A Spy in Canaan by Marc Perrusquia

Author:Marc Perrusquia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2018-03-27T04:00:00+00:00

17.

THE ELECTRIC CROSS:

THE FBI GETS TOUGH, SUMMER 1965

VICKI GABRINER ROLLED A SHEET of stationery under her typewriter ribbon. Already, winter was setting in at the University of Wisconsin. As an icy wind rattled outside on the isthmus separating the choppy waters of lakes Monona and Mendota, she pecked out the date, December 2, 1965.

Raised in Brooklyn, in a politically active Jewish family, the idealistic, twenty-three-year-old graduate student had matriculated from Cornell University, where she first answered the call of civil rights, marching in picket lines and tending to the poor in Harlem. By the time she and her husband, Bob, enrolled at UW in 1964, they were immersed in radical politics, eventually becoming deeply involved in the budding antiwar movement in Madison, home to the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam. But on this day her thoughts were far away, in rural Fayette County, Tennessee, where she’d spent the previous summer living among poor black families; where she had helped lead a divisive voter registration drive.1

Where she’d met a photographer named Ernest Withers.

“Dear Ernie,” Gabriner typed. “I’m looking at your card now and it says, ‘Pictures Tell The Story,’ and I remember that spread you had in your window of that guy who was killed in Viet Nam. Do you still have it up? By this time, Memphis has probably lost many more of her sons in that war.”

In her letter, Gabriner offered to buy copies of a photo Withers had shot. It showed her smiling sweetly on the steps of the “Freedom House,” a nondescript, cinder-block building where she and her fellow civil rights workers headquartered during that hot, liberating summer of 1965 in conservative Somerville. The town was home to a year-round electric cross that greeted visitors from atop the city water tower and to young white thugs who roamed the patchwork of winding dirt roads, dispensing vigilante justice to anyone who challenged the unforgiving Jim Crow code. Together with three to four dozen college-aged colleagues, Bob and Vicki Gabriner pushed hard against the local white establishment. Pushback came with equal force. Several of the young activists had been kicked, punched, spit upon, and threatened with death—one stabbed, another struck with a baseball bat—as they tested public accommodation laws in local restaurants, sitting together, black and white, demanding service. They marched. They registered voters. They organized a boycott of the segregated schools.2

Withers was there with his cameras to chronicle much of it. The youthful workers considered the older “Ernie,” then forty-two, a colleague in the cause. Some visited his Beale Street studio in Memphis. One even spent the night at his house. He liked his picture of Vicki so much he hung it on his wall in Memphis.3

“Have you been out to Somerville at all since the summer?” she typed. “There is still a small group working in the area…Bob sends his regards. Yours in freedom, Vicki.”

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