do not catch at all. The crowd is mostly black and moves with stiff dignity. The difference between the whites and blacks in the march is so plain and predictable it almost makes one cry, the difference which makes the march necessary in the first place. The whites are off on an adventure. With a few exceptions, these 40,000 liberals are having a mixture of catharsis and outing. For months they have watched television news full of civil rights demonstrations in the South. They have heard the strains of “We Shall Overcome” on Huntley-Brinkley reports while eating supper in their suburban living rooms. Now they come to Washington to share in the struggle by listening to black leaders, singing black songs, getting a contact high off black nightmares. At the end of the day, they will drive back north to white Chevy Chase, white Forest Hills, white Tenafly.
I am just as guilty as any of them. I am on an adventure. I have come to be with my father, to carry a banner for him. I would follow him on a hike into the Arctic Circle in support of free ice cream if that was what he wanted.
The black crowd has not come to sing. They don’t want to perform for America this afternoon in a national civil rights minstrel show. This is not a Jerry Lewis telethon for “Freedom,” even though television cameras hang out of the treetops and down into the marchers’ faces like prehistoric reptiles, bringing it all back home.
Steve and I sit down in front of the Lincoln Memorial. There are two moments this afternoon. The blacks in the crowd burst out in waves of thunder when Mahalia Jackson sings “Buked and Scorned” with tears pouring down her face. She turns the city of Washington into a hot Baptist church on a dusty Sunday street in Niggertown, Mississippi. It is almost enough. But Martin Luther King will take the day and make it his, his gift to the crowd. His Dream reaches down inside each listener’s ear, a silver lance of language piercing not only the head but into the guts, touching that invisible envelope, whatever it looks like, soul. Men weep around me. Women grab their hair and shake. Steve looks lost and we move from one foot to another, our voices shouted away.
“…let Freedom ring.” He closes each mirage with this command, which is also a warning, which is also a prayer. “…let Freedom ring.”
I have never seen Martin Luther King before. I have not been prepared. He picks me up and shakes me as if a black Andalusian bull had got his horns into my guts and was tossing me above his head. Then drops me on my feet. I am not bleeding. But I have been gored, I am open in front. The March passes away slowly, like the approaching autumn of 1963, the hundreds of thousands drifting back through the trees to buses and cars.
I remember the March as one of the great events of my life. When we stepped off the curb onto Constitution Avenue and startedtoward the Lincoln Memorial, I glanced around me and saw under the banner of the National Council of Churches 200 of the leaders of Protestantism—Ralph Sockman right behind me—and every name off the cover of the Christian Century for the last two decades. As we got into the middle of that crowd and started down Constitution Avenue, I felt for the first time in my ministry that the church was where it belonged, in the middle of the street. There was an eschatological feeling about the whole day. It was very unreal, because everyone knew this was an affirmation of determination. By this event we were inescapably committed to move beyond acquiescence in present conditions.
ON THE STEPS OF THE LINCOLN MEMORIAL.
I get out of bed on a Sunday morning not long after the March. It is past noon. Downstairs I can hear my father’s voice. He must be talking on the telephone. His voice sounds angry. I know Sunday mornings in this house in Tenafly and something is going on out of the ordinary today.
“Yes. I already talked to somebody at the Justice Department,” he says into the phone. I walk past him to get some orange juice out of the refrigerator. He is still in his pajamas and robe, sitting on the edge of the formica table. “Sure, a telegram is okay. And we have to get a large delegation down there for the funeral. But I want federal protection there. Yes, I have the number of somebody closer to Bobby.”
I walk into the living room. I have rarely seen my father so upset. The fat package of The New York Times sits untouched on the seat of our red armchair. The television is running, with the sound turned down—one of those interview shows with some government official and three reporters. My father hangs up in the kitchen.
“What’s happening, Dad?”
“They bombed a church in Birmingham, Alabama, this morning. Killed four little girls in the Sunday school.”
“What?”
“It’s unbelievable, isn’t it? I called the Justice Department this morning and told them if we can protect three-quarters of the world from communism, we ought to be able to protect a Sunday school from being bombed in Alabama.”
“Have they caught anyone?”
“No. And they won’t. There is a riot going on down there now. God only knows how many are going to die today. The President has got to step in. They have to put more FBI from the North down there. The FBI in the South are racists like anybody else.”
“Four little girls? That’s incredible.”
“Isn’t it sickening?” He sits down. “I don’t know if I should go down or send someone else and organize. King will be going there. Right now we have to build a national coalition of all the local churches. When something like this happens, we have to be right there to put pressure on the government. Otherwise nothing is going to change.”
On the television, there is suddenly a special news bulletin. “Turn it up,” my father says. Then a series of still photographs of the bombed-out church, the frantic congregation being fired on by the Birmingham police, the bodies being hauled on stretchers past wailing women, police chasing a black man up the street with his shirt ripped and their clubs raised high over their heads. The newscaster says another Negro has died, killed by a shotgun blast from the police. My stomach is knotted. I am disgusted and furious. I look at my father and remember the night of the March. There was a celebration thrown in the Mayflower suite for many of the leaders. I was introduced to Floyd McKissick, who spoke for CORE at the March. “This is Bob Spike’s son.”
“You Bob Spike’s son?” he asked, leaning toward me, obviously a little high and full of the afterglow from that afternoon.
“Yes.”
“I hope you know you got a great daddy. Your daddy is a great man. If it weren’t for him, hardly none of these white folks would have marched today.”
My father is looking at a photograph of a Birmingham cop slugging a young black in the neck with his truncheon. He lets the air out of his mouth in a hiss. “Would you look at that son of a bitch!”
“I’d like to kill that cop,” I say. My father says nothing. I have never seen him so disturbed.
“I’m going to call the Justice Department again,” he says and gets up.
“What are you going to say?”
“I don’t know.” The sound of his finger dialing. Then he says, “I’m going to tell them the Protestant churches in this country are finished ignoring the lynchings and bombings in the South. If they don’t do something about them, the Protestant churches are going to find somebody who will in the next election.
My father was a gentle man who filled people with strength. His early biography might be something out of Horatio Alger.