A Renegade History of the United States Read online

  While the officers were writing the citation, John Carter’s wife came out of the house and told John not to sign the citation. The officers told her to go back in the house. She refused to do this and began hollering and causing a scene, which drew a crowd of other colored people. She told the officers that this was a public street and that there was no one that could tell her to leave. The officers placed her under arrest and she began to fight and scratch at the officers. She attempted to bite officer Jack Parker’s hand. While Officer Parker was scuffling with this black female her husband made an attempt to jump on Officer Parker.

  The department studied the number of women arrested during 1959 and found that seventeen black women had been arrested for carrying a concealed weapon, while only one white woman faced a similar charge during that year.

  Several reports tell of spontaneous acts of solidarity against police encroachments on black spaces, such as an incident at the Three Sisters Café, a club in the black Southside district, on May 7, 1960. When two officers entered the café and arrested a man and a woman for drunk and disorderly conduct, “this caused several other Negroes to become belligerent and to begin cursing the police,” and “several other patrol cars had to be dispatched to the scene” to handle the ensuing melee. Similarly, following a sporting event at the Municipal Auditorium in the summer of 1956, violence broke out between two large groups of whites and blacks when a black married couple, Harold and Vinia Lay, with an infant in tow, confronted and cursed out a white man they accused of hitting them with his car. The couple was placed under arrest, but fought against the police and had to be dragged through the street to police headquarters. During the trial, the judge told the couple that their actions nearly caused a “race riot.”

  Some of the reports of resisting arrest must be approached by the historian with caution, since they may have been efforts to justify instances of police brutality. However, they date from the late 1950s and early 1960s, before police brutality against African Americans had entered the national discourse and before any Birmingham police officer had been convicted or punished for unwarranted violence against an African American. Also, most of the reported incidents involved only slight injuries to the suspects or none at all. There are also many reports of incidents in which an officer involved was injured and the suspect was not. Indeed, during one eighteen-month period that was studied by the department, on average, one officer per month was seriously injured in a case of resisting arrest.

  Similar kinds of resistance were directed at white civilians as well. Police and newspaper reports contain numerous accounts of blacks brazenly challenging the power of whites to maintain segregated spaces.

  In the summer of 1955, white farmers at a downtown market told a group of black youths to leave their stall. When the youths refused, a farmer kicked one of them. The three teenagers then left and returned shortly with two older youths carrying pistols. With the armed guard, one of the boys began taunting the farmers. “The older boys in the background dared us to make the boy move from in front of our wagon,” one farmer reported to the Birmingham News. “When we started after him, the older boys opened fire.” Two of the farmers were wounded and three others narrowly missed being hit by bullets.

  In 1960 white residents of the Kingston neighborhood, which was divided by race along railroad tracks, complained to the police about groups of black youths using their streets as a shortcut to a housing project, and threatened to arm themselves after their houses were stoned by the trespassers. Over the next several years, whites in this borderland area continued to complain that blacks attacked their homes and then escaped arrest by running back to the black side of the tracks.

  On the other hand, white incursions into black neighborhoods were often met with violent reprisals. In September 1962, a group of white teenagers drove back and forth along a main thoroughfare in a black neighborhood, and, according to testimony one of them later gave to the police, were “yelling and hollering at Negroes, especially Negro girls.” When they parked the car, two black men “grabbed them and beat them up and then went on.” A police report filed one month later told of a similar incident, in which a patrol car responded to a call regarding a stabbing. When the officers arrived at the scene, they found three white teenagers, one of whom, Gary Hopkins, had been stabbed in the back. Hopkins said that as he was entering a drug store he “accidentally bumped into a black male standing in front of the store.”

  He [Hopkins] stated that the black male had his hand on his hip with the elbow sticking out and this is the part of the Negro’s body that he bumped. After he bumped the Negro they both started threatening and curs[ing] each other. This black male told Hopkins that he had better never see his face up there again, and then stabbed Hopkins in the back.

  On a Saturday night in October 1960, a black man entered a café that was frequented by whites, approached the counter, ordered food, and handed the waitress money. At that point, according to the police report, two white customers told the man that he couldn’t purchase food there. The waitress told him to wait outside for her to bring it to him. As he walked out of the café, several white men followed him but stopped at the front door. A group of twelve or so black men then came to the front door and, according to the waitress, “began cussing and calling names and inviting them outside.” At that point, several of the white men rushed outside but were met by gunshots. One of the whites was wounded, and the black men escaped.

  Perhaps the most dramatic act of violent resistance in Birmingham was authored by a twenty-year-old black woman named Matilda Cunningham. She told the police that on the afternoon of August 8, 1960, three white men came to the rear door of her apartment and demanded entrance.

  When she refused them entrance to her residence, they forced the screen door open and entered. They searched the house inside, and then asked Matilda where her husband was. She told them that he was at work. They then told her that they were looking for him to beat him up. They stated that he was a “Smart Nigger” and that he had been seen coming out of a white woman’s house in West End. They left at this time, and told her they would be back.

