Climbing Jacob's Ladder,-by Pat Watters and Reese Cleghorn
Robbins, Richard
IN THAT BEST AND WORST OF TIMES for the South, the decade from 1955 to 1965, a remarkable drama unfolded. The best came out of "The Movement," the loose coalition of civil-rights groups. The...
...The Movement's young people, black and white, went into the Negro communities to persuade the people to organize, to march in peaceful demonstration, as a means of gaining back what the white man had taken away unlawfully in the first place —the right to vote, to dine and travel freely, to be decently schooled and treated with respect at the courthouse...
...The President and his brother, the Attorney General, were men of good conscience, troubled—especially after Birmingham—by what they saw on television...
...By 1966 there were 2.6 million Negro voters in the South, 52 per cent of their voting-age population...
...We know now that the Ugly South of the sadistic sheriffs and sidewalk niggerhaters was one among many Souths...
...Shine...
...Here, wish appears to be father to their thought...
...IN THAT BEST AND WORST OF TIMES for the South, the decade from 1955 to 1965, a remarkable drama unfolded...
...so her mayor proclaims the city's "progressive" race relations, while its slums are festering not far from his own office...
...No public issue survives clear-cut, without shading or contradiction, though it may appear so at the time—but later, history duly provides us with a necessary balance and complexity...
...Remarkably then, in the face of unremitting local pressure and in the absence of a real federal presence (which only arrived very late), Negro voters' registration increased sharply in the South...
...State governors and state police spoke for law and order but broke it continuously by being studiously neutral, in order to repress black citizens...
...The "reformed" Byrd machine in Virginia is no answer to the educational crisis in Virginia...
...The stage had been set, in the words of the book's subtitle, for "the arrival of Negroes in Southern politics...
...Olive Baptist Church, Sasser, Georgia, a little frame building...
...BOOKS But if the subtitle points to results, the metaphorical title is the key to the value of this book...
...the young college girl, black or white, just beginning to reach people in the community across a wall of fear and silence...
...Watters and Cleghorn have not set out to analyze political theory and practice, but to present a history of quiet heroism in a deeply meaningful cause...
...They recall the terrible vulnerability of the voter registration groups and that of the people they were trying to reach...
...Their own commentary is clear, moving, beautifully written, and without a trace of sentimentality...
...The best came out of "The Movement," the loose coalition of civil-rights groups...
...the "reformed" Governor, once an arch-segregationist, has an interest in Negro votes, but none in Negro poverty...
...Olive Baptist was burned to the ground...
...Yet they maintain the distance needed to keep to human beings and human scale, even when describing unbelievable white vindictiveness...
...The South naturally seized the advantage handed to it...
...in Poland and Bulgaria...
...CLIMBING JACOB'S LADDER meets the first condition admirably...
...The FBI, quick as lightning in the pursuit of spies, followed a leisurely procedure in investigating the killing and wounding of civil-rights workers in the South...
...But the civil-rights struggle in the South during those years, as it worked itself out primarily in terms of The Movement confronting the Ugly South, brought us as close as we shall ever come to a clean division of justice and injustice...
...Suddenly, 15 white men, including a deputy, entered and stood at the back of the church...
...the black Harvard graduate returning South where work had to be done...
...Diary and memoir must give way to first histories, for the nonviolent direct-action movement down South is over...
...and they are understandably reluctant to concede how little continuity there now is between the new and the old...
...And a few nights afterward Mt...
...Later there would be a voter registration meeting...
...Climbing Jacob's Ladder is another in the series, and a very good one—as it has to be to hold our interest which now has shifted from the Southern county to the problems of the new separatism, "black power," and the Northern ghetto...
...the white figures were 10.6 million, 52.5 per cent of white voting-age population...
...new directions are required, both North and South...
...As churches and homes were bombed, as sheriffs and deputies applied the traffic laws with wild selectivity, unjust harassment and jailings became a badge of honor for the people in The Movement...
...In 1962 1.3 million Negroes were registered, 26.8 per cent of Negro voting-age population...
...What embittered them—and Watters and Cleghorn—was the glacial slowness with which the federal government responded to its citizens' pleas for protection from the minitotalitarianism in states like Alabama and Mississippi...
...It's so...
...They want to see The Movement continue—who does not...
...Much time elapsed before J. Edgar Hoover was finally induced to expand his Southern regional office...
...That is one reason why it has resulted in so many books, with many more to come...
...A way must be found, rather, to make use of the Negro vote now growing so as to get Negroes nominated for higher state offices and—why not?—for Congress...
...The key civil rights laws came in 1964-65...
...We see the tough, compassionate Negro lawyer who traveled the back roads to document BOOKS cases of voter intimidation and brutal police methods...
