MY STUMBLES THROUGH THE SIXTIES AND THE CIVIL RIGHTS ERA

Tags

Civil Rights, Football, Gloria Steinem, Low Country, Nonfiction, Pat Conroy, South Carolina, That Was The Week That Was, The Sixties

I have a great memory, but fifty years ago is a long time. If some of the people mentioned have different memories, then that is to be expected. I also depended on the valuable memories of my old friend Dicky Strozier and my brother Charlie. Charlie’s differ a bit from mine, but not in any significant way. 

At times I look back on the sixties in the deep south and see a foreign place. I think that sense of alienation may have been enhanced by the fact that I joined the Peace Corps in 1975, and except for a year or so living in DC and a few extended visits, I lived and worked in Africa until the early nineties, and only returned to live in the south in the mid-nineties. When change happens gradually you can adjust almost unnoticed, but after a twenty year absence, I experienced culture shock. In Columbus, Ga. the elderly husband of my neighbor had been rushed to the hospital, a very sweet couple. A few neighbors, including me, had gathered around her when we saw her outside to give her our best wishes. One of them said something about bearing witness for her husband. She started dancing around, flailing her arms and chanting, “He’s been bathed in the blood of the lamb! He’s been bathed in the blood of the lamb!” It reminded me of the time I had inadvertently stopped my truck in the middle of a female circumcision ceremony in Chad. This was alien to me, strange ritualistic stuff. Things had changed over the years. There has been a great deal of mythology and revisionist history written about the sixties. Perhaps one personalized account can reset reality for those who read it.

I was born in Charleston, but spent years 2-10 in the outer suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri being my father’s home state. Then we moved back to the Charleston area, to Johns Island, in 1959. Distance wise Johns Island is not far from Charleston, but in those days it was still mostly rural with a 70% black population, many of whom spoke Gullah. Blacks lived right down the road, any road, but there was no mingling of the races. Black kids and white kids never played together, or went to the same churches, or attended the same schools. Blacks and Mexicans harvested the produce, and white kids worked the sheds packing it. There was a palpable sense of arrogance bordering on animosity shown by all white people toward black people. The n-word was commonly used. The only pro civil rights whites were “northern agitators,” often Jews. There were no Jews on Johns Island that I ever heard of; they all lived in downtown Charleston; and I only knew of one Catholic family. As I would learn later, most of the Jews in Charleston shared the prevailing prejudices. In fact some had ancestors who had fought for the Confederacy. I don’t think there were any white liberals on Johns Island. If there were, they kept a very low profile. I remember asking my father why he had voted for Kennedy. He replied, “Because Lincoln was a Republican.”

I’m going to tell a little anecdote here that I have included in another story, because it provides some insight into the times. My mother grew up on a farm in St. George, SC. She had a limited education, sixth grade I think, but she was literate and enjoyed reading newspapers and such. She was ignorant of many things, but she wasn’t stupid. She had a bevy of strange beliefs and superstitions. Now the point of this is not so much the tale itself, but her absolute unawareness that there was any sexual component to it. Of course as a precocious teenage boy I saw the sexual connotations, but I never mentioned them. That was ground best not trod on.

You see there is an actual long, slender, nonpoisonous black snake in the SC low country called the coachwhip. My mother believed it would lie in wait for a young woman to walk by. Then it would rise up, head waving back and forth, and make a perfect wolf whistle, just like a brash construction worker might. When the woman looked toward the sound, the snake would stare into her eyes and hypnotize her. Then it would crawl up, wrap around her, and squeeze her to death.

The black culture on Johns Island and adjacent Wadmalaw Island was quite different from the white one. Many blacks spoke the Gullah dialect, although almost all of them could and would speak something much closer to regular English to white people. They had their own music and superstitions. I remember the shack like houses with blue panted doors, window trim, and porch ceilings. That color was called haint blue. They believed that ghosts (haints) wouldn’t cross water, so the blue would keep them from entering their homes. One of my great regrets is that I never immersed myself in such an interesting culture. That was impossible for me at that time. I had evolutionary miles to go.

I was a product of my environment. I was just as prejudiced as the other white kids, used the n-word, and generally tried to fit in with everybody else. There was one difference though, I loved to read. No one ever read bedtime stories to me or even encouraged me to read, so I started out reading comic books. I later branched out to kid’s adventure stories, then sports books, and soon I was reading anything I could get my hands on. My one year younger brother and I thirsted for knowledge in a wasteland. How I envy the children of today. In those days encyclopedia publishers would send the first book, the “A” book, to people free, hoping they would go on to buy the set. We could never afford a set, but Charlie and I memorized the “A” book from cover to cover. I still have a warm place in my heart for aardvarks. Also it probably explains why I haul two old encyclopedia sets around with me every time I move. I just like looking at them.

