Chapter IX: LCFO, SNCC, AND DICK GREGORY

“Watch out for the preachers. Captain’ll double cross you when it’s his rent gotta be paid.”

…Dick Gregory, as quoted in Carry It On by Susan Youngblood Ashmore

The next morning over breakfast, Elmer announced that there would be no field work that day. All the SCLC staff would be busy preparing for the Saturday anniversary. We were to go to the office and help out wherever we could. I for one felt a huge sense of relief. I was hung over, dispirited, and still confused over Stokely’s monologue at the Chicken Shack. Even though fogged by the effects of too much drippin’s, I distinctly remembered it included sentiments that whites should more or less just send money but stay home. In my hangover I thought, ‘Well, I’ll drink to that.’

But I had to admit that there was something edgy about Stokely that I liked. When we got to the SCLC offices, Jim Myers and I stole away and went upstairs. Stokely was in the corner of a back room, sitting at a table made of a wide board spanning two stacks of boxes. The previous evening’s collations hadn’t seemed to affect him at all. He invited us to look around while he started in right where he left off the night before. I picked up a small slip of paper, shown in Figures IX-1a and 1b. When he saw what I had, he laughed and said that little piece of paper was what got all the arsons started in Lowdnes County. He told us he had passed out hundreds of them and that the visual impact really upset the whites. He also said that it saved him having to go into long explanations about what the LCFO was all about and what he was trying to do. “They probably used those instead of rags for the Molotov cocktails,” he said, turning aside to rummage through one of the endless stacks of papers on the floor.

“Here, this is what I was trying to draw last night.” He handed me a six-page pamphlet. Right there on the front was the black panther. I was amazed that the one he drew on the cocktail napkin looked so close. “Check that out while I finish up my speech.” There must’ve been fifty of them in the stack. Jim picked up another, and we sat on the floor and read. The booklet in its entirety is shown in Figures IX-2a though -2k (the back of the sixth page is blank). Jim made a disparaging remark about the Alabama Democratic Party having a chicken as a symbol. Neither of us had seen it before.

“All you needed was a little zoology to come up with something better than that. There’s nothing dumber than a chicken. I would’ve picked a unicorn. A white elephant would be the wrong party. I came up with the panther in about two seconds. I read somewhere that the last thing people remember before being attacked is the eyes.” This last bit tickled him no end, and he kept laughing to himself as he looked through his notes.

“Now, I hear that Martin himself is going to be here tomorrow,” he said looking up. Jim volunteered that the people downstairs at SCLC kept saying early this morning that he was too busy with affairs in Atlanta, but that comedian Dick Gregory was already in town somewhere. Jim asked if there was anybody else from LCFO around. Stokely laughed, “Shit, this is Friday. They’re all working! Hey, here, have a button.” He gave each of us a blue button with the black charging panther. I pulled out a button that an SCLC staffer had given me back on Monday to wear while we were out doing fieldwork and looked at both of them in the palm of my hand. The two couldn’t be more different, and I think they sum up the two political philosophies currently warring over the blacks in the Alabama Black Belt (Figure IX-3). I wore the LCFO button off and on all through the rest of that academic year and the next. Even most of the SCORE members didn’t know what it represented. Figure IX-4 shows my younger brother Rob and me under the Juniata sign on Moore Street in the fall of 1966 at the start of my junior year. You can just see the button through the obscenely loud American Madras plaid sport coat.

Figures IX-1a & 1b. Front & obverse side of Stokely’s famous “tiny slip of paper that upset the apple cart.” Stokely claimed that this piece of paper did more to galvanize the rural blacks of Lowndes County to action and did more to galvanize the whites to retaliation than anything he had ever done or said. And that’s saying something.

Figure IX-2a. Stokely Carmichael’s LCFO manifesto, used as a field guide for volunteers out in the “rurals” and as a handout at rallies and political gatherings. This is the panther Stokely was trying to duplicate on the bar napkin at the Chicken Shack the previous night (Figure VIII-6).

