Page 176 of Edge of Eternity (The Century 3)

The crowd got angrier.

Soon they were throwing bottles and rocks. Dogs and water cannon were the favorite targets. George went back inside the motel. Verena was helping to rescue an elderly black woman from a wrecked ground-floor room by flashlight.

"It's getting nasty out there," George said to Verena. "They're throwing rocks at the police."

"So they damn well should. The police are the bombers."

"Think about this," George said urgently. "Why do the whites want a riot tonight? To sabotage the agreement."

She wiped plaster dust off her forehead. George watched her face and saw rage replaced by calculation. "Damn, you're right," she said.

"We can't let them do it."

"But how can we stop it?"

"We have to get all the movement leaders out there calming people down."

She nodded. "Hell, yes. I'll start rounding people up."

George went back outside. The riot had escalated fast. A taxicab had been overturned and torched, and was blazing in the middle of the road. A block away, a grocery store was alight. Squad cars approaching from downtown were halted at Seventeenth Street by a hail of missiles.

George grabbed a megaphone and addressed the crowd. "Everybody stay calm!" he said. "Don't jeopardize our deal! The segregationists are trying to provoke a riot--don't give them what they want! Go home to bed!"

A black man standing nearby said to him: "How come we have to go home every time they start violence!"

George jumped on the hood of a parked car and stood on the roof. "This is not helping us!" he said. "Our movement is nonviolent! Everybody go home!"

Someone yelled: "We're nonviolent, but they ain't!"

Then an empty whisky bottle flew through the air and hit George's forehead. He climbed down from the roof of the car. He touched his head. It hurt, but it was not bleeding.

Others took up his cry. Verena appeared with several movement leaders and preachers, and they all mingled with the crowd, trying to talk people down. A. D. King got up on a car. "Our home was just bombed," he cried. "We say, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. But you are not helping--you are hurting us! Please, clear this park!"

Slowly, it began to work. Bull Connor was nowhere to be seen, George noted: the man in charge was Chief of Police Jamie Moore--a law enforcement professional rather than a political appoin

tee--and that helped. The police attitude seemed to have changed. Dog handlers and firemen no longer seemed eager for a fight. George heard a cop saying to a group of Negroes: "We're your friends!" It was bullshit, but a new kind of bullshit.

There were hawks and doves among the segregationists, George realized. Martin Luther King had allied himself with the doves, and thereby outflanked the hawks. Now the hawks were trying to reignite the fires of hatred. They could not be allowed to succeed.

Lacking the stimulus of police aggression, the crowd lost the will to riot. George began to hear a different kind of comment. When the burning grocery store collapsed, people sounded penitent. "That's a doggone shame," said one man, and another said: "We gone too far."

At last the preachers got them singing, and George relaxed. It was all over, he felt.

He found Chief Moore on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Seventeenth Street. "We need to get repair crews to the motel, chief," he said politely. "Power and water are out, and it's going to get unsanitary in there pretty quickly."

"I'll see what I can do," said Moore, and put his walkie-talkie to his ear.

But before he could speak into it, the state troopers arrived.

They wore blue helmets and they carried carbines and double-barreled shotguns. They arrived in a rush, most in cars, some on horseback. Within seconds there were two hundred or more. George stared in horror. This was a catastrophe--they would restart the riot. But that was what Governor George Wallace wanted, he realized. Wallace, like Bull Connor and the bombers, saw that the only hope now for the segregationists was a complete breakdown of law and order.

A car drew up and Wallace's director of public safety, Colonel Al Lingo, jumped out, toting a shotgun. Two men with him, apparently bodyguards, had Thompson submachine guns.

Chief Moore holstered his walkie-talkie. He spoke softly, but carefully did not address Lingo by his military rank. "If you'd leave, Mr. Lingo, I'd appreciate it."

Lingo did not trouble to be courteous. "Get your cowardly ass back to your office," he said. "I'm in charge now, and my orders are to put those black bastards to bed."

George expected them to tell him to get lost, but they were too intent on their argument to care about him.

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