Black Revival in the South

THE spirit of Selma, Birmingham and Montgomery was alive and marching again in the South. With an outward joy that failed to conceal their inner anger, blacks were singing, praying and chanting together in a common cry for social justice. Though relatively quiet for nearly two years, they have all along resented the shift of the nation's protest from civil rights to the war and the environment. But the Nixon Administration's Southern strategy, accenting law and order and a slowdown on school integration, rankled deeply. Then came armed peace officers blasting away with guns at Kent State and Jackson State and in Augusta -and once again the excessive use of police power only enlarged the unrest it had sought to quell.

The center stage for the new action was Atlanta, a city which bills itself with some justice as "too busy to hate." There, some 150 weary protesters ended a 120-mile bus-and-walking trip from Perry, Ga., in what its S.C.L.C. organizers called a "march against repression." Following symbolic coffins and two mules nicknamed "Nixon" and "Lester," the marchers arrived after four days of uneventful travel under a blistering sun to be joined by some 9,000 noisy, but nonviolent advocates of "soul power" in the biggest civil rights rally in the South since 1965.

Barbers' Razors. In some less urbane areas than Atlanta, the racial tensions seemed more ominous and violence prone than in the early days of the civil rights movement. In Jackson, where Mississippi state troopers had raked a crowd of black demonstrators with at least 250 shots, killing two, outraged Negroes marched almost daily through the' streets. Rumors grew of more rioting to come, and the public schools were closed. White homeowners rushed to buy guns, and young blacks walked about with long barbers' razors purposely allowed to protrude from their back pockets. Eight ghetto stores were firebombed, apparently by blacks. Angry whites discussed moves to oust Mayor Russell Davis because he had appointed a biracial commission to investigate the killings.

A group of liberal Washington legislators and the N.A.A.C.P.'s Roy Wilkins held an informal field investigation of their own. When it was over, Indiana Senator Birch Bayh protested that "What we have seen is enough to make a grown man cry." A planeload of 87 other Washington visitors, led by Democratic Senator Edmund Muskie and including Republican Senator Charles Percy and Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, flew in for the funeral of one of the shooting victims, James Earl Green, 17. They heard Fayette Mayor Charles Evers deliver a eulogy in the same hall in which services had been held for his slain brother Medgar. Asked Evers: "How long, O Lord, will our white brothers continue to kill us?"

Attorney General John Mitchell briefly surveyed the bullet-riddled women's dormitory at Jackson State, met with College President John Peoples and Mayor Davis. Then in a previously scheduled talk in Cleveland, Miss., to wealthy plantation owners and businessmen of the Delta Council, he infuriated blacks by blandly condemning both "violent demonstrations" and "unrestrained reactions," seemingly equating rocks with bullets. But back in Washington, Mitchell began studying the volumes of preliminary reports that the FBI has turned in on the shootings in Jackson, Kent and Augusta. The normally placid Mitchell seemed shaken. He bluntly cautioned all law enforcement agencies that they "have a responsibility to keep their cool and to utilize only such minimum force as is required to protect the safety of the general public, the bystanders and themselves."

No such warnings came from Southern officials. Instead of reprimanding his troopers, Mississippi Governor John Bell Williams defended them as "professional officers all -highly experienced. These men are not hotheads and they are not given to losing their heads under stress." He ordered 10,000 National Guardsmen placed on stand-by alert in his tense state. Another potential shootout was narrowly averted at Jackson State when armed officers gathered near the campus before dawn to back up Williams' dispatch of work crews to dismantle part of the dormitory facade as evidence in the investigations. Defiant students quickly gathered but finally yielded on the assurance that they could watch to be sure that the evidence went directly to the FBI rather than to state authorities.

In Georgia, Governor Lester Maddox expressed no regrets over the killing of six blacks in Augusta. He blamed the deaths on protest demonstrations that "spawned hate and prejudice," and that were "supported by the Communist enemies of freedom." He almost invited further tragedy by predicting that someone would attempt to kill one of the Perry-to-Atlanta marchers in order "to blame the Governor of Georgia."

In Augusta, where rioting blacks had caused nearly $1,000,000 worth of property damage in their own neighborhood, Negroes held rallies, demanded the removal of some of the trigger-happy cops, and planned to boycott stores. Noting the multiple wounds in the backs of most of the victims, Whitney Young, executive director of the National Urban League, complained bitterly: "When a policeman shoots a man nine times, he is not just trying to kill a man -- he is trying to kill everything that man represents." But whites were seething too, at the lack of press attention to the fact that ten whites caught innocently in the black rampage preceding the shootings had been injured.

Long-festering controversies over school integration have sent Georgia blacks marching repeatedly through the streets of Athens, Covington and Perry. Mainly because they lacked parade permits, some 400 blacks were arrested in Perry's surrounding Houston County, and about the same number in Athens, where the National Guard was called out. Blacks there contend that police have burst into their neighborhoods, clubbing residents indiscriminately.

Liberation Train. It was in that kind of raw emotional atmosphere that some 400 blacks responded to the call of the S.C.L.C.'s President Ralph Abernathy and March Organizer Hosea Williams (see box, preceding page) , and packed a for mer school auditorium in Perry to plan the trek to Atlanta. They sang hymns and chanted "Freedom Now!" in the old civil rights style. As they trudged up U.S. 41, escorted by state patrol cars, they passed young blacks holding up clenched fists, the local symbol for soul power. Except for a few motorists who swerved their cars toward the marchers to scare them, whites mainly ignored the black band of protesters. Despite the Maddox warnings, they reached Atlanta without any violence.

The rally there grew with the addition of thousands of college students, including a "Liberation Train" from Washington's predominately black Howard University. Picking up many whites as well, the rally moved in a half-mile line from the Rev. Martin Luther King's Ebenezer Baptist Church to the live oak campus of Morehouse College. They chanted "Power to the People!" and sang, inevitably, We Shall Overcome. A sign pleaded: NIXON -STOP THE MURDER AT HOME AND ABROAD. Lounging on blankets or standing atop trucks to view speakers on the campus, the crowd warmly applauded the antiwar, anti-Government rhetoric war, anti-Government rhetoric of such speakers as Mrs. Coretta King, Senator George McGovern, new U.A.W. President Leonard Woodcock and Black Poet LeRoi Jones. The affair had all the gaiety of a picnic, yet the feelings ran deep and the South was once again experiencing racial tensions that could easily erupt into new violence.

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