Chilling Shift

Floyd McKissick, the new national director of CORE, stretched out on the bed in his room in Washington's Sheraton-Park Hotel one evening last week and languidly shut his eyes--as if bored beyond all tolerance with the two white men earnestly pleading before him.

"My God," argued Baltimore's Republican Mayor Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin, stretching his arms out emotionally, "I've been fighting for the same thing CORE wants since 1927. I've sent open-occupancy legislation to our city council three times, and three times the Democrats have killed it. There are many things that need to be changed in our city, and you can help us. You can help me." Taut, trim Major General George Gelston, Baltimore's acting police commissioner, added his voice: "Look, I've only been a policeman since April, and I'm going to quit in September. All I want is to get the job done, and part of that job is maintaining the peace in Baltimore."

They might as well have stayed in Baltimore, for all their pleading. Floyd McKissick was not interested in cooperation or McKeldin's suggestion that he come to Baltimore the next day to talk with civic leaders. Baltimore has been selected as CORE'S target city for the summer of 1966, the demonstrations are in progress, and CORE is setting its own timetable and its own conditions. McKissick will talk to Baltimore leaders when he is ready. He had only one comment after they had gone. "Well, I'm surprised," he said. "You know, I really didn't think they'd come."

Aura of Hysteria. Winner in a covert internal coup that ousted longtime CORE Leader James Farmer last winter, McKissick, 44, has lately steered his civil rights outfit, a leader in the movement in the '60s, away from gradual integration toward aggressive Desegregation Now. Almost all white members and most Negro moderates have either resigned or been nudged out of national policymaking positions. Opposition to the war in Viet Nam has reached a hysteria, and CORE leaders have come close to damning any cooperation with whites--as McKissick did during his meeting with the two Baltimore officials.

"Sometimes the pseudoliberal can become a monkey on your back," McKissick tartly explained to Charlotte, N.C., Reporter Dwayne Walls shortly before his election. "They have only a partial commitment, and they think in terms of the great progress the Negro has made instead of thinking of the great injustice."

"Join the White Man?" Farmer, 46, who helped to found CORE on Gandhian principles of nonviolence in 1942, is now denounced for not condemning the war in Viet Nam when he was director, and the entire range of U.S. foreign policy is seen as a plot against the non-white races. "Obviously," says New York CORE Chairman Roy Innis, 31, "the Pax America of Johnson refers to white people and the interests of white people, not the world that is mostly nonwhite."*

It may in part be rhetoric, the tough talk of a new management that feels it must outdo the men who introduced the freedom rides. In Baltimore, a city that has often been coldly, even arrogantly inhospitable to the Negro, CORE has followed its old tactics of civil disobedience and already forced some desegregation on new high-rise apartment buildings and taverns--including, ironically, the seamy, sinful strip known as "the Block" (TIME, Feb. 4). Most important, it has forced the white business and community leaders of a sometimes smug city to re-examine the obstacles remaining before Negroes.

Yet CORE has undergone a chilling alteration in its basic principles. Few cities that CORE could target have a mayor or a police commissioner as eager to join its forces as Baltimore's McKeldin and Gelston. Few Presidents have embraced civil rights as fervently as has President Johnson. No one defines the change better than McKissick. "Join the white man?" he asked in his interview with Reporter Walls. "How can we? How can we have respect for a race that has no respect for itself--not even for its God?"

*2,070,000,000 nonwhites; 930,000,000 whites, based on a 1960-61 estimate.

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