People called Martin Luther King "Mr. Leader" or, in lighter moments, "De Lawd." Walker was Brer Rabbit.
The plan Walker devised for Birmingham was called Project C-for confrontation. The staging ground was the city"s venerable 16th Street Baptist Church, next to Kelly Ingram Park, and a few short blocks from downtown Birmingham. Project C had three acts, each designed to be bigger and more provocative than the last. It began with a series of sit-ins at local businesses. That was to draw media attention to the problem of segregation in Birmingham. At night, Shuttlesworth and King would lead ma.s.s meetings for the local black community to keep morale high. The second stage was a boycott of downtown businesses, to put financial pressure on the white business community to reconsider their practices toward their black customers. (In department stores, for example, blacks could not use the washrooms or the changing rooms, for fear that a surface or an item of clothing once touched by a black person would then touch a white person.) Act three was a series of ma.s.s marches to back up the boycott and fill up the jails-because once Connor ran out of cells he could no longer make the civil rights problem go away simply by arresting the protesters. He would have to deal with them directly.
Project C was a high-stakes operation. For it to work, Connor had to fight back. As King put it, Connor had to be induced to "tip his hand"-thereby revealing his ugly side to the world. But there was no guarantee that he would do that. King and Walker had just come from running their long campaign in Albany, Georgia, and they had failed there because the Albany police chief, Laurie Pritchett, had refused to take the bait. He told his police officers not to use violence or excessive force. He was friendly and polite. His views on civil rights may have been unevolved, but he treated King with respect. The Northern press came to Albany to cover the confrontation between white and black, and found-to their surprise-they quite liked Pritchett. When King was finally thrown in jail, a mysterious well-dressed man-sent, legend had it, by Pritchett himself-came the next day and bailed him out. How can you be a martyr if you get bailed out of jail the instant you get there?
At one point, Pritchett moved into a downtown motel so that he could be on call should any violence erupt. In the midst of a long negotiating session with King, Pritchett was handed a telegram by his secretary. As Pritchett recalled, years later: I...must have shown some concern over [it] because Dr. King asked me if it was bad news. I said, "No, it"s not bad news, Dr. King. It just so happens this is my twelfth weddin" anniversary, and my wife has sent me a telegram." And he says-I never will forget this and this shows the understandin" which we had-he said, "You mean this is your anniversary?" And I said, "That"s right," and I said, "I haven"t been home in at least three weeks." And he said, "Well, Chief Pritchett, you go home tonight, no, right now. You celebrate your anniversary. I give you my word that nothing will happen in Albany, Georgia, till tomorrow, and you can go, take your wife out to dinner, do anything you want to, and tomorrow at ten o"clock, we"ll resume our efforts."
Pritchett would not throw King in the briar patch. It was hopeless. Not long afterward, King packed his bags and left town.6 Walker realized that a setback in Birmingham so soon after the Albany debacle would be disastrous. In those years, the evening news on television was watched in an overwhelming number of American households, and Walker wanted desperately to have Project C front and center on American television screens every night. But he knew that if the campaign was perceived to be faltering, the news media could lose interest and go elsewhere.
"As a general principle, Walker a.s.serted that everything must build," Taylor Branch writes. "If they showed strength, then outside support would grow more than proportionately. Once started, however, they could not fall back....In no case, said Walker, could the Birmingham campaign be smaller than Albany. That meant they must be prepared to put upwards of a thousand people in jail at one time, maybe more."
Several weeks in, Walker saw his campaign begin to lose that precious momentum. Many blacks in Birmingham were worried-justifiably-that if they were seen with King, they would be fired by their white bosses. In April, one of King"s aides spoke before seven hundred people at a church service and could persuade only nine of them to march with him. The next day, Andrew Young-another of King"s men-tried again, and this time found only seven volunteers. The local conservative black paper called Project C "wasteful and worthless." The reporters and photographers a.s.sembled there to record the spectacle of black-on-white confrontation were getting restless. Connor made the occasional arrest but mostly just sat and watched. Walker was in constant contact with King as King commuted back and forth between Birmingham and his home base in Atlanta. "Wyatt," King told him for the hundredth time, "you"ve got to find some way to make Bull Connor tip his hand." Walker shook his head. "Mr. Leader, I haven"t found the key yet, but I"m going to find it."
The breakthrough came on Palm Sunday. Walker had twenty-two protesters ready to go. The march would be led by King"s brother, Alfred Daniel, known as A.D. "Our ma.s.s meeting was slow getting together," Walker recalled. "We were supposed to march at something like two-thirty, and we didn"t march until about four. In that time, people, being aware of the demonstration, collected out on the streets. By the time they got ready to march, there were a thousand people up and down this three-block area, lining up all along the sides as spectators, watching."
The next day, Walker opened the newspapers to read the media"s account of what had happened, and to his surprise he discovered the reporters had gotten it all wrong. The papers said eleven hundred demonstrators had marched in Birmingham. "I called Dr. King and said, "Dr. King, I"ve got it!"" Walker recalled. ""I can"t tell you on the phone, but I"ve got it!" So what we did each day was we dragged out our meetings until people got home from work late in the afternoon. They would form out on the side and it would look like a thousand folks. We weren"t marching but twelve, fourteen, sixteen, eighteen. But the papers were reporting fourteen hundred."
