Two stopped at the white cells. "This trash keeps it up, you go ahead and do what you got to do," one said meaningfully to my cellmates. On the Negro side, I could hear the clatter of a drawn gun on bars like a stick dragged along a picket fence. "They'll be no damn singing in this jail!" came the shout. We got handcuffs to lock ever' one a you to the bars. Y'all shut up an' stay shut up--raisin' san' when we got to work!"

Tentative Silence

There was a tentative silence as if everyone were trying it out just to see how it sounded. Then next door to me, another white worker called out in the slow sing-talking rhythms of a black preacher: "White po-licel Listen now! I want you to hear me, white law-men! You better know, yes you better know that the white man's day is almost over! The days of Uncle Tom and Mr. Charlie, white po-lice, the days of lynchin' an' moanin' an' runnin' an' hidin', they near an' end. An' the end is so close, so close, Mr. Law, that Lawd, yes Lawd, I can see it. I can see the future. I can see the future rushin' at the present, an' lemme sing--lemme sing about the future: I'm singin' 'bout a white dog. I'm singin' 'bout a black dog. I'm singin' 'bout a blue dog. I'm singin' 'bout a green dog. I'm singin' 'bout any kind of dog.--An' that's the color of the future, white po-lice, that's the color of equality. LET'S SING ABOUT IT PEOPLE!"

The black voice from the white cell was a perfect affirmation, and an affront to the cops--it rang with contempt for them. And then it was brave, and so inspired bravery. There was sudden intense applause, and a thunderous burst of song:

"Oh, oh freedom, oh, oh, freedom,

Oh, oh freedom, over me..."

White leadership, when it emerges, is hardly white, and it is possible only when whites have the talent and time to become black. It takes time to become a part of any community. But when one is physically and culturally alien, then it takes a great deal of time. In the southern Movement and in SNCC, there are so many in-and-out, summer vacation whites, so many who do not know the meanings of white, who forget that, because they are white, they will have to prove themselves time and time again before they can be one of the people--fight with them and not for them. The vacationers register a few voters (sell a few gallons of healing oil and an insurance policy), antagonize a cracker grocery store owner or two (collegiate mischief), then take off for school and--poof--their work goes up in the smoke of myth and old habit.

In early June this year, a troop of plain-skirted, work-shirted college students pitched up in pecan-milling, cotton-ginning, very segregated Albany, Georgia, to make the revolution. There was a mass meeting soon after their arrival, and they were introduced to the other people as "friends who feel so deeply that segregation is a blot on our land that they have come down to help us destroy it." In the amen corner, old Mrs. Jones nodded her gray head beneath its round, straight hat, admiring, grave and grateful as if before a work of God: "Sacrificin' their summers an' all for the Movement." In the back of the church, four tight-trousered cats from the pool hall down the street looked a little incredulous. A carefully dressed young woman, a student from a nearby Negro college, turned a near chuckle into a slow, wry smile. But the revolutionaries did not interpret individual expressions, and only stood, a little in awe, before the great body of black faces for which they were now to become a head.

Speaking roughly, there were two varieties of white in southwest Georgia this summer. There were those, first of all, whose conceptions of the good brave beautiful man they would like to be had made academic life dangerously unsatisfying. At another level, this usually seems to have had something to do with a left-wing upbringing, some early identification, a driving need for fame, notoriety, praise or persecution, or an inadequate sex life on the campus. At first they debated a great deal about the Movement: Was it revolutionary or reformist and so on. But for all of them, working for SNCC was going to solve a lot of personal problems, and identification with the organization was much more than political.

Then there were the drifters, the life-collectors. There were only a couple of these. They had had sufficient experience to make them more honest and so clearer about what social effect their participation in the struggle was really going to have, and they didn't talk about it much.

Both types wanted to go to jail very badly at the beginning of the summer. Among the coffee house-fast freight-self-defense for the Negro-rice diet set, going to jail must be worth about as many points as a hitch-hike to southeastern Peru. And the simple yen for jail was the force behind their organizing. For several days, they moved around the circle of the very committed Negroes, assuring those who least needed it that this time demonstrations would be big and effective, and persuaded in turn by the inevitable enthusiasm of the Movement regulars that maybe they really would be. Long tedious organizing among the masses of Negroes (who were cynical and tired after a year's vain demonstrating) was hardly necessary if the people were so ready. Anyway, they would be leading somebody into jail.

Some Sobering

And they did. In mid-June, a bunch of cocky, naive college students went to jail with the shock troops of the Movement (who were going anyway) and two or three weeks later, they came out again - tired. Jail was a sobering experience. Beating acquires wholly new meaning when you are beaten for half an hour by a karate expert. 'Doing your time' is much more than a collegiate aspiration when you do it in a four-man cell with ten or twelve drunks and petty crooks who all know you're a "nigger-lover" and literally shake with their hate for you. Once out of jail, among the one group of whites, there began a withdrawal, a retreat, that was rationalized as a "waking up to the futility of demonstrations in this stronghold of southern racism and a turn to more realistic solutions to the problem." Kids who had been burning hot to lead the masses off to battle were suddenly very interested in selective patronage, voter registration, and federal contracting regulations. There was (is) validity to the turn, but it was a retreat nevertheless.

The drifters, naturally enough, began to drift. While the first group did its homework and sang Bob Dylan songs, the drifters checked out the rough black bars, picked up chicks, and, so as far as the other customers were concerned, slipped off into an old Southern tradition.

There were projects and plans of course. But nothing much got done, for, suddenly, the summer was over, school was about to open and the troops moved north to tell their tales of jail and suffering. No social walls had come tumbling down. No real organizing work had been done. There hadn't been time. A bunch of college students had had a titillating (the newspapers would call it meaningful) summer.

The white problem then is more than how to be black. It is, can you be? Do you want to be? Have you the time, talent, love? For SNCC, the problem is one of recruiting. But, with SNCC's image in the North--coffee-soaked, smoked-stained, streched like a guitar string and hope full like a song--it won't be easily solved. And neither will the white world's Negro Revolution.