The small sexually censored, but surprisingly philosophically uncensored, school library was my only source of literature. I read anything and everything, Mein Kampf, The Communist Manifesto, just to name a couple. These days I would probably be put on a watch list. What I discovered from reading those books was that even the most abhorrent philosophies have some appealing truths at their core, which are then warped and twisted into something evil. There is an Arabic proverb: “That which is learned in youth is carved in stone.” However, thanks mostly to my voracious reading, gradually, very gradually, I began to question my own beliefs.

Because of the association of the Republican party with Lincoln, as well as being the party of blacks during Reconstruction, almost all whites were Democrats. I never heard of a white Republican on Johns Island. That would have been a curiosity like a two-headed calf. Since blacks were kept from voting by one means or another, that meant that in South Carolina the Republican Party only existed on paper. Oh every now and again some guy with a big ego would run for office as a Republican simply because he could, but it was just token stuff. For all the statewide offices, the general election was a joke. The Democratic primary was the only real election.

During the Kennedy Administration, southern whites became increasingly alarmed and angry with the progressive tendencies of the Democratic Party. The solid south held together one last time for Johnson in 1964, only because he was a fellow southerner. Johnson’s relentless support for civil rights was the killing axe blow among whites to the Democratic Party in the south. Oh the tree didn’t fall immediately, but it was doomed. On the other hand the Republican Party was a blank slate, an empty vessel just waiting to be filled. And fill it they did. The Republican Party in the south was reborn as the party of racism and intolerance. That didn’t mean that the whites who remained in the Democratic Party weren’t racists too, most were, just of a more moderate variety, some of whom were capable of adjusting their beliefs. Also a few hardcore racists remained Democrats for seniority or other personal reasons.

The exodus to the Republicans continued over the years, particularly as the Republicans began to tone down the racist rhetoric. The fight over integration and voting rights was over. They began to couch their policies in terms of states rights, limited federal government, and the pro-life movement. The last time that I looked, around the turn of the century, less than fifteen percent of registered white voters in South Carolina were Democrats. It well might be less today. Even with the exodus of the hardcore racists, it was still difficult for blacks in the sixties, seventies, and eighties to win Democratic primaries. This was the era of Clinton, Carter, the Gores, etc. White Democrats were more progressive than white Republicans, but it was still tough for them to vote for a black person, especially one who had never held a major elected office, and almost none had. Eventually this led to the tacit acceptance by southern blacks of Republican gerrymandering, which assured that fewer Democrats would  be elected, but most of those that were would be black. Also it meant that Republican candidates in gerrymandered districts did not have to moderate their positions in order to get elected, in fact quite the opposite.

PHIL OCHS, THE UFO COFFEE HOUSE, AND ME

Tags

Civil Rights, Free Speech, Student Protests, The Late Great Phil Ochs, The Turbulent Sixties, UFO Coffee House, University of South Carolina

I wrote most of this years ago, but I never published it. With all the recent discussion about freedom of speech, especially all the back patting about our reverence for it here in the US, I thought a little reality check down memory lane might be in order. I made some effort to check facts, but it wasn’t easy. As far as news coverage went in tumultuous 1968, these events were a couple grains of sand in a sandstorm. So this is written largely from personal memory. The saddest part of this sad story is that the people who govern South Carolina today are not significantly different from those who governed it then.

It was the bleak winter of 68/69, the end of a year notable for the disaster of the Democratic National Convention, the election of Nixon, heart ripping assassinations, the soul numbing daily Vietnam body counts, and the Orangeburg Massacre which occurred just 40 miles away from the University of South Carolina where I was a student. Everybody remembers Kent State where white students died, but how many people remember South Carolina State on February 8th, 1968 when three black students were killed and twenty-seven wounded, all shot in the back by police as they engaged in a peaceful protest because Orangeburg’s only bowling alley was whites only. So many were wounded because the police used shotguns, firing buckshot indiscriminately into the fleeing crowd.

It’s a small thing to mention, but a year or two later I was beaten bloody and unconcious after participating, just in passing, in an on campus civil rights protest, chatting with a few friends while somebody up front burned a Confederate flag. I was attacked from the bushes bordering the horseshoe’s sidewalk as I continued on with my arms full of books to the library. I never saw a thing, or if I did a concussion wiped it out. Two coeds heard the proud shout, “I got one of the N-lovers!” Then they watched a student kick me in the ribs as I was lying unconcious, before running off. Some hours later, face stitched up and shirt covered in blood, I filed the required paper work for assault at the campus police station.

Somehow word got out that the cops were holding me. Five or six cars full of freaks poured into the parking lot. Hippie/leftist white students at USC south called themselves “freaks” and called the majority conservative southern white students “grits.” I know, sounds West Side Storyish, except that there were nineteen grits to every freak. We each had our own uniforms: tie dye or peace sign t-shirts, army surplus shirts, navy peacoats, cutoffs, earth tone corduroy pants or bell-bottoms jeans, sandals or desert boots (aka shit kickers), and perhaps a whiff of marijuana for the male freaks; Gant shirts (the ones with the little hanger loop on the back pleat), alligator belts, plaid pleated slacks, penny loafers, loose knit pastel alpaca sweaters, and redolent quantities of Jade East cologne for the male grits. The northern students sometimes became freaks, but never grits, and sometimes they did their own black clothes, pale skin, Velvet Underground thing. We even held a Freak Day Festival once a year on campus, which, oddly, the university knowingly allowed. It featured joint rolling and brownie baking competitions among other fun events.

