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May 1970:
North & South, Mountains & Deserts - & Blood
by Hunter Gray
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Kent State Incident
On April 30th, 1970 President Richard Nixon announced on national TV the call-up of additional troops for the war in Vietnam. This caused rioting on many college campuses throughout the nation. At Kent State University, students burned the ROTC building. The Governor of Ohio called out 900 Ohio state National Guardsman to restore order on the campus. On May 4th, 1970, the Guardsman opened fire on the students killing four and wounding eight.
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Early on, I could tell it was going to be one hell of a big
protest march - even for Chicago. My car safely parked, I
walked north through and with increasing numbers of people
- people of all ages and all colors - and all of us heading
to the edges of the downtown central business section.
There, where the massive march was fast taking shape, other
heavy streams of humanity were coming in from every other
direction.
The very early May 1970 afternoon sky was as clear as a
chemically tinted Chicago cover could ever get - and the
Sun forced the outlines of its face through. But the mood
of the people, all of us, was dark, somber, exuding
suppressed anger, bitterness. And some hope - hope that
this mass action, and all of the others taking place at the
same time across the nation, could prevent hideous things
from occurring and continuing. And maybe, too, that the
once bright springtime spirit of the 1960s - our time! -
could be restored and we could go on, in a mighty wave, to
build a society where a full measure of bread and butter
and a full measure of liberty - and peace - were all
permanent parts of the social/cultural geography.
In all our minds - every one of us - were the pictures
shown throughout the world of the just occurred bloodbath
in our good land: dead and injured students at Kent State -
peaceful young people seeking peace but sent to funeral
homes and hospitals by National Guard troopers often no
older than they.
But behind those troopers, and behind the hideous and
sanguinary "commitment" of United States military forces to
Southeast Asia were - as always - the glowing and
calculating and sanctimonious faces of the properly dressed
Old Men (and some not all that old) who make the wars they,
themselves, never fight.
I was, myself, hard-pressed for time that afternoon. In
only a few hours, I was leaving by train - the old IC, the
Illinois Central - for Jackson, Mississippi where I was
involved in a long-pending court action with civil rights
dimensions which was finally coming to trial.
But this was a march I couldn't and wouldn't miss. And I'd
made it.
The great pool of humanity gradually began to take the
shape of definitive action - a structured form directed by
the army of parade marshals who were arranging the vast
number of respective organizations into a linear line-up. I
learned that those of us who were not affiliated with any
of these formal groups would fall in behind the others -
and that could be a long, good while.
The Chicago police, somewhat on their better behavior,
signaled the start, and the great march began with Grant
Park, some many blocks away, the destination and designated
locale for the subsequent huge rally. Organizations and
groups, one by one and each with its banners held high - in
a fashion reminiscent of my Army days and its full-dress
parades of years before - moved out briskly.
One pulled up near me, stopped for a moment. Its
participants were somberly and darkly dressed, and their
faces one and all grim, committed, intense. I had no idea
what their particular tribal flag of the Left was and I
didn't care. Walking to its leader, a tall old man in a
black suit with a blood red emblem in its lapel and on his
face the look of a man who knew his way around the
ideological fencing ring, I said - using the old-time
Wobbly address with which I was especially familiar and
comfortable:
"Fellow worker, I don't have much time but I
want to march before I take the IC down to Mississippi for
a civil rights case. Can I join you?"
He looked me over, quickly, carefully.
"I haven't heard
that used for a long, long time," he said. There was a very
faint smile with a hint of decades now far, far away.
"You
certainly can join us."
So I did, and we marched along.
And, as we marched, I remembered.
It had been ten years since the Berkeley students had so
effectively, through non-violent demonstrations, defied the
witch-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee at San
Francisco - and only a few months before that since the
first civil rights sit-ins had begun in the Upper South and
the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee had formed.
At that time, I was in my native Arizona where already, for
half a decade, I'd been deeply involved in militant,
radical labor campaigns and Indian rights activities -
learning my organizing art and trade - even as I, piece by
piece, completed my basic academic work in sociology.
In the summer of 1961, my wife Eldri and I went down into
Mississippi where I now became a professor at Tougaloo
College, a private Black institution near Jackson. And
there I quickly became, too, the Advisor to the Jackson
Youth Council of the NAACP and a close colleague of the
extraordinarily committed Medgar Evers - and then a primary
organizer and chair of the Strategy Committee of the
historic Jackson Movement of 1962-63. Along with countless
others, I was beaten and arrested - many times indeed. In
mid-June of 1963, Medgar was killed, shot from ambush, and
we fueled the Jackson Movement even higher to become the
biggest mass upheaval in the history of that blood-dimmed
state.