It was a situation straight out of one of the most famous of all trickster tales-the story of Terrapin, a lowly turtle who finds himself in a race with Deer. He hides just by the finish line and places his relatives up and down the course, at strategic intervals, to make it seem like he is running the whole race. Then at the finish line, he emerges just ahead of Deer to claim victory. Deer is completely fooled, since, as Terrapin knows, to Deer, all turtles "am so much like annurrer you can"t tell one from turrer."
Underdogs have to be students of the nuances of white expression-the hang of the head, the depth of tone, or the sharpness of the tongue. Their survival depends on it. But those in positions of power have no need to look at the weak. Deer had disdain for the lowly Terrapin. To him, a turtle was a turtle. The comfortable elite of Birmingham were just like Deer. "They can only see...through white eyes," Walker explained, gleefully. "They cannot distinguish even between Negro demonstrators and Negro spectators. All they know is Negroes."7 Connor was an arrogant man who liked to swagger around Birmingham saying, "Down here we make our own law." He sat drinking his bourbon every morning at the Molton Hotel, loudly predicting that King would "run out of n.i.g.g.e.rs." Now he looked out the window and saw Terrapin ahead of him at every turn. He was in shock. Those imaginary one thousand protesters were a provocation. "Bull Connor had something in his mind about not letting these n.i.g.g.e.rs get to city hall," Walker said. "I prayed that he"d keep trying to stop us....Birmingham would have been lost if Bull had let us go down to the city hall and pray. If he had let us do that and stepped aside, what else would be new? There would be no movement, no publicity." Please, Brer Connor, please. Whatever you do, don"t throw me in the briar patch. And of course that"s just what Connor did.
A month into the protest, Walker and King stepped up the pressure. One of the Birmingham team, James Bevel, had been working with local schoolchildren, instructing them in the principles of nonviolent resistance. Bevel was a Pied Piper: a tall, bald, hypnotic speaker who wore a yarmulke and bib overalls and claimed to hear voices. (McWhorter calls him a "militant out of Dr. Seuss.") On the last Monday in April, he dropped off leaflets at all of the black high schools around the county: "Come to 16th Street Baptist Church at noon on Thursday. Don"t ask permission." The city"s most popular black disc jockey-Sh.e.l.ley "the Playboy" Stewart-sent out the same message to his young listeners: "Kids, there"s gonna be a party at the park."8 The FBI got wind of the plan and told Bull Connor, who announced that any child who skipped school would be expelled. It made no difference. The kids came in droves. Walker called the day the children arrived "D Day."
At one o"clock, the doors to the church opened, and King"s lieutenants began sending the children out. They held signs saying "Freedom" or "I"ll Die to Make This Land My Home." They sang "We Shall Overcome" and "Ain"t Gonna Let n.o.body Turn Me Around." Outside the church, Connor"s police officers waited. The children dropped to their knees and prayed, then filed into the open doors of the paddy wagons. Then another dozen came out. Then another dozen, and another, and another-until Connor"s men had begun to get an inkling that the stakes had been raised again.
A police officer spotted Fred Shuttlesworth. "Hey, Fred, how many more have you got?"
"At least a thousand more," he replied.
"G.o.d A"mighty," the officer said.
By the end of the day, more than six hundred children were in jail.
The next day-Friday-was "Double-D Day." This time fifteen hundred schoolchildren skipped school to come down to 16th Street Baptist. At one o"clock, they began filing out of the church. The streets surrounding Kelly Ingram Park were barricaded by police and firefighters. There was no mystery about why the firefighters had been called in. They had high-pressure hoses on their fire trucks, and "water cannons," as they were also known, had been a staple of crowd control since the 1930s in the early days of n.a.z.i Germany. Walker knew that if the demonstrations grew so large that they overwhelmed the Birmingham police, Connor would be sorely tempted to turn on the hoses. He wanted Connor to turn on the hoses. "It was hot in Birmingham," he explained. "I told [Bevel] to let the pep rally go on a while and let these firemen sit out there and bake in the sun until their tempers were like hair triggers."
And the dogs? Connor had been itching to use the city"s K-9 Corps. Earlier that spring, in a speech, Connor had vowed to combat the civil right protesters with one hundred German shepherd police dogs. "I want "em to see the dogs work," Connor growled, as things began to get out of control in Kelly Ingram Park-and nothing made Walker happier than that. He had children marching in the streets, and now Connor wanted to let German shepherds loose on them? Everyone in King"s camp knew what it would look like if someone published a photograph of a police dog lunging at a child.
Connor stood watch as the children came closer. "Do not cross," he said. "If you come any further, we will turn the fire hoses on you." Connor"s jails were full. He couldn"t arrest anyone else, because he had nowhere to put them. The children kept coming. The firemen were hesitant. They were not used to controlling crowds. Connor turned to the fire chief: "Turn "em on, or go home." The firemen turned on their "monitor guns," valves that turned the spray of their hoses into a high-pressure torrent. The children clung to one another and were sent sprawling backwards. The force of the water ripped some of the marchers" shirts from their bodies and flung others against walls and doorways.
