Because discomfort, anguish and other psychological distress is sure enough what I felt after spending an hour with one of the most successful teachers I ever had, Mrs. Septima Poinsette Clark.
It was December 9, 1964. Mrs. Clark was then a member of Dr. Martin Luther King’s executive staff, his inner circle. She had an office in his headquarters suite in Atlanta.
I was a brand-new recruit, called a subsistence worker, earning the grand wage of $25 per week.
Randolph Blackwell
I had told Dr. King’s chain-smoking office manager, Randolph Blackwell, that I was a writer, who could churn out copy on demand. I had done that in college back in Colorado, for the yearbook and the campus newspaper.
Blackwell said they needed some copy churned out, to keep up with the hurly burly of news.
And news there was. That was the month when Dr. king headed to Oslo to collect the Nobel Peace Prize. And, I soon learned, he and his staff were almost ready to launch a voting rights campaign in Alabama.
Yes, there was plenty of copy to produce. But it was quickly revealed that my college churnings, about fraternities and football teams and homecoming royalty, were not much help in charting the fast-moving, often dangerous civil rights movement.
I was a flop at my initial assignments, of which we’ll skip the details. It turned out my claim of being a writer was mostly about the future: I was working toward becoming one; but in the roiling South, I wasn’t there yet.
I went to Blackwell for help. He puffed on his cigarettes and smiled enigmatically, apparently understanding the whole situation at a glance.
There was, he said, another project I could work on, and quietly report to him about: an article commissioned by Ebony Magazine, on “The Men Around Dr. King.”
Although it would be put in final form by Ebony’s staff writers, they wanted us to furnish summary interviews with Dr. King’s Executive Staff; and I could do those, Blackwell said.
This sounded promising, even exciting. The next morning, I set out to do my first interview.
It also turned out to be my last.
Perhaps appropriately, at the top of my list of “the men around Dr. King,” was a woman: Mrs. Septima Poinsette Clark.
This was more logical than I realized, because Mrs. Clark, being female, was at the bottom of the executive staff status ladder. (No, Dr. King and his circle were not pioneers of new wave feminism.) Thus she was the most accessible.
Yet, being female, Mrs. Clark’s place in Dr. King’s orbit was not as straightforward as it appeared. She had come to SCLC from a project in Tennessee that had developed a program called Citizenship Education.
While her program eschewed protest marches and lunch counter sit-ins, it was as radical in its impact as anything else the movement did: it taught illiterate adult sharecroppers how to read.
The course dealt less with ABCs than showing farmworkers how to understand such documents of concrete survival and liberation as bank accounts, which most of them had never had, and aspiration: the Bill of Rights, which few had even heard of. This program also trained many of its students to become teachers themselves.
It went on without fanfare or public notice. But it was nevertheless profoundly subversive of both the outward and the inward pillars of Southern racism. Dr. King and his inner circle knew how valuable Mrs. Clark’s work was.
Mrs. Clark was also a calm pillar of the movement, with roots sunk deep in its past: she had, I learned, joined the NAACP before World War One, when the group was new and radical. And she did so in South Carolina, which was about as tough a place as there was in the Deep South.
Moreover, she had been a schoolteacher, of the sort who could control a room full of unruly youth without raising her voice.
I often wondered if she played a similar role in Dr. King’s executive staff meetings; she had the presence, and that gaggle of seething male egos surely needed her gravitas and steadying influence as much as any group she had ever been in.
Just how quietly imposing Mrs. Clark could be became massively evident almost as soon as I sat down in her small office and introduced myself.
I think I began taking notes of our conversation, but soon stopped, and they are lost.
At home that night, I sat down at the typewriter, rolled in a sheet of paper, and tried to write up the encounter. But to say I was feeling discomfort, anguish and other kinds of psychological distress is an understatement. (Though I wasn’t feeling guilty; Mrs. Clark didn’t seem to traffic in that bourgeois indulgence.) It was critical race theory in action, not yet able to speak its name.
Nevertheless, after a few hours at the typewriter, instead of a profile for Ebony, nothing would come out of my fingers but, of all things, a poem, which I appropriately titled. “On Meeting Mrs. Septima Poinsette Clark.”
I didn’t dare show it to Blackwell, but I still have it, and it is worth excerpting here:
Mrs. Septima Poinsette Clark
On Meeting Mrs. Septima Poinsette Clark Atlanta, December 9, 1964
I sit down quietly in the chair, The older woman smiles and light Reflects off frame glasses and gold rose earrings, the voice Is like, is like the whisper of tires on a faroff nighttime highway Or maybe that of a Negro woman of sixty-six Which it is. She inhales to speak, I raise My fine young journalistic pen, prepared to summarize Her story into ink traces, To finish my entry blank in the Biographical Sweepstakes: “Tell us, in 150 words or less, The substance of her life”; I am, of course, confident― The smile fades back into equilibrium, and she says calmly: “My Father was a slave.”