  According to Cunningham, three days later the three men returned to her apartment.

  She stated that when she saw them coming, she went to the rear door to see what they wanted. They told her they were coming inside. She asked them to wait a moment, and went back inside the house. She stated that she got a shotgun and went to the rear door and they started walking off hurriedly. She then fired twice at the men as they were going away, however, no one was hit, and one of the men hollered back that they would return.

  By 1956, white anxieties about black violence were so great that in the adjacent industrial city of Bessemer, whites became convinced that blacks had organized what they called “Push Day,” when crowds of blacks would invade the downtown area and push white people off the streets. All off-duty police in Bessemer were called in to patrol downtown, but Push Day never happened.

  At first glance, several incidents of blacks attacking whites appear to have been nothing more than acts of criminal malice. In August 1958, a young white couple walking in a deserted area late at night was set upon by four black men who smashed bottles over their heads and cut them with the jagged edges. In a similar incident, in March 1961, a group of six black people, four men and two women in their twenties, encountered a lone white man walking down a street, pounced on him, pummeled him, and cut him in the shoulder and hand. There is no evidence to suggest that the black attackers in incidents such as these were motivated by any explicit political mission, but their actions proved to be crucial in the desegregation of Birmingham.

  Perhaps the most famous image of the civil rights movement was created in May 1963, when Bull Connor loosed fire hoses and police dogs on black people during the nonviolent protests led by King. What is not well known about that image is that the victims in it were not the nonviolent protesters. Rather, they were what historians of the Birmingham movement have
described as “bystanders,” “onlookers,” “spectators,” and people “along the fringes.” These descriptions serve two functions. First, they efface the history of autonomous resistance by ordinary African Americans in the city, who, it now seems, were far more representative of black Birmingham than were the sons and daughters of civil rights activists who marched themselves into jail. Second, these descriptions assign to African Americans a victimhood that was precisely the identity that King sought to construct in the service of integration and assimilation. Yet, the people who were attacked by Connor’s cops were hardly victims, and their actions, before and during the demonstrations, evinced no desire to be integrated or assimilated.

  In fact, during the May demonstrations, there were far more people throwing rocks and bottles at the police than there were nonviolent protesters. And it was their violence that forced Connor to employ his brutal tactics. The Birmingham Police papers show that four officers were injured by rocks, bottles, and bricks in the first week of May, before the use of the hoses and dogs. It was not until May 7, when the rioting had grownso severe that six more police officers were injured, that Connor took the course of action that brought him eternal notoriety. Over the next several days, the rioting continued to grow in intensity, as thousands of the black residents of the Southside poured out of their homes and into the streets, where they met the police not just with fists and rocks and bottles but also with knives and guns. More than ten officers were injured during this street war, including one who received stab wounds and another who was wounded during what he described as a “gun battle.”

  The confrontational attitude of these bystanders was far more common at the Birmingham anti-segregation demonstrations in May 1963 than the ‘respectable’ behavior of the civil rights activists who marched peacefully to jail.

  But what did all of this accomplish? The answer can be found in the pivotal moment in King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, when he presents the city’s white elite with a choice. He wrote that he stood between two forces in the black community: the complacent and conservative middle class that had accepted segregation and what he called a force of “bitterness and hatred.” “I have tried to stand between these two forces,” King wrote, “saying that we need emulate neither the ‘do-nothingism’ of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist.”

  If the philosophy of nonviolence had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as “rabble-rousers” and “outside agitators” those of us who employ nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black-nationalist ideologies, a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.

  With our knowledge of the history of black resistance in Birmingham that was not respectable, loving, or seeking reconciliation and inclusion, we can understand why King’s threat carried so much weight. If Birmingham’s whites did not negotiate with him to open public spaces to blacks, they would have to continue to deal with the forces of hatred and bitterness—those bad people in the streets. Indeed, after several days of rioting, white business and government leaders sat down with the civil rights leader and signed an agreement that allowed blacks full access to commercial and public spaces in the city and desegregated jobs in downtown stores. This was not integration, in that it did not compel African Americans to live with or like whites, but it did allow them to come and go where they liked and as they pleased. And it was won not by appealing to the conscience of whites, nor by seeking admission to the American family, but by making the price of segregation too high to pay.

  Sidney Smyer, the president of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce who brokered the deal with King and the SCLC, said at the time that he was motivated not by a love for the Negro but by the need to regain control of the city. He called himself a “segregationist from top to bottom,” but said, “what I’m doing is of more interest to our stockholders than anything else I could do for them.” He told the Wall Street Journal, “Every dime of our assets is in Birmingham, but 30 percent of our property is vacant and unproductive. We’ve got to have growth if we want to develop it, and you can’t have it in a city of hate and violence.” Smyer later remembered, “I wanted some peace, too, and that’s the honest truth.”