Back at the church, Walker began deploying waves of children to the other end of the park to open another front. Connor had no more fire trucks. But he was determined that none of the marchers cross over into "white" Birmingham. "Bring the dogs," Connor ordered, calling in eight K-9 units. "Why did you bring old Tiger out?" Connor shouted at one of his police officers. "Why didn"t you bring a meaner dog-this one is not the vicious one!" The children came closer. A German shepherd lunged at a boy. He leaned in, arms limp, as if to say, "Take me, here I am." On Sat.u.r.day, the picture ran on the front page of every newspaper around the country.
Does Wyatt Walker"s behavior make you uncomfortable? James Forman, who was a key figure in the civil rights movement in those years, was with Walker when Connor first deployed the K-9 units. Forman says that Walker started jumping with joy. "We"ve got a movement. We"ve got a movement. We had some police brutality." Forman was stunned. Walker was as aware as any of them just how dangerous Birmingham could be. He had been in the room when King gave everyone a mock eulogy. How could he be jumping up and down at the sight of protesters being attacked by police dogs?9 After D Day, King and Walker heard it from all sides. The judge processing the arrested marchers said that the people who "misled those kids" into marching "ought to be put under the jail." On the floor of Congress, one of Alabama"s congressmen called the use of children "shameful." The mayor of Birmingham denounced the "irresponsible and unthinking agitators" who were using children as "tools." Malcolm X-the black activist who was in every way more radical than King-said "real men don"t put their children on the firing line." The New York Times editorialized that King was engaged in "perilous ventures in brinkmanship" and Time scolded him for using children as "shock troops." The U.S. attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, warned that "schoolchildren partic.i.p.ating in street demonstrations is a dangerous business," and said, "An injured, maimed or dead child is a price that none of us can afford to pay."10 On the Friday night, after the second day of children"s protests, King spoke at 16th Street Baptist Church to the parents of those who had been arrested that day and the day before. They knew full well the dangers and humiliations of being a black person in Birmingham. Jesus said He"d go as far as Memphis. Can you imagine how they felt with their children at that moment languishing in Bull Connor"s jails? King stood up and tried to make light of the situation: "Not only did they stand up in the water, they went under the water!" he said. "And dogs? Well, I"ll tell you. When I was growing up, I was dog bitten...for nothing. So I don"t mind being bitten by a dog for standing up for freedom!"
Whether or not any of the parents were buying this is unclear. King plunged on: "Your daughters and sons are in jail....Don"t worry about them....They are suffering for what they believe, and they are suffering to make this nation a better nation." Don"t worry about them? Taylor Branch writes that there were rumors-"true and false"-about "rats, beatings, concrete beds, overflowing latrines, jailhouse a.s.saults, and crude examinations for venereal disease." Seventy-five and eighty children were packed into cells intended for eight. Some had been bused out to the state fairground and held without food and water in stockades in the pouring rain. King"s response? "Jail helps you to rise above the miasma of everyday life," he said blithely. "If they want some books, we will get them. I catch up on my reading every time I go to jail."
Walker and King were trying to set up that picture-the German shepherd lunging at the boy. But to get it, they had to play a complex and duplicitous game. To Bull Connor, they pretended that they had a hundred times more supporters than they did. To the press, they pretended that they were shocked at the way Connor let his dogs loose on their protesters-while at the same time, they were jumping for joy behind closed doors. And to the parents whose children they were using as cannon fodder, they pretended that Bull Connor"s prisons were a good place for their children to catch up on their reading.
But we shouldn"t be shocked by this. What other options did Walker and King have? In the traditional fable of the Tortoise and the Hare, told to every Western schoolchild, the Tortoise beats the Hare through sheer persistence and effort. Slow and steady wins the race. That"s an appropriate and powerful lesson-but only in a world where the Tortoise and the Hare are playing by the same rules, and where everyone"s effort is rewarded. In a world that isn"t fair-and no one would have called Birmingham in 1963 fair-the Terrapin has to place his relatives at strategic points along the racecourse. The trickster is not a trickster by nature. He is a trickster by necessity. In the next great civil rights showdown in Selma, Alabama, two years later, a photographer from Life magazine put down his camera in order to come to the aid of children being roughed up by police officers. Afterward, King reprimanded him: "The world doesn"t know this happened, because you didn"t photograph it. I"m not being cold-blooded about it, but it is so much more important for you to take a picture of us getting beaten up than for you to be another person joining in the fray." He needed the picture. In response to the complaints over the use of children, Fred Shuttlesworth said it best: "We got to use what we got."
A dyslexic, if she or he is to succeed, is in exactly the same position, of course. That"s part of what it means to be "disagreeable." Gary Cohn leapt into the taxi, pretending he knew about options trading, and it is remarkable how many successful dyslexics have had a similar moment in their careers. Brian Grazer, the Hollywood producer, got a three-month internship after college as a clerk in the business affairs department at the Warner Bros. studio. He pushed a cart around. "I was in a big office with two union secretaries," he remembers. "My boss had worked for Jack Warner. He was putting in his last hours. He was a great guy. There was this great office there, and I said to him, "Can I have it?" The office was bigger than my office today. He said, "Sure. Use it." It became the Brian Grazer business. I could do my eight-hour workdays in one hour. I would use my office and my position to get access to all the legal contracts, business contracts, the treatments being submitted to Warner Brothers-why they pa.s.sed, what they considered. I used that year to gain knowledge and information about the movie business. I would call someone every single day. And I would say, "I"m Brian Grazer. I work at Warner Brothers business affairs. I want to meet you.""
