smash-pacifism-zine

John Lewis, the young president of the increasingly militant
SNCC, planned to give at the Lincoln Memorial rally. The
sentence that bothered Kennedy was "In good conscience,
we cannot support the administration’s civil rights bill, for
it is too little too late."[8] Primarily Lewis opposed the fact
that the bill did not protect blacks from violence or
guarantee the right to vote, but the statement seemed a clear
denial of the link between the march and the Kennedy’s
efforts to secure passage of this act. Others were offended
by Lewis’s speech as well. The Roman Catholic Archbishop
Patrick O’Boyle was troubled by the phrase, "Patience is a
dirty and nasty word," and the militancy of the lines: "We
will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie,
the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own ‘scorched
earth’ policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground nonviolently."[9]
A man who had worked tirelessly as a civil
rights activist for many years, O’Boyle said that if the
"Sherman" part wasn’t changed he wouldn’t deliver the
invocation the next day.
“(...)
“By late morning on the day of the march, Lewis
and several other SNCC leaders were huddled together with
march leaders in a security guard’s office behind Lincoln’s
statue still debating various edited revisions of the speech.
At one point a last-minute version of
the speech edited by the president
himself was delivered by deputy
attorney general, Burke Marshall, who
had rushed over in the sidecar of a
police motorcycle.”[10]
This set off a heated debate
that ended only with the elder,
Randolph, pleading with Lewis and
other SNCC members to tone down
their speech:
“Finally, perhaps to preserve
the spirit of unity and out of respect
for the long struggle of a venerable
leader, a salvaged agreement was
made. Despite the changes in
wording, Lewis’s speech was the most
militant of the day. Telling an audience
who interrupted his speech with
applause fourteen times that "the revolution is at hand," his
strident, impassioned language was a harbinger of a
separate movement to come.”[11]
Four victims of Birmingham Bombing.
Notes
[1] Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the
King Years, 1954-63. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988,
p. 840.
[2] Paula Pfeffer. A. Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil
Rights Movement, p. 244.
[3] Ibid, p. 249.
[4] Fairclough, Adam. Martin Luther King Jr. Athens,
Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1995, p. 89.
[5] Reeves, Richard. President Kennedy, Profile of Power.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993, p. 581.
[6] Hampton, Henry and Steve Fayer with Sarah Flynn.
Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights
Movement from the 1950s Through the 1980s. New York:
Bantam Books, 1990, p. 161.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Marable, Manning, and Leith Mullings, editors. Let
Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and
Renewal. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield
Publishers, Inc., 2000, p. 407.
[9] Reeves, p. 581.
[10] Branch, p. 878.
[11] Branch, p. 880.
* Randolph was a longtime organizer in the Black
civil rights movement. He was the president of the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a small but influential
union. Randolph had extensive contacts with organized
labour and business, and was critical in gaining support
from organized labour for civil rights groups. He was also a
“staunch anti-communist.”
_________________________________________
Birmingham Bombing,
1963
On September 15, 1963, just
weeks after the March on
Washington, a church in
Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed.
The target was the 16th St. Baptist
Church, an organizing base for the
civil rights movement in the city.
The attack occurred six days after
local schools were desegregated. The
bomb killed four young girls (one
was 11 years old, three were 14
years old).
As fireman and police arrived, a
mob of Black youths gathered and
began throwing rocks and bottles. In
the clashes that followed, two more Black youth were
killed, one by police and another by white youth.
In the streets, armed white racists patrolled their
neighbourhoods. King arrived that evening, secured in a
'safe house' with armed bodyguards, demanding the
deployment of federal troops from the Kennedy
administration.
Even at this time of outrage and sorrow, Kennedy
still manoeuvred to dampen Black militancy, using the
impending civil rights act as leverage:
“He then asked King to help forestall further
violent outbreaks and demonstrations. Kennedy said they
could adversely affect the civil rights bill... 'Congress can't
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