The Failure in Albany, Georgia

Peter deLissovoy, '64, a white Harvard student, has since June been working for SNCC in Albany. The story of "Knight" is true.

The story of the involvement and disinvolvement of a Southern Negro gang leader in integration work with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee

"C.M.E. bad all right, but it ain't nothin' like it was two years ago." Knight Collins emphasized his judgment with the tap of fist against cupped hands, and we walked.

(Dirt roads and sagging, patched, unpainted shacks. The inevitable railroad tracks. On summer mornings, cotton trucks rolling through the streets in search of pickers. Blood stench in the air on slaughter day at the meatpacking plant. A 29-year-old grandmother drunk--clinging to a tree. Children.)

"You know what the letters stand for, C.M.E.?" Knight did not wait for me to answer. "Used to be that C.M.E. Church over yonder, back when that church was a big thing. But it dosen't have anything to do with it any more. C.M.E., it stands for crime, murder, and the electric chair.--Shoot, I seen white folks run here just from fear of slowin' down. Seen it two years ago, anyhow."

Knight and I walked by a liquor store. The manager was replacing a cracked window pane with plywood, shaking his head, apparently done at last and forever with glass.

Knight lowered his voice: "Had a little trouble here last night--cop got shot." He grinned. "Same little raggedy-ass cop we kidnapped back in '61.--Hell, it ain't nothin' like it was back then. Them cops came right in here last night. We didn' use' to 'low no cops in C.M.E." Knight rubbed his chin. "I don't know what it is. Looks like the Movement got people kind of non-violent. Two years ago, they wouldn'a showed up for a Brinks robbery."

* * *

Knight was known around Albany as a "gang leader." In the South, this implied nothing about jackets, a "turf," organized warfare or a hierarchical command, but meant simply that he fought hard, drank a lot, carried influence among his male peers in C.M.E. as the best among equals, and weilded genuine authority only over the age-group that rides souped-up bicycles and smokes cigarettes with great flourish. Quick, wild-grinning, tall and made taller by the brush of his untended process, he was working when he could, hustling what he could, living round the circle of his relatives and women, and working out his own "race problem" by rolling white drunks and taking potshots at cops.

Our first conversations were necessarily political. Knight assumed my inferiority in his territory and wanted to prove it in mine: the white problem. He knew my line of course. He had heard it before. I was working for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, I was "the new Movement cat," and so I could be counted on to talk voter registration and non-violence, and to exonerate white drunks and poor-white cops of ultimate blame for the exploitation of Negroes in this country.

We talked most about the Tift Park swimming pool. It was early summer, hot, and the pool, which the City of Albany was keeping segregated despite court rulings by "selling" to a private party, was a prime symbol of discrimination. Knight wanted to blow it up--white swimmers and all. I argued for demonstrations, saying that these would involve more Negroes than a simple demolition job, and so lead to a longer, wider struggle. And I remarked the possibility of victory and suggested there should be something left to swim in.

"You don't know these crackers," Knight sneered. "They'll close it down before they'll let us swim in it. Then I'll have to blow it up anyway, and I won't get nobody."

But we talked again. Ultimately, my argument boiled down to something like, "Well, you don't know because you haven't tried." And then one day he was persuaded. One day be hailed me in the street:

"Hey man, gonna do me some integratin'."

"You're gonna what?"

"Gonna integrate me a pool."

Off he strolled. He wouldn't say more. And in an hour, he was in the SNCC Office, water running from his sodden trousers, his face and hands dried by the long run from the pool. He had picked up two of his boys. The three had vaulted the fence, taken a dip in the forbidden pool, and exited by the front gate under the gaping, ineffectual stares of the whites.

"I jump in an' that sorry little life guard yells, "Hey, hey, hey." Knight slumped down in a chair. "Duv' off that board a few times, he was blowin' that foolsh little whistle, and baby, we walked out just as straight!"

People get into the Movement in strange ways. This was Knight's way. Two evenings later, we told about it at mass meeting. The jump was one of those brilliant, total, solid-silver triumphs that satisfy so perfectly a basic human need, and Knight was applauded to the speaker's stand.

"Well, we had a fine little swim all right. Even got me a tan." Knight looked down at the black of his hand and laughed, and then he looked around the church and grew serious.

"Only--" He hesitated here, almost stopped, but something made him go further.

"Only we still had to jump the fence, and I want to see the day we can all go through the gate."

Amid cheers, Knight walked back to his seat, committed now to integrating Tift Park pool. A few days later, when we demonstrated against segregation in public accommodations, he went to jail with us.

