Each time Dr King stepped out at the head of the next stage on the road north, more local people joined, mostly blacks but a lot of whites too. Many of the so-called ‘day marchers’ returned home after making their gesture of solidarity but already several hundred had become ‘all the way to Philly marchers’.
Caroline was surprised by the number of police officers and state troopers outside Wheeler Hall and in the corridors inside. Many of the twenty or more Berkeley PD men on the steps carried pump action shotguns or long night sticks. Within the building the police were randomly searching everybody before they were permitted to enter the Wheeler Auditorium. Nathan was patted down, and subjected to several hard stares; Caroline was waved through, perversely, a little miffed by the blanket assumption that women of a certain age were unlikely to be carrying concealed weapons.
The lecture hall was half-full by the time they found places in the body of the tiered seating. There was a lot of talking; the atmosphere was half party, half revivalist rally, increasingly charged as more and more people filed noisily into the auditorium.
Caroline had thought she would feel left out, old in this company but although the majority of the audience comprised college age kids there were people of all ages sprinkled around her. All ages and all colors which was a weird experience for her and suddenly she was asking herself why. She was the daughter of second generation German-Jewish, and Greek-Cypriot immigrants who had initially settled respectively in the Bronx and Atlantic City around the turn of the century. But she had always been an American because being American was not about where you came from but about signing up to the shared idea of America.
All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. That among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…
But if a child was born black or was in any way less than wholly white in this country those fundamental rights had never been ‘inalienable’. Perhaps, she ought to have cared about that a lot more than she actually had long before now?
It also occurred to her that she had never previously attended a political, let alone a ‘protest’ rally before. Throughout her life the American political process had completely passed her by and she had never even bothered to wave at it as it rolled off towards the horizon. She had been too busy paying lip service to her miserable marriage, too deeply immersed in her career to worry overly about who was sitting in the White House; most election years she never got around to voting. She could have told a third party who the Mayor of Chicago was most years, but as to the identity of her Congressman or either of the Senators sent to Washington DC by the State of Illinois, or their party affiliation, she was indifferent and frankly, ignorant. And then the October War had blown away her old certainties and politics had mattered even less.
The chaotic theatricality of the ‘rally’ slowly, surely drew her in.
What was going on in the Deep South was bad…
America had lost its way…
The nation was house divided…
There was no ‘Democrat’ or ‘Republican’ twist to what each speaker who stepped up to the battery of microphones down in the well of the auditorium said to the murmuring, buzzing crowd in the packed hall that evening.
Caroline felt a little as if she had walked into a charismatic religious assembly. Several of the men — there was only one woman on the stage party — spoke like evangelists of the rights of Man, of how lucky Californians were to live in an island of relative good order and peace, in which the racial tensions present in ‘so many other sad places’ were if not absent, then at least ‘contained’.
She thought it was all rather self-congratulatory and complacent.
California had been uniquely lucky. Untouched by the war and economically booming back in late 1962 it had been better placed than practically any other state in the Union to ride out the post-war shocks. The entire American south west had escaped the bombs and the fallout, and behind the great wall of the Rockies and the Sierra Madre Californians had soon recognized that they were living in a very different country to that inhabited by many northerners and easterners.
Over an hour into the rally; with the audience becoming a little restive in the increasingly smoky auditorium and wearying of the roll call of well-intentioned, mainly middle-aged men — local luminaries and academics in the main — each spouting more or less the same rhetoric, the single woman on the platform rose to her feet.
Caroline was aware of the hush around her.
Everybody seemed to know who the young woman was and she did not.
She was blond and willowy in a calf-length flowery frock, her hair, falling almost but not quite across her shoulders. She was as tall — taller in fact — than several of the men around her and oddly, seraphically at ease with every eye in the Wheeler Auditorium fixed upon her. Her composure was not the superficial, manufactured presence of a movie star at a glitzy premier, or the slick glad-handing command of a professional politician. No, it was something that defied instant encapsulation, as if she had not yet begun to come to terms with it herself.
“My name is Miranda Sullivan,” the young woman declared with a self-deprecating diffidence that effortlessly charmed the unwary. “I am,” she corrected herself, “was the first secretary of the California Civil Rights Forum. I consider myself honored and privileged to be the friend and co-worker of Mr Terry Francois, the President of the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP. Many of you will know that following an automobile crash Terry is still in hospital. He sends his apologies for not being able to make this rally tonight… ”
Caroline flinched at the vehemence of the sudden outburst of clapping and cheering that threatened to raise the rafters high above her head.
“Many of you will also know,” Miranda continued, resting her pale hands on the rostrum as she looked around the auditorium, “that I resigned my post at the CCRF after the death of my boyfriend Dwayne John in the Bedford Pine Park atrocity. Like you I believe it is a national disgrace that the FBI and the law enforcement agencies of the Federal Government has still not brought the evil and misguided men responsible for that crime to justice… ”
There was a stamping of feet, a crescendo of angry condemnation.