Failure in Albany II: The White Minority

PETER deLISSOVOY, '64, a white Harvard student, has been working for SNCC in Georgia since last June. In an earlier article he discussed the role of a Southern Negro gang leader in the Movement.

She had long blonde hair. Thin rings of silver trailed from her pierced cars. Almost a parody of the Northern White "Liberal," she bounced confidently and sensually over the red-clay Georgia road, her sandals flicked up small clouds of dust, her face full and bright and her eyes flashing and darting as if she were caught up in a desperate search for someone to greet. The road was lined with small gray shacks of the sort owned by whites and rented at exhorbitant prices to Negroes. As she neared a cracked old structure that had settled dangerously on its western foundation, she stopped suddenly, flipped open the notebook that she carried, entered a remark, and then looked up again in time to wave generously at a Negro who was crossing the road halfway down the block: "Hil"

He stopped wide-eyed for a moment and looked incredulously at her. Then he seemed to catch his breath, and he began walking again, very rapidly, in a very straight line, head diving for shelter beween his shoulders. She shut her book efficiently and strode to the porch of the shack, taking its three steps in a single jump. She knocked.

After a while, the door opened a crack. It opened wider.

"Ma'am?" A middled-aged Negro stood, eyes narrowed, waiting.

Good morning sir. I work with SNCC--you know, with the Albany Movement. You've heard about the election next month of course. It's an important election and we're concerned that you realize how important it is that you vote in it. Have you a moment you can spare me, a moment for discussion? And don't call me 'ma'am'.--I could be your daughter."

The man gulped. "OH NO MA' AM!--I mean yes, ma'am--I mean yes... (ma'am)." He waited.

Sales Pitch

"All these years, white politicians have been stealing our votes with false promises about what they would do for the Negro, or buying them outright." Her voice was indignant. "Now we have a black man running for office. Now we have a man we can trust. And now we must realize that our votes can have meaning--can change this city. Have you registered, sir?"

"Me, ma'am? Uh, no, ma'am. I've been 'tendin' to, honest. Only my wife, she been sick..."

"Well you can't vote if you don't register. When do you want to go down?"

"To city hall, ma'am?"

"Yes--and just call me Julie--not 'ma'am.' We want to get rid of that 'ma'am' business. That's what the struggle's about."

"Oh . . . yes."

"Well when? We'll furnish transportation."

"Oh. . ."

"You work, don't you? How about Saturday monring?"

"Well..." He was overcome. "All right."

"You can get it over with in an hour and be right home."

She made a note in her book, extended her hand, and bounced from the porch, her face reflecting a controlled, anticipated satisfaction. A car full of whites passed. Necks crained. The driver turned around just in time to watch his car clatter noisily in and out of a shallow ditch.

"You see that?" she called, laughing, to the man she had just left.

But the door was closed. She was, without knowing it, a sort of miracle in the Georgia road--a mirage at first for whomever (black or white) saw her, then undeniable, and finally, damn it all, real enough, and a threat.

Inside his house, the prospective registrant scratched his car. He might have bought an insurance policy or a bottle of healing oil. Maybe she would forget to come back.

Whiteness is the problem of a tenacious if sometimes comical little minority within the American Negro Movement. It is not an insurmountable problem, as the cynics would insist, but it is difficult, three-like in its old deep roots and twisting ramifications, and, if not faced honestly and quickly by the afflicted, it can be crippling.

Julie, the dedicated young thing on the Georgia road, might go a week signing up registrants for Saturday, believing that she was identifying with the people and accepted and just like one of 'em. But come the big day, when not one in ten showed up, she would have to explain it--if only to herself.

The Explanation

Either they had forgotten or been detained (which ought to strike even Julie as implausible) or they had been plain-lying, and then why would they lie? If she were lazy or frightened enough, she just might accept the first explanation, hollow as it would sound. She might avoid the real problem (why did they lie?) as lesser people than she avoid so much by not seeing the Negro. And she might avoid it indefinitely if whatever she were running from in the North were sufficiently terrible, end up lying blatantly to herself and only step up the volume of romantic postcards sent home about the eufferin' and the new-found dignity--all set to turn cynical when expedient.

But if she were honest, she just might just try to figure out why it was that the Negroes had lied to her, and perhaps, sudden-like, she might see that it was the same old thing: White folks in this country have been demanding that Negroes lie to them for a long time. The lie and its anticipated consequence, a slight but noticeable and sometimes crucial lifting of the hob-nailed boot from a black neck, formed a principle of existence for a whole lot of people long before the Fathers signed their ambiguous document and still does. If you act white, you're going to be lied to. Or better, if you don't act black. Because skin is skin and it takes a heap of acting to get outside it.

Having gotten this far, Julie, if in were in her, might begin to grow--might master the old relationships in order to transcend them, become always sensitive to the gall of words, their effects, begin to learn a folklore, a new language, how to sing and dance. Liberals to the contrary, this would be a struggle in itself, and she would have to be very honest and sincere and have talent. This is the white problem: the cultural gap that does exist. The solution is to be black, and if few make it, some do--and are effective.

I remember a night in the Albany city jail. It was after a demonstration, the Negro cell block was crowded past humanity, and on the white side, two or three of us "white-niggers" were sprinkled among the drunks and hustlers. We had been singing freedom songs, loud and happy. It was very late. The booking section stands adjacent to the jail itself, and the night duty cops, who had been unable to work, but were trying to ignore us, finally stormed in, faces red, voices resping:

Two stopped at the white cells. "This trash keeps it up, you go ahead and do what you got to do," one said meaningfully to my cellmates. On the Negro side, I could hear the clatter of a drawn gun on bars like a stick dragged along a picket fence. "They'll be no damn singing in this jail!" came the shout. We got handcuffs to lock ever' one a you to the bars. Y'all shut up an' stay shut up--raisin' san' when we got to work!"