He was eventually fired, but only after he had stretched his three-month term to a year and sold two ideas to NBC for five thousand dollars each.
Grazer and Cohn-two outsiders with learning disabilities-played a trick. They bluffed their way into professions that would have been closed to them. The man in the cab a.s.sumed that no one would be so audacious as to say he knew how to trade options if he didn"t. And it never occurred to the people Brian Grazer called that when he said he was Brian Grazer from Warner Brothers, what he meant was that he was Brian Grazer who pushed the mail cart around at Warner Brothers. What they did is not "right," just as it is not "right" to send children up against police dogs. But we need to remember that our definition of what is right is, as often as not, simply the way that people in positions of privilege close the door on those on the outside. David has nothing to lose, and because he has nothing to lose, he has the freedom to thumb his nose at the rules set by others. That"s how people with brains a little bit different from the rest of ours get jobs as options traders and Hollywood producers-and a small band of protesters armed with nothing but their wits have a chance against the likes of Bull Connor.
"I still t"ink Ise de fas"est runner in de worl"," the bewildered Deer complains after a race in which Terrapin has done something that would get him banished from every compet.i.tion in the world. "Maybe you air," Terrapin responds, "but I kin head ou off wid sense."
The boy in Bill Hudson"s famous photograph is Walter Gadsden. He was a soph.o.m.ore at Parker High in Birmingham, six foot tall and fifteen years old. He wasn"t a marcher. He was a spectator. He came from a conservative black family that owned two newspapers in Birmingham and Atlanta that had been sharply critical of King. Gadsden had taken off school that afternoon to watch the spectacle unfolding around Kelly Ingram Park.
The officer in the picture is d.i.c.k Middleton. He was a modest and reserved man. "The K-9 Corps," McWhorter writes, "was known for attracting straight arrows who wanted none of the scams and payoffs that often came with a regular beat. Nor were the dog handlers known for being race ideologues." The dog"s name is Leo.
Now look at the faces of the black bystanders in the background. Shouldn"t they be surprised or horrified? They"re not. Next, look at the leash in Middleton"s hand. It"s taut, as if he"s trying to restrain Leo. And look at Gadsden"s left hand. He"s gripping Middleton on the forearm. Look at Gadsden"s left leg. He"s kicking Leo, isn"t he? Gadsden would say later that he had been raised around dogs and had been taught how to protect himself. "I automatically threw my knee up in front of the dog"s head," he said. Gadsden wasn"t the martyr, pa.s.sively leaning forward as if to say, "Take me, here I am." He"s steadying himself, with a hand on Middleton, so he can deliver a sharper blow. The word around the movement, afterward, was that he"d broken Leo"s jaw. Hudson"s photograph is not at all what the world thought it was. It was a little bit of Brer Rabbit trickery.
You got to use what you got.
"Sure, people got bit by the dogs," Walker said, looking back twenty years later. "I"d say at least two or three. But a picture is worth a thousand words, dahlin"."11 1 In William Nunnelley"s biography of Connor, t.i.tled Bull Connor, Nunnelley identifies the relevant section of the Birmingham city code as section 369, which prohibited serving "white and colored people" in the same room unless they were separated by a part.i.tion seven feet high with separate entrances.
2 My mother, who is West Indian, was taught Anansi stories as a child and told them to my brothers and me when we were young. Anansi is a rascal, who is not above cheating and sacrificing his own children (of which he invariably has many) for his own ends. My mother is a proper Jamaican lady, but on the subject of Anansi she becomes the picture of mischief.
3 In Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, Lawrence Levine writes: "The rabbit, like the slaves who wove tales about him, was forced to make do with what he had. His small tail, his natural portion of intellect-these would have to suffice, and to make them do he resorted to any means at his disposal-means which may have made him morally tainted but which allowed him to survive and even to conquer."
4 The historian Taylor Branch writes of Walker: "Walker was a hotspur. As a New Jersey high school student in the 1940s, he had heard Paul Robeson say that if being for freedom and equality meant being a Red, then he was a Red. Walker promptly joined the Young Communist League. One of his high school papers was a five-year plan for a Soviet-type economy in the United States, and he dreamed of carrying out technically ingenious a.s.sa.s.sinations against leading segregationists."
5 Walker continued: "We were just going to give ourselves up to the mob and felt that would appease them. Let them beat us to death, I guess."
6 Pritchett actually came to Birmingham and warned Bull Connor about King and Walker. He wanted to teach Connor how to handle the civil rights tricksters. But Connor wasn"t inclined to listen. "I never will forget, when we entered his office," Pritchett remembers, "his back was to us...some big executive chair, you know, and when he turned around, there was this little man-you know, in stature. But he had this boomin" voice, and he was tellin" me that they closed the course that day...said, "They can play golf, but we put concrete in the holes. They can"t get the ball in the holes." And this gave me some indication as to what type of man he was."
