in history that ever wished to abolish itself. And if one listens to
some of our ‘moderate’ Negro leaders, it appears that the Ameri
can Negro is the first race that ever wished to abolish itself. And,
my black brothers and sisters, it stops tonight.”
The crowd was clapping and stomping, so loud that Jay could
feel it backstage, as if the walls were shaking. He could not believe
the heat this man was generating, like a lightning rod in a prairie storm. It wasn’t just the man, but, really, the ideas, the words . . .
“So what you’re preaching, man,” one of the white students
down front asked, a cat dressed in cords and a denim patch jacket,
“isn’t it just racism of a different color? Isn’t ‘black power’ inher
ently anti-white?”
“See, you’re still putting yourself at the center of it, jack.
That’s what you ain’t yet getting. Black folks ain’t talking about
you, or
He had to be escorted out the back entrance that night, not
because of rioting, but because so many people wanted to shake
his hand, wanted a word with the brother. Jay had to shuttle
him out of the rear of the auditorium to avoid a mob. He shoved
Stokely into Lloyd Mackalvy’s VW bug, and the three of them
rode on to Austin that night, to accompany Stokely at the anti
war rally at the University of Texas.
That was the first night somebody put a gun in Jay’s hand. The Klan had threatened publicly to meet Mr. Carmichael
on Highway 71 that night, stopping the car before it got past
Bastrop. They promised a good show for anyone man enough to
come out and watch. Lloyd kept a little .22 pistol under the front
seat. He handed the gun to Jay and appointed him lookout. Stokely talked the whole way on the road that night, his head
leaned against the passenger-side window, coat turned around
and tucked under his chin like a blanket. He was mumbling softly
over the radio about how they were gon’ change the world, how
it was gon’ be better for their kids. Jay remembers Aretha had
a new cut out that spring, a haunting cover of Sam Cooke’s “A
Change Is Gonna Come.” The music was so slow and pretty that
Lloyd turned up the radio, and the three of them rode in silence
in the car, smoking cigarettes and listening to Aretha sing of
hope, Jay with Lloyd’s pistol still in his hand.
Stokely would shortly leave SNCC for the Panthers, joining
Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton and Elaine Brown. The
civil rights movement as any of them knew it would never be
the same. Black nationalism became the order of the day, less
a focus on integration than on self-reliance and full-scale sup
port of black pride and culture, entrepreneurship and political
uplift, to the exclusion of everything and everybody else. Bumpy
got on this big-time. He pushed for the complete disbanding of
COBRA. The old Scott Street group reinvented itself as AABL,
Afro-Americans for Black Liberation, or “able.” Bumpy and
Lloyd Mackalvy had fallen head over heels in love with black
