Voices in Our Blood by Jon Meacham

Author:Jon Meacham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780375506826
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2001-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

The Negro Revolt Against “The Negro Leaders”

Harper’s Magazine, June 1960

LOUIS E. LOMAX

For nearly a century a small “ruling class” has served as spokesman—and has planned the strategy—for all American Negroes. Now it is being overwhelmed by an upsurge of aggressive young people, who feel that the NAACP is far too conservative and slow-moving.

As Pastor Kelly Miller Smith walked to the lectern to begin his Sunday sermon, he knew his parishioners wanted and needed more than just another spiritual message. The congregation—most of them middle-class Americans, many of them university students and faculty members—sat before him waiting, tense; for Nashville, like some thirty-odd other Southern college towns, on that first Sunday in March of this year, was taut with racial tension in the wake of widespread student demonstrations against lunch-counter discrimination in department stores.

Among the worshipers in Pastor Smith’s First Baptist Church were some of the eighty-five students from Fisk and from Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial University who had been arrested and charged with conspiracy to obstruct trade and commerce because they staged protests in several of Nashville’s segregated eating places. Just two days before, Nashville police had invaded Mr. Smith’s church—which also served as headquarters for the demonstrators—and arrested one of their number, James Lawson, Jr., a Negro senior theological student at predominantly white Vanderbilt University, on the same charge.

The adult members of the congregation were deeply troubled. They knew, as did Negroes all over America, that the spontaneous and uncorrelated student demonstrations were more than an attack on segregation: they were proof that the Negro leadership class, epitomized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was no longer the prime mover of the Negro’s social revolt.

Each protest had a character of its own, tailored to the local goals it sought to achieve. Neither the advice nor the aid of recognized Negro leaders was sought until after the students had set the policy, engaged the enemy, and joined the issue. Despite the probability that the demonstrations would be met with violence, the students took direct action, something Negro leadership organizations consistently counseled against. By forcing these organizations not only to come to their aid but to do their bidding, these militant young people completely reversed the power flow within the Negro community.

“Father forgive them,” Mr. Smith began, “for they know not what they do.” And for the next half-hour, the Crucifixion of Christ carried this meaning as he spoke:

“The students sat at the lunch counters alone to eat and, when refused service, to wait and pray. And as they sat there on that southern Mount of Olives, the Roman soldiers, garbed in the uniforms of Nashville policemen and wielding night sticks, came and led the praying children away. As they walked down the streets, through a red light, and toward Golgotha, the segregationist mob shouted jeers, pushed and shoved them, and spat in their faces, but the suffering students never said a mumbling word. Once the martyr mounts the Cross, wears the crown of thorns, and feels the pierce of the sword in his side there is no turning back.

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