7 This was a running theme with Walker. One time in Birmingham, the city filed an injunction against the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which meant that Walker had to appear in court. The question was: If Walker was tied up in court, how would he run the campaign? Walker"s answer was to register with the court and then have someone else show up in his place every day thereafter. Why not? He said, "You know, all n.i.g.g.e.rs look alike anyway."
8 Stewart was a huge figure in Birmingham. Every African-American teenager listened to his show. The second part of his message to his listeners was "Bring your toothbrushes, because lunch will be served." "Toothbrushes" was code for "be dressed and prepared to spend a few nights in jail."
9 Forman writes: "It seemed very cold, cruel, and calculating to be happy about police brutality coming down on innocent people...no matter what purpose it served."
10 King thought long and hard before agreeing to use the children. He had to be talked into it by James Bevel. Their eventual conclusion was that if someone was old enough to belong to a church-to have made a decision of that importance to their life and soul-then they were old enough to fight for a cause of great importance to their life and soul. In the Baptist tradition, you could join a church once you were of school age. That meant that King approved of using children as young as six or seven against Bull Connor.
11 Walker makes a similar claim about the famous photographs of protesters being hit by Connor"s water cannons. The people in the photographs, he says, were spectators like Gadsden, not demonstrators. And they had been standing outside 16th Street Baptist Church all afternoon-on a typically humid Birmingham spring day. They were hot. "They had gathered in the park, which is a shaded area. And the firemen had set up their hoses at two corners of the park, one on Fifth Street and one on Sixth Street. And the mood was like a Roman holiday; it was festive. There wasn"t anybody among the spectators who were angry, and they had waited so long, and it was beginning to get dark now. So, somebody heaved a brick because they knew that-in fact, they had been saying, "Turn the water hose on. Turn the water hose on." And Bull Connor, then somebody threw a brick, and he started turning them on, see. So they just danced and played in the hose spray. This famous picture of them holding hands, it was just a frolic of them trying to stand up [unintelligible] and some of them were getting knocked down by the hose. They"d get up and run back and it would slide them along the pavement. Then they began bringing the hose up from the other corner, and instead of Negroes [unintelligible] they ran to the hose. It was a, it was a holiday for them. And this went on for a couple of hours. It was a joke, really. All in good humor and good spirit. Not any vitriolic response on the part of even the Negro spectators, which to me, again, was an example of the changing spirit, you know. When Negroes once had been cowed in the presence of policemen and maybe water hoses, here they had complete disdain for them. Made a joke out of it."
Part Three
The Limits of Power
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Ecclesiastes 9:11
Chapter Seven.
Rosemary Lawlor
"I wasn"t born that way. This was forced upon me."
When the Troubles began in Northern Ireland, Rosemary Lawlor was a newlywed. She and her husband had just bought a house in Belfast. They had a baby. It was the summer of 1969, and Catholics and Protestants-the two religious communities that have lived uneasily alongside each other throughout the country"s history-were at each other"s throats. There were bombings and riots. Gangs of Protestant militants-Loyalists, as they were called-roamed the streets, burning down houses. The Lawlors were Catholic, and Catholics have always been a minority in Northern Ireland. Every day, they grew more frightened.
"I"d come home at night," Lawlor said, "and there would be writing on the door: "Taigs out." "Taigs" is a derogatory word for an Irish Catholic. Or "No Pope here." Another night we were there, we were very lucky. A bomb came into the backyard and didn"t explode. One day I went to knock on my neighbor"s door, and I realized that she was gone. I found out that day that a lot of people had gone. So when my husband, Terry, came home from work, I said, "Terry, what"s going on here?" And he said, "We"re in danger."
"We left the home that night. We had no phone. You remember, this is in the days before mobiles. We walked out. The fear was in me. I put my son in his pram. I gathered up best we could pieces of clothes for him and ourselves. There was a tray at the bottom of the pram, and we stuffed them all in the tray. And Terry says to me, "Right, Rosie, we"re just going to walk straight out of here and we"re gonna smile at everybody." I was trembling. I was a teenage mum, a teenage girl who got married, nineteen, married, new baby, new world, new life. Taken away from me like that. D"you know? And I have no power to stop it. Fear is an awful thing, and I remember being really, really scared."
The safest place they knew was the all-Catholic neighborhood of Ballymurphy, in West Belfast, where Lawlor"s parents lived. But they had no car, and with Belfast in turmoil, no taxi wanted to venture into a Catholic neighborhood. Finally they tricked a cab into stopping by saying their baby was sick and needed to get to a hospital. They shut the car door and Terry told the driver, "I want you to take us to Ballymurphy." The driver said, "Oh, no, I"m not doing that." But Terry had a poker, and he took it out, and he placed the point against the back of the driver"s neck and said, "You"re going to take us." The cabdriver drove them to the edge of Ballymurphy and stopped. "I don"t care if you stick that in me," he said. "I"m not going any further." The Lawlors gathered up their baby and their worldly possessions and ran for their lives.