Tentative Silence

There was a tentative silence as if everyone were trying it out just to see how it sounded. Then next door to me, another white worker called out in the slow sing-talking rhythms of a black preacher: "White po-licel Listen now! I want you to hear me, white law-men! You better know, yes you better know that the white man's day is almost over! The days of Uncle Tom and Mr. Charlie, white po-lice, the days of lynchin' an' moanin' an' runnin' an' hidin', they near an' end. An' the end is so close, so close, Mr. Law, that Lawd, yes Lawd, I can see it. I can see the future. I can see the future rushin' at the present, an' lemme sing--lemme sing about the future: I'm singin' 'bout a white dog. I'm singin' 'bout a black dog. I'm singin' 'bout a blue dog. I'm singin' 'bout a green dog. I'm singin' 'bout any kind of dog.--An' that's the color of the future, white po-lice, that's the color of equality. LET'S SING ABOUT IT PEOPLE!"

The black voice from the white cell was a perfect affirmation, and an affront to the cops--it rang with contempt for them. And then it was brave, and so inspired bravery. There was sudden intense applause, and a thunderous burst of song:

"Oh, oh freedom, oh, oh, freedom,

Oh, oh freedom, over me..."

White leadership, when it emerges, is hardly white, and it is possible only when whites have the talent and time to become black. It takes time to become a part of any community. But when one is physically and culturally alien, then it takes a great deal of time. In the southern Movement and in SNCC, there are so many in-and-out, summer vacation whites, so many who do not know the meanings of white, who forget that, because they are white, they will have to prove themselves time and time again before they can be one of the people--fight with them and not for them. The vacationers register a few voters (sell a few gallons of healing oil and an insurance policy), antagonize a cracker grocery store owner or two (collegiate mischief), then take off for school and--poof--their work goes up in the smoke of myth and old habit.

In early June this year, a troop of plain-skirted, work-shirted college students pitched up in pecan-milling, cotton-ginning, very segregated Albany, Georgia, to make the revolution. There was a mass meeting soon after their arrival, and they were introduced to the other people as "friends who feel so deeply that segregation is a blot on our land that they have come down to help us destroy it." In the amen corner, old Mrs. Jones nodded her gray head beneath its round, straight hat, admiring, grave and grateful as if before a work of God: "Sacrificin' their summers an' all for the Movement." In the back of the church, four tight-trousered cats from the pool hall down the street looked a little incredulous. A carefully dressed young woman, a student from a nearby Negro college, turned a near chuckle into a slow, wry smile. But the revolutionaries did not interpret individual expressions, and only stood, a little in awe, before the great body of black faces for which they were now to become a head.

Speaking roughly, there were two varieties of white in southwest Georgia this summer. There were those, first of all, whose conceptions of the good brave beautiful man they would like to be had made academic life dangerously unsatisfying. At another level, this usually seems to have had something to do with a left-wing upbringing, some early identification, a driving need for fame, notoriety, praise or persecution, or an inadequate sex life on the campus. At first they debated a great deal about the Movement: Was it revolutionary or reformist and so on. But for all of them, working for SNCC was going to solve a lot of personal problems, and identification with the organization was much more than political.

Then there were the drifters, the life-collectors. There were only a couple of these. They had had sufficient experience to make them more honest and so clearer about what social effect their participation in the struggle was really going to have, and they didn't talk about it much.

Both types wanted to go to jail very badly at the beginning of the summer. Among the coffee house-fast freight-self-defense for the Negro-rice diet set, going to jail must be worth about as many points as a hitch-hike to southeastern Peru. And the simple yen for jail was the force behind their organizing. For several days, they moved around the circle of the very committed Negroes, assuring those who least needed it that this time demonstrations would be big and effective, and persuaded in turn by the inevitable enthusiasm of the Movement regulars that maybe they really would be. Long tedious organizing among the masses of Negroes (who were cynical and tired after a year's vain demonstrating) was hardly necessary if the people were so ready. Anyway, they would be leading somebody into jail.

Some Sobering

And they did. In mid-June, a bunch of cocky, naive college students went to jail with the shock troops of the Movement (who were going anyway) and two or three weeks later, they came out again - tired. Jail was a sobering experience. Beating acquires wholly new meaning when you are beaten for half an hour by a karate expert. 'Doing your time' is much more than a collegiate aspiration when you do it in a four-man cell with ten or twelve drunks and petty crooks who all know you're a "nigger-lover" and literally shake with their hate for you. Once out of jail, among the one group of whites, there began a withdrawal, a retreat, that was rationalized as a "waking up to the futility of demonstrations in this stronghold of southern racism and a turn to more realistic solutions to the problem." Kids who had been burning hot to lead the masses off to battle were suddenly very interested in selective patronage, voter registration, and federal contracting regulations. There was (is) validity to the turn, but it was a retreat nevertheless.

The drifters, naturally enough, began to drift. While the first group did its homework and sang Bob Dylan songs, the drifters checked out the rough black bars, picked up chicks, and, so as far as the other customers were concerned, slipped off into an old Southern tradition.

There were projects and plans of course. But nothing much got done, for, suddenly, the summer was over, school was about to open and the troops moved north to tell their tales of jail and suffering. No social walls had come tumbling down. No real organizing work had been done. There hadn't been time. A bunch of college students had had a titillating (the newspapers would call it meaningful) summer.

The white problem then is more than how to be black. It is, can you be? Do you want to be? Have you the time, talent, love? For SNCC, the problem is one of recruiting. But, with SNCC's image in the North--coffee-soaked, smoked-stained, streched like a guitar string and hope full like a song--it won't be easily solved. And neither will the white world's Negro Revolution.