He was immensely glad that at least if things did go wrong Miranda had plenty of backup. What could possibly go wrong when he was standing beside the Attorney General of California, his old friend Stanley Mosk?
Several of the San Francisco PD’s finest were already holding back the photographers and a small but growing number of placard waving NAACP protestors when the two cars had drawn up outside the Mission Police Station. The Police had only moved into the station in 1950 but the building already looked small, old and rather neglected.
Stanley Mosk had clambered from of Harvey Fleischer’s Lincoln and puffed out his chest. A fog had filled the Bay most of that day but here on Valencia Street the air was relatively clear, and weak sunshine bathed the scene.
“Good!” He decided, glancing around at Miranda Sullivan and Terry Francois, the President of the San Francisco chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, approaching on the sidewalk.
Stanley Mosk, the Attorney General of California, was the son of a Hungarian father and a German mother, born into a family of Reform Jews in San Antonio, Texas. He had come a long way in his fifty-one years. Twenty years ago he had been the youngest Superior Court judge in the state, now he was well into his second term as the state’s Attorney General, the first man of Jewish descent to hold a state wide elected executive office in the history of California. A committed Democrat, a close friend and despite everything, still an unabashed and vocal supporter of the President of the United States of America, unlike his old friend Harvey Fleischer, Stanley Mosk was and had always been, extremely exercised over the Civil Rights of every man, woman and child in California. He had not just presided over a series of high profile cases, including one in which he had forced the Professional Golfers’ Association of America to rewrite its regulations discriminating against golfers from ethnic and racial minorities; he had also created the California Attorney General’s Civil Rights Division alongside new Consumer Rights, Constitutional Rights, and Anti-Trust Divisions.
“Well, Mr Francois,” Stanley Mosk said to the President of the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP, “let’s be about our business!”
The most senior man at the Mission Police Station, a sweating, flustered lieutenant who would rather have been anywhere but where he actually was, had glanced at the court order Terry Francois had pressed into his moist palms and promptly, abdicated his problem to the senior of the two FBI Special Agents on the premises.
“Special Agent Horowitz, your honour,” this man, who was neither sweating or flustered, had introduced himself as he eyed up the Attorney General of California and his companions in the hot, humid and very crowded lobby which accommodated the front desk of the station. “Mr John is being held under a Federal warrant…”
Stanley Mosk was silent.
Terry Francois looked the FBI man in the eye.
“You hold in your hands a Superior Court order requiring the immediate cessation of the unconstitutional incarceration of Mr Dwayne John into the custody of the Attorney General of California, Agent Horowitz.”
It was over within minutes.
Dwayne John, a handsome towering man, blinked at the photographers as he stood between Terry Francois and Stanley Mosk, looming a full head above both men. He kept sneaking a glance in Miranda’s direction, recognising and not recognising her and as yet too bewildered for the moment to know what to make of his sudden freedom.
“Do I know you, ma’am?” The tall young black man asked Miranda shortly after they were driven away from the scrum outside the Mission Police Station by Harvey Fleischer in his Lincoln.
“We can talk about that when we get to where we are going, Mr John,” Miranda retorted tartly, regretting her incivility instantly.
“Right,” the man muttered. “What exactly just happened back there?”
“All in good time, son,” Harvey Fleischer told him from behind the wheel of the Lincoln.
“I’m free to go, right?”
“Sure you are. But we’ll put a little distance between you and the FBI before we cut you loose.”
Miranda stared out of the window; disengaging briefly from the rollercoaster ride of the last few days. She had not realised what she was involved in until Terry Francois had explained it to her.
‘The FBI stopped fighting crime a long time ago, Miss Sullivan.’
The President of the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP had taken pity on her, writing her apparent naivety off to a lamentable gap in her education for which he in no way held her personally responsible.
‘Oh, don’t get me wrong. There are a lot of FBI agents who do their best to fight crime, it’s just that fighting crime is not what the FBI does most places. Not since the war. The last year or so the FBI has been looking for Reds, moles, fifth columnists, traitors and turncoats. I used to think it was because fighting organised crime, the Mafia and such like, was too difficult. But that isn’t it. I think it has more to do with Mr Hoover and the people around him just not liking blacks, spicks and anybody who doesn’t look like them or think like them. The FBI is out to get the leaders of the Civil Rights movement. There is no place for a secret police force in our constitution but that doesn’t stop the FBI spreading lies and falsifying evidence against the leaders of the movement. Fortunately Mr Hoover doesn’t have hundreds of thousands of agents, so he can’t watch everybody all the time. Dr King and his advisors know that. That’s why they’ve got good young people like Mr John travelling all over the country pretending to be ‘couriers’ and ‘secret agents’ for the movement. Mr Hoover has set his dogs on us, so we’ve given his dogs hundreds of completely harmless hares to chase. The FBI is so busy chasing young black men and women around America an army of Soviet spies could, as we speak, be setting up their tents on the lawn of the White House and J. Edgar Hoover would never know!’
Miranda had recoiled at the stinging contempt with which Terry Francois had delivered his indictment of the FBI and its legendary director. However, the more she thought about what he had said the deeper her unease became. Was it possible that the FBI could be so monolithic, so blinkered that it remained the tool of a man whose mindset was stuck in a 1930s and 1940s bear trap, obsessed with defending a status quo that had more to do with his own racist and ideological prejudices and preoccupations than the safety of citizens on the street?
Perhaps, the way the FBI was behaving — like a law unto itself — was no more than a crudely expressed metaphor for the fault lines opening up across the whole country?
Miranda had only been working in the Governor’s Office for a few weeks; already she glimpsed the way many of her colleagues, including many close to the Governor, secretly saw the future. A big, wealthy, self-sufficient state like California, undamaged by the October War, and sheltered from the rest of the United States by the Rockies, the Sierra Madre and the deserts of Arizona, Nevada and Utah could easily survive alone. California cut adrift from the Union would be one of the five most powerful economic and potentially, military, countries in the World. A ‘confederation’ with either or both of Oregon and Washington State was a subject of both academic and increasingly, real political debate, albeit that the word ‘confederation’ was always spoken very, very quietly. Inevitably, other states far enough away from Washington DC and the ‘East Coast money men’, which were still whole enough to be viable alone must also be beginning to think the impossible. States’ Rights was a live issue on university and college campuses across California; and while Pat Brown would never renege on the Democrats — assuming the party still existed as a national force by the time the next Gubernatorial election came around in October or November 1966 — nobody doubted he would face a strong and possibly unstoppable States’ Rights candidate. Things that had seemed impossible, absurd, ridiculous only months ago now seemed possible, even likely. In a city in which nobody wanted to talk about the next big earthquake — which might happen any day — the prospect of sudden violent seismic aberrations in the political geology of the previously unquestioned century-old postbellum settlement seemed inevitable.