Black Water Rising

where the money came from) an after-school program at Yates

High School.

Sometime in the late winter of that year, Bumpy got arrested

for passing out flyers on Texas Southern University’s campus.

He was promoting a rally in support of two older gentlemen

who’d been picked up for loitering while waiting at a bus stop

on Dowling. Bumpy was booked on charges of trespassing and

being an all-around public nuisance. It was Jay who came up with

the idea for a march to the courthouse downtown. He walked the

campus, going dorm to dorm, walked the neighborhood around

the college until the soles of his feet bled, until he got nearly five

hundred people to agree to march with him. They would meet

on campus, cut up Wheeler to Main and walk in unity, storm­

ing the courthouse, not leaving until they got justice for Brother

Williams and the two other men in lockup. He wrote the press

release himself, stayed up typing all night, drinking black coffee

and smoking cigarettes, listening to Otis Redding on his turn­

table.

They were at the courthouse almost seventy-two hours, a

round-the-clock vigil. Jay didn’t have a law degree then, but he

knew enough to know the cops couldn’t hold people indefinitely, not without a formal indictment. He got the Post and the Chronicle there, got his name and face in the paper. He made the mistake of sending the clipping to his mother in Nigton. She mailed it back about a week later with a note saying she’d raised him better and wasn’t he due for a haircut. Still, Jay became something of a hero. Bumpy was released, and a few days later, they let the other two men go as well. COBRA was now a force to be reckoned

with, getting more attention than the local SNCC chapter. It was Jay Porter whom Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the

national chapter of SNCC, called when he was coming through

Texas for the first time. An antiwar rally was happening in Aus­

tin that April, and Stokely wanted to speak in Houston while he

was visiting the state. All through that winter and spring, he’d

been traveling the country, speaking on campuses or wherever

he could get a hall, reworking and refining a position paper he

was calling “Toward Black Liberation.” The remarks, which Jay

and his group had not yet heard (as no Houston paper would

print them), were apparently so inflammatory that Carmichael

was being blamed for riots all across the country. According to

local police, wherever Stokely spoke, there was gon’ be trouble. Texas Southern, just a few minutes from the U of H campus,

flat-out wouldn’t have him. The University of Houston also said

no. Jay simply ignored them. The night Stokely came through

town, Cullen Auditorium was free. So that’s where they held the

rally . . . just went in and took it over. Word got around campus,

and some three hundred people showed up, more than the hall

could hold. They were spilling out into the hallway, onto the

grass lawn outside. Some of them curious, wanting to be a part

of the thing that everyone was talking about. But there was also

a contingent of rebels—conservative white students who didn’t

want this loudmouth nigger on their campus—and they raised

painted signs and fists to make it known. And just beyond the doors, in martial formation on the lawn outside the auditorium, were a hundred officers from the police and sheriff’s depart­

ments, dressed from head to toe in riot gear.