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CHAPTER 14 You Want Your Power Black or with Cream? The civil rights movement of the s and s had more white sympathizers in the South than has been acknowledged in many of the printed and televised retrospectives.But the core of the movement was black. It had to be so. There had been white activists for many years, and there had been black activists for at least a couple of generations. But in the ’s and ’s the South saw for the first time a mass uprising of black people that spread right across the old Confederacy. It was as if in the s there had been a simultaneous uprising of millions of slaves, all somehow coming to a telepathic understanding from Texas to the Carolinas that the black underclass was mad as hell and was not going to take it any longer. In the s, that telepathic understanding came about not by some mysterious message carried on the wind but because gifted black leaders meticulously gathered the massive rage of black people and thrust it with great force against the massive resistance of their white oppressors. That meant that for the first time the black resistance was able to gather a critical mass of leadership, not in one or two places but right across the South. Some came from black universities. Some were young preachers. Some were young teachers. Some even came from the servant class. Think Fannie Lou Hamer of the Mississippi Delta,who suddenly fanned her spark into a flame and strode into the fray. The bulk of the leadership coalesced in the civil rights organizations, new and old. There was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which had been active for generations. It still had great strength, but its leaders tended to use its strength with a measure  of caution. There was the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which had been around long enough to accumulate battle scars. Then there were the two new institutions, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).The latter two provided most of the leaders who became known around the South and the nation. James L. Bevel was the most charismatic of Dr. King’s colleagues in SCLC. He had come down from Nashville with a good-looking wife and a history of hell-raising at the American Baptist Theological Seminary. His wife, Diane Nash, was another young leader who remained active in the movement for many years. The so-called children ’s crusade in Birmingham was Bevel’s idea. That produced sickening television images of children being chased by the police and knocked down by fire hoses. It strengthened the SCLC, the sponsor of the idea, at a time when it needed national support. It was Bevel who rallied the hurt and angry marchers after Bloody Sunday at Selma and sent them forth again to face the ongoing peril on the road to Montgomery. Later it was Bevel who counseled his boss to oppose the Vietnam War, which split King and the movement from the president who had strong-armed Congress into passing the Voting Rights Act. I was astonished the first time I saw Bevel. He was a preacher, but he wore overalls over a white shirt and tie. He became known for warming up the crowd for the main act, Martin Luther King. His preaching style was fiery, and so were his words, a contrast to King’s measured, low-volume, and stunningly elegant style. It was hard to reconcile the flamboyant fellow in the pulpit with the calmly rational conversationalist who spent hours with us reporters in the back rooms of churches and in the living rooms of local activists. Indeed, as the years went by it became clear that James Bevel was a seriously divided personality. The same man who so effectively led crowds of demonstrators , and who was widely believed in some white circles to be a Communist, evolved politically into a follower of Ronald Reagan. In his later years, he showed signs of real instability. He was Lyndon H. LaRouche’s running mate in the presidential campaign of . His personal life descended into disaster. He was convicted in , the last year of his life, of having sexual intercourse with one of his daughters when she was a teenager. That was long after he had parted from  YOU WANT YOUR POWER BLACK OR WITH CREAM? [18.116.42.208] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...

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