Social Controversy and Public Address in the 1960s and Early 1970s: A Rhetorical History of the United States, Volume IX

by Richard J. Jensen (Editor)

Overview

The period between the 1960s and 1970s is easily one of the most controversial in American history. Examining the liberal movements of the era as well as those that opposed them, this volume offers analyses of the rhetoric of leaders, including those of the civil rights movement, the Chicano movement, the gay rights movement, second-wave feminism, and conservative resistance groups. It also features an introduction that summarizes much of the significant research done by communication scholars on dissent in the 1960s and 1970s. This time period is still a fertile area of study, and this book provides insights into the era that are both provocative and illuminating, making it an essential read for anyone looking to learn more about this time in America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611862485
Publisher:	Michigan State University Press
Publication date:	10/01/2017
Series:	Rhetorical History of the United States , #9
Edition description:	1
Pages:	420
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 11.00(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Richard J. Jensen is a Professor Emeritus of Communication at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He has authored and coauthored more than fifty articles and book chapters, most of which focus on social protest and social movements.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Fannie Lou Hamer on Winona: Trauma, Recovery, Memory

Davis W. Houck

Violence, or the threat of it, is critical to understanding the formation of a black identity through memory. It is the literal or figurative cut, after all, that is simultaneously the original injury and the inspiration for observation and witness. It may well be, however, that the story of the resulting scar tells us more about the nuances of racial memory.

— Jonathan Scott Holloway, Jim Crow Wisdom

President Lyndon B. Johnson had one helluva Mississippi problem. As his party's convention neared its formal opening on Monday, August 24, 1964, the unelected president grappled with a matter so complex and intractable that the former master of the Senate contemplated the unthinkable: in an August 15 telephone conversation with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) Roy Wilkins, Johnson mused about the possibility of resigning the presidency, moving back to Johnson City, Texas, and collecting his $50,000 annual pension. After encouraging Wilkins to reach out to other civil rights leaders for more ideas to help him with his Mississippi problem, the president confessed, "I don't want this power. I don't want all this. ... I don't have to do this." Seconds later, almost as if he'd entered a wholly different conversation, Johnson was back in the policy arena, trying on another set of arguments with Wilkins, who tried gamely to recover from the interpersonal whiplash.

Just what was it about Mississippi that had the nation's leading political player, one whose DNA seemed hardwired for the minutiae of policy and the calculus of compromise, ready to concede defeat? If the convention agreed to seat the legally elected and all-white Mississippi delegation, Johnson feared losing northern black support that he deemed essential to defeating the Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater. God only knew what kind of televisual chaos might erupt if the rabidly white supremacist delegates got on the floor.

It wasn't a secret that Johnson was hated by many Democrats in the Magnolia State. On the other hand, a group of mostly poor, black Mississippians who fancied themselves "Freedom Democrats" and whose legal challenge to represent the state was dubious at best, demanded to be seated. Those demands grew increasingly persuasive with the discovery of the bodies of Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner, and James Chaney less than three weeks earlier. The president did the electoral math with several interlocutors. If he seated the Freedom Democrats, even in a symbolic show of solidarity with their aims, he'd risk losing at least fifteen states in a southern backlash. Couldn't the Freedom Democrats see? He was their president. He'd maneuvered to get the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law. He'd come down hard on Mississippi. Why couldn't they just see these facts and let the politicians handle the quadrennial political theater?

There were also some unpleasant "facts" about the leadership of the Freedom Democrats. To his soon-to-be vice presidential candidate, Hubert Humphrey, Johnson confessed in an August 20 phone conversation:

Now just between us, and I don't think I'd tell another man this, and I can't, and if you ever indicate it I'll have to put ya in jail, I read these reports every night. They've [FBI] got all kinds of taps around. Everything [Joseph] Rauh [Freedom Democrats' legal counsel] says, and everything these other guys are doing, are of great concern to the government because the communists are in this thing deep. ... We've got to put a stop to him [Rauh] quick because this thing is gonna get out of hand. I would say, out of the twenty-five top ones, twenty of 'em are communists. ... [Martin Luther] King is completely owned and directed by 'em.

