African Americans

At the end of June 1968, the Poor People’s Campaign–the enormous project that preoccupied Martin Luther King, Jr., in the last months of his life–came to a muddy, depressing end in Washington, D.C.

King had announced the plans in December 1967 at  a press conference, saying:

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference will lead waves of the nations poor and disinherited to Washington, D.C. next spring to demand redress of their grievances by the United States government and to secure at least jobs or income for all. We will go there, we will demand to be heard and we will stay until America responds. If this means forcible repression of our movement, we will confront it, for we have done this before. If this means scorn or ridicule, we embrace it, for that is what America’s poor now receive. If it means jail, we accept it willingly, for the millions of poor already are imprisoned by exploitation and discrimination. … In short, we will be petitioning our government for specific reforms and we intend to build militant, nonviolent actions until that government moves against poverty.

By the middle of May, thousands of poor people of all races  were pouring into Washington from all parts of the country.  A vast encampment of plywood shanties and tents–”Resurrection City”–was set up on the Capitol Mall, between the Lincoln Memorial and what is now the World War II Memorial.  The goal was to re-focus King’s demands for civil rights for African Americans to economic justice for all impoverished people, to make LBJ’s famous “War on Poverty” (declared four years earlier) into a broader national commitment.

In this issue of JET from just before the start of the campaign, the Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy–heir apparent to King and now head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference–said:  ”We used to sing a song in our church–’Take Your Burdens to the Lord and Leave Them There.’  We have decided that we are going to take all our problems, our bodies, our children, the rats and the roaches and everything to the White House and leave them with LBJ.”

But within a few weeks, Resurrection City and the Poor People’s Campaign began to collapse under the pressure of indifferent Federal leadership, internal squabbling, massive infrastructural failure, and general acrimony.  Nearly constant rain turned the tent city into a muddy quagmire–all too vivid and obvious a metaphor for the campaign’s failings.

One last gasp of hope was held on this day, however, in 1968:  June 19th (coincidentally, a date celebrated in some parts of the U.S. as ”Juneteenth,” an African American holiday).  At Resurrection City, this was “Solidarity Day,” and nearly 50,000 people marched through Washington in support of the Campaign’s goal of ending poverty.  And on this day, the sun was shining.  But five days later, bulldozers moved in and demolished the last remnants of Resurrection City.

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Forty-two years ago today, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis.  In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, America was convulsed by grief and outrage, as well as violent rioting in more than 100 cities.  American newspapers and magazines brought out special issues in honor of Dr. King.  JET–the small-format magazine that was a fixture in African-American homes in the 1960s–published this commemorative issue on April 18.  Today, it’s a collector’s item.

The Weekly Negro News Magazine

JET was founded in 1951 as the “Weekly Negro News Magazine” and is still published today by the Johnson Publishing Company of Chicago, which is also behind Ebony, the glossier, LIFE-sized black magazine.  JET is tiny:  just 4×5 inches, smaller even than Readers’ Digest, to which it is sometimes compared.  It was meant to provide bite-sized news and entertainment.  There were always news items from the civil rights front, gossip columns, sports news, book reviews, and entertainment features–all focusing on black subjects.

The killing of a prince

This commemorative issue is filled with photographs, including an open-coffin photo of Dr. King, which was less widely published in white-owned magazines.  The two-week lag between the killing and this issue also allowed JET to cover the many riots in American cities– a “mutiny of Negro citizens,” as Simeon Booker, the story’s writer, called it:  ”No single crime had enraged black men and women as the wanton killing of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the black prince of peace.”  Booker noted that the “intensity and fury of rioters and looters . . . eluded the Negro middle class.”

The Easter connection

JET noted that “among the strange coincidences of Dr. King’s death is the fact that, like the Saviour Jesus Christ and Abraham Lincoln, he was killed at Eastertime.”

(Easter Sunday in 1968 was on April 14.)   As the photo caption of Jesus, Lincoln, and King said:  ”all died for a better world.”

“We are pointing a gun at our own heads”

King himself is quoted liberally throughout the issue– the “Dream” speech, and the “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.”   But among the longest pieces in the issue is a reprint of a column by Chicago Daily News columnist Mike Royko.  He notes that the FBI would certainly catch up eventually to the killer (James Earl Ray eluded capture for two months), but that “it doesn’t matter if they do or if they don’t.”  Because, as Royko bitterly wrote:  ”Martin Luther King was executed by a firing squad that numbered in the millions. They took part, from all over the country, pouring words of hate into the ear of the assassin. . . . So we killed him.  Just as we killed Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy.  No other country kills so many of its best people. . . . We have pointed a gun at own head and we are squeezing the trigger.”

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Biafra: A disaster from the 1960s

The images from the catastrophe in Haiti this past week reminded me of another time that Americans were gripped by a similar disaster and its shocking images: the civil war in the tiny breakaway state of Biafra that was coming to a bloody peak in 1968.

