Read Online 1968 by Mark Kurlansky - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Mark Kurlansky
Tags: Fiction
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there was no turning back. Czechoslovakia could no longer live in isolation. Suddenly Prague was watched, talked about, even seen on television in many lands, and what the Czechs and the Slovaks were doing in the beginning of 1968 sent shock waves through the entire communist world and attracted the attention of young people throughout the West. Suddenly a Prague student who had never seen the rest of the world, bearded and in
Texasski
jeans too stiff and too blue, felt part of a liberating world youth movement.
CHAPTER 3
A DREAD UNFURLING OF
THE BUSHY EYEBROW
Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.
—M ARSHALL M C L UHAN AND Q UENTIN F IORE,
The Medium Is the Massage,
1967
L IKE AN UNNOTICED TREE falling in the forest, if there is a march or a sit-in and it is not covered by the press, did it happen? From Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Lewis to Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, there was wide disagreement on tactics within the civil rights movement, but they all agreed that an event needed to attract the news media. And it became obvious to the violent and nonviolent alike that violence and the rhetoric of violence were the most effective way to get coverage.
Mohandas K. Gandhi himself, the master of nonviolence who had inspired the movement, had understood this very well. He went to great trouble to try to get Indian, British, and American coverage of every event he organized, and he often spoke of the value of British violence in order to entice the media. It is the paradox of nonviolence. The protesters can be nonviolent, but they must evoke a violent reaction. If both sides are nonviolent, there is no story. Martin Luther King used to complain about this, but after he met a man named Laurie Pritchett, he understood that it was a reality.
Pritchett was the police chief in Albany, Georgia, in 1962 when Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference had singled out the town for a campaign of nonviolent resistance. The area in rural southwestern Georgia was infamous for segregation and had been the object of one of the first federal suits for voting rights under the 1957 Civil Rights Act. Little Albany, with seventy-five thousand people, about a third of whom were black, was the biggest population center in the area, and SNCC, with the encouragement of local blacks, decided to launch a voter registration drive there. The registration drive expanded to desegregation of public buildings, including the bus station, and Martin Luther King was brought in.
There were numerous encounters between the protesters and the law over several months, with mass arrests, including of King, but at no point did the polite, well-spoken sheriff use violence. Pritchett had been able to anticipate the protesters’ every move because he had informants from the Albany black community. Because there was no violence, King and the other leaders were never able to get Robert Kennedy and the Justice Department to intervene as they had in other places. Federal intervention makes a bigger story. Worse, reporters liked Pritchett. He was folksy and pleasant. He told them that he had studied Martin Luther King’s use of nonviolence and that he had adopted nonviolent law enforcement. King responded to criticism from civil rights activists who said he always remained safely removed from the action, by letting himself be arrested in Albany. But this forced him to cancel a valuable television appearance on
Meet the Press,
only to be personally released from jail by Pritchett himself, who said that “an unidentified Negro man” had paid bail and related fines. Many assumed that King’s father, a distinguished Atlanta figure sometimes called Daddy King, had gotten his son out. King could go to jail because his daddy would get him out. In truth, the wily Pritchett had simply released him.
The entire Albany campaign was a disaster. After
Texasski
jeans too stiff and too blue, felt part of a liberating world youth movement.
CHAPTER 3
A DREAD UNFURLING OF
THE BUSHY EYEBROW
Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.
—M ARSHALL M C L UHAN AND Q UENTIN F IORE,
The Medium Is the Massage,
1967
L IKE AN UNNOTICED TREE falling in the forest, if there is a march or a sit-in and it is not covered by the press, did it happen? From Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Lewis to Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, there was wide disagreement on tactics within the civil rights movement, but they all agreed that an event needed to attract the news media. And it became obvious to the violent and nonviolent alike that violence and the rhetoric of violence were the most effective way to get coverage.
Mohandas K. Gandhi himself, the master of nonviolence who had inspired the movement, had understood this very well. He went to great trouble to try to get Indian, British, and American coverage of every event he organized, and he often spoke of the value of British violence in order to entice the media. It is the paradox of nonviolence. The protesters can be nonviolent, but they must evoke a violent reaction. If both sides are nonviolent, there is no story. Martin Luther King used to complain about this, but after he met a man named Laurie Pritchett, he understood that it was a reality.
Pritchett was the police chief in Albany, Georgia, in 1962 when Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference had singled out the town for a campaign of nonviolent resistance. The area in rural southwestern Georgia was infamous for segregation and had been the object of one of the first federal suits for voting rights under the 1957 Civil Rights Act. Little Albany, with seventy-five thousand people, about a third of whom were black, was the biggest population center in the area, and SNCC, with the encouragement of local blacks, decided to launch a voter registration drive there. The registration drive expanded to desegregation of public buildings, including the bus station, and Martin Luther King was brought in.
There were numerous encounters between the protesters and the law over several months, with mass arrests, including of King, but at no point did the polite, well-spoken sheriff use violence. Pritchett had been able to anticipate the protesters’ every move because he had informants from the Albany black community. Because there was no violence, King and the other leaders were never able to get Robert Kennedy and the Justice Department to intervene as they had in other places. Federal intervention makes a bigger story. Worse, reporters liked Pritchett. He was folksy and pleasant. He told them that he had studied Martin Luther King’s use of nonviolence and that he had adopted nonviolent law enforcement. King responded to criticism from civil rights activists who said he always remained safely removed from the action, by letting himself be arrested in Albany. But this forced him to cancel a valuable television appearance on
Meet the Press,
only to be personally released from jail by Pritchett himself, who said that “an unidentified Negro man” had paid bail and related fines. Many assumed that King’s father, a distinguished Atlanta figure sometimes called Daddy King, had gotten his son out. King could go to jail because his daddy would get him out. In truth, the wily Pritchett had simply released him.
The entire Albany campaign was a disaster. After
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