Our march protesting the murder of Medgar and the racist
system which had manipulated his assassin, and which pulled
the trigger, took place on June 15, 1963: six thousand of
us from all over Mississippi and elsewhere, the first
"legal" civil rights march in the history of the state -
legal simply because there were too many of us to arrest.
We marched two miles in 102 degree heat, past hostile
police at every point, through grimly supportive Black
neighborhoods and through frightened and hostile white
ones. When that march was officially over, we had a huge
spontaneous demonstration which was attacked by many
hundreds of lawmen of all kinds, guns, dogs, tear gas. I
was one of 29 arrested.
Out on one of my now numerous bail bonds, I in my car and a
colleague riding with me were, less than three days later
and one week after Medgar's murder, seriously injured and
almost killed in a wreck precipitated by the son of a
prominent segregationist family. Our civil lawsuit against
these people, pending for seven years and now at the very
point of trial, was the reason I was heading to Mississippi
this day.
As we marched along the Chicago turf, I remembered other
times, other marches.
After Jackson - and we left that deeply jarred with
national and international focus on Mississippi for years
to come - I became a full-time civil rights field organizer
for the radical Southern Conference Educational Fund -
doing grassrootsorganizing and anti-Klan work in some of
the toughest and most isolated parts of the Deep South.
Much, much later I went into militant anti-poverty
organizing and leadership training in the rural South and
then, in 1967, Eldri and I and our growing family went to
the Pacific Northwest on the organizing trail and then on
and on.
Now, at Chicago, where I'd been since 1969, I was the
Southside Director - a new position - for the Chicago
Commons Association: one of the city's oldest and largest
private social service organizations. My vision was a
brand-new service area on the turbulent, pervasively
violent South/Southwest Side. With an excellent,
interracial and completely committed staff, we were
breaking new activist ground on the Toughest City's urban
frontier. Here, large numbers of white people were moving
out - out to the suburbs and beyond; and much larger
numbers of non-white people - Black, Puerto Rican, Chicano
- were moving in. The newcomers were finding that city
services were now suddenly and sharply curtailed by the
Richard Daley machine, they were finding police harassment,
and continual attacks by white racist gangs. We were
beginning a long-term project, organizing multi-issue block
clubs and federations of block clubs, made up mostly of
these new minority people but including any whites who
remained and who wanted to work with us.
Chicago - especially Richard Daley's era - was, it often
seemed to us, almost pure blood in ethos. Not too long
after I arrived, Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and
Mark Clark were murdered in a cold and calculated fashion -
"under color of law" - by Cook County States Attorney Ed
Hanrahan, an army of lawmen, and with FBI backup and
assistance. On the borders of our own massive project area,
in a white location called Canaryville and often known as
"The Bucket of Blood", a Black man from Tennessee, driving
in Chicago for the first time and lost at night, was pulled
from his car by a mob of three dozen white men, many with
baseball bats, who murdered him.
As we were literally moving into a storefront field office,
a horde of white Chicago riot police swarmed onto the yard
of a nearby elementary school - attacking Black and Puerto
Rican children and clubbing and arresting their parents. We
got the parents out and our protest rally was big - very
big! Our organizational efforts jumped ahead with great
rapidity.
Long, long before all of that for sure - and maybe even
long before I got to Mississippi - I had ceased to be
surprised by official and vigilante murder, brutality,
frameups.
I was certainly not surprised by Kent State.
And I was not at all surprised by the huge throng of
quietly surging people ahead and around and behind me on
these Chicago streets.
We arrived at Grant Park. My tribal host group and I parted
amiably with mutual handshakes and, as they went off to a
close-in rally vantage point, I camped under a tree on the
edges. I listened for awhile to the speeches, then went
back to my car and briefly home - and then I was on the
Illinois Central with the land falling out below me as I
headed down into Mississippi.
There were always some positive changes there when I
returned for visits. And now, I could see even more of
them: the hard-lines of resistance to social change weaker,
even broken in parts; more desegregation; the old
atmosphere of terror fast waning substantially; ever more
Black political activism; new unionization efforts.
But economic deprivation - poverty pure and simple - was
starkly to the fore across much of the scenery: the
Mississippi countryside from the train window - and in
Jackson when I got there. Still, in that very early May,
Jackson somehow seemed far more sedate and serene than
Chicago.
But I was not sanguine. Mississippi storms were so often
always preceded by, and in the context of, hot and
momentarily placid and languid afternoons.
A few hours after my arrival, I was in a chancery courtroom
setting where our case was scheduled. The walls hung with
portraits of the founders of the system and the wooded
walls and doors and everything else were polished to a
shine - befitting the high-church status always
characterizing Deep South court proceedings.
