Ain't Scared of Your Jail: Arrest, Imprisonment, and the Civil Rights Movement

6. You Can’t Jail the Revolution

102 6 You Can’t Jail the Revolution “This is the 27th time I have been arrested—I ain’t going to jail no more. I ain’t going to jail no more.” This was Stokeley Carmichael’s message to a rally in Greenwood, held to support the 1966 Meredith March. Earlier in the day, he and two other SNCC workers had been arrested by police as they tried to erect tents on the grounds of a local black high school. That evening, shortly after his release, he told the crowd, “Every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned tomorrow to get rid of the dirt.”1 “What do you want?” he asked them. They responded with “black power!” That Carmichael should introduce his call for black power with a reminder of the bigoted nature of the southern criminal justice system is no great surprise. Its failure to punish racist violence—while zealously imprisoning peaceful civil rights protesters—was a painful reminder of just how slowly the You Can’t Jail the Revolution | 103 South was changing. In spite of years of exhausting work and the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, those who challenged white supremacy in the South were still outlaws. “Black power” was no more a coherent statement of protest philosophy than “freedom now” was in the early 1960s. Both were so popular because they spoke to the aspirations and frustrations of many people. Indeed, black power’s popularity lay largely in its malleability. It covered a range of issues and meanings: armed self-defense, political empowerment, economic independence, black separatism, racial pride, and antiwhite sentiment. The speed with which the cry of black power was adopted by SNCC and CORE belied the fact that its underlying ideology had been influencing some activists long before 1966. Racial conflict, vigilante violence, and frustration with the federal government had all taken their toll upon individuals and the movement . The rioting in Northern ghettos from 1964 onward contributed further to the disintegration of the national nonviolent movement by shifting the nation’s focus northward, toward the problem of urban poverty. For many members of SNCC and CORE, who had often worked in the most violently repressive parts of the South, the pressure for change—to officially abandon their original philosophy of integration and nonviolence—was great. In 1966, both organizations embraced black power, and SNCC expelled its white members. The same year CORE, facing bankruptcy, closed its southern office. Although it would take a further two years for CORE to officially expel its white members, its black power orientation meant it had few left by that point.2 The movement’s collapse at the national level did not, however, lead to its destruction at the local level. Studies of the movement in Louisiana, North Carolina, and Arkansas demonstrate that community activism continued in many towns and cities.3 Sometimes , such organizing reflected black power’s influence. Lance Hill’s study of the Deacons for Defense in Louisiana and Mississippi reveals the extent to which the emphasis upon armed self-defense—in itself not new—was openly embraced by some southern African Americans . Adam Fairclough’s study of the movement in Louisiana demonstrates that this heightened commitment to armed self-defense and 104 | Ain’t Scared of Your Jail support for all-black political tickets was evidence of localized support for black power. Black power supporters focused especially on police brutality during the late 1960s. Numerous confrontations between residents of urban black communities and the police took place, and a number of the most serious riots in Northern cities were sparked by these. Adam Fairclough has suggested that the increased size of the black electorate and the appointment of more black police officers in the South during the late 1960s most likely resulted in an overall reduction in police brutality. The many cries of police brutality during the late 1960s, therefore, reflected “heightened sensitivity” to the issue as a result of riots in the North, as opposed to an increase in the actual levels of violence. While some communities did enjoy a reduction in police brutality, as Fairclough himself observes, many others did not.4 This was particularly the case in poor, black, urban communities in the South; the civil rights movement had the least impact in these places. Police killings and beatings had long taken place in such communities, and one must question whether it...