Thanks to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's J. Edgar Hoover and his team of espionage specialists, President Johnson had round-the-clock surveillance on the Freedom Democrats — including the order in which they'd likely be speaking on live national television on August 22.

The would-be Mississippi delegates faced off against each other that Saturday afternoon. Based on telephone conversations leading up to that dramatic confrontation, Johnson was willing to make only two concessions to the Freedom Democrats ahead of the convention. First, he agreed to seat them — preferably far away from the white Mississippi regulars at the convention hall in a symbolic show of support (with no official voting privileges). And second, he pledged the party to pass a resolution to ensure that four years hence race would not be a factor in deciding a state's delegation. This was as far as Johnson would go.

Little could he have known as the afternoon of August 22 approached that a poorly educated forty-six-year-old black Mississippi sharecropper was about to show the Texan a thing or two about power politics played out on the national stage.

Joseph Rauh had been given just one hour to make the Freedom Democrats' case before the Credentials Committee. He stacked his speaking lineup with movement stars, including the NAACP's Roy Wilkins, the Congress of Racial Equality's (CORE) James Farmer, and Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Rauh decided to lead off with Dr. Aaron Henry, a Clarksdale, Mississippi, pharmacist long active with several civil rights organizations in the state. Henry was followed by the Reverend Edwin King, a recently ordained white Methodist minister who served as chaplain at the historically black Tougaloo College near Jackson. A native of Vicksburg, the young minister offered two brief stories that illustrated the extent to which police officers in the state terrorized civil rights workers — with no repercussions. King's testimony set the stage for the next witness. Rauh introduced her with a flourish: "What I want the Credentials Committee to hear is the terror which the regular party uses on the people of Mississippi which is what Reverend King was explaining which is what Aaron Henry was explaining and which is what the next witness will explain, Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer."

Fannie Lou Hamer had the nation's undivided attention from her first words, "Mr. Chairman, and members of the Credentials Committee, my name is Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, and I live at 626 East Lafayette Street, Ruleville, Mississippi, Sunflower County, the home of Senator James O. Eastland." This was decidedly not Aaron Henry, nor Edwin King; this was an altogether different voice who, less than forty words into her speech, was speaking — loudly and boldly — truth to power. No doubt many whites missed Hamer's defiance because of their unfamiliarity with rural black life in the Mississippi Delta. The courtesy title "Mrs." was almost always denied to black women — regardless of their age. Whether age eighteen or eighty-five, black women in Mississippi were not addressed by white southern men or women — children, too — with such lexical markers of respect. Also, publicizing one's residential address, especially for civil rights workers in the state, was an open invitation for violent confrontation; it announced, "I'm here, I'm staying, and I'm unafraid of you," to whites seeking to harm or harass. A few of her viewers back home in Ruleville probably noted that such a bold pronouncement of location also meant that Fannie Lou Hamer was well-armed at 626 East Lafayette.

Like Edwin King, Hamer offered two stories of violence. The first described what radicalized her and facilitated her entry into full-time organizing work for civil rights. The second story was something altogether different; its telling on live national television (and retelling in the evening before an even wider audience) changed her life. It also changed the bargaining power of the Freedom Democratic Party. The story detailed the events surrounding her arrest on June 9, 1963, at a Winona, Mississippi, bus terminal with five colleagues returning from a voter education workshop. Hamer skillfully narrated the sadism that ensued:

And it wasn't too long before three white men came to my cell. One of these men was a State Highway Patrolman and he asked me where I was from. And I told him Ruleville. He said, "We are going to check this." And they left my cell and it wasn't too long before they came back. He said, "You are from Ruleville all right," and he used a curse word. And he said, "We're going to make you wish you was dead."

I was carried out of that cell into another cell where they had two Negro prisoners. The State Highway Patrolmen ordered the first Negro to take the blackjack. The first Negro prisoner ordered me, by orders from the State Highway Patrolman, for me to lay down on a bunk bed on my face. And I laid on my face, the first Negro began to beat me.

