Marches Off Target? : Covert Bias of ‘80s Splits Rights Effort

ATLANTA —  They were standing along the snowy roadside, waving Confederate flags and shouting, “Nigger, go home!” But their taunts only filled the marchers with purpose.

The procession was moving in a line more than a mile long up Old Buford Road. My God, the marchers realized, they had these racists outnumbered 20 to 1. They had come to Cumming, Ga., and they were showing the world!

Waiting to greet them on the steps of the white-columned county courthouse, the Rev. Hosea Williams--one-time “field general” for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.--permitted himself some of that same satisfaction. He had organized the protest, but he had never expected anything this size.

‘A New Day Is Dawning’

“Look who’s coming to dinner!” he said aloud, staring into a sea of 20,000 faces, almost as many white as black. Then, gazing around at a who’s who from the old days of the movement, he proclaimed: “A new day is dawning. This nation is ready for a resurgence of civil rights!”

By its sheer size, the march in all-white Forsyth County refired hopes for a time of activism in the streets against the nation’s “pockets of racism,” but conflicts about goals among a fragmented black leadership appear to make that unlikely.

While last week’s rally was an emotional reminder of how much the nation’s racist past remains alive in its racially troubled present--and while the feisty Williams plans more actions in Forsyth County, including one Sunday--most black leaders say marches against lily-white enclaves ought not to be a major tactic of the 1980s. They say blacks have bigger, more urgent problems closer to their doorsteps.

“I don’t think you can go county by county, town by town, trying to mop up these pockets of racism,” said Rep. John Lewis, himself the leader of scores of civil rights marches in the 1960s and now a Democratic congressman from Atlanta. “Forsyth County is a very small fish, really, in a very large pond.”

Blacks’ Concerns Change

In the 1960s, the struggle was to change a society that kept blacks from schools and lunch counters and voting booths by the force of its laws and customs. Nonviolent confrontation then was a way to prick the nation’s conscience about its outrageous prejudices and inequalities.

But times have changed. The major concerns of blacks now are not as easy to focus on as segregated buses or a rabble of slur-shouting, robe-wearing racists. Bigger problems--more entrenched and harder to combat--have come to the forefront.

Black leaders recite them almost as a litany: teen-age pregnancy, the deteriorating black family structure, black-on-black crime, drug abuse, lagging economic development in black neighborhoods.

Marching won’t make those problems go away, and black leaders complain that they need more of a commitment from the faithful than a few hours’ stroll up a street.

“Maybe the civil rights movement of the ‘60s spoiled us,” said one veteran activist of that era who is now involved in prison reform in Washington. “Maybe it made us too crowd-conscious, too spectator-conscious. We seem to have reached a point in our struggle where unless something instantaneously clicks and draws the crowds . . . very little gets done.”

Indications of Worse Times

A report released two weeks ago by the National Urban League lists dreary indications that bad times for blacks are getting worse:

Black adult unemployment is at 15%, twice that of whites. Black teen-age joblessness in the inner cities is over 50%. The median income of blacks is declining against that of whites. About half of all black children live in poverty. Almost a third of all black families have no assets at all.

Roger Wilkins, a senior research fellow at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, said: “The Forsyth County march said something real about the hatred of some whites for virtually all blacks, but those aren’t the real issues facing black people.

“Those issues are things like whether black children are going to get decent health care so they don’t approach the earliest school tasks diminished and depleted--or whether they’ll get a decent education to enable them to compete when they grow up.”

Robert L. Woodson, one of a new breed of conservative black thinkers, argues that blacks too often wait for white help rather than take up the burden on their own.

Calls Marches a Waste

“The idea is not to picket the place but to buy the place,” he said. “Blacks need to invest their money in black businesses, and it’s a waste of that money to go off on marches in little towns in Georgia.”

Its leaders insist that the civil rights effort remains vigorous, but, they say, these days it must concentrate on a rear-guard action, trying to preserve past gains from a Reagan Administration with much different ideas about fairness among the races.

“What can you do when the Administration is telling people that civil rights enforcement means not that some people will gain equality but that those people will be made favorites?” asked Mary Frances Berry, a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

She and others criticize the Administration’s coldness toward affirmative action, school desegregation, the extension of the Voting Rights Act and even the effort to honor King with a national holiday.

Hooks Expresses Concerns

“Marches are fine, and they make a good show for people conditioned by TV; you know, give me a happy ending in half an hour,” said Benjamin L. Hooks, executive director of the NAACP. “But most of the work is more tedious. We were in a helluva fight just to get the voting rights bill renewed.”

Nevertheless, Hooks and most other black leaders were moved by what they saw in Cumming, just 40 miles north of Atlanta. To them, the march had an adrenaline and electricity they had not felt in years.

“There may have been 1,000 rabble-rousers yelling, ‘Nigger, go home!’ but even they realized that even if all those policemen hadn’t been present, they never could have chased that big a crowd from the town,” Hooks said.

Last week’s rally was a response to more than trouble in Forsyth, where on Jan. 17 a group of 400 rock-throwing bigots had routed a “Brotherhood March” of 75 people--mostly blacks from Atlanta--on a country lane south of town.

