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From Manchester to Monroe: the Unexpected Journey of Constance Lever

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From Manchester to Monroe: the Unexpected Journey of Constance Lever Individual Life From Manchester to Monroe: The Unexpected Journey of Constance Lever Stephen Tuck and Imaobong D. Umoren n the evening of Thursday, August 24, 1961, a 20-year-old white UK stu- Odent, Constance Lever, disembarked from a Greyhound Bus in Monroe, North Carolina. Wheeling her luggage, she headed, on foot, to the home of Robert Williams—an African-American man she had never met who edited a newspaper she had never read (“I didn’t even know he was black,” she recalled, later). Born in Manchester, England, the daughter of an English literature professor, and, in 1961, a student at the London School of Economics, Lever was a self-confessed conservative, placing a high value on tradition and patriotism. That summer, she had flown to California to visit relatives and then bought an unlimited travel Greyhound Bus ticket in order to explore the country. Having come across Williams’ newspaper in Los Angeles, and hoping to find a cheap place to stay, she wrote to ask whether she could help with his newspaper for a few days. Williams invited her to lodge at his home, with his family.1 On Sunday afternoon, three days later, Lever joined a score of demonstrators against racial discrimination in downtown Monroe.2 A jeering crowd of thou- sands surrounded them. One member of the mob smashed a gun into an African- American student leader’s face. The blood spattered all over Lever’s blouse. The mob surged. The police whisked the demonstrators away.3 By Sunday evening, Lever was in the county jail, charged with—to quote her arrest warrant—seeking to “bring about racial dissension . in a violent manner to the terror of the people” while “armed with firearms concealed with pistols [sic].” Or, as the arresting officer put it more simply, Lever “unlawfully and wil- fully did incite a riot.” Bail was set at $1,000. At her trial, the UK student tourist was found guilty, and sentenced to six months in prison.4 In many ways, Constance Lever was in the wrong place at the wrong time. But this was not complete chance. Though a white UK student with some 148 STEPHEN TUCK AND IMAOBONG D. UMOREN conservative values, Lever had long been interested in global questions of racial justice. She was Jewish, living in Israel from age 6 to 12, and was well aware of the Holocaust. As a young teenager, in the university town of Durham, she heard news of South African apartheid. Like so many Britons of her generation, she was horrified. In 1960, the year after she left school—and the year which the United Nations dubbed the Year of Africa, as decolonization swept the continent (seven- teen countries in total)—her family moved to Uganda, where her father taught for a stint at Makerere University in the run up to the country’s independence, two year’s later.5 Constance taught at an Indian primary school there. Indeed, follow- ing news of her arrest, Constance Lever’s “upset” mother, Anita, told reporters that the time in Uganda was to blame for her daughter’s “problem,” since “she has no conception that a black person is any different from a white [person].”6 At University in London, Lever got involved in antiapartheid organizing following the massacre of 69 men and women in South Africa’s Sharpeville township and the banning of the African National Congress in 1960.7 She became convinced that “the values of French Revolution were now western traditions,” and that all deserved the right to liberty, equality and fraternity.8 In other words, a naïf Englishwoman in America she was not. Indeed, the reason Lever came across Williams in the first place was because she went to visit Los Angeles’ antiapartheid office, which subscribed to his news- paper. Lever scribbled down Williams’ address, made contact, and headed to Monroe, eager to learn about the civil rights movement and the American South. What she found appalled her. “The journey through the South—with everything at bus stops segregated—was horrific.” She ate her sandwiches on the bus to avoid sitting in the white only cafes. When she turned up in the midst of a protest movement in Monroe, “it never occurred to me not to join their pickets.”9 By August 1961, there were plenty of pickets in Monroe—and even more armed African-American self-defense groups. The agricultural-industrial com- munity of Monroe, Union County, 24 miles east of Charlotte, North Carolina, had a population of no more than 11,000 people. Yet it had become a hot spot of the American’s South racial tensions. After the Supreme Court ruled against segregation in the Brown decision of 1954, Klan rallies regularly exceeded 15,000 people. In 1958, two black boys—one aged seven, the other nine—were arrested for kissing a white girl. The girl’s father organized a posse to hunt down the boys; the police took the boys from their families, and a juvenile court sentenced them, in- definitely, to reform school. The case became international news. From Monroe, Robert Williams, the chairman of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, issued regular press releases. Joyce Egginton, a London journalist, using her British accent to gain access to the boys, published the story (complete with a photo taken with a camera she had smug- gled in to the meeting). Demonstrators in Rotterdam pelted the US Embassy with stones. The United States Information Agency received 12,000 letters. In the face of this international pressure, North Carolina’s governor pardoned the boys— without apology. CONSTANCE LEVER 149 A Second World War veteran from the Marines, and an admirer of Fidel Castro, Williams decided that the best response to Klan activism was to meet “violence with violence.”10 In Monroe, it worked. When the Klan threatened William’s deputy at the NAACP, a local doctor, Williams organized a defense team—with sandbags, guns, and helmets reminiscent of trench warfare—to keep the Klan at bay. But during the NAACP’s fiftieth annual convention in New York in 1959, members voted 764–14 in favour of Williams’ suspension as Union County chapter president. Later that year Martin Luther King took Williams to task on the nonviolence question in a high profile debate in Liberation magazine.11 Williams won re-election by his chapter, organized locally, went on the offen- sive in national debates, and courted the international media. Little wonder that he was so willing to open his home to a white UK student. But the tumult of 1961 was not, in fact, of his making. That year, Freedom Riders—interracial groups on interstate buses—traveled across the South. Inevitably, when they reached Monroe late that August, tensions quickly mounted. Some of those tensions, in fact, were between the Freedom Riders and Williams’ group—the riders were pacifist, formed a Monroe Nonviolent Action Committee, and distanced them- selves from Williams’ methods. Nevertheless, Williams opened his home and welcomed them publicly, (and privately reckoned it was an ideal chance to “show that what King and them were preaching was bullshit.”)12 And then Constance Lever rode the bus into town. The fact that Lever made the trip to Monroe is a reminder of keen British in- terest, especially among students, in the American civil rights movement—and the eagerness of American activists to use international support. But the conse- quences of her visit—on the Monroe movement, on British opinion, and on Lever herself—reveal that this transatlantic connection was also a transformative rela- tionship, in both directions. As Williams had hoped, the arrival of a young white Englishwoman turned out to be more than a footnote to the story proper in the battle for equality in Monroe. In the first place, Lever’s presence sparked