Whether Lyndon Johnson had heard enough at this point and decided to deliver a short, prepared speech, thereby redirecting the nation's collective attention to himself, is unknown. It is known, however, that the president knew when his rhetorical interests were being served — and when they weren't. The cameras dutifully followed Johnson to the East Room of the White House and a small meeting of the nation's Democratic governors where Johnson touted the past nine months and looked ahead to a future of prosperity and peace: "I have sought with all that is within me to serve that trust and to serve it to the fullest. So long as I am their servant, I shall work in no other way than for their peace, their prosperity, and their progress toward a new day, a finer day, and a better day." Johnson's closing stood in stark contrast with those uttered by Hamer: "One white man — my dress had worked up high — he walked over and pulled my dress — I pulled my dress down and he pulled my dress back up." Presidential platitudes could not compete with the brutalization of this masterful raconteur.

Walter Mondale spoke for many that afternoon and evening who had watched Hamer's address: "And in a moment people recall to this day, a sharecropper named Fannie Lou Hamer transfixed the room — and the nation — as she told of being shot at, arrested, and beaten for urging her fellow black citizens to vote." In eight minutes, Fannie Lou Hamer went from being a rural Mississippi civil rights worker to an international celebrity. Mail and calls poured into the White House and to Atlantic City, New Jersey, supporting the Freedom Democratic Party and its fearless spokeswoman.

Lyndon Johnson knew he'd been bested, at least temporarily, in this high-stakes rhetorical game. So on the morning of August 23, the phone calls began anew with the man targeted by Hamer in her opening remarks. The president informed the very powerful Mississippi senator and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, James O. Eastland, that the bargaining stakes had changed. Johnson was now offering the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party real voting privileges — not symbolic and segregated seats — at the convention. Eastland, predictably, was furious. Sure, it was only two votes, and yes, those votes would be designated as "at-large," not Mississippi, votes, but Fannie Lou Hamer's Winona story had stormed the convention. No, by God, the president wasn't going to allow "that illiterate woman" to cast one of them, but it was clear that the Mississippi regulars had been routed and a corner turned.

More than fifty years after her dramatic testimony in Atlantic City, people know Fannie Lou Hamer primarily because of her harrowing eight-minute speech. The speech had clearly mesmerized the entire country — not just Democrats assembled on the East Coast. The speech then and now "stands as one of the most compelling in American history." While those few moments on national television had instantly made Hamer a recognizable civil rights figure, her "Winona story" had been a staple of her rhetorical practices well before Atlantic City and would be well afterward.

In this chapter I examine Hamer's telling of the Winona story in three very different speeches. Regardless of how far her travels took her from Montgomery County and the Winona jail, the story of what happened there almost always accompanied Hamer. Several years after the event, she continued to mesmerize and horrify audiences with details of her beating.

The story is so conspicuous in her public speechmaking that it can be productively read through the lens of trauma. While several scholars and movement activists have argued for an exclusively instrumentalist reading of Hamer's Winona story specifically and her rhetorical practices more generally, I argue here for the story's constitutive aims, and how telling this painful story repeatedly over many years also engendered Hamer's emotional healing. More specifically, I read Hamer's Winona narrative for its dissociative tactics that allow her to reclaim a role other than traumatized victim. In addition, Hamer's narrative is often grounded on Judeo-Christian warrants, such that she becomes one of God's chosen agents in moving America closer to fulfilling its founding myths. No one can ever know the full extent of Fannie Lou Hamer's psychic damage or healing. But, one vital legacy of her Winona story, I also argue, occurs at the level of memory: more than thirty years after her death in 1977, our collective memory of Hamer remains finely sutured to the events in Winona on June 9, 1963.

I begin by offering a brief history of civil rights in Mississippi, with an eye on both Hamer and a post-Brown world marked by a nonviolent movement and an often very violent countermovement. I then examine how scholars have attempted to understand Hamer's rhetorical practices and how those efforts often run afoul of a stubborn sourcing problem. I next move to an overview of the literature on trauma and the intimate relationship between traumatic events and rhetorical practices. Using several different primary sources, I offer a detailed narrative of what likely happened in Winona from the time of Hamer's arrest to her release on June 12. I will then move to a close reading of Hamer's Winona story across three different contexts. Finally, I will make a brief survey of the extent to which our collective memory of Hamer's Winona story informs her historical legacy.