...Knowing The Movement was very far from perfect and now is gone from the South, I still turn again to page 161 of this book...
...In the same way, while the authors are realistically aware of the great obstacles to converting Negro voter registration into effective Negro voting power, they seem to foresee a conventional two-party system bidding for needed Negro votes and thereby affording Negroes a measure of change...
...In any case, conventional "bidding" promises even less and it demeans the spirit of The Movement about which Watters and Cleghorn write with such eloquence...
...We on the democratic Left are as much entitled to think about what The Movement meant and was as any royalist has to think back to companies and kings...
...The result was at best an eccentric civil-rights policy...
...They write as committed men who lived close to The Movement, and as men deeply ashamed of the region called the Ugly South...
...the corresponding white figures were now 14.3 million and 70.2 per cent...
...The statistics were built from "quiet little dramas of grandeur" all over the South as Negro men and women were guided toward registration, were moved in this or that small town to "redish...
...The worst occurred in those towns and cities where the white community's response to The Movement's demand for freedom and justice was met with implacable hostility, intimidation, frequent violence, and, on occasion, murder...
...The authors write skeptically of Southern oratory...
...Negroes, starting lower, had gone further under far greater stress...
...Martin Luther King had come over from Selma, on a special trip to Gee's Bend, Alabama, population 700, all-Negro, terribly poor: "I came over here to Gee's Bend to tell you, you are somebody . . . you are as good as any white person in Wilcox Coun ty...
...One night in July 1962, Charles Sherrod, Negro, led the prayers in Mt...
...justifiably...
...So was The Movement, and it too, for all its high purpose, had more than its share of internal conflicts...
...The measure of a book now is whether it has caught accurately the brief history of that special time and place, and whether it assesses the permanent impact, if any, upon the Southern system's power and politics...
...For former Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, South Carolina's first citizen and leading segregationist, they have but one sentence: Byrnes called for "free and unfettered elections...
...In two final chapters— "The Future of The Movement" and "The Future of Southern Democracy"—Watters and Cleghorn seem to falter...
...the President managed to appoint a federal judge whose racism was akin to Hitler's, and the Attorney General often wasted his energy on irrelevant issues, such as the sham "confrontation" with Governor Wallace at the University of Alabama...
...But they chose, wrongly, to rely exclusively on the federal courts and complex administrative procedures in the Justice Department, and to depend on a working and pragmatic relationship with Southern Democrats...
...The old ladies with head scarves knotted in front nodded, and said, "It's so...
...the young Negro from the town itself, determined and committed...
...Wielding power, black power, democratically, with some whites and over other whites, Southern Negroes can begin to get at some of those woeful social and economic conditions that press down on poor whites, and yet harder on poor Negroes...
...Watters and Cleghorn describe the field workers who were sent into the small towns and rural counties to establish contacts, sponsor meetings (often in the small Negro churches), explain the new freedom and how to register and vote...
...A new kind of black-white middle-class-led coalition seems light-years away in the Deep South...
...Atlanta, for example, has so far tried only the form and not the substance of it...
...This they have done surpassingly well...
...They have not attempted a comprehensive history of the civil-rights confrontation, but have built most of their book around the aspect they were closest to: the effort of the Southern Regional Council and similar groups to increase Negro voters' registration in the Deep South during the early sixties...
...Give God your glory, glory...
...The people sang, "We are climbing Jacob's ladder ., . Every round goes higher, higher . . ." And then, as the white men turned away and went outside, the singing became exultant: "Rise...
...WHAT OF THE SECOND CONDITION that has to be fulfilled by a book like Climbing Jacob's Ladder—that it try to estimate to some degree the impact The Movement and the new Negro voters might have on the future of the Southern social structure...
...But later that night there was further harassment from the sheriff and his deputies...
...Pat Watters and Reese Cleghorn are journalists who know the South...
...In the end, however, these criticisms of Jacob's Ladder do not matter very much...
...It is from the scribbled notes, the honest and sometimes uncertain reports of the field workers that the authors have woven their narrative...
...but it is possible...
...WATTERS AND CLECxoaN are hard on the Kennedys...
...Not much can come from this, I think, save a kind of Negro veto power against the worst white racist candidates turning up in either party...
...Local violence the project workers anticipated...
...The one case they cite, the survival of the grass-roots Mississippi antipoverty program, is due not so much to the program's roots in the Freedom Schools of half a decade ago, as they argue, as to its good fortune in having friends with power to intervene in Washington...
...They write of the Council's Voter Education Project (VEP) and those of SNCC, Martin Luther King's SCLC, and COFU (the Mississippi coordinating agency)—all with parallel goals and strategies...
Vol. 15 • March 1968 • No. 2
