196
ROBERT COLES
ice cream cone and sit and eat them - but not have the money to pay,
no man."
I heard that early in 1967 from a young man I had known for
years. I knew him in Georgia, where he took part in one sit-in after
another, to get into those Howard Johnson's and Holiday Inns. I knew
him in Alabama, through which he traveled on the Freedom Rides. I
knew him in Mississippi, where he just barely managed to live while
he urged upon American citizens the traitorous desire to vote. I knew
him in the jails of Birmingham,
Jack~on
and the Delta, where all those
trumped-up charges had brought him. I visited him in those disgraceful
jails and talked with him, and each time he used words like "justice"
and "equality" and "progress" and "enlightenment." I remember that
after I left the prison one time I wondered how long such a man's
patience and kindness could last. He was fighting for American principles,
and his reward was primitive, foul-smelling American dungeons, with
plenty of beefy uniformed men to swear a,nd threaten and beat the
"goddam nigger-jew-communists" who were threatening - well, every–
thing, of course.
By 1967 that young man (still safely under thirty) could laugh at
all he had done, laugh at over five years of incredible sacrifice and
devotion. He turned on himself as well as white people with a vengeance:
"I was a fool, a fool drunk with a crazy dream that turned into a
nightmare, if you ask me. We all thought we could get down on our
hands and knees and ask Mr. White-Middle-Class-America to remember
his own hard times and his civics lessons in school- and come join
us to make this country over, to put an end to the
lip-service
it pays
to words like 'democracy.' We figured we couldn't lose. We figured–
oh, can I remember the bull sessions, all night ones! - that the big;
strong United States was actually running scared.
It
was fighting Com–
munists, who said it was another colonial country, allied to rich, corrupt
cliques in Greece or Spain, not to mention all over Africa and Asia.
It was fighting the Communists in the name of
freedom
and
liberty
and
democracy
-
and so it was embarrassing that the Negro, the black man,
lives like he does here, close to a slave, very close. So, we figured the
white man in America, he'd not only come over to our side for
idealistic
reasons, but for
practical
reasons, too. And we were wrong, dead wrong.
Instead, he passed himself a couple of laws, to make it look like the
South had entered the twentieth century, and then he went off to Asia
to make sure the twentieth century knows it's stilI white people who
make the big decisions all over the world. That's what we saw, and
that's what made us look in the mirror and say 'fool, fooL'
"Now you say I'm tired and you keep on wondering why I want