Figure IX-2b. The inside page of the pamphlet was used by field workers registering voters out in the “rurals.”

Figure IX-2c. This primer language was necessary for people who had never voted in their lives, either to read on their own or to be read to them by field workers.

Figure IX-2d. “What is politics” follows the primer style, but I doubt that blacks needed to be reminded of the ways they had been denied the right to vote.

Figure IX-2e. This scene could have been drawn during the meeting we attended on Wednesday night.

Figure IX-2f. Stokely had the county “covered” for his fieldwork.

Figure IX-2g. A slightly different map of the county.

Figure IX-2h. Susan Youngblood Ashmore explains in detail how the white power structure thwarted efforts of the blacks to organize.

Figure IX-2i. I can’t imagine that this detailed explanation of Alabama voting laws was used in the field. It all had to be covered, though. It was just this type of information that the whites didn’t want the blacks to know.

Figure IX-2j. Brave words, but the sad results of the 1966 fall elections showed just how far things still had to go.

Figure IX-2k. The back page of Stokely’s pamphlet.

Figure IX-3. A tale of two buttons. On the left is the one given to me by the SCLC staffer to wear while walking with him out in the “rurals” of Dallas County, AL…all very kum ba yah. On the right is the LCFO Black Panther button given to me by Stokely Carmichael at his temporary office inside the SNCC offices in Selma. Is it any wonder that Stokely drove the white, pickup truck crowd over the edge? While SCLC theorists were quoting Thoreau and Gandhi, Stokley was throwing a panther at every white face he met.

Figure IX-4. My brother Rob and me at the start of my junior year. Unfortunately, I don’t look very radical, but the Black Panther button on my right lapel did make a statement. American madras and black power were certainly an odd mix for the ultra-conservative Juniata College of September 1966.

There was a commotion in the front rooms. Stokely listened, then stood up. “Julian’s here. Might as well go say hello.” Neither Jim nor I knew who Julian was, so we followed Stokely out to a small group of SNCC staffers who were in a half-circle around this young, well-dressed black guy. The circle parted as Julian Bond, later to be almost as famous as MLK himself, put out his hand. “Stokely! How are things in the county? I here it’s been kind of hot lately.” The not-so-oblique reference to the recent arsons made everybody laugh. Both Jim and I stood at the outside of the circle and tried to listen. Unfortunately, I can’t remember all they talked about. After a minute or two, Jim and I went down a flight to the SCLC office to find out what everybody was doing. The rest of the Juniata contingent was on the streets passing out handbills, one of which is shown below in Figure IX-5. Note that Susan Youngblood Ashmore has the incorrect date of April 11th in her book. This would’ve been the following Monday, and there would have been a much smaller crowd on a workday. The “projects” mentioned were a series of one-story apartment buildings with a fairly substantial amount of lawn around the buildings.

Neither SCLC nor SNCC are mentioned because, aside from all the associations with the March To Montgomery and Martin Luther King, the rally was really a sort of coming out party for the Dallas County Independent Free Voters Organization, which had been formed just a week or two earlier with support from SNCC and with the intent of forming a third political party just as Stokely had done with the LCFO in Lowndes County. Although the SCLC Selma office supported the effort, SCLC headquarters and the federal Office of Economic Opportunity supported an organization called Self-Help Against Poverty for Everyone, or SHAPE, that was formed just the previous fall. When you throw in the Dallas County Voters League and the Alabama Democratic Party, you can see how it was just about impossible for our group to keep the acronyms straight, let alone figure out who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.

