James Farmer's Reflections Part 7

Now to the march itself. Many people wonder how it started and they assume that maybe Dr. King one day said “come on, you all, let’s march” and everybody got together and marched. Oh, not so. Or Roy Wilkins or Whitney Young or maybe Farmer. No indeed. The originator of the march was a man by the name of A. Philip Randolph who at that time was the eldest statesman of the movement. Perhaps you’ve never heard the name of Randolph, the late great A. Philip Randolph—the founder and then President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Randolph is one of my heroes, I still consider him to be one of the greatest of the Civil Rights leaders of history. Phil Randolph (Phil, as we called him) was not a member of the so –called “big six” or the “big four”, depending upon who you included in that group. He was not a member of the Council on United Civil Rights Leadership, the top leadership of the Civil Rights groups that met approximately monthly in New York in the early ‘60s, because he was not then head of a national Civil Rights organization. He was head of a trade union, and only heads of Civil Rights organizations were in the Council on United Civil Rights Leadership. Randolph, in order to come before that council, had to get unanimous permission of the members of the council. So Phil, who had the great, undying admiration of all of the members of the council, called Roy Wilkins, who was acting chairman for a period of time (that was a rotating chairmanship), and told Roy that he would like permission to come before a council and present a proposal to them. Roy Wilkins then called the other members, including myself, to get our approval, and of course, that was unanimous approval because we all had such enormous respect for Phil Randolph. Randolph proposed a march on Washington. He proposed that those Civil Right Organizations represented there—the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Urban League, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee,  the National Council of Negro Women—pool some of their resources and some of their staff and organize a gigantic, he called it a “monster”, march on Washington involving black and white, Protestant, Catholic, and Jews, Labor and Capital, to come to Washington to protest discrimination in employment and demand jobs for all, and to demand passage of Civil Rights legislation. This recommendation of Randolph’s was approved by the Council, and Randolph was named director of the march on Washington and he appointed Bayard Rustin as his deputy to do the work of organizing the March with the assistance of certain staff persons of the various organizations. The National Council of Christians and Jews participated then, and the National Council of Churches, some of the labor organizations, such as the United Automobile Workers of America, that’s President Walter Ruther in the leadership, the United Electrical Workers of America, and some of the other unions participated. And the march of plans were underway. I was arrested in Plaquemine while the march was being planned. I was urged to come out. I received telegrams from both Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young urging me to bail out of jail and come to the march and make a speech on behalf of the organization of which I headed—CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. Well, I did a lot of soul searching, then decided that I could not do so in good conscience. How could I leave my colleagues in jail? They wanted to go to the march too. I chose to stay in jail. Actually, I think that both Mr. Wilkins and Whitney Young felt that I was trying to upstage them because they felt that by staying in jail, I might be saying to the throng assembled in Washington for the march that here these people are making speeches and I’m acting—in jail, in the deep South. Well, nothing was farther from my mind than that. After all, some upstaging that would be, because press form all over the country, and hey, all over the world would be assembled there in Washington to capture those speeches for posterity. The media would be there. This would be a media event. And the fact that one of the leaders was absent would go largely unnoticed. So if there was any attempted upstaging, it would be absolutely stupid because it could not work. But I remained in jail. I watched the march on Washington on television, however. Local citizens of this town in Louisiana—Plaquemine in Iberville Parish—who brought me a television set and the jailers allowed them to bring it up to my cell, a little black and white set…and I observed the march. The press announced that there were a quarter of a million persons there. That was an understatement! Actually, there were at least four hundred thousand persons there. They had originally predicted there would be a hundred thousand or more, and there were four hundred thousand. It was like a prayer meeting—the White House had been frightened of it, fearing that it would lead to riots in the street, the National Guard, indeed, the Army had