Tales from the attic: Learning an American story

Sam Smith - In August 1960 I wrote in a letter:

Have been covering  some of the anti-segregation demonstrations around the Washington area. The results here have been hopeful. Good police work has kept violence to a minimum although the presence of neo-Nazi Lincoln Rockwell and his "troopers" doesn't make the situation any simpler. Quite a few lunch counters have been desegregated. 

In February 1960, four black college students had sat down at a white-only Woolworths lunch counter in Greensboro, NC. Within two weeks, there were sit-ins in fifteen cities in five southern states and within two months they had spread to fifty four cities in nine states. In April the leaders of these protests had come together, heard a moving sermon by Martin Luther King Jr. and formed the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.

The summer I first worked for WWDC I had covered the passage of the first civil rights legislation in Congress since 1875. Now it was getting serious. By the end of June, I was covering the desegregation of lunch counters in Northern Virginia after sit-ins by groups led a Howard Divinity School student, Lawrence Harvey. Harvey then took his troops to Glen Echo.

Although I saved few recordings from that period, I copied a Glen Echo guard confronting Harvey:

Are you white or colored?

Am I white or colored?

That's correct. That's what I want to know. Can I ask your race?

My race. I belong to the human race.

All right. This park is segregated.

I don't understand what you mean.

It's strictly for white people

It's strictly for white persons?

Uh-hum. It has been for years. . .

You're telling me that because my skin is black I can not come into your park?

Not because your skin is black. I asked you what your race was.

I would like to know why I can not come into your park.

Because the park is segregated. It is private property.

Just what class of people do you allow to come in here.

White people

So you're saying you exclude the American Negro.

That's right.

Who is a citizen of the United States.

That's right.

I see.

As a biracial group marched outside with picket signs, Harvey had led a group inside to sit-in at the restaurant and mounted one of the carousel horses. The case ended up in court and less than a year later, the park opened for all.

 

LAWRENCE HARVEY CONFRONTS A SECURITY GUARD AT GLEN ECHO AMUSEMENT PARK
Photo: MLK Library DC

Meanwhile the House and the Senate were tying themselves in knots over civil rights legislation. In the House, the egregious but courtly Judge Howard Smith, czar of the Rules Committee, promised that "I shall not dilly, I shall not dally, neither shall I delay" and then proceeded to do all three. Judge Smith had once justified slavery on the grounds that the Romans and Egyptians had used it to build their civilizations. He also noted that southerners had never accepted the idea that the "colored race" had equal intelligence, education and social attainments as whites.

He was not alone. Over on the Senate side, I reported that "This afternoon it was JW Fulbright who said the issue of discrimination was non-existent -- raised every four years for political reasons." Fulbright at the time was participating in a southern filibuster that had already been going 69 hours, far longer than any previous effort.

Among those also taking part were Sam Ervin and the rambunctious, hard-drinking Russell Long who managed to hold the Senate floor for eleven hours. This, however, was no record. Two years earlier, Strom Thurmond had held the floor for more than a day.

Thurmond reportedly described to Rep. Wayne Hayes in some detail how he managed this feat without having to relieve himself, noting that he had taken saunas, avoided liquids and so forth. Hayes listened thoughtfully and then said, "Strom, I can understand how you went that long without pissing, but I can't figure out how someone so full of shit as you could have done it."

At the time, I saw these stories as separate events but it seems now that it wasn't a bunch of stories I covered back then, but rather the end of one big story, a story that Americans such as I had been raised to believe, a story about perfectibility and how close we were to it and how easy it would be to go the rest of the way. At the end of the story was not what we had been told to expect. At the end of the story there were guards keeping people out of amusement parks and coffeehouses being shut down by cops who thought poets were dangerous. It turned out that the end of the story was that much of the story hadn't been true.

I couldn't have put it as directly then. I was only 23 but I know those months changed me even as they changed the country. I no longer thought of the Capitol as a cathedral, the exciting had turned tawdry, the right choice was less certain and the important no longer peremptorily apparent.

I had stopped noticing the shine of the marble. The floors of the House and Senate office buildings became harder, the hallways darkened, and the doors that lined them seemed to conceal more than they invited. Even on foggy and rainy evenings, the Capitol dome no longer floated in the sky but sat lumpy and leaden on top of the Hill, waiting for a new story to begin.