Down on the second floor, we were put to work carrying various pieces of sound equipment down to a pickup truck parked on the curb. The building housing all three civil rights organizations was right across from the Selma municipal building that included city hall, the main police and fire stations, and the county sheriff’s office, courthouse, and jail. The big doors to the fire station were open during daylight hours every day we were there, and there were always two to five firemen sitting on chairs in front of the two fire engines, with an assortment of others always standing around. It seemed to be THE stopping place for every police officer and sheriff’s deputy that had business inside the building. They seemed to find the comings and goings of all the civil rights workers to be highly amusing and would yell over at whomever went in or out of the building. They would get particularly agitated whenever anyone from our group appeared, talking loudly about “white niggers,” who as far as we could understand were the lowest creatures on the evolutionary scale and all of whom had dire portents in their futures, which they seemed convinced were very short.

Already in early April, the windows in both the SCLC and SNCC offices were open during the day, and the loud threats would start up whenever they saw any of us at a window. For some perverse reason now lost to time, Fred Bailey, Jim Myers, and I took strange delight in putting both hands on the lower windowsills and leaning slightly out. This mild form of redneck baiting was very much out-of-character for all three of us. The ghosts of Goodman, Schwerner, Chaney, Reeb, and Luizo and a dozen others were very much in everyone’s mind who worked civil rights in the south. To this day, I don’t know why we persisted. Finally, an SCLC staffer put a stop to it. I know Elmer Maas was extremely upset by our behavior.

Our small assignment was finished in just a few minutes. Phil Jones drove up, and the four of us returned “home” very early. We got cleaned up and spent the late afternoon sitting on the front porch. After everybody returned and we had eaten dinner, Phil Gruber stopped by and asked if we wanted to visit one of the local civil rights activists who lived in the projects. Turns out, Phil Jones knew the family well because it was one of the daughters who was the recipient of his Easter duck. So five of us crammed into Phil’s 1955 Chevy and drove over. Phil knew the way, and I wondered how many times he had visited the apartment over the week we had been in town. I can’t remember anybody’s name, but we had a great time coloring Easter eggs in the kitchen. For whatever reason, one of the daughters who was in high school and who was very good looking, took a liking to me, and we more or less spent the evening talking between ourselves. We were all very relaxed because the field work was over and the next day was to be a holiday of sorts, with the rally taking up the morning and maybe even an outside chance of meeting Dick Gregory or even MLK himself.

Figure IX-5. Handbill for the anniversary rally. These were posted and handed out all over Selma and rural Dallas County. Unfortunately, MLK, Jr. never made it. Note that Julian Bond isn’t on the program, although he did give a speech. SNCC and SCLC aren’t even mentioned.

The rally the next morning went by in a blur. Martin Luther King never made it, but Dick Gregory added a measure of cachét to the event and was extremely funny in his remarks on national and local politics. I kept thinking, ‘he’d never be able to say this stuff on TV.’ In the afternoon, we ended up back at the apartment in the projects. We were only there a few minutes when in came Dick Gregory and Julian Bond. What started out as a friendly social call became a verbal free-for-all of standup comedy, SNCC rhetoric, and politics and sociology from the “rurals” to the White House. What struck me was that Gregory kept trying to steer the conversation to foods and health, obviously a new obsession with him. I remembered well his standup routines on the Tonight Show and other venues, but never knew that he was some sort of health freak. Julian would start in on the problems of education in the Black Belt, and Dick would interject with the advantages of eating some raw vegetable or another. In any case, when the afternoon ended my ears were ringing and my mind utterly exhausted with the intensity. It was as if I’d been at an organic foods political rally.

We left the apartment only after promising to return that evening for a sort of going away party. We were scheduled to leave Easter Sunday as early as Elmer could get us all up and out the door. Our last supper was quite an affair, and it was at the end of the meal that we were all introduced to double-decker sweet potato pie. It haunts the taste buds of my memory to this day. In 45 years, there’s never been anything like it.

The party turned out to be a fairly subdued affair, especially considering the verbal mayhem of that afternoon. Everybody was pretty much tired out, the blacks from all the excitement of the rally and our group from the week’s work out in the county. We got back on campus late in the evening of Sunday, April 10^th.