Tales from the Attic: Learning about change

Sam Smith, sometime in the 1970s - I started The Idler, which would eventually morph into the Progressive Review. In the first issue I ran excerpts from letters from Mississippi written by my friend, Gren Whitman, who was taking part in the 1964 Mississippi organizing. Gren would survive the summer but three other young men - James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner wouldn't. They were murdered while working for black voting rights. Chaney was black; Goodman and Schwerner were white.

When, the following February, the US Civil Rights Commission held hearings on the subject in Jackson I went down to cover it. My story began:

And the Lord came to the Good Man and said, "Son, I want you to go to Mississippi and help the poor people down there." And the Good Man replied, "Lord, I'll go if you'll be there with me." And the Lord said, "Son, I'll go with you, but only as far as Memphis."

Mississippi, despite civil rights laws, statements of principle and hints of progress, still inspires Negroes to tell such stories, stories born in the deepest frustration, despair and anger.

Last February, the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights went the other side of Memphis, to Jackson, Miss., to view for itself this state, that, 100 years after the end of Civil War, remains morally and philosophically seceded from the Union.

Several thousand words later, I ended:

Mississippi is changing. As the stranger sees the small signs and smiles, his confidence is renewed in the process of democracy.  He leaves the state shoving the memories of callousness and cruelty aside to make room for more pleasant thoughts of progress, statements of principle, and communications between the races.

In the next five years I would end up as the guy who dealt with the media for Washington's SNCC chapter, headed by another twenty-something named Marion Barry. I would be sitting in the basement of the SNCC office when Stokely Carmichael arrived and announced that whites were no longer welcomed in the civil right movement. Not long after, I would be covering the riots in Washington for the community paper I had started. Two of the four major riot strips were in our neighborhood, one just a few blocks from our house. Biracial efforts to stop anything like that in our community had failed. Then, just two years later, I found myself helping to form a local third party comprised of blacks and whites who had somehow forgotten that things were hopeless. The party would hold elected posts for 25 years.

I had been introduced to change.

I found myself thinking of some activists. People like my college buddy Gren, who had been a paratrooper, high school wrestler and nicknamed Rocky, and in 1964 had gone to Mississippi. I thought of Stokely Carmichael, the guy who told us that whites were no longer welcomed in the civil right movement, visiting the civil rights activist Julius Hobson despite the fact that Hobson had a white wife. Carmichael had learned things from Hobson and so did I.

I thought of black civil rights activists dissin' white liberal members of Congress as unreliable and of the man they called an Uncle Tom, Mayor Walter Washington, standing up to J Edgar Hoover and telling him, no, he was not going to shoot looters during the riots. I thought of my two Texas white bosses at the radio station and news service for which I had worked, who sent me out as early as 1959 to cover protests and interview civil rights leaders because they cared about it all despite their color, accents and place of birth.

I thought of a handful of important civil rights activists I worked with who later lost their way, one of them being Marion Barry.

And so on. . .

To institutionalize change, to be too judgmental of those participating in it, to make too many rules about the right way to talk about it, doesn't help change at all.

I sometimes remind folks that we have always had Christian fundamentalists; we just used to call them New Deal Democrats because their political minds were on something else. I have always tried to go after the big bastards and treat the rest as their victims to be freed or educated or given something better to think about.

Which is how I learned that change doesn't have to be neat; it just has to be in the right direction.