Delta Sharecropper

Fannie Lou Townsend was born in Tomnolen, Mississippi, in Webster County on October 6, 1917. The youngest of twenty children born to Lou Ella and James Lee Townsend, Fannie Lou experienced extreme poverty in the midst of considerable wealth. Her family sharecropped for most of her adult life on the E. W. Brandon plantation outside of Ruleville, Mississippi, in Sunflower County. That method of farming, only slightly more benign than the system of slavery it had replaced following the Civil War, typically functioned as a form of debt peonage wherein poor blacks and whites farmed land owned by wealthy whites in exchange for the rudiments of daily life: a small shack, food provisions, seed, fertilizer, and other necessities — all of which had to be purchased at the plantation commissary and often on credit. The yield from the year's cotton harvest was split between landowner and sharecropper. But because many sharecroppers could not read or do basic arithmetic, they were at the mercy of the plantation owner once the cotton crop had been picked and debts were settled. Conditions were so desperate in the Townsend household that the family often "scrapped" cotton, which meant that they gathered cotton that had been missed during the first picking. Fannie Lou remembers her mother tying rags around her children's feet to protect them from the punishing cold as they scrapped cotton in late fall on local plantations.

Croppers and their entire families typically worked from "cain't till cain't" — can't see till can't see — six days a week to try to come out ahead on the year's expenses. Most often, families did not break even, forcing them to work off the debt in the succeeding year. While sharecroppers barely eked out an existence, white plantation owners in the Mississippi Delta often became wealthy on the backs of black laborers. Because Fannie Lou's parents needed her labor in the cotton fields, her formal education stopped at age twelve.

Fannie Lou Townsend came of age in this economic context, and it was this same context of oppression that she railed against for most of her life. The system had badly stunted her development — physically, emotionally, and educationally — and at an early age she had become aware of its devastating effects. To her mother she confessed a wish that she had been born white. But her mother would not allow her family to envy whites. Carefully emphasizing the interconnection between the races, Mrs. Townsend insisted that the exploitative system of sharecropping did not leave white people unscathed. Hamer remembered her mother working in the fields or cleaning their small shack while singing, "I would not be a white man / White as a drip in the snow / They ain't got God in their heart / To hell they sure must go," which she would follow with the related stanza, "I would not be a sinner / I'll tell you the reason why / I'm afraid my Lord may call me / And I wouldn't be ready to die." Beyond restoring a sense of race pride in her daughter, Lou Ella's allusion to divine justice left Fannie Lou with an understanding that the races were inextricably bound. Both were ensnared by segregation and needed one another to liberate themselves from its devastating effects.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Preface,
Introduction Richard J. Jensen and David P. Schulz,
1. Fannie Lou Hamer on Winona: Trauma, Recovery, Memory Davis W. Houck,
2. Theorizing Black Power in Prison: The Writings of George Jackson and Angela Davis Lisa M. Corrigan,
3. From Farmworker to Cultural Icon: Cesar Chavez's Rhetorical Crusade Richard J. Jensen and John C. Hammerback,
4. Free Speech at Berkeley, 1964–1967: Mario Savio, Clark Kerr, and Ronald Reagan David Henry and James Arnt Aune,
5. Finding Feminism's Audience: Rhetorical Diversity in Early Second-Wave Feminist Discourse Bonnie J. Dow,
6. Dr. H[omosexual] Anonymous, Gay Liberation Activism, and the American Psychiatric Association, 1963–1973 Thomas R. Dunn,
7. Making and Unmaking Political Mischief: Trickster Influences in the Rhetorical Humor of the 1960s Mari Boor Tonn,
8. People Get Ready: The Civil Rights Movement, Protest Music, and the Rhetoric of Resistance Stephen A. King,
9. Extremism in the Defense of Liberty: The Countercultural Rhetoric of Barry Goldwater's 1964 Acceptance Speech Carl R. Burgchardt,
Bibliography,
About the Authors,
Index,

Editorial Reviews

Editor Richard J. Jensen has put together a remarkable collection of extended case studies in the rhetoric of social protest in the 1960s and early 1970s. From the civil rights and black power movements to second wave feminism, gay rights, and student protests, the voices of dissent come alive in this valuable retrospective on one of the most tumultuous, controversial, and misunderstood periods in U.S. history.”
—J. Michael Hogan, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric, Penn State University, and Visiting Professor and Chair of Communication Studies, Davidson College
 

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