Week in Georgia. The others were for recognition of Dr. Benjamin E. Mays on his retirement after twenty-seven years as president of Morehouse College, and for recognition of Morehouse on its hundredth anniversary. My three, along with the hundreds of others for recognition of all kinds of things, passed. One of my biggest problems in the legislature was getting used to the flowery language.”

When it was time for Mr. Bond to give his speech at the Roosevelt, we noted an absence of flowery language and a tendency to come straight to the point. He spoke briefly of the National Conference for New Politics and of the need for race consciousness. (“Negroes must not forget race consciousness as long as they are victims of racism,” he said.) Then he spoke of the early Negro activists and the heritage of dissent they helped to create in this country. Finally, he made his main point by means of four quotations. The first was from a Negro newspaper of 1842:

If war be declared, shall we fight with the chains upon our limbs? Will we fight in defense of a government which denies us the most precious right of citizenship? . . . We ask these questions. . . . The states in which we dwell have twice availed themselves of our
voluntary services,
and have repaid us with chains and slavery. Shall we a third time kiss the foot that crushes us? . . . No!

Mr. Bond's voice rose, then fell at an even pitch as he introduced his next quotation—from Henry McNeal Turner, one of twenty-seven Negroes who were expelled from the Georgia legislature in 1868:

The black man cannot protect a country if the country doesn't protect him; and if, tomorrow, a war should arise, I would not raise a musket to defend a country where my manhood is denied. . . . I will say this much to the colored men of Georgia. . . . Never lift a finger nor raise a hand in defense of Georgia, unless Georgia acknowledges that you are men, and invests you with the rights pertaining to manhood.

Mr. Bond paused for a moment, then continued with a quotation from a newspaper article by Lewis Douglass, son of Frederick Douglass, written in 1899:

It is a sorry, though true, fact that wherever this government controls, injustice to dark races prevails. The people of Cuba, Porto Rico, Hawaii and Manila know it well, as do the wronged Indian and outraged black man in the United States. . . . The question will be asked: How is it that such promises are made to Filipinos thousands of miles away while the action of the administration in protecting dark citizens at home does not even extend to a promise of any attempt to rebuke the outlawry which kills American citizens of African descent for the purpose of gratifying bloodthirstiness and race hatred? . . . It is hypocrisy of the most sickening kind to try to make us believe that the killing of Filipinos is for the purpose of good government and to give protection to life and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Mr. Bond's last quotation was from W. E. B. DuBois, who wrote in 1904:

I believe in the Prince of Peace. I believe that War is Murder. I believe that armies and navies are at bottom the tinsel and braggadocio of oppression and wrong; and I believe that the wicked conquest of weaker and darker nations by nations white and stronger but foreshadows the death of that strength.

Mr. Bond was quiet for a few seconds, then asked the audience to consider those statements in the light of events today, and sat down.