June 18: The Last Holy Day in the Jackson Movement Calendar

["Hunter Gray" <hunterbadbear@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

June 18: The Last Holy Day in the Jackson Movement Calendar [Hunter
Gray/John R. Salter, Jr.]

Late Spring, 2003:

About two years ago, the right cheekbone side of my face -- badly smashed
eons before in Another Time -- began to hurt significantly and
intermittedly, swell slightly, then recede. [From early childhood on, I've
always been able to handle pain.]  This went on consistently for those two
years.  Then, during the marathon Jeep speaking trip I recently took [with
Eldri] -- 3700 miles and nine states in eleven days -- I suddenly felt
something very strange 'way up in the upper right hand inside of my mouth.
We stopped hurriedly at an Interstate rest stop.  It was a large thin and
somewhat molded piece of ancient bone-gray plastic -- into which were
blood-vessel/bone type indentations.  It was very old, crumbled when I broke
it.

We knew then just what it was.

Since then, more pieces have come.

The pain and the swelling are gone.  Something is now healed; something else
is no longer needed.

Memories remain, cut into the inside of my skull.

============================================================

The night of June 18, 1963:

Flat on the operating table, I looked up at the young white surgeon poring
over me.  Behind him stood an array of other whites.  Medical whites.

Mississippi whites.

"You'd like to kill me, wouldn't you?" I asked him.

He shook his head slowly, sadly.

Then it was many hours later, next morning.  I was still alive.

======================================================
At 11:30 a.m. on the previous day of Tuesday, June 18, 1963 on Hanging Moss
Road on the north end of Jackson, Mississippi, a colleague of mine, the
Reverend Ed King, and I were heading back to our Tougaloo College base
following a meeting with one of our lawyers, Jack Young.  He had told us
matter-of-factly that we were both being indicted by the Hinds County Grand
Jury on "inciting to riot" charges. I was driving my little blue '61 Rambler
and we were passing through the white area in fairly steady both ways
traffic.  Police had been following us as we headed north but now, suddenly
and inexplicably, had turned off.

A week before, in our massive Jackson Movement, Medgar Evers had been shot
and killed.  A day or so after that I was beaten by police into bloody
unconsciousness during a demonstration on Rose Street and then taken to the
huge Fairgrounds Concentration Camp. Two days later, I met Martin King and
his party at the Jackson airport and took Dr King and several members of his
group in my car to the funeral at the Negro Masonic Temple on Lynch Street.
Six thousand of us subsequently marched two miles in 102 degree heat from
the Masonic Temple to the Collins Funeral Home on North Farish Street -- the
first "legal" civil rights march in the history of Mississippi.  Then we had
a huge spontaneous demonstration -- so many that the police only arrested 29
of us, taking us to the Fairgrounds encampment while Governor Ross R.
Barnett called the National Guard into Jackson to supplement the many, many
many hundreds of white Mississippi lawmen of all kinds.

And the mobs of white vigilantes.

Suddenly, at my left and from a side street, right through its stop sign,
came a lunging, plunging car -- driven by a young white.  In the intricate
maneuvering, his car forced a large, heavy oncoming third car directly into
our path.

We hit head on.  When I regained consciousness, I knew my car was destroyed.
The windshield was smashed and part of Ed King's face clung to it.  We were
both blood-drenched and Ed was still unconscious. Standing all around us,
not far away, was a growing crowd of grinning and laughing whites --  many
of them.  The white police were standing with them.

The quite innocent driver of the third car -- that which had been forced
into us head-on -- was uninjured.

Finally, after at least a quarter of an hour, the police came over.  One
asked, to which of the hospitals did we wish to go?  Only I could answer,
and I said St Dominic's, the Catholic hospital.

They took us instead to the Southern Baptist hospital but not inside -- not
right away.  For a bit, we lay out in the yard in front of the hospital,
while drought-breaking rain sprinkled down on us, and a brief discussion
occurred inside about the propriety of receiving us.  Then, we were finally
taken inside. Ed was carried somewhere but I was placed on a cot in a public
aisle -- while two dozen or more Jackson police walked grinning around my
ostensible bier.

Finally, we were in a hospital room.  I was able to call a brother of mine
in Arizona before someone rushed in and took the phone away. I wanted my
brothers and our rifles from Flagstaff.

Heavily armed Mississippi lawmen were stationed outside our door -- and it
had little to do with "protecting" us

Ed slept consistently -- but I only intermittedly. Then Ed's wife,
Jeannette, was there and told me that Eldri -- who, with Baby Maria I had
forced out of Jackson via plane for safety's sake to her parents in
Minnesota days before and under an assumed name -- was flying desperately
down.  Maria remained with her grandparents.

Jeannette had a copy of the afternoon paper, the Jackson Daily News.  It had
a big headline, "Integration Leaders Hurt Here:  Salter and King Hurt In
Wreck."

And a banner headline told us, "President Calls Jackson Mayor."  It
developed that President John Kennedy and his brother, Robert, the Attorney
General, had been busy on their phones to Jackson officials both the
preceding day, Monday -- as well as this day, Tuesday.