Anyway, the freaks began pounding their fists on the police cars, demanding my release. The cops didn’t know what to do. In those days campus cops did not resemble SWAT teams. They were more like mall cops. I went out and calmed things down, although it took some doing given my appearance. The cops seemed relieved, even grateful. However as expected the campus police made no effort to find my attacker, never even contacting me or the coed witnesses. A week or so later, the campus newspaper reported the protest and added: “One unidentified student was reportedly injured.” As I learned much later from an old HS football teammate who was playing for the Gamecocks, my assailant instantly became the toast of fraternity row. Eventually he flunked out, was drafted, and subsequently toured Vietnam.

So on a cold gray day I walked down Main St. in Columbia, past the State Capitol with its Confederate flag flying defiantly, past the prosperous stores, banks and offices, on up to the seedy tattered end of the street to the boarded up buildings where the homeless huddled and litter swirled. The USO was located there, and not by coincidence so was the UFO Coffee House. The UFO was off-limits to military personnel from nearby Fort Jackson. For a period they actually posted MPs outside. Absent the place being off-limits, probably some lonely soldiers would have visited it, since there were often coeds present. Usually the hippyish coeds were at least polite to soldiers when they encountered them on campus. From what I could tell, a pleasant chat with a pretty girl seemed to mean a lot to a lonely young soldier. Given the prevailing paranoia that any stranger could be a narc, especially one with short hair, things rarely advanced beyond that. However by contrast, the Suzy Creamcheese sorority girls who so strongly supported the war wouldn’t let a common soldier get within a football field of them. Come to think of it, they treated me pretty much the same way. So with its Che Guevara posters and socialist newspapers, the UFO was designed to irritate the powers that were, and it did. The owners were former students from up north. They didn’t serve alcohol or allow drugs in, instead they served coffee, tea, and a few New York specialties like Italian ices to homesick yankees and hippies. The clientele chatted, played chess, or read newspapers. Speed Limit 35, an excellent local blues/rock band sometimes played there on the weekends.

That night there was a small amateur poster on the door announcing Phil Ochs. The original price of seventy-five cents had been marked through and changed to fifty cents. So with thirty to forty kindred spirits I sat on the floor in front of a tiny stage and watched one of the great iconic performances of my life. Never before or since has person, place and time meshed so perfectly. A cigarette dangling James Dean character in a navy peacoat walked on stage and sang naively, idealistically, forcefully, defiantly, disappointedly, and humorously with a pleasing natural voice. His performance was raw, funny and profoundly sad. To this day when kids ask me what the sixties were like, I tell them to listen to Phil Ochs — it’s all there.

His tragic life was just as iconic. He traveled the world. In Tanzania he was mugged and his attacker hit him in the throat with a club. His voice was never the same. That set off a downward spiral. He bummed around the country for years under assumed names. In Dave Van Ronk’s deathbed autobiography, partially ghost written by his wife and a close friend, Phil is described near the end, sitting on Dave’s couch maniacally cutting pictures out of magazines and threatening anyone who came near with scissors. Then he hung himself. Sean Penn is a big fan. I read that when he was still young enough he wanted to play Phil in his life story, but that film never happened. Too bad, he would have been good.

       

As for the UFO Coffee House, the authorities trumped up charges and closed it down. They charged the owners with owning and maintaining a public nuisance. I sat through the Stalinesque show trial. I remember that the main complaint was that the UFO “was a gathering place for persons of evil name, fame, and conversation.” When I heard that I started to raise my hand, the coed with me grabbed my arm and shook her head no. Probably a good thing, even if my bravado was at least partly due to us being buried deep in the balcony. The complaint also accused them of corrupting minors with their leftist propaganda, minors as defined by the prosecutor as anyone under twenty-one. Now at that time the drinking age in South Carolina was eighteen for beer and wine. So going into a bar and getting knee-walking bowl-hanging drunk was just fine, but reading the latest issue of The Great Speckled Bird was corrupting.

That trial convinced me that God really was goofing on me. I had long suspected it. In the considerable history of that law, the harshest penalty ever given out had been a thirty day suspended sentence. From day one the verdict was never in doubt. Three people were sentenced to six years each. At least one guy had jumped bail earlier and fled home to New York. Governor Rockefeller refused to extradite. The appeals took about a year winding their way through the state court system, losing at every turn. When the case reached the state supreme court the next stop would have been the federal courts. There was no doubt that the convictions would have been overturned there, probably accompanied by some scathing language. So to avoid the embarrassment, the state supreme court overturned the convictions on a technicality. Such were the sixties.