Motor City Burning by Bill Morris Page B

whole week of day-long visits to persuade Jess to walk into the Sunflower County courthouse and tell the startled clerk that he wanted to register to vote. It was one of the hardest and most rewarding things Willie had ever done.
    When he got to the last snapshot in the envelope, he felt his first shiver. It was a picture of him in his Snick uniform, standing by the reflecting pool during the March on Washington. To complete the bumpkin effect, he was wearing a straw hat. He was deep in conversation with another Snick volunteer, a beautiful brother from New York named Bob Moses who had memorized most of the Bible and dug Camus even more than Willie did—and Bob could read Camus in French. Playing a hunch, Willie opened his journal from the summer of ’63—the notebooks were dated and neatly bundled—and he soon found a long entry about the March, including this exchange with Bob Moses by the reflecting pool:
    â€œKnow what this is?” I asked Bob M.
    â€œA couple hundred thousand freedom-high brothers and sisters is what this is,” he replied.
    â€œYeah, but this ain’t no March on Washington.”
    â€œNo? Then what is it?”
    â€œThis here’s the FARCE on Washington.”
    Bob had guffawed. He knew Willie was mimicking Malcolm X, but he happened to agree with him—and a lot of other people who’d spent years in the trenches. Most Snick foot soldiers viewed the March as nothing more than a public relations stunt scripted by the Kennedys and the F.B.I., with Martin Luther King as their star house-nigger. Their star White House-nigger. Bob and Willie had come to Washington to picket the Justice Department and, almost as an afterthought, they went to the reflecting pool to hear John Lewis, the only speaker from Snick on the day’s program. John’s speech wasn’t bad, but when Willie learned later that the organizers had forced him to water it down, his disdain for the March grew even deeper.
    Looking at the photograph of those people packed all the way to the Washington Monument, and remembering what he and Bob Moses had said, Willie realized he’d made his first small breakthrough. If he’d lost faith in King by the summer of ’63, then that meant the trap door had already opened and he had already begun to fall. He kept soldiering on for another year after the March, though he could see now that he was just going through the motions. It’s hard to admit you’re living a lie.
    So now he knew that the moment he was looking for—the moment his disillusionment was born—had happened before the Farce on Washington. That still left him with a lot of ground to cover, a little more than three years’ worth, from early 1960 till the summer of ’63. But suddenly he felt hopeful. He refilled his coffee cup and took the rest of his journals and files out of the box and set them on the desk. He started digging through the stack in chronological order, beginning in early 1960.
    He was still digging when he heard the first birds and looked up to see that the windows were blue. The night had begun with high hopes after he matched the picture of the Farce on Washington with the corresponding journal entry, but as the night wore on he realized the journals were spotty and thin. Sometimes he wrote dense pages about a night in jail, about the lurid, almost laughable epithets of the white hecklers, about the strange tickly sensation of sitting at a lunch counter and having a white man pour sugar on top of your head and feeling the granules trickle down inside the collar of your shirt. One notation read: Ketchup looks like blood on a starched white shirt. These were the kinds of details he could use. But then there would be gaps where he didn’t write a word for weeks.
    Just before the sun came up, he finally had another breakthrough from an unexpected source: a newspaper clipping. Some of the people in the movement were crazy about collecting