As it turned out, the most interesting thing about our case
that day was the intriguing social scene that swirled
around us in the minutes before the case formally began. My
colleague - white Mississippi civil rights activist
Reverend Ed King - and I and our lawyers, veteran Black
activist R. Jess Brown and gutty white maverick Dixon
Pyles, were surrounded by a flood of spectators who seemed
to me to be coming out of a time machine from the Bad Old
Days: a former sheriff, a once outspokenly racist and still
practicing criminal court judge, various old time white
politicians, police officials. Their faces were very
pleasant, their voices gracious and cordial. The same swirl
surrounded our formal adversaries: the young white man -
now completing a professional degree at Ole Miss - who had
driven the car precipitating the wreck, his obviously
worried parents, an older brother.
We were naturally - very naturally - wary at the good
fellowship and friendliness exhibited by once very hostile
judges and lawmen. But one could not help wonder - was this
a real change?
Compared to the old days, the court proceedings certainly
were. The presiding judge was the same old man who, seven
years before had issued the most sweeping, venomous,
anti-Movement injunction in the history of the Southern
struggle - City of Jackson vs. John R. Salter, Jr., et al.
- which we promptly defied. But now he was scrupulously
fair, even-handed. And the jury - the jury had blacks
(still new but not that new) and it also had women, very
new this spring to Mississippi juries!
The court proceeding itself moved routinely. Midway, the
adversaries indicated a wish to settle quickly out of court
and, with the proceedings temporarily adjourned, this was
effected satisfactorily. The judge then reconvened, thanked
the jury and everyone else, and adjourned. It was late
afternoon. People were now leaving quickly. But I stood in
the corner of the courtroom and looked to the other side
where the young adversary stood with parents - and his
older brother.
I, too, was the older brother in our family. The brother's
eyes and mine locked. As one, we moved toward each other
and, close in, held out and shook hands.
"Tell your brother," I told him,
"that we wish him very well in his career."
"I will," he said,
"And you have no idea how much that means to us. It means so much."
And there, for those of us in that little group, locked
together for seven years by a bloody and hideous spectacle,
that was change - heavy change.
But what of the world beyond? I still wondered as the
Illinois Central now carried me up through the dark
Mississippi night, the dim countryside rising - back to
Chicago.
After I got back, our organizing work very rapidly became
wildly intense. Waves of white violence were directed -
month after month and beyond - against our Black and Puerto
Rican and Chicano constituencies. We fought that off, found
our key field office set afire, I had to barricade my home.
A key staff member was viciously framed by the police - but
we got him quickly exonerated. Red-baiting was prevalent,
especially against me.
But three years later, we'd helped minority people organize
almost 300 block clubs and related groups and we'd
maintained and expanded city services; we'd pushed a dozen
court actions; we'd played the key role in preventing what
would have been one of Chicago's very worst race riots -
Labor Day, 1971 - by forcing power structure concessions on
the one hand and "cooling the streets" on the other. And
we'd fought the Daley machine, the Republicans, and the
police to the point where our new grassroots organizations
- democratically led and hard-hitting - were widely
respected and quite effective and essentially permanent
mountains on the South/Southwest Side scenery.
But now, of course, back in time - back to Mississippi.
Because just after I returned to Chicago from that very
early May 1970 trip to Mississippi - still wondering, How
much has really changed down there - came the news of the
Jackson State massacre: college kids, Black kids -
essentially peaceful demonstrators - shot down at night by
an army of white Mississippi lawmen. And so now if the
question of How much change down there ? was at least
partially, somewhat answered for the time being, other
questions seeking sharper, much more focused answers forced
their way up and out - pronto:
What did all of this mean - the shooting down of college
kids, North and South? Had Mississippi - and the Deep South
- become more like the rest of the country? Or was the rest
of the country taking on what Mississippi and the Deep
South had traditionally done so very well: killing the
victims?
Or were they all, ever, South and North, so vastly
different from one another?
I frankly decided that May 1970 that they were not so very
different - that they were always much more like one
another than many of us had wanted to concede. For no
matter how you cut the pie, the pieces are always
connected.
And then the really heavy question: Can we, any of us,
break the skeleton hand of the past - and build, really
build, toward the Sun? I said Yes! that May of 1970. And so
did a vastly large number of others - all over our land.
We kept going and many of us still do and many more indeed
will: over the mountains and through the long, arid
stretches and far, far beyond.
Always organizing. Always fighting.
- – Hunter Gray
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Note by Hunter Gray:
This contribution of mine will soon
appear in Too Many Martyrs. Edited by Susie Erenrich, this
is a very extensive collection of exceptionally fine
writing on the United States in the twilight of the 1960s
and the tragedies of Kent State and Jackson State. An
earlier anthology edited by Susie Erenrich and published
under the auspices of the Cultural Center for Social Change
is Freedom Is A Constant Struggle: An Anthology Of The
Mississippi Civil Rights Movement, Montgomery, Alabama,
Black Belt Press, 1999.
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