Series of Racial Incidents

Coming as it did as the nation prepared to celebrate King’s birthday, that attack seemed to crystallize reaction to a series of highly publicized racial incidents. The events included one in Howard Beach, a neighborhood in Queens, N.Y., where blacks were beaten and chased and one was struck and killed by a car as he fled, and another at The Citadel, a military college in South Carolina where white students tormented a black student who later left the school.

“Blacks feel a lot of submerged anguish,” said Eleanor Holmes Norton, chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the Jimmy Carter Administration. “They believe there is still considerable racism in this country and they do not think whites have that same sense.”

Ironically, the Forsyth march was organized by Williams, an Atlanta city councilman once at the vanguard of the civil rights movement but now something of a Rodney Dangerfield figure in his home town.

Williams, 61, has been trying to get more respect since 1971, when he was ousted from the national staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in a rift over ideology.

Negative Headlines

His image was not helped by his 1980 endorsement of Ronald Reagan for President, nor by several arrests on traffic and drunk driving charges that summoned headlines in the local papers.

“They kept telling me that I was an old battle-fatigued general who couldn’t change with the times,” Williams said this week, declaring his vindication. “They said it’s time to get the movement out of the streets and into the suites. But I proved that Dr. King’s strategies are not obsolete.”

Friday, Williams announced plans for a return to Forsyth County on Sunday--this time to lead supporters in a visit to the churches there “under the religious banner that we’ve always operated under.”

“We’re going peacefully, nonviolently, not to cause any type of dissension or confrontation,” he said at a news conference staged at King’s white marble crypt in Atlanta.

“Destiny calls me into Forsyth County,” he declared.

Some Appear Wary

Several black leaders who consider Williams an unpredictable maverick are troubled at having him spearheading the action, though no one wants to be quoted saying so.

For example, neither Coretta Scott King, King’s widow, nor the Rev. Joseph E. Lowery, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, has so far endorsed a set of six demands Williams has drawn up for Forsyth County. King and Lowery are members of the Coalition Against Fear and Intimidation, formed after last Saturday’s march, which also includes Williams and NAACP representatives.

Williams’ demands call for, among other things, reparations for blacks who lost property in a 1912 Ku Klux Klan uprising in the county, a federal investigation into housing and employment discrimination there and the hiring of blacks as police officers and sheriff’s deputies.

Williams said he would deliver the demands Friday, adding that public officials and civic leaders in Forsyth County would have 48 hours to respond.

Williams Declares Resolve

If their response is not positive, Williams said, “Then we will continue mounting a nonviolent movement in Forsyth County just like we mounted in Birmingham, Selma, Savannah, Ga., and St. Augustine, and other places that we changed from racial bigotry. . . . “

“We will march, we will boycott, we will do whatever comes within the purview of nonviolence. . . . We will be beaten, bleed, and there’s a good possibility that many of us will die.”

One indication that others may be unwilling to expose themselves to such dangers came Wednesday when Clarke Central High School in Athens canceled two basketball games in Forsyth County--one with the boys team, the other with the girls team--after members of the predominantly black athletic groups expressed fears about playing there.

Williams says he was bewildered by the school’s decision. “That is evidence why they need to teach the philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr. throughout the school system,” he said. “Had they understood, they would have gone.”

But beyond the difficulty of agreeing on goals, some black leaders say the lessons of marches inevitably get lost amid white indifference, anyway.

Central Issue of Racism

Wilkins, for one, said, “White people look at the guys waving Confederate flags and wearing hoods, and they say: ‘That’s not us.’ Same as 25 years ago, when they saw (former Birmingham Police Chief) Bull Connor and said: ‘That’s not us.’

“One of the central issues of American racism is denial--denial that it exists, denial that it is as bad as it is, denial that black people are injured by it.”

American racism, many civil rights leaders say, has undergone its own transformations. These days, it is not so much a matter of “Jim Crow” as something that has been called “James Crow Esq.,” a far more subtle, even covert prejudice.

If few whites retain a belief in genetic superiority, many hold on to racial resentments and fears, a deep-set psychology that observes color before almost anything else.

‘Fundamental Decisions’

“People still make fundamental decisions about their lives based on race: where they live, who they hire, what churches and clubs to join,” said Laughlin McDonald, the Southern regional director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Polling data about the racial attitudes of whites shows great progress toward general tolerance, but it is mixed with equivocation, or even resistance, when the issues get closer to home.

For instance, an increasing number of whites--now more than 92%--favor integrated schools, though about half say they would object to sending their children to a school where more than 50% of the students are black.

“Whites are still moving in a liberal, more-accepting direction, while at the same time staying opposed to busing and affirmative action,” said Tom W. Smith, who interprets polls for the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

New Stereotypes Defined

Some observers say the nation is undergoing a breakdown in racial etiquette. Constraints have loosened against expressing prejudices. New stereotypes have replaced the old.

“Ten or 15 years ago, you might have heard someone say blacks are lazy, but now the catch phrases would be more like: Blacks are about as well off as whites. Or blacks are always getting a special leg up,” said Howard Ehrlich, a social psychologist with the National Institute Against Prejudice and Racism.

Or as Eleanor Holmes Norton put it: “Forsyth County might have been the extreme, but there is a whole lot of unattended racism out there. We’ve only had a half-finished civil rights revolution--and a long way to go.”