Those five words, spoken as mildly as any others she said, hit me like a critical race theory sandbag dropped from the ceiling. (The rest of the poem can be read here.) Without a hint of aggressiveness, she blew a big hole in the invisible wall of ignorance and obliviousness I had been living in all my life.
It took me days to recover (or maybe I haven’t fully recovered yet). I’m still grateful to Mr. Blackwell for not firing me. In fact, he let me leave the Atlanta office and follow Dr. King to Selma for the opening of the Alabama voting rights campaign.
I persuaded Blackwell that I could be useful as a writer there. In those pre-internet and non-cell phone days, I planned to write up a summary of each day’s movement events, beyond what the national media covered, and phone it in to the Atlanta office for use as background in fielding the endless press inquiries.
I think I actually managed to do that once.
Then I took a lunchtime walk around the Black section of Selma’s downtown. It proved to be another collision with critical race theory, the 1965 extracurricular, sidewalk-level version.
Back at the typewriter in the movement office, I again flailed and floundered in a mess of discomfort, anguish and other psychological distress, with no Texas governor to help me sink back into callow denial. All that came out then was — another poem.
SELMA STREETS – February, 1965
Here along the Selma streets Old men like tree stumps, Young men like defaced pillars,
Whiskers and hair grease and dirty overalls, Keeping impassive hopeless vigils,
Fraying edges on society’s old, but not discarded clothes.
I spring upon them, a dangerous animal, Dressed in new overalls and enthusiasm, Hands full of transmigrated dynamite caps:
ONE MAN-ONE VOTE the caps read,
They offer no resistance when I pin the explosives on reluctant lapels, But then, of course, they never have.
“Come on down to the courthouse, come on come on… Nobody’s gonna hurt ya………………. ”
I’m right of course, nobody’s ever gonna hurt them anymore, but that’s not what I’m talking about, not even what I’m thinking….
“Yeah, OK (they don’t say Boss Man or Mr. Charlie (thank God?)), sure, “Ah’ll be downnere inna fewww minuss, sure
“Inna fewww minussa, sure “Inna feww, sure
“Suresuresuresuresu”
Heads nod, graying whiskers flicker in and out of shadow, but the eyes say Go away go away, please now just go ahead on away;
The eyes look around me, over, beside, through, but not at, because I don’t Really exist, can’t exist, mustn’t exist (I’m thinking about
socioeconomic factors, the effects of a political aristocracy,
the philosophy of dynamic nonviolence and, of course, the existential value of
the local Negro religion, yes, professor, you see, as I explained fully in the footnote on page 47 of my thesis and as we can clearly see from MacElvain’s quite valuable remarks on the subject……….. ).
A memorial park for James Reeb, killed nearby during voting rights protests in 1965, downtown Selma Alabama.
Again, Blackwell and my other superiors passed on the opportunity to cut me loose. But I didn’t write anymore for the Atlanta office, or any other movement group. In sum, I was struck dumb, as far as writing prose went, for the next eight or nine months.
Fortunately, I managed to find other menial tasks to do to earn my $25 paychecks. And there were plenty more encounters with what some now call critical race theory, all of which were very educational, if often discomfiting.
Further, I even ran into the 1619 Project that year. In those days its incarnation was as a book, called Before the Mayflower, a hefty tome by Lerone Bennett, a veteran writer/researcher for Ebony magazine, published in 1962. Bennett scooped the New York Times on this story by 50-plus years; I still wonder what all the fuss is about.
But back at the typewriter, now privately, furtively, all through the height of the movement, the only thing that came out were a couple more poems. (One more, untitled, is here.)
Not until late autumn 1965, when the Vietnam War was steadily overshadowing the civil rights movement in public awareness, were my fingers “unstuck”, and I was able to write an article calling on Dr. King to publicly oppose the War.
The piece was published in The Christian Century in March 1966, not long after I had discovered Quakers, and left Alabama to do required alternative service to the military draft.
Then I started learning about how Critical Race Theory intersected with Critical War Theory.
Critical War Theory?
If that’s not a thing, fifty-seven years later and at least that many trillions of war bucks wasted (not to mention casualties, heavily weighted toward nonwhites), then it’s past damn time it became one.
I wrote a poem about that too, in 2003. But that’s for another post.
And by the way, now both are facing Critical Democracy-Is-In-Freaking-Dire-Peril Theory.
Hey, Texas Governor Abbott, how about you outlaw that one? It causes me discomfort and anguish and psychological distress every day. (Even more than wearing a mask.)
I don’t have a poem about that one. But give a few minutes, and I could probably work up a limerick.
Oh, wait–
There once was a guv’nor from Texas,
Who made Mar-a-Lago his nexus. Do whatever Don sez, It’ll make you the Prez– Or drive you to jail in your Lexus.
