Beware of Limbo Dancers: A Correspondent’s Adventures with the New York Times

16. Outrage by the Book

CHAPTER 16 Outrage by the Book InAugust ,the cops inWest Point,Mississippi,arrested the eighteenyear -old son of a congressman and charged him with manslaughter. Michael Reuss, son of Representative Henry S. Reuss of Wisconsin, had traveled to the state along with hundreds of other young people from the North to work in the movement. He was one of forty-five whites and Negroes arrested during a protest march. While he was being searched at the jail by an investigator for the State Highway Patrol, the young man reportedly pushed the man. The officer promptly died of a heart attack. That was the official version of events. The sheriff charged Reuss on the spot with causing the man’s death. Friends of the young man,who was a student at Stanford University, told a different story. They said the officer began his search by ripping a civil rights button from Reuss’s shirt. Then, they said, the young man removed a second button himself, handed it to the officer, and walked away.They said the officer went on to another person in the line,ripped a button from his shirt, then collapsed and died. The manslaughter charge was soon dismissed, and young Reuss resumed his civil rights activities. The main goal of the activists was to register enough Negro voters to break the headlock that the white supremacists had on the state’s government . Second-class citizenship was not an idle designation. The list of officially sanctioned disadvantages was a long one.If you were black, you could not even get your street paved without political muscle. The immensity of the challenge was clear. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission held a hearing in Jackson early in  and heard a stunning statistic. Only . percent of the eligible Negroes in the state were registered to vote.  Natchez,the home of those grand old antebellum mansions,broke into the news a few weeks after Michael Reuss’s arrest in West Point. George Metcalfe, the local president of the NAACP, was sent to the hospital with two broken limbs and a damaged eye. Someone had planted a bomb in his car. That was the seventeenth act of violence against Negroes in Adams County in a matter of months. The black folks of Natchez were enraged. Dr.King had to send his best diplomat,AndrewYoung,to Natchez to remind the followers there that their only hope in the movement was nonviolence. He told them: “The white man of Western civilization has mastered the art of murder, and you can’t compete with him on that basis.” Instead of taking up arms, the black leaders fell back on the petition . They sent a list of perfectly reasonable demands to the city authorities—hire Negro policemen,clamp down on the Ku Klux Klan, etc.—and the city predictably rejected all of them. The next step was to announce street demonstrations. Governor Paul B. Johnson Jr. sent  National Guard troops to the town to “avert possible racial violence,” and the Guardsmen patrolled the streets with drawn weapons.The demonstrations were called off.That left the black community in a familiar condition: angry and frustrated, alternating between a simmer and a boil. White policemen across the South were, with a few exceptions, part of the political apparatus for maintaining white supremacy. Civil rights protesters knew they would probably be arrested in any of hundreds of small towns fromVirginia to Texas. That was part of the nonviolent campaign: arrest, jail, rallies to denounce the police and their political leaders, then more marches, more arrests, more speeches, etc. Sometime during  I became aware of a new police tactic.Black victims might expect to be arrested. The first case was merely mentioned in passing as one of a long list of outrages made public at the Civil Rights Commission hearing in Jackson. An auto mechanic in McComb told the commission that a bomb had exploded in his yard one midnight in . The police promptly arrested him. The motive for the bombing and possibly his arrest was that his wife had tried to register to vote. Not to be outdone, Crawfordville, Georgia, came up with a truly  OUTRAGE BY THE BOOK exotic solution to the outside agitator problem. A Ku Klux Klansman beat up a photographer for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference during a march. State Police officers took both men into custody. They found some firecrackers in the photographer...