  The Bad Nigger desegregated the South and, in one of the great ironies in American history, he did so by speaking through the man whose mission was to wipe him from the face of the earth: the apostle of nonviolence, Martin Luther King.

  15

  GAY LIBERATION, AMERICAN LIBERATION

  Gay people weren’t always renegades. But once they rejected the goal of becoming “good” Americans, they broke open myriad freedoms and pleasures for all Americans.

  The first gay political movement in the U.S., the “homophile” movement of the 1950s and 1960s, sought “civil rights,” “full citizenship,” and “recognition that we are just like heterosexuals.” When America most vigorously defined itself as heterosexual, homosexual activists sought inclusion rather than freedom.

  The crusade against sexual deviancy began in earnest in February 1950, when a State Department official testified to Congress that the department was riddled with homosexuals. This inaugurated a five-year period in which the Senate investigated “perverts” in government, the FBI conducted surveillance of thousands of Americans’ sexual practices, the armed forces doubled the number of discharges of alleged deviates, President Dwight Eisenhower banned homosexuals from federal jobs, prospective employees were required to undergo screenings of their sexual histories, municipal police departments conducted thousands of raids on gay bars and cruising areas, and newspapers reported the names and addresses of men and women arrested for illicit sexual practices.

  In response to the antihomosexual culture of the 1950s, members of the Mattachine Society, the Daughters of Bilitis, and the Janus Society, the three major homophile organizations, adopted the “politics of respectability” of the civil rights movement. Members of the organizations wore business suits and conservative dresses. They were expected to adhere to “Ivy League fashion”; no “swishing” and no “bottled-in-blond men, limp wrists and lisping” were permitted. At social gatherings, they showed only “scientific documentaries about homosexuality” that had “been approved by the Supreme Court.” No “muscle movies” were allowed. The groups explicitly banned drag queens and “bull dykes” from their meetings. And their political activities were limited to seeking sympathetic scientists to conduct research that would demonstrate that homosexuality was “normal.” The Mattachine Society adopted a resolution disavowing “any direct, aggressive action” in pursuit of its goals. Virtually repeating the words of Martin Luther King Jr. and other assimilationist leaders of the civil rights movement, the Janus Society urged “all homosexuals to adopt a behavior code which would be beyond criticism and which would eliminate many of the barriers to integration with the heterosexual world.”

  Early in the history of the Mattachine Society, one of its founding members argued for a different way. Chuck Rowland, who had grown up in a small town in South Dakota, where homosexuality was never discussed, and who had served in the army during World War II, knew the straight world as well as anyone. Yet at a 1953 convention of the Mattachine Society, Rowland attacked the politics of assimilation. “We must disenthrall ourselves of the idea,” he said, “that we differ only in our sexual directions and that all we want or need in life is to be free to seek the expression of our sexual desires.” The dominant, heterosexual culture had excluded them, and “as a result of this exclusion, [we] have developed differently than have other cultural groups.” Rowland called for Mattachine members to affirm rather than hide their desires, pleasures, behaviors, and identities, and to focus on creating “an ethical homosexual culture.” This was the last call for gay affirmation and autonom
y for a generation. Rowland was defeated at the convention by leaders of the organization who committed it to the position that “the sex variant [homosexual] is no different from anyone else except in the object of his sexual expression” and that homosexuals should adjust themselves to a “pattern of behavior that is acceptable to society in general and compatible with [the] recognized institutions … of home, church, and state.”

  At the 1963 conference of the East Coast Homophile Organizations, according to one magazine report, “deadly respectability was the keynote” and “everyone was conservatively dressed.” On the floor of the conference, “no swishing was allowed in public” and “a couple of local queens who sashayed up to one session were told politely but firmly to go home and come back only if they were properly dressed and behaved.” The report concluded that “because they are so earnestly seeking respectability, the organizations discourage the obvious effeminates.” The keynote speaker for the conference, a “big but pretty woman” named Joan Fleischmann, later said that “masculine men and feminine women were good public relations” for the homophile movement and that she was selected as convention chair in part because she did not look like “the stereotypical bulldyke.”

  When homophile organizations staged protests, they consisted of marching in silence for a few minutes, then departing quickly and without a word. The groups demanded that in public their members demonstrate not the slightest hint of sexuality, “not even touching or hand holding.” Leaders of the organizations insisted again and again in their public statements that “the majority of homosexuals are, in everything but their sexual inclinations, no different than anyone else.” They enforced a code of silence about sex and attacked the “swishy type of homosexual who brought contempt and derision on the majority of homosexuals.” They sought to erase the renegade history of the gay subculture and to make themselves into respectable Americans. One could certainly argue that the strategy of respectability was necessary in the conservative era of the 1950s and early 1960s, but it was also an abject failure. The respectable movement failed to end police harassment (it actually increased in the 1950s and 1960s), won no civil rights, and, by eliminating the most powerful form of sexual dissent in American culture, actually contributed to the sexual conservatism of the time.