* * *

We were walking in a column, carrying no signs, singing softly. Knight was just ahead of me, singing too, very proud, very straight. We had intended to walk into the white downtown area. But the cops stopped us long before we reached it. When they came down on us, I watched Knight's reaction, and I could see that it was painful for him to submit to the roughing up and the arrest without a fight.

But then there was a fight--Knight against himself, Knight fighting to forget a great part of his past. And the fight continued: Ordinarily, once subdued, Knight would have "Tommed" to the cops. That is, he would have suppressed all pride, all hate, all honesty, presented only the laughing, awkward, servile, lewd surface that they wanted to see, and so maybe got an occasional pack of cigarettes and a soft job on the work gangs. That was the game: Fight in vengeance, fight to escape, but if caught, make the best of it.

But this time Knight was cold and aloof and proud, and the cops were troubled by it. Knight the drunk or Knight the thief they expected and even wanted, but Knight with the Movement was a threat and a challenge. In the jailhouse, they attempted to show him how he had gone wrong. They tried cajoling:

"Knight boy, you been misled. You been listenin' to that damn communist over there, but boy you don't know what he got in the back of his mind. You ought to be proud of your race. You ought to be ashamed, messing around with this integration trash."

And when Knight merely yawned, thew grew desperate and angry:

"You goddam Movement nigger. You don't want nothin' but a white woman nohow, do you?"

"Me? Not me, boss. Me, I want thirty or forty."

He said it merely to infuriate them. I could see he was enjoying his psychological superiority. When they threatened to handcuff him to the bars and "whup his ass," he only shrugged.

There was just one time that I thought he might crack in jail: At breakfast one morning, one of the cops poured hot coffee over a fifteen year old girl who was in jail her seventeenth time for the Movement, and in the moment of her scream, Knight started forward. He checked himself though, gave the cop a you'll-never-touch-me smile, and turned his anger to brushing the coffee from the girl's hair and clothing. He had gone to jail understanding what the struggle demanded, and, strain though it was, that's how he stayed.

* * *

The weeks in jail were a struggle themselves, and our release seemed like a triumph. But right away we saw we were living in the same old Albany. As in every demonstration over the last two years, the Albany cops had swept us off the streets as fast as we had appeared (the charges: disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, assault, attempted murder, parading without a permit, running a red-light), the one white newspaper had made no report, and thought it had legal sanction to act (the first amendment to the Constitution, section 242 of the U.S. Criminal Code), the Federal Government had made no move to protect the rights of its citizens to petition and assemble.

Tift Park pool was still segregated of course. The demonstrations had not made segregation of the pool an issue even. Most whites did not know the demonstration had occurred.

And we had anticipated it all. It will be a long hard battle, we had told ourselves. But in the dank, filthy, crowded (on the Negro side, fourteen and sixteen people in cells made for four) Albany jail, the struggle to stay merely human had obscured the social battle. Once free, a sense of the complete futility of our suffering settled down upon us like a heavy, enervating fog.

One day, Knight finally said it:

"Want to jump a fence?"

"Man, this thing's not going to be won in a day. But if we stick to it--"

"I got some dynamite."

"Look baby, we want victory. Whichever way you think we can--"

"I 'bout had it with that kind of victory." He said it slowly, sadly.

* * *

The demonstrations occurred in June. They were the last of any size that Albany has seen. There is a sense of failure in the city. ("Trouble with the Movement, we marched and we marched and we went to jail, we marched and we went to jail.--Now we done stopped marchin' an' all that's happened, we ain't goin' to jail for marchin' no more.") The number of committed Movement people is declining. The faith in the power of right that was intense enough to touch even guys like Knight has been shaken, and with it--though temporarily--faith in the idea of struggle itself.

Over time, moral appeal having failed, spirit will revive around a more pragmatic and diverse attack. Already, voter registration is the central activity of the Movement in Albany. And tiny and depressed though it is, the Movement is organizing for a selective patronage campaign against Coca-Cola.

But, immediately, the lull will continue, and protest will be the province of the few and stalwart. Immediately, there is a re-awakening to what the white man is about in the South, and a backsliding into old Southern habits. Who failed? The white man failed--failed to measure up to the conception of man with which the Movement began. These days Knight has about as much time for me as a poker player for a man who, somehow, persuaded him to play a hand as if pairs were high.

I saw him the other day in C.M.E.

"What's happ'nin', Knight?"

"I'm supposed to say, 'The Movements happ'nin',' aint I?"

"I don't know. A lot of people used to say it like that."

"Only the Movement ain't happ'nin' no more."

"People gettin' their wind, man. You know can't nothin' kill a thing like this."

Knight was starting away. I stopped him:

"Ain't nothin' goin' on around here at all?"

"Well--" He grinned. "I got me a rent collector the other night." The grin became thoughtful. "C.M.E. gettin' bad again."