After the Tall Timber by RENATA ADLER Read Free Book Online Page A

the busload. Inside the trailer were Norman Talbot, a middle-aged black man from Selma who had borrowed the trailer from his uncle and was serving as its driver (“I used to work in a junk yard, until they fired me for joining the movement. I’ve got a five-year-old daughter, but after that I made it my business to come out in a big way”); Pete Muilenberg, a nineteen-year-old white student on leave of absence from Dartmouth to work for COFO, the Congress of Federated Organizations, in Mississippi; and Mike Kenney, a twenty-nine-year-old white student who had quit graduate school at Iowa State to work for SNCC.
    “SNCC isn’t officially involved in this march,” Mr. Kenney said to a marcher who visited him in the trailer early that morning. “Although individual SNCC workers can take part if they like. They say Martin Luther King and SNCC struck a bargain: SNCC wouldn’t boycott this march if SCLC would take part in a demonstration in Washington to challenge the Mississippi members of Congress. We didn’t want to bring in all these outsiders, and we wanted to keep marching on that Tuesday when King turned back. Man, there are cats in Selma now from up North saying, ‘Which demonstration are you going to? Which one is the best?’ As though it were a college prom, or something. I tell them they ought to have sense enough to be scared. ‘What do you think you’re down here for? For publicity, to show how many of you there are, and to get a few heads bashed in. Nobody needs you to lead them. SCLC has got plenty of leaders.’ People need SNCC, though, for the technicians. Some of us took a two-day course in short-wave-radio repair from one of our guys, Marty Schiff, so we could set up their radios for them. Then, a lot of SNCC cats have come over here from Mississippi, where the romance has worn off a bit and it’s time for our experts to take over—running schools, pairing off communities with communities up North, filing legal depositions against the Mississippi congressmen and against the worst of the police.
    “We’re called agitators from out of state. Well, take away the connotations and agitation is what we do, but we’re not outsiders. Nobody who crosses a state line is an outsider. It’s the same with racial lines. I don’t give a damn about the Negro race, but I don’t give a damn about the white race, either. I’m interested in breaking the fetters of thought. What this march is going to do is help the Alabama Negro to break his patterns of thought. It’s also going to change the marchers when they go back home. The students who went back from the Mississippi project became dynamos. It’s easier to join the movement than to get out. You have this commitment. There will be SNCC workers staying behind to keep things going in Selma. We were here, working, a year and a half before SCLC came in. Man, there’s a cartoon in our Jackson office showing the SNCC power structure, and it’s just one big snarl. Some of us are in favor of more central organization, but most of us believe in the mystique of the local people. We’re not running the COFO project in Mississippi next summer, because of the black-white tensions in SNCC. Some of the white cats feel they’re being forced out, because of the racism. But I can understand it. The white invasion put the Negro cats in a predicament. Not even their movement was their own anymore. I’m staying with it, though. Every SNCC meeting is a traumatic experience for all of us, but even the turmoil is too real, too important, for me to get out now. It’s what you might call the dramatic-results mentality. Some of the leaders may be evolving some pretty far-out political philosophy, but it’s the workers who get things done—black-white tensions, left-right tensions, and all.”
    Later that morning, Tuesday, it began to rain, and the rain continued through most of the day. When the first drops fell, whites at the roadside cheered (a Southern adage says that