At the beginning of 1970, things got worse. That Easter, there was a riot in Ballymurphy. The British Army was called in: a fleet of armored cars with barbed wire on their b.u.mpers patrolled the streets. Lawlor would push her pram past soldiers with automatic rifles and tear-gas grenades. One weekend in June, there was a gun battle in the bordering neighborhood: a group of Catholic gunmen stepped into the middle of the road and opened fire on a group of Protestant bystanders. In response, Protestant Loyalists tried to burn down a Catholic church near the docks. For five hours, the two sides fought, locked in deadly gun battle. Hundreds of fires burned across the city. By the end of the weekend, six people were dead and more than two hundred injured. The British home secretary responsible for Northern Ireland flew up from London, surveyed the chaos, and ran back to his plane. "For G.o.d"s sake, bring me a large Scotch," he said, burying his head in his hands. "What a b.l.o.o.d.y awful country."
A week later, a woman came through Ballymurphy. Her name was Harriet Carson. "She was famous for hitting Maggie Thatcher over the head with a handbag at City Hall," Lawlor said. "I knew her growing up. Harriet was coming around with two lids of pots, and she was banging them together and she was shouting, "Come on, come out, come out. The people in the Lower Falls are getting murdered." She was shouting it up. And I went out to the door. My family was all there. And she was shouting, "They"re locked in their houses. Their children can"t get milk, and they haven"t got anything for a cup of tea, and there"s no bread, and come out, come out, we need to do something!""
The Lower Falls is an all-Catholic neighborhood just down the hill from Ballymurphy. Lawlor had gone to school in the Lower Falls. Her uncle lived there, as did countless cousins. She knew as many people in the Lower Falls as she did in Ballymurphy. The British Army had put the entire neighborhood under curfew while they searched for illegal weapons.
"I didn"t know what "curfew" meant," Lawlor said. "Hadn"t a clue. I had to say to somebody, "What does that mean?" She said, "They"re not allowed out of their houses." I said, "How can they do that?" I was totally stunned. Stunned. "What do you mean?" "The people are locked in their houses. They can"t get out for bread or milk." While the Brits, the British Army, were kicking in doors and wracking and ruinin" and searchin", I was, "What?" The biggest thought in everybody"s mind was, there are people locked in their houses, and there"s children. You have to remember, some houses then had twelve, fifteen kids in them. D"you know? That"s the way it was. "What do you mean they can"t get out of their houses?"" They were angry.
Rosemary Lawlor is now in her sixties, a st.u.r.dily built woman with ruddy cheeks and short, white-blond hair swept to the side. She was a seamstress by trade, and she was dressed with flair: a bright floral blouse and white cropped pants. She was talking about things that had happened half a lifetime ago. But she remembered every moment.
"My father said, "The Brits, they"ll turn on us. They say they"re in here to protect us. They"ll turn on us-you wait and see." And he was one hundred percent right. They turned on us. And the curfew was the start of it."
The same year that Northern Ireland descended into chaos, two economists-Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf Jr.-wrote a report about how to deal with insurgencies. Leites and Wolf worked for the RAND Corporation, the prestigious think tank started after the Second World War by the Pentagon. Their report was called Rebellion and Authority. In those years, when the world was exploding in violence, everyone read Leites and Wolf. Rebellion and Authority became the blueprint for the war in Vietnam, and for how police departments dealt with civil unrest, and for how governments coped with terrorism. Its conclusion was simple: Fundamental to our a.n.a.lysis is the a.s.sumption that the population, as individuals or groups, behaves "rationally," that it calculates costs and benefits to the extent that they can be related to different courses of action, and makes choices accordingly....Consequently, influencing popular behavior requires neither sympathy nor mysticism, but rather a better understanding of what costs and benefits the individual or the group is concerned with, and how they are calculated.
In other words, getting insurgents to behave is fundamentally a math problem. If there are riots in the streets of Belfast, it"s because the costs to rioters of burning houses and smashing windows aren"t high enough. And when Leites and Wolf said that "influencing popular behavior requires neither sympathy nor mysticism," what they meant was that nothing mattered but that calculation. If you were in a position of power, you didn"t have to worry about how lawbreakers felt about what you were doing. You just had to be tough enough to make them think twice.
The general in charge of the British forces in Northern Ireland was a man straight out of the pages of Rebellion and Authority. His name was Ian Freeland. He had served with distinction in Normandy during the Second World War and later fought insurgencies in Cyprus and Zanzibar. He was trim and forthright, with a straight back and a square jaw and a firm hand: he "conveyed the correct impression of a man who knew what needed to be done and would do it." When he arrived in Northern Ireland, he made it plain that his patience was limited. He was not afraid to use force. He had his orders from the prime minister: the British Army "should deal toughly, and be seen to deal toughly, with thugs and gunmen."
On June 30, 1970, the British Army received a tip. There were explosives and weapons hidden in a house at 24 Balkan Street in the Lower Falls, they were told. Freeland immediately dispatched five armored cars filled with soldiers and police officers. A search of the house turned up a cache of guns and ammunition. Outside, a crowd gathered. Someone started throwing stones. Stones turned into petrol bombs. A riot started. By ten p.m. the British had had enough. An army helicopter armed with a loudspeaker circled the Lower Falls, demanding that all residents stay inside their homes or face arrest. As the streets cleared, the army launched a ma.s.sive house-to-house search. Disobedience was met with firm and immediate punishment. The next morning, a triumphant Freeland took two Protestant government officials and a pack of journalists on a tour of the neighborhood in the back of an open flatbed truck, surveying the deserted streets like-as one soldier later put it-"the British Raj on a tiger hunt."