been brought close to Washington and camped in tents in the event rioting broke out, they could be close by and move in quickly. The President, President Kennedy, had tried to get the march called off, he feared violence so much. But it was most peaceful. And the climate there was one of friendliness. Everyone seemed to be friendly and peaceful. I watched it and I was impressed. I wept during some of the speeches. I wept especially during the speech of a rabbi and Walter Ruther of the United Auto Workers, and particularly during the now famous speech of Martin Luther King Jr., “I have a Dream,” and I wished, of course, that I had been there. When the march was over, just a couple of days later, Louisiana cancelled all bail bond requirements and let us out on our own recognizance, which indicated, of course, that the high bail was merely to keep us in jail, keep us from going to the march. So they said “alright, you can get out now, no bail required.” I got out and then followed the most unlikely and the strangest episode in my life. Local citizens—black citizens—of this town held a march to protest police brutality. This was on September 1, 1963—mark the date in your memory—just a few days after the march. The march had been August 28th. Practically every black citizen of Plaquemine was in that march, the issue was so shocking. The march, led by most of the ministers, proceeded. They had asked me to lead it and I had declined to do so because they were being accused by the city fathers of Plaquemine of being led by an outside agitator, namely me. And I didn’t mind being called an agitator, after all, as Thurgood Marshall, who at that time was with the NAACP legal defense and education fund told me, he said “Jim, don’t be afraid of being an agitator because every housewife knows the value of an agitator. It’s the instrument in the washing machine which bangs around and gets rid of all the dirt!” So I didn’t object to being called an agitator, but I thought it was an insult to the local black citizens of Plaquemine to be told that they were being led around by the nose by an outside agitator. So I asked them to do this march by themselves, and I would remain behind, I would stay in the parsonage, the home of black Baptist minister, the pastor of the Plymouth Rock Baptist Church, where many of our rallies were held and where the marchers gathered before their march began. The march was stopped when it got to the edge of town by city police. It was not broken up, the marchers were not dispersed, it was stopped and the marchers were held there and told to just stand, wait. What were they waiting for? A little while later, a large number of state police cars came speeding up, followed by a large number of horse vans. State police, state troopers mounted the horses and rode into the crowd of marchers, swinging billy clubs, wielding electric cattle prods, those instruments which are used in many rural areas to move bulky cattle. They’re battery operated, and if the cow won’t move, if Bossy wants to be very bossy and will not move, then Bossy is stuck with the electric cattle prod and gets a shock, and that moves Bossy. Well, the troopers had electric cattle prods, and they stuck the people with them, they got shocked. The troopers also had canisters of tear gas on their belt, and they had their guns too. One girl was trampled by a horse, rather severely injured; others were cut and bruised from the clubs. The would-be marchers came running back to the Church in disarray—crying, screaming. There were a couple of nurses there who bandaged up those who were injured. Troopers rode right into the Church, if you can visualize that. I did not know that the steps were strong enough to carry those horses, but they did. A few of the horses were prodded right up the steps into the Church. Those troopers who rode into the Church had gas masks on and the troopers hurled gas canisters into the crowd of people, the hundreds of them who were there. The people ran, still screaming and crying, out the back door of the Church, some running for their homes, others running into the parsonage, the minister’s home next door, where I was. The troopers broke the windows of the Church out, those colored windows, yes, stained glass. They turned over the pews. They brought in high pressure fire hoses and turned them full blast onto the inside of the Church. There was a reporter from a Baton Rouge Daily newspaper there and his byline article the next day said “Bibles and Hymnals were Floating in the Aisle.” They soon got him out of there and they discovered there was a reporter there, one of the troopers stuck him with an electric cattle prod and he got in his car and headed fast for Baton Rouge and wrote his story. That left us isolated because the press was our protection. People hesitated to brutalize us as long as the cameras were there, preserving it for posterity. They did not want to be seen on television news doing their dirty work, did not want to be captured for the front page of daily papers doing it. But with the press gone, we were at their