There was a picture of Jackson Mayor Allen Thompson holding a telephone.
Said the caption, "Peace Will Return."  Under it was a sentence, "Mayor
Thompson says Jackson will again be peaceful for both races when the outside
agitators are defeated. . ."

And then there something else:  the fact that that very Tuesday afternoon,
as we awaited heavy surgery, conservatives from the Strategy Committee of
our Jackson Movement were meeting unilaterally with the Mayor. In fact, it
was going on at that very moment that Jeannette held the newspaper, reading
to me.

Surgery for both Ed and me took many hours. I was first, then Ed.  Ed's face
was badly -- hideously cut -- and in my case many bones were smashed and
broken from the right side of my face all the way down through my ribs. My
right eye-lid had been intricately sliced, almost off, but miraculously the
eye was unhurt.

Later, when an attorney of ours, the hard-fighting and super courageous Jess
Brown [an interesting mix of African, Native American, and Scottish] came to
see us, he grabbed a janitor's broom and, shuffling and scraping, pushed it
down the corridor and around the corner right to our locked door.  The
heavily armed Mississippi lawmen let him in.

Once in there, he whipped out a yellow pad and took testimony.

Wednesday's morning paper, the Clarion-Ledger -- and Jeanette King -- had
more on the Kennedy phone calls to Jackson.

And then from both  the paper and Jeannette, I also learned that, as we had
laid bloodily that preceding Tuesday afternoon in the hospital, the
conservatives on our Movement's Strategy Committee had indeed met with Mayor
Allen Thompson and others -- and agreed to a  modest "settlement."  It was
all given a very big play.

And Eldri arrived.

As it turned out, the Jackson Movement -- Mississippi's largest grassroots
upheaval -- had shaken the very foundations of Jackson and the sovereign
State of Mississippi.  And its bloody ramifications  reached across Dixie
and the nation -- and out into the whole wide world.

I heal fast and was out in a few days, heavily bandaged. Ed King was in the
hospital much longer, subsequently having many plastic surgery operations
over several years.  We both kept going in the Southern Movement -- and then
beyond in many other campaigns.

Soon after I was out, the Rambler salesman came to our Tougaloo home with a
new car to sell me.  As I was signing the papers, he said, in regretful
fashion, that he was sure I understood why CIT Credit Corporation would be
unable to offer me the usual life insurance protection for my investment.

I told him that, of course, I understood.  Pointing to a Winchester 44/40
lever action rifle on a table, I told him "That's my life insurance."

Nothing was ever done to the young white man -- actually just an older
Teen -- who was  the son of a prominent Citizens' Council politician and
activist.

Seven years after that, in May 1970, following a successful civil law
suit/damages proceedings in Jackson, it was late afternoon in the old
Anglican-type Hinds County court room.  Here's what happened then:

================================================
>From an oral history done by me for the John C. Stennis Library, Mississippi
State University, Starkville, December 26, 1990 -- one of several such
histories I've done over the years.  But this one also had this:

"I stood with Ed and Jeanette King and a couple of other people in one
corner . . .And it was about 4:30 in the afternoon.  This other group stood
over on the other side; this was the immediate, primary family that had been
involved in this situation.  And I looked at the old father and the mother
and they were just two scared old people.  And I looked at this boy who had
been eighteen then; now he was twenty-five and a medical student on the
brink of becoming a doctor.  And I looked at his older brother, a lawyer in
Jackson, who had a reputation for actually being very moderate and good on
good issues.

And there we stood, our little group in one corner of that courtroom and the
other little group in the other corner -- because there was something that
remained to be done and there were some people from the old days who stood,
just watching to see what was going to happen.

And my eyes locked with the older brother's eyes.  Maybe the fact that I'm
the older brother in my family had something to do with it.

But my eyes locked with his and we began walking toward each other out into
the center of that almost deserted courtroom.

And as one we stuck out our hands and we shook hands.  And I told him, "Tell
your brother that we wish him well in his career as a physician."

And he held onto my hand, the older brother, and shook it with as much
emotion as anyone has ever shook my hand and said, "That means so much to
us, Professor Salter. You have no idea how much that means."

I could see that this was reaching their little family further over.  And
there were signals from them, they sort of half-waved.

And we ended it then.  That's where we ended it.  I never again engaged in
the luxury of hating those people or trying to relive it.

Then we went on and, as far as I know, I think the boy's become a quite
successful doctor in another Southern state.  I don't know the fortunes of
the rest of the family.  I do know that it was important to end that because
people have to live together and there comes a time when you can no longer
afford the luxury of just hating people."

Hunter Gray  [John R. Salter, Jr.] Chair of the Strategy Committee of the
Jackson Movement  of 1962-63

Hunter Gray  [Hunterbear]  Micmac / St Francis Abenaki / St Regis Mohawk
www.hunterbear.org
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´
and Ohkwari'
with [Toltec] Tezcatlipoca

In our Gray Hole, the ghosts often dance in the junipers and sage, on the
game trails, in the tributary canyons with the thick red maples, and on the
high windy ridges -- and they dance from within the very essence of our own
inner being. They do this especially when the bright night moon shines down
on the clean white snow that covers the valley and its surroundings.  Then
it is as bright as day -- but in an always soft and mysterious and
remembering way. [Hunterbear]