Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ of the LA crew, 29-year-old Roena Rand, would go on to lead the large but tempestuous CORE chapter in Washington, DC.¹⁷

      The third LA Freedom Ride—involving four Blacks and eight whites—was sponsored by the religious flagship of the Central Avenue corridor, the Second Baptist Church. Dr. Raymond Henderson had been at the pulpit of this famed church, long associated with the NAACP, since 1940, and his passionate endorsement of the Rides was a snub to Roy Wilkins, the organization’s executive secretary.¹⁸ Despite the popularity of the movement among the NAACP’s Youth Councils, Wilkins agreed with the Kennedys that the CORE-initiated movement had become an “extremist” threat to moderate reform. He also believed that CORE was infested with Communists and other left-wingers.¹⁹ Henderson was less worried. The Jackson-bound riders included two middle-aged Los Angeles lawyers, Jean Kidwell Pestana and Rose Schorr Rosenberg, whose leadership in the left-wing National Lawyers Guild and travels in the socialist bloc were widely publicized by Mississippi’s mini-KGB, the State Sovereignty Commission, with the help of McCarthyism’s poet laureate, the conservative columnist Fulton Lewis Jr.²⁰

      “The notion that the Freedom Rides were part of a Communist plot,” explains Raymond Arsenault, “first emerged in Alabama in mid-May when Bull Connor, Attorney General MacDonald Gallion, and others played upon Cold War suspicions of a grand conspiracy to subvert the Southern way of life. Later, after the focus of the Rides moved to Jackson, the Communist linkage became the stock-in-trade of Mississippi politicians and editors attempting to discredit the campaign.”²¹ This fusion of McCarthyism and white supremacy was serendipity for hardline Dixiecrats while allowing groups like the John Birch Society to exploit Northern racism. (As we shall see later, the Birchers—with Chief Parker’s unofficial sanction—had spectacular success infiltrating the LAPD and winning its rank and file to their ideas.)

      By the end of July, scores of Freedom Riders, having served the thirty-nine days that CORE requested, were bailing out of Parchman and leaving the state. Mississippi’s leaders, as well as the Justice Department, assumed that the movement had run out of steam and would soon dissipate. However, Farmer, as we have seen, had prepared for such a contingency and now called for more CORE reserves from the West Coast. With the help of veteran activist Henry Hodge, Santa Monica CORE, led by Robert and Helen Singleton, dispatched a contingent that arrived in Jackson on June 25. Nine of the fifteen LA Riders were, like Bob Singleton, UCLA students, and they included Michael Grubbs, the nephew of famed historian John Hope Franklin.²² By now, the arrest and processing of Riders had become routine, and the volunteers were well informed of the treatment they could expect. But while waiting in the Jackson Jail to be transferred to Parchman, Helen Singleton was “most amazed but not amused” to find a portrait of LAPD Chief Parker on a wall. It was a recruiting poster extolling the opportunities offered by the LAPD.²³

      In early August Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth came to L.A. In 1956 he had crawled out of the rubble after his parsonage was bombed by the Klan; more recently he had saved Freedom Riders from the Klan. He addressed almost a thousand people at Will Rogers Park in Watts, then, in a demonstration of Southern stamina, marched several hundred of them nearly ten miles to the Federal Building downtown to demand protection for civil rights workers in the Deep South.²⁴ The spirit of that summer was also manifest in a successful boycott, organized by the Sentinel and the Eagle together with CORE and the NAACP, against the annual Times-sponsored charity football game on August 17 between the LA Rams and the Washington Redskins. The DC team, owned by the venomous bigot George Preston Marshall, was the last Jim Crow holdout against integration in the NFL, and the Sentinel’s sportswriters—“Brock” Brockenbury and Brad Pye—had long blasted the Times and the Rams for bringing “these Washington Redskins here every year to insult their Negro customers in the first game of the season.” In the event, most Black Rams fans stayed away from the game, and some joined the interracial protest of 500 people (including the great blues shouter, Jimmy Witherspoon) outside the Coliseum. The LA protest, moreover, catalyzed demonstrations at other “Paleskin” games, increasing the discomfort of Marshall’s rival owners and reinforcing threats from Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall to deny the team use of the new DC-owned Washington Stadium. In December, pro sports’ leading racist George Wallace finally capitulated and drafted Heisman Trophy winner Ernie Davis.²⁵

      Meanwhile the fifth and last LA Freedom Ride (with seven white and four Black participants) had set out for Jackson, via Houston and New Orleans. Once again the composition of the group reflected the important, even central, role played by red diapers in L.A. CORE. Bev Radcliff and Ellen Kleinman, already mentioned, were ISU activists, while Steven Sanfield (the night manager at the famed Larry Edmunds Bookshop in Hollywood) and artist Charles Berrard were close to the Southern California CP. Steve McNichols, also mentioned earlier, was with UCLA and Santa Monica CORE. Adding a different ideological tincture, Robert Farrell and his close friend Ronald La Bostrie represented the civil rights current among L.A.’s Black Catholics. Marjorie Dunson, slightly older, was a Jamaican citizen. En route to Mississippi by train, the contingent planned to meet up with young activists from Texas Southern University who had been struggling to desegregate the coffee shop at Houston’s Grand Central Station. Their Ride ended there.

      In Houston’s Jim Crow jail, Ferrell, Berrard and La Bostrie, along with two local protestors, were welcomed “as heroes and treated accordingly” by Black male prisoners; likewise for Dunson, and for Marian Moore, one of the leaders of Houston’s Progressive Youth Association. With her Mediterranean complexion, Kleinman’s race confused her jailers, who initially put her in the Black female section. Sent back to the white women’s wing, she and Pat Kovner (who had helped found CORE in the Valley) became the subject of a hair-raising plebiscite by their fellow inmates, who decided by one vote not to beat them up. The four white male Freedom Riders, however, were greeted as “fuckin’ nigger lovers” and spent two terrible days as punching bags for the sadistic racists and anti-Semites in their part of the jail. McNichols from UCLA suffered the worst beatings, which permanently damaged his spine. As Ferrell would recall years later, “he was never the same physically … he was a damaged man.” Their lawyers were shocked at their battered state—reminiscent of the wounded on the first Freedom Rides—and bailed them out in time to prevent them being murdered. Ironically they would have been safer in Jackson, where Riders, however mistreated, were usually kept apart from other prisoners.²⁶

      In September the last of the LA Riders were released from Parchman, although trials and legal battles would continue until 1962. CORE, meanwhile, supported the vigorous picketing of the LA Greyhound terminal that had been initiated by John T. Williams and other members of the Teamster Rank-and-File Committee for Equal Job Opportunity. The demonstrations continued through the fall until the company, profiting from contracts to carry mail and servicemen and therefore vulnerable to federal anti-discrimination law, finally agreed to hire their first Black driver.²⁷ L.A. CORE, while continuing to support the Southern struggle, turned its attention principally to housing integration, the issue that would most define the civil rights movement in Southern California for the next three years. The returning Riders, toughened by jail and profoundly inspired by the courage of their counterparts in the South, were eager to unleash nonviolent direct action on a new scale in Los Angeles. But another force was rising in Black communities throughout the North—one that rejected integration, Christian leadership and nonviolence. Although CORE would return to center stage in 1963, it was Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam that would transfix Los Angeles in the approaching year.

4

       “God’s Angry Men”: The Black Muslims (1962)

      In 1958, after a number of guards were injured in a riot at the Deuel youth prison, east of Oakland, authorities took the unprecedented step of transferring the СКАЧАТЬ