Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis

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СКАЧАТЬ NAACP chapter, for its part, began planning a massive Freedom Rally for Birmingham on May 26 at Wrigley Field. Dr. Christopher Taylor, the dentist who had succeeded Reverend Maurice Dawkins as the president of the local NAACP, sent a telegram to Bull Connor asking him to relay a speaking invitation (“send reply collect”) to the jailed comedian and movement stalwart Dick Gregory. Gregory promptly made bail and flew to L.A. Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy changed tour schedules to attend the LA rally, and Governor Pat Brown acted as honorary chair, as he had when King spoke at the Sports Arena in 1961. Sammy Davis Jr. agreed to wrangle celebrities (Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Rita Moreno, Dorothy Dandridge, Tony Franciosa and Mel Ferrer, among others), while Burt Lancaster volunteered to organize an after-rally party in Beverly Hills to squeeze money out of them. That Sunday’s turnout of 35,000 to 40,000 was phenomenal, dwarfing the legendary King rallies of November 1960 and June 1961.

      In King’s “The Time Is Now” speech, he called upon President Kennedy to personally escort onto campus the two Black students that the courts had ordered admitted to the University of Alabama but Governor Wallace had blocked from entering. He received his most rapturous applause, however, when he urged the crowd to emulate Birmingham and unite to fight every form of segregation and discrimination in Los Angeles: “Birmingham or Los Angeles, the cry is always the same: We want to be free.”³⁸ In making the equation between the two cities, King only echoed what Malcolm X had said the year before, and Baldwin a few weeks earlier. (Baldwin: “There is not one step, one inch … no distance between Birmingham and Los Angeles.”³⁹)

      The interracial committee that organized the rally was soon nominated to lead such a struggle when Reverend Dawkins warned the Times that if immediate steps were not taken to desegregate L.A., the NAACP and its allies would launch a “Birmingham-type drive.” “We are not just asking for a small specific adjustment,” he declared, “but a total community integration.” Whether Dawkins, who constantly sought the limelight of the media, actually spoke with the full permission of the coalition is unclear, but his statement was catalytic.⁴⁰ The official founding of the UCRC took place at a closed meeting of numerous groups under NAACP auspices on June 4. Predictably, Dr. Taylor was elected chairperson, although he would often be upstaged by the coalition’s president: the dynamic young African Methodist Episcopal minister H. H. Brookins, who, through his close alliance with newly elected council member Tom Bradley and his success in building a superchurch with an estimated 19,500 members, eventually became one of the city’s most important power brokers.⁴¹

      Although the united front was originally called the NAACP-UCRC, the ACLU was an equally important player. Indeed, ACLU director Eason Monroe claimed in his 1974 oral history that

      [we] played a dominant role in organizing [it], and a dominant role in holding [it] together for a period of a year and a half or two years, when other groupings in the community had more limited resources than the ACLU had by that time, and when, as a matter of fact, the fate of that organization [UCRC] rested, in a very important sense, upon ACLU involvement.

      He also emphasized the failure of the UCRC to bring to the fore any leader of real stature apart from Reverend Brookins, clearly implying the incompetence of Dr. Taylor.⁴² Monroe, however, did not clarify in these interviews whether this critique was one he had directly expressed in executive meetings of the UCRC or simply the wisdom of hindsight. CORE, in contrast, was openly skeptical of the NAACP from the beginning. Irked by the NAACP’s sudden assertion of seniority, spokesman Danny Grey pointedly reminded a Times reporter that CORE was already waging a “Birmingham-type” campaign. But he could hardly demur when Taylor, acknowledging the “tremendous pressures from the Negro community ‘to do something right now,’” promised that the UCRC was “determined to mount an all-out offensive in the areas of racial discrimination in job opportunities and housing, de facto school segregation and the abuse of police.”⁴³

      Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, the elder of what would become Los Angeles’s most important political dynasty, represented a large portion of the Black community and was the first to react to the UCRC’s emergence. He urged the County Human Relations Commission to set up an emergency meeting between the organizers and the Los Angeles “power structure” (the CHRC’s term). With city government almost paralyzed by relentless warfare between Yorty and a majority of the council, the county Board of Supervisors became the sponsors of a summit at the Statler Hilton on June 7 in order “to avert a spread of racial tension”: a euphemism for the large-scale urban disorder or violence that they feared might be imminent.⁴⁴ About half of the 150 civic and business leaders invited to the Hilton conference actually attended, mostly to sit in uncomfortable silence as Wendell Green, editor of the Sentinel, “asserted there is more racial segregation in Los Angeles than in any city in the South and more than in any large Northern city except Chicago and Cleveland.”

      Dr. Taylor, in turn, outlined proposals for a citizens review board for the LAPD, revision of school district boundaries to achieve integration, and a nondiscrimination clause in all government contracting. The attendees were urged to support the Rumford fair housing bill in the legislature, and if it failed to pass, to adopt muscular city and county fair housing ordinances. “Birmingham-style demonstrations,” Taylor explained, would be postponed for ten days to allow business and government leaders to respond with concrete proposals for ending discrimination in their respective areas of education, law enforcement, housing and employment. Task forces in each area, coordinated by CHRC, were set up.⁴⁵ But the newly born UCRC was making demands from the cradle without proof that it could actually organize civil disobedience on a Birmingham scale, or, conversely, keep control over spontaneous protest in the community. Certainly a new Black middle class was flexing its muscles in electoral and activist politics, but, as Loren Miller had sagely warned at a statewide Black leadership conference in 1960, the elite should “not confuse their own middle-class attitudes with the needs of the people they purported to represent.”⁴⁶

      During the ten-day UCRC “grace period,” the national civil rights crisis deepened with the murder in Jackson, Mississippi, of Medgar Evers, the NAACP’s field secretary for that state. In L.A. a week later, 1,500 people sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” as they marched from Wrigley Field through South Central in a memorial procession for Evers organized by the UCRC; that same day in the east, NAACP director Roy Wilkins lashed out with startling vitriol against CORE, SNCC, and the SCLC for receiving “the publicity while the NAACP furnishes the manpower and pays the bills.”⁴⁷ It was an unjust and selfish rant that immediately jeopardized the civil rights united fronts emerging across the country. From the point of view of other groups, local and even state NAACPs (as in Mississippi) might occasionally take the lead in direct action, but the national organization’s commitment to mass protest and civil disobedience remained equivocal at best. In Sacramento, meanwhile, it was CORE, not the NAACP, that mobilized the volunteers—including, for one day, Paul Newman and Marlon Brando—who occupied the rotunda while the Rumford Bill, even after being watered down by its author, remained bottled up in a Senate committee dominated by conservative Democrats. In order to break the deadlock, Mari Goldman of L.A. CORE led a “lie-in” in front of the Senate chamber until demonstrators were carried away “like lengths of cordwood” by the state police.⁴⁸ New convoys of activists headed toward the capitol, but an ominous rebellion broke out among white working-class Democrats in LA County, who opposed Rumford.

      Negotiation Fails

      Then came a stunning electoral upset—one that was universally interpreted as a backlash against the anti-discrimination policies of Pat Brown in Sacramento and Kennedy in Washington. A special election had been called to fill the congressional seat left vacant by the death, in March, of Representative Clyde Doyle, a Democrat in the midst of his seventh term. The district, where registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans almost two to one, encompassed L.A.’s industrial heartland, including the blue-collar suburbs of Compton, Lynwood, South Gate, Huntington Park, Bell, Bell Gardens, Bellflower, Paramount, Maywood and Downey. Both the president and the governor СКАЧАТЬ