Four Days in Mississippi

AMERICA

From MURRAY KEMPTON

Just 143 of these wanderers were still afoot en the road between Benton and Canton when one found them iu the morning. At their front walked Martin Luther King and Stokely Carmichael of the Student Non-Violent Co- ordinating Committee, an NBC announcer be- tween them, to whom they delivered variant points of view on black power.

It rained, off and on, in Canton that afternoon and Stokely Carmichael ran among the crowds of local negroes on the sidewalks crying out `Black Power,' Black Power'; they were not looking at him.

There was one of those emergencies which the movement, because it has lost the public's attention, seemed now to need to invent; the County of Madison had refused the marchers permission to erect their tents on the grounds of the negro school. They went to the courthouse first and sang their songs and under the delusion of that moment without inhibition by the estab- lishment, the local negroes joined the march to the school grounds to put up the tents.

Suddenly there were no more state policemen in sight. Stokely Carmichael and Martin Luther King stood on the moving truck which carries the tents of the marchers and Stokely Carmichael put his long arm in the air and said he understood that the troopers thought they could come and lake the school. 'Let us show them,' he said, 'that all the scared niggers are dead.'

Then the eve wandered and one understood where the state police had gone; they were lined up fifty yards away in their gas masks, their carbines at the ready. Someone counted sixty of them. 'This,' said Stokely Carmichael, 'is when we separate the men from the mice.' And then there fell upon the Madison County negroes the silence born of an understanding how brief had been their moment of mockery and affirmation, and they began to drift away from the truck. The marchers were alone again; they started to put up the tents.

The troopers came down and stood waiting until as much of the game as wished came down into their hunting preserve. And then the march's crew raised their arms and held the tent edges aloft and the troopers threw their gas canisters. The wind was perfect for the attack. Men lay down in the smoke and it blew through them sluggishly. Then men and girls began to run. 'Don't stop them. Leave them an escape route,' a troop commander called. And, behind, with the cold malice of a man who has hated them and their company for three weeks, a trooper threw a canister at each coughing beaten figure as it passed.

There were perhaps a dozen resistants left to be cleared. Three troopers had a youth with a football sweater on the ground and they were kicking him into the road. One understood then that there had been orders for no arrests. just a beating from the field.

'Get up,' a trooper said to the youth he w as kicking. The voice came hollow and impersonal through the gas mask; the reality of power had no face except the long snout and the plastic eyes. At the other end of the ground, two troopers had a white man down; one of them

hit him three times in the face with the butt of his carbine; one could hear the bolt bounce and the wood crack. He rose at last outside on the road, one side of his face pushed in and the other swollen out, and went away—on his back a patch with the inking 'Medical Assistant.'

The Attorney-General of the United States said late at night that he was confident that law and order were being maintained. The Governor of Mississippi announced that the marchers had attacked his state police. None of the Attorney- General's representatives on the spot seemed in a position to say what every witness knew, that this statement was a lire. It is, of course, law and order when everyone who hits anyone else is wearing a uniform.

FRIDAY, Philadelphia.—The marchers had almost been driven from Philadelphia here, four days ago; according to their nature and their commitment, they had to return today.

The coming back to Neshoba County began with the sight of those persons who had never left it, of the cars with the rebel flags around the courthouse, and of the Baptist church on the hill above Philadelphia, where perhaps 200 of the county's negroes sat and waited for what they knew they would have to endure, at worst to be hit, at best to be scorned. They sang a long time about how they were ready to do what the spirit says they have to do. It was more a prayer than a song: their leader made no effort to in- crease their beat; they knew and yet they were ready and they had earned the right to be a little sad about the moment before them. Then the marchers came out of their cars and the beat increased. It is the point of their mission to tell the county negroes that they have nothing to be afraid of; that is, of course, not true, but it is in the small lies to self that real self-respect begins. The marchers have earned their right, too.

The march back was over negro gravel and came at last to white pavements and its course was being directed by the sheriff's deputy, Cecil Price, charged by the Federal government with having conspired to abridge the civil rights of James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Foodman by assisting in their murder and burial in a red river bank.

In the square, the marchers lined up faithful to their agreement to keep off the courthouse lawn, separated from those who hate them by troopers

who also hate them and by two thin pieces of string and perhaps twenty feet of roadway on each side. The Rev Clinton Collier, leader of the Neshoba County Freedom Democratic Party, stood on the steps and, as he began to speak, the howls of the spectators began and a few bottles were thrown, harmlessly. It was the first time in Clinton Collier's life—and the next could hardly be close—that he could speak his mind to all of Neshoba County.

He used it in a way that ought to have made everyone present wonder how he would use his own one chance. He had known more comfort- able places, he said. 'But I don't much care as long as I can be here and declare our rightful place in Neshoba County. . . . We have been dictated to long enough. You can tell about these people who are yelling at us because, if they had decent things to do, they would be home tending to their own business. We are here to help this county. And we will come back until we can declare that every bit of a man everywhere in the world is like every- one else.'

Oddly enough, the horrible crowd around the courthouse was listening; it heard every sentence through and then spat it out of its mind with a howl of hatred. It went on like that all through this special half-hour of these county negroes until King's turn came and the crowd spat out each of his sentences with special disgust until he arrived at his peroration: 'We're gonna win because, though the arc of the moral universe is immense, it bends towards justice. We're gonna win because there standeth God in the shadows protecting his children.' Then suddenly, almost harsh: 'We're gonna win because the Bible is right when it says, "You shall reap what 'you sow."' And he stopped and just as suddenly there was silence all about. It lasted just long enough for nothing to be heard until the beginning of the applause of the marchers.

So this whole day was perhaps half a second when Martin Luther King enforced upon us the reflection that what you sow you shall reap, and the ten seconds when a Negro preacher could look upon white people and tell them that, if they had decent things to do, they'd mind their business.

SUNDAY, Jackson.—And now the poor 143 of Thursday come down from Tougaloo for the last eight miles, 8,000 by now and another 6,000 wait- ing to join them at points along the way and all singing about the light of freedom.

The march had been slow on Thursday from the mere need to endure. It was as slow now from the congestion of triumphant wake and when it came, after an eternity, to the state capital, the few white teenagers who had come to scoff were quite invisible behind the incredible file of black faces. There seemed, indeed, more white marchers than there were white protesters.

The day after James Meredith had been shot, someone said, the march had begun not just without money but without the promise even of food. 'And so we sent word down the road that these are black folk and they are coming down the line and, where we went, you were there to feed us.' And he looked at all these people he'had never known before and said, 'It was what you did, what you did.'

So these men, Meredith, King and Car- michael, have done all the things they hale done because they have refused to accept what everyone else knows to be the reality of existence. Now they had been rescued by the poor negroes who had refused to accept the harshest reality in their country. No one thanked anyone else. Thanks are for distinguished visitors. Members of families do not owe it to one another.