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~ 5 ~ How to Kill a Protest Ordinarily, a person leaving a courtroom with a conviction behind him would wear a somber face. But I left with a smile. I knew that I was a convicted criminal, but I was proud of my crime. —martin luther king jr., march 22, 1956 T he next day, John Garner and Vernon Jordan were apprehended by the Baton Rouge police for sitting at the whites-only lunch counter of Sitman’s Drug Store. At about the same time, Larry Nichols, Conrad Jones, Eddie C. Brown, Lawrence Hurst, Charles L. Peabody, Sandra Jones, and Mary Briscoe were arrested at the Greyhound bus station for sitting at the whites-only terminal coffee shop. Charles Peabody —my whisky-drinking, high-living buddy who just twenty-four hours earlier had told me he couldn’t see the point in such protest—was among the group, along with Conrad Jones, the reserved, married lawyer-to-be from Reed’s class. I couldn’t believe it, but there it was. The spark had caught fire, and the fire was spreading. At this point, my involvement at the core of the protest was limited; I was carrying messages from the student leadership to the various dorm meetings and fund-raising rallies. I was still holding back, more an observer than an active participant. Had the protestors asked me to sit in with them at that point, I am not even sure I would have. I was not yet ready to take action or risk, not yet an initiator. I believed in the rightness of what the students were doing; but it simply never occurred to me to become more intimately involved. It was, I suppose, my year to just be eighteen, to watch and learn. But the seeds of change were firmly planted within my mind, just as they were in Scotlandville and Baton Rouge. Later in the afternoon of March 29, Ulysses Jones, dean of men, sent out a notice that Dr. Clark had been called back to campus by Superintendent 48 the education of a black radical Jackson. As the afternoon passed, state police arrived—also in response to Jackson’s directive—and took up strategic positions throughout the campus, including along the only two roads leading onto the campus with the Mississippi River at its back. The police presence added significantly to the already extreme tension we were all feeling and transformed the pleasant cocoonlike atmosphere of Southern to that of an armed camp or prison. But who was being protected from whom? Did Jackson and Clark perceive us as potentially volatile, even dangerous? Did they feel physically threatened? That they perceived a need for state troops was not only insulting but foreboding. We could only guess what retaliation against the protestors they had in mind. Dr. Clark arrived back on campus very early Wednesday morning and called an emergency universitywide convocation for 9:00 a.m. But the student leadership, following the advice of Reverend Jemison and his citizens’ group, had already planned to call for a class boycott and a march to the State Capitol, so they moved the march up to 8:00 a.m. Boycotting was unanimous. Nearly three thousand students marched to the State Capitol, where they held an hour-long prayer meeting. I boycotted classes, but I didn’t march. Later Oscar told me that Major Johns had spoken, and that all in all the protest had been surprisingly peaceful. No harsh words, no tear gas, no violence. It was a classic nonviolent expression of civil disobedience. That afternoon, Clark met with Dean Jones and Martin Harvey, dean of students, and prepared orders for the expulsion of the sixteen students who had participated in the sit-ins and Major Johns. This action suddenly shifted the focus of the protest from the lunch counters to the university administration. Robinson, Johns, and Moss held another rally in front of a house on Swan Street, across the railroad tracks from the campus, and called for a continuing boycott until the seventeen students—nine of whom were still in jail—were reinstated. Speaking from a second-floor balcony, Robinson asked: “Which is more important—human dignity or the university? We feel it is human dignity.” The next morning, classrooms were empty, and Governor Earl K. Long, horrified at this turn of events, called Dr. Clark to the Capitol for still more protracted meetings. Meanwhile, Major Johns was delivering a spinetingling speech from the balcony on Swan...

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