|
 We
Were Led By The Children
by David Halberstam, March 22, 1998
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I think I knew
in some instinctive way from the first time I watched these
young people walk from Kelly Miller Smith’s church in Nashville
to Woolworth’s lunch counter that I was watching the beginning
of something historic, that they were not going to be turned
around. It was a heady time for me, my first big story, and one
with self-evident larger social significance. But if I
understood some of what these young people were doing in those
months and why they did it, perhaps the one thing I did not
understand was the effect they would have on me, then at the
beginning of my journalistic career.
It was February 1960, and I still see the scene with remarkable
clarity: the black college students walking proudly, heads held
high, paying no attention to the relentless volley of racial
epithets aimed at them. In just a few minutes they would become
targets of white hoods— ketchup and coffee poured on them as
they sat there at the counter, cigarettes extinguished on their
heads. I was 25 at the time, only two or three years older than
some of the students. What they were seeking struck me as
nothing less than the most elemental of American rights.
What they accomplished in that brief time span still strikes me
as a shining example of democracy at work: ordinary young
people, hardly favored by circumstances at their birth, changing
first the conscience of the nation and then its laws.
They did not look like heroes. Most of them came from the
simplest and least privileged of homes; their parents had more
often than not struggled with jobs at the most marginal end of
the economy. In many of their homes, the grandparents did much
of the actual child-rearing, because the parents might be off
somewhere, trying to help make enough cash to keep from losing
the home or the land.
Thus their very presence in college represented not merely an
enormous investment for each family. It also represented the
embodiment of the American Dream itself, for much sacrifice had
already gone into saving the money and getting them to these
schools—Fisk, Meharry, Tennessee State and American Baptist. To
their parents, who had often held two or three menial jobs in
order to put aside the money, the idea of the sit-ins and the
Freedom Rides that were to follow were terrifying. So, by
sitting in, they were defying their parents by putting at risk
not only their lives—for death was a very real possibility—but
also their parents’ one chance for their children to better
themselves through a college education.
That they would be so stunningly successful surprised everyone.
On the eve of beginning these protests, they themselves had
their doubts. Diane Nash of Chicago, beautiful and fiery, told
me years later of how terrified she was before the first sit-in.
She had sat in her dorm the night before, thinking of how
formidable the forces aligned against them in Nashville were:
the rich store-owners in the business community, the
all-powerful white politicians, the white police and the white
judges who served them. “We are just children,” she had thought.
“How naïve and foolish of us to take on so powerful an
apparatus.” Everyone else in the group thought she was the
bravest of them all, but she was sure she knew better. On the
mornings of the sit-ins, she was always scared.
In a way I watched them grow up in front of my eyes. One moment
they were young and uncertain, some of them still teenagers, and
the next they were battle-hardened young veterans of our new
domestic war. I, as principal reporter on that story for the
local paper, knew them as well as any white person in Nashville.
I had a clear sense of the totality of the commitment and the
religious faith that drove them. They were utterly immune to the
normal temptations of ego and vanity—only the cause moved them.
They did not look like heroes…That they would be so stunningly
successful surprised everyone. On the eve of beginning the
protests, they themselves had their doubts…One moment they were
young and uncertain, and the next they were battle-hardened
veterans.
As the protests continued, I was somehow sure they were going to
win their battle of the lunch counters. What I did not expect,
and what stunned me, was what happened the next year, when many
of these same Nashville leaders took the struggle into the
dramatically more dangerous Deep South, where they challenged
legal and political restrictions on black freedom, particularly
the right to vote. Then I truly feared for them.
I knew the power of the white resistance and the violence in the
hearts of the Klansmen who awaited them in Alabama and
Mississippi. But in 1961, it was these young people from
Nashville who took over the Freedom Rides after most of the
first Freedom Riders—sponsored by CORE, the Congress of Racial
Equality —pulled back because of the violence inflicted on them
by the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama. When a Justice Department
official warned Diane Nash that she and her friends would be
killed if they went into Alabama, she answered that, yes, they
were all very aware of that, but if they were killed, others
would follow them. I was not surprised when, a few days later,
John Lewis was savagely beaten by Klansmen at the Montgomery,
Ala., bus station. Nor was I surprised that he and the others
continued the Freedom Rides into Mississippi and then eventually
began to do voter registration work in both states.
A mere three years later, thanks to their efforts and those of
hundreds and perhaps thousands of others who followed them, the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed. And a year after that, an
even more important bill, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, was
enacted. This meant that they, as company commanders and foot
soldiers under Martin Luther King Jr., had helped lead a
domestic revolution in the brief period of five years.
Consider what they did. When they had started out, they were
virtually alone. Only the Supreme Court, of all governmental
organs, seemed sympathetic. Even to the young liberal President,
John Kennedy, they were in the beginning, in his own words, a
pain in the ass. Yet only five years later both parties in the
Congress were competing to pass legislation trying to outlaw
voting injustices; the Justice Department had become their
activist partner; the FBI, however reluctantly, had come aboard;
and the President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson, was
their principal convert.
They did this with the help of television, which made the
struggle a national morality play. What they accomplished in
that brief time span still strikes me as a shining example of
democracy at work: ordinary young people, hardly favored by
circumstances at their birth, changing first the conscience of
the nation and then its laws, because their cause was right and
because they were willing to risk their lives. That was their
simple strategy. By offering up their lives in one dangerous
venue after another, they believed, first the media and then the
feds would be forced to come with them and witness what happened
to them.
Follow them we did, and because of that, almost unconsciously,
we were changed by them. Here, I speak not just for myself but
also for many of my colleagues who covered the civil rights
years. If these young people could risk their lives for what
they believed in, then we had to risk ours too. In my own
instance, in the most immediate way, it made me a better
reporter two years later in Vietnam: If they could stand apart
from officialdom at home, then I could stand apart from
officialdom in Saigon.
But looking back now, 38 years later, my gratitude is broader:
They made me, I have decided, a better citizen and thus a better
reporter in ways I did not understand then. Very simply, they
helped me to believe that the system could work and the
government might listen. I have, I think, never been cavalier
about the idealism of others since. After 40 years in this
profession, I have decided that the most corrosive thing to good
journalism is cynicism, and no cynic could have covered and
witnessed those events.
As my friend Karl Fleming, who covered the movement for
Newsweek, once said: “Those young people changed me, and they
changed everyone who covered them—their idealism and courage
affected us in the best way. None of us was ever the same
afterward.” That certainly was true of me. What they did allowed
me, for all of the contradictions and pain we have regarding
race in the United States, to believe much more in my own
country and to believe that, under certain conditions, the
system can work.
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