mercy. There was something strange about the troopers on this occasion—their name plates and badge numbers were taped over so that it would be impossible to identify them from those things. Two of my young staff member of CORE who were hiding outside, one had hidden under the steps of the Church, another had climbed up a fig tree. The two of them overheard one trooper talking to others and he said to them “when we catch that g-d nigger Farmer, we’re going to kill him.” In the parsonage we could hear shouts out in the street. “Run, nigger, run.” You could hear horse hooves. “Get up, run nigger, run,” and beheld down obviously by an electric cattle prod or something, “we’ll let you go, nigger, if you tell us where Farmer is.” I think every black citizen of Plaquemine knew where I was that afternoon, but nobody was telling. Nobody was telling. Phone calls came in through the parsonage informing us that the troopers, state police, were kicking open doors in the black community. This was not Johannesburg. Plaquemine, Louisiana, Tipperville Parish, September 1, 1963. Kicking open doors, screaming “come on out, Farmer. We know you’re in here.” They ransacked the house and not finding me, turn over furniture, tear it up, and on the way out the door, toss canisters of tear gas in and then go to the next house, kick open that door, and go through the same process. Troopers who were outside of the parsonage began tossing tear gas bombs into the parsonage. A window would shatter, in would come a canister of tear gas and the place would fill with it. “Ppppssssssssssssss.” Another window, another canister, another, another, another, another. I’m sure you’ve never been massively tear-gassed, and I hope you never will be, and you probably never will be, but when that happens, you feel that death would be merciful. You would do almost anything to be able to fill your lungs with oxygen, with air, and to stop the burning in your eyes. I have believed for a long time that the eye problems which I’ve had for the last seven years were a result of the long duration tear-gassing that evening. My ophthalmologists, however, I must hasten to add, say that there is no evidence in the literature on tear gas to support that belief. Yet, we were massively tear-gassed. I was trying to get phone calls out of town, long-distance calls. I tried to call the White House, the President of the United States. I tried to call the Department of Justice, the attorney general. I tried to call the FBI. I tried to call member of my staff in New York, but that day in Plaquemine Louisiana, Bob Bell was not placing any long-distance calls from the black community. I would give the number and we would lose connection and I’d get a dial tone. I tried repeatedly with the same result. As more tear gas and more came into the house, most of the people in the house would burst out the back door into the back yard to fill their lungs with air—a little respite. As night was falling now, the dust had fallen, flood lights would sweep across the crowd in the back yard looking for someone, probably for me, obviously. Not finding me, tear gas was thrown into the crowd behind them to force them back into the house, more gas in the house to force them back into the yard, more flood lights, back into the house, the yard, the house, the yard, the house, the yard. I didn’t go out with the crowd because I thought that to go out meant to die, since they were looking for me. I sent one, I think it was two, young CORE men crawling through tall grass to get to black phone funeral home a half block away to ask the mortician there, a woman funeral director, if we could come there for refuge. Since this place had been gutted and was so full of tear gas, we just couldn’t abide it. The funeral director had never been a part of the movement. She was one of the few blacks in town who had never marched with us, had never attended our rallies, had never done anything in the movement. In fact, some of the young activist had called her a “nervous Nellie.” Well, I thought her answer would probably be “no,” but lo and behold, her answer was” yes.” And so we began crawling in twos, threes, and fours through the tall grass and weeds to get to the back door of this house, this funeral home. Crawling isn’t exactly the word—we moved like soldiers move in the army, on our bellies, using our elbows, keeping our heads down so as not to be spotted by the troopers who were around. We’d get to the back door and tap on it at its base and she would open the door, come in, and the door would be closed quickly. When all of us, or most of us, were there, it was clear that we had gone some place, had left the parsonage, because the shouting and screaming and crying and yelling had stopped. And it didn’t take the troopers long to figure out where we had gone, so they came to this place, the funeral home. They were behind the funeral home, then, yelling “come on out, Farmer, we know you’re in there! We’re here to get you!” and inside the funeral home, I was trying, still unsuccessfully, to get phone calls out of town.