The British Army went to Northern Ireland with the best of intentions. The local police force was overwhelmed, and they were there simply to help-to serve as a peacekeeper between Northern Ireland"s two warring populations. This was not some distant and foreign land: they were dealing with their own country, their own language, and their own culture. They had resources and weapons and soldiers and experience that dwarfed those of the insurgent elements that they were trying to contain. When Freeland toured the empty streets of the Lower Falls that morning, he believed that he and his men would be back home in England by the end of the summer. But that"s not what happened. Instead, what should have been a difficult few months turned into thirty years of bloodshed and mayhem.
In Northern Ireland, the British made a simple mistake. They fell into the trap of believing that because they had resources, weapons, soldiers, and experience that dwarfed those of the insurgent elements that they were trying to contain, it did not matter what the people of Northern Ireland thought of them. General Freeland believed Leites and Wolf when they said that "influencing popular behavior requires neither sympathy nor mysticism." And Leites and Wolf were wrong.
"It has been said that most revolutions are not caused by revolutionaries in the first place, but by the stupidity and brutality of governments," Sean MacStiofain, the provisional IRA"s first chief of staff, said once, looking back on those early years. "Well, you had that to start with in [Northern Ireland], all right."
The simplest way to understand the British mistake in Northern Ireland is to picture a cla.s.sroom. It"s a kindergarten cla.s.s, a room with brightly colored walls covered in children"s drawings. Let"s call the teacher Stella.
The cla.s.sroom was videotaped as part of a project at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia, and there is more than enough footage to provide a good sense of the kind of teacher Stella is and the kind of cla.s.sroom she has. Even after a few minutes, it is abundantly clear that things aren"t going well.
Stella is sitting in a chair at the front of the room. She"s reading out loud from a book that she is holding up to one side: "...seven slices of tomatoes," "eight juicy olives," "nine chunks of cheese...." A girl is standing in front of her, reading along, and all around her, the cla.s.s is in chaos, a mini-version of Belfast in the summer of 1970. A little girl is doing cartwheels across the room. A little boy is making faces. Much of the cla.s.s seems to be paying no attention at all. Some of the students have actually turned themselves entirely around, so that they have their backs to Stella.
If you were to walk in on Stella"s cla.s.s, what would you think? I"m guessing your first reaction would be that she has a group of unruly children. Maybe she teaches in a school in a poor neighborhood and her students come from troubled families. Maybe her students come to school without any real respect for authority or learning. Leites and Wolf would say that she really needs to use some discipline. Children like that need a firm hand. They need rules. If there is no order in the cla.s.sroom, how can any learning take place?
The truth is, though, that Stella"s school isn"t in some terrible neighborhood. Her students aren"t particularly or unusually unruly. When the cla.s.s begins, they are perfectly well behaved and attentive, eager and ready to learn. They don"t seem like bad apples at all. They only start to misbehave well into the lesson, and only in response to the way Stella is behaving. Stella causes the crisis. How so? By doing an appalling job of teaching the lesson.
Stella had the girl from the cla.s.s reading alongside her as a way of engaging the rest of the students. But the pacing of the back-and-forth between the two of them was excruciatingly slow and wooden. "Look at her body language," one of the Virginia researchers, Bridget Hamre, said as we watched Stella. "Right now she is just talking to this one kid, and no one else is getting in." Her colleague Robert Pianta added: "There"s no rhythm. No pace. This is going nowhere. There is no value in what she"s doing."
Only then did the cla.s.s begin to deteriorate. The little boy started making faces. When the child started doing cartwheels, Stella missed it entirely. Three or four students to the immediate right of the teacher were still gamely trying to follow along, but Stella was so locked onto the book that she wasn"t giving them any encouragement. Meanwhile, to Stella"s left, five or six children had turned themselves around. But that was because they were bewildered, not because they were disobedient. Their view of the book was completely blocked by the little girl standing in front of Stella. They had no way of following along. We often think of authority as a response to disobedience: a child acts up, so a teacher cracks down. Stella"s cla.s.sroom, however, suggests something quite different: disobedience can also be a response to authority. If the teacher doesn"t do her job properly, then the child will become disobedient.
"With cla.s.srooms like this one, people will call what is happening a behavioral issue," Hamre said. We were watching one of Stella"s kids wiggling and squirming and contorting her face and altogether doing whatever she could to avoid her teacher. "But one of the things we find is that this sort of thing is more often an engagement problem than a behavioral problem. If the teacher is actually doing something interesting, these kids are quite capable of being engaged. Instead of responding in a "let me control your behavior" way, the teacher needs to think, "How can I do something interesting that will prevent you from misbehaving in the first place?""
The next video Pianta and Hamre played was of a third-grade teacher giving homework to her students. Each student was given a copy of the a.s.signment, and the teacher and the cla.s.s read the instructions aloud together. Pianta was aghast. "Just the idea that you would be choral reading a set of instructions to a bunch of eight-year-olds is almost disrespectful," he said. "I mean, why? Is there any instructional purpose?" They know how to read. It is like a waiter in a restaurant giving you the menu and then proceeding to read every item to you just as it appears on the page.