“Look at us as human beings”

Ask people today where “Biafra” is and I suspect there would be few looks of recognition.  The civil war began there in 1967, when mostly Ibo tribesmen of southeastern Nigeria attempted to secede and create a new country: Biafra.  But, as LIFE’s editors said in 1968, it was a civil war that “has raged with a savagery barely noticed by the rest of the world.”  The vastly better equipped Nigerian forces–with arms supplied by Great Britain, Russia, and Arab countries–bombed Biafran towns and created blockades that led to mass starvation. The Biafran leader, Odumegwu Ojukwu, said to a reporter: “All I really ask is that the outside world look at us as human beings and not as Negroes bashing heads.”

Images of starvation

It was not the first time that the West had seen images of war and revolution coming from Africa, struggling to overcome centuries of colonial rule.  But in the 1960s, the word “Biafra” began to take on especially totemic meaning. In the American media at least, the word became synonymous with images of starvation, particular of starving children, with bellies incongruously bloating below stick-like ribcages, and always the huge, pleading eyes (like the “big-eyed” Keane paintings so popular in the 1960s).  People in the West even learned a new African word: kwashiorkor, a word describing protein malnutrition.

A world getting smaller

It’s striking to compare this LIFE cover from July 1968 is to one published just a few months earlier, a photograph by Gordon Parks to illustrate LIFE’s story about race and urban America, “The Negro and the Cities: The Cry That Will Be Heard.”  The inescapable similarities provide more evidence that visual culture in 1968 increasingly reflected the sense that the world’s concerns and peoples were coming closer together.

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An inflammatory book of black rage

Eldridge Cleaver (1935-98) made one of the 20th century’s more unusual journeys through public life–youthful criminality and prison, radical politics, literary celebrity, presidential political campaigning, exile, born-again Christianity, conversion to Mormonism and then to conservative Republican politics, embarrassingly provocative clothing design.   American popular culture has seen its share its share of “one-book wonders,” and Cleaver fits the description.  Soul on Ice, some of which had been excerpted in Ramparts magazine (where the masses presumably had not seen it) was an extraordinary, inflammatory book of black rage, poured like gasoline on the fire of white anxiety and fear in the summer of 1968.

“A formidable analytical mind.”

White people, especially white intellectuals of the New Left, were looking for avatars to guide them through the dense thicket of black anger, for ways of knowing and thinking about black “demands” and expectations.  Here, suddenly, was the eloquent guide they were looking for.  The blurbs excerpted on the back of the book are, with one exception, by “literary” white people:  Geoffrey Wolff (praising Cleaver’s “moral energy”); Thomas Lask (”an exceptional volume”); Robert Coles (”He is full of Christian care, Christian grief and disappointment . . .”); and radical critic Maxwell Geismar, whose introduction to the book is quoted on the back:  ”Cleaver is simply one of the best cultural critics now writing. . . .”    The sole black critic is Julian Mayfield, writing in The Nation:  ”Beautifully written by a man with a formidable analytical mind.”

“What does the Negro want?”

“Cultural critic.”  ”Formidable mind.”  ”Moral energy.”  Unexpected praise for someone who writes (dated October 1965, in Folsom Prison):  ”I’m perfectly aware that I’m in prison, that I’m a Negro, that I’ve been a rapist, that I have a Higher Uneducation.”   But Soul on Ice, with its short, punchy chapters and outrageous pronouncements that somehow also ring true (”That growing numbers of white youth are repudiating their heritage of blood and taking people of color as their heroes and models is a tribute not only to their insight but to the resilience of the human spirit”) was absolutely riveting to hordes of readers, both black and white.  For blacks, here was a new literary hero–articulate and learned, but speaking in a voice that “sounded like ‘right now.’”  For whites, Cleaver was a hip, edgy answer to that desperate Sixties question:  ”What does the Negro want?”   In some ways, especially in retrospect, Soul on Ice looks like the kitchen sink.  As perhaps befits the man who became the “Minister of Information” for the Black Panthers, Cleaver has something to say about everyone and everything: Baldwin and homosexuality (he’s against it), King, Malcolm X, LeRoi Jones, the United Nations, Elijah Muhammed, LBJ, FDR, JFK, Vietnam (”The black man’s interest lies in seeing a strong Vietnam which is not the puppet of white supremacy”), Norman Mailer, Castro, Muhammed Ali, Stepin Fetchit, the New Left, beatniks and Ginsberg, World War II, colonialism, Frederick Douglass and the Civil War.  There’s even a strikingly astute riff on Ian Fleming’s James Bond, who is “offering the whites a triumphant image of themselves.”  The book ends in a couple of chapters–I’m guessing most readers skipped these–that offer meandering and deeply misogynistic rantings about white women and black women.

A summertime 1968 bestseller

Soul on Ice was a sensational publishing phenomenon.  It showed up–in hardback–in the top ten of the New York Times Best Seller List (10th, to be exact) twice in late summer 1968–not a gigantic blockbuster, but still remarkable given its fellow occupants on the list (diet books, books about rich people and money, The Naked Ape).  It was in paperback–the version depicted here– that the book’s influence was most strongly felt.  Here, indeed, is a true icon of 1968:  the Black Man with Afro and furrowed brow, liberated from prison (in the background), posed with a clutch of white lilies, symbolizing . . . well, who knows?

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