Lewis reluctantly agreed to read a watered-down version of his speech
while two Kennedy aides stood by ready to pull the plug on the
microphone should he revert to his original text.
It's safe to say that James Baldwin would have been even more critical
of the government had he been allowed to speak, convinced as he was that
the civil rights movement was actually "the latest slave rebellion."
But most critical of all was Malcolm X, who acidly dismissed the
event as "the farce on Washington." Said Malcolm:
"The Negroes were out there in the streets . . . .They were talking
about how they were going to march on Washington . . .That they were
going to march on Washington, march on the Senate, march on the White
House, march on the Congress, and tie it up, bring it to a halt, not let
the government proceed. They even said they were going out to the
airport and lay down on the runway and not let any airplanes land. I'm
telling you what they said. That was revolution. That was revolution.
That was the black revolution."
No leader had any chance of stopping it:
"It was the grass roots out
there in the street. It scared the white man to death, scared the white
power structure in Washington D.C. to death; I was there. When they
found out that this black steamroller was going to come down
on the capital, they called in . . . . these national Negro leaders
that you respect and told them, 'Call it off.' Kennedy said, 'Look, you
all are letting this thing go too far.' And Old Tom said, 'Boss, I
can't stop it because I didn't start it.' I'm telling you what they
said. They said, 'I'm not even in it, much less at the head of it.'
They said, 'These Negroes are doing things on their own. They're
running ahead of us.' And that old shrewd fox, he said, 'If you all
aren't in it, I'll put you in it. I'll put you at the head of it. I'll
endorse it. I'll welcome it. I'll help it. I'll join it.'"
And this co-optation worked:
"This is what they did with the march on Washington. They joined it . . .
became part of it, took it over. And as they took it over it lost its
militancy. It ceased to be angry, it ceased to be hot, it ceased to be
uncompromising. Why it even ceased to be a march. It became a picnic, a
circus. Nothing but a circus, with clowns and all. . . ."
No dictator could have achieved more thorough control:
"No, it was a sellout, a takeover. They controlled it so tight, they
told those Negroes what time to hit town, where to stop, what signs to
carry, what to sing, what speech they could make, and what speech they
couldn't make, and then told them to get out of town by sundown."
Civil Rights + Black Nationalism = Slave Rebellion
The U.S. civil rights movement emerged
from the official hypocrisy of (allegedly) fighting racism abroad (with a
segregated military!) during WWII while maintaining Jim Crow at home.
In the wake of foot-dragging on the Supreme Court's desegregation
decision (1954), the hideous murder of Emmett Till (1955), and the siege
of Little Rock (1957), militant disaffection and non-violent moral
witness burst forth with stunning suddenness and unprecedented depth.
In Greensboro, North Carolina black
students sat-in at department store lunch counters, exuding and
demanding the dignity that was their due. In Monroe, North Carolina
Robert Williams called for black "armed self-reliance" years in advance
of Black Power and fought off white terrorists in furious gun battles
that led to his flight from the country as an FBI fugitive. Escaping by
means of a modern-day Underground Railroad to Canada and then Cuba,
Williams broadcast scathing denunciations of "rump-licking Uncle Toms"
and "Ku Klux Klan savages" via "Radio Free Dixie" from his sanctuary in
Havana.
In Alabama and Mississippi, pacifist
"Freedom Riders" toughed out savage beatings at the hands of racist mobs
to integrate public transportation. Meanwhile, activists of the
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee faced down clubs, bullets,
bombs, and jail in the deepest strongholds of the Klan, winning the
franchise for all Americans a century after Lincoln had issued the
Emancipation Proclamation.
Embarrassed by the screaming headlines
and distressed at the propaganda advantage the Kremlin was reaping from
such events, the Kennedy administration moved belatedly and reluctantly
to support the black freedom movement. While peaceful protesters were
beaten and jailed, and Medgar Evers was murdered on his front porch, FBI
agents took notes and filed reports, but did nothing to protect the
lives of black Americans. Concerned about his support in Congress,
President Kennedy moved to shore-up his Southern political base,
appointing racist judges to the bench, including one in Georgia who
sought to prevent "pinks, radicals and black voters" from overturning
segregation, and another in Mississippi who saw no point in registering
"a bunch of niggers on a voter drive."
Yes, segregation finally crumbled, but not
before inflicting a century of lynchings, and the federal government
only very cautiously abandoned its Dixie allies under intense and
sustained popular pressure. The persistence of racial subordination beyond the dismantling of legal apartheid heralded the growing realization that racism was not
simply an anachronism of the ex-Confederate states, as many liberals had
supposed, but pervaded the entire nation. In his first northern
campaign (1966) Martin Luther King was shocked by the virulence of
Chicago prejudice, where ghettoization had achieved an informal
apartheid every bit as formidable as legal segregation and the Citizens
Councils. At the peak of civil rights success, devastating riots in
Harlem, Watts, Detroit, and Newark made the national character of
American racism dramatically plain while serving notice that its
abolition demanded something more than programmatic change. By decade's
end the rhetoric of liberal inclusion and the tactics of marching,
singing, and sitting-in gave way to the angry rhetoric and armed
apostles of Black Power, who echoed Malcolm X's demand for freedom "by
any means necessary."
Sources:
Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, (Harper, 1995) p. 449
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, (Dell, 1962) pps. 117-18
Tom Hayden, Reunion, A Memoir, (Random House, 1988) p. 59
Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, (Houghton Mifflin, 1965) p. 972