A boy sitting next to the teacher raises his hand midway through the reading, and without looking at him, the teacher reaches out, grabs his wrist, and pushes his hand back down. Another child starts to actually do the a.s.signment-an entirely logical action, given the pointlessness of what the teacher is doing. The teacher addresses him, sharply. "Sweetie. This is homework." It was a moment of discipline. The child had broken the rules. The teacher had responded, firmly and immediately. If you were to watch that moment with the sound turned off, you would think of it as Leites and Wolf perfectly applied. But if you were to listen to what the teacher was saying and think about the incident from the child"s perspective, it would become clear that it is having anything but its intended effect. The little boy isn"t going to come away with a renewed appreciation of the importance of following the rules. He is going to come away angry and disillusioned. Why? Because the punishment is completely arbitrary. He can"t speak up and give his own side of the story. And wants to learn. If that little boy became defiant, it was because his teacher made him that way, just as Stella turned an eager and attentive student into someone who did cartwheels across the floor. When people in authority want the rest of us to behave, it matters-first and foremost-how they behave.
This is called the "principle of legitimacy," and legitimacy is based on three things. First of all, the people who are asked to obey authority have to feel like they have a voice-that if they speak up, they will be heard. Second, the law has to be predictable. There has to be a reasonable expectation that the rules tomorrow are going to be roughly the same as the rules today. And third, the authority has to be fair. It can"t treat one group differently from another.
All good parents understand these three principles implicitly. If you want to stop little Johnnie from hitting his sister, you can"t look away one time and scream at him another. You can"t treat his sister differently when she hits him. And if he says he really didn"t hit his sister, you have to give him a chance to explain himself. How you punish is as important as the act of punishing itself. That"s why the story of Stella is not all that surprising. Anyone who has ever sat in a cla.s.sroom knows that it is important for teachers to earn the respect of their students.
What is harder to understand, however, is the importance of these same principles when it comes to law and order. We know our parents and our teachers, so it makes sense that legitimacy should matter a lot inside the home or the school. But the decision about whether to rob a bank or shoot someone seems like it belongs to a very different category, doesn"t it? That"s what Leites and Wolf meant when they said that fighting criminals and insurgents "requires neither sympathy nor mysticism." They were saying that at that level, the decision to obey the law is a function of a rational calculation of risks and benefits. It isn"t personal. But that"s precisely where they went wrong, because getting criminals and insurgents to behave turns out to be as dependent on legitimacy as getting children to behave in the cla.s.sroom.
Let me give you an example. It involves an experiment that has been going on for the past few years in the New York City neighborhood of Brownsville. Brownsville is home to just over a hundred thousand people, and it lies in the eastern part of Brooklyn, past the elegant brownstones of Park Slope and the synagogues of Crown Heights.1 For more than a century, it has been among the most dest.i.tute corners of New York City. There are eighteen public housing projects in Brownsville, more than in any other part of the city, and they dominate the skyline: block upon block of bleak, featureless brick-and-concrete developments. As the crime rate in New York City fell dramatically over the past twenty years, Brownsville always remained a step behind, plagued by groups of teenagers who roamed the streets, mugging pa.s.sersby. From time to time, the police would flood the streets with extra officers. But the effect was never more than temporary.
In 2003, a police officer named Joanne Jaffe took over as head of the city"s Housing Bureau, the group with primary responsibility for the Brownsville projects. She decided to try something new. Jaffe began by making a list of all of the juveniles in Brownsville who had been arrested at least once in the previous twelve months. That search yielded 106 names, corresponding to 180 arrests. Jaffe"s a.s.sumption was that anyone arrested for a mugging had probably committed somewhere between twenty and fifty other crimes that never came to the attention of the police, so by her rule of thumb, her 106 juveniles were responsible for as many as five thousand crimes in the previous year.
She then put together a task force of police officers and had them contact every name on the list. "We said to them, "You"re in the program,"" Jaffe explained. ""And the program is that we"re going to give you a choice. We want to do everything we can to get you back in school, to help you get a high school diploma, to bring services to your family, find out what"s needed in the household. We will provide job opportunities, educational opportunities, medical-everything we can. We want to work with you. But the criminal conduct has to stop. And if it doesn"t stop and you get arrested for anything, we"re going to do everything to keep you in jail. I don"t care how minor it is. We are going to be all over you.""
The program was called J-RIP, for Juvenile Robbery Intervention Program. There was nothing complicated about it-at least on the surface. J-RIP was standard-issue, high-intensity modern policing. Jaffe put her J-RIP task force in a trailer in the parking lot of a housing project, not off in a station house somewhere. She made every surveillance tool available to her J-RIP team. They made lists of each J-RIPper"s a.s.sociates-the people they had been arrested with. They went on Facebook and downloaded photos of their friends and looked for gang affiliations. They talked to brothers and sisters and mothers, and they put together giant, poster-size maps showing the networks of friendships and a.s.sociations that surrounded each person-the same way an intelligence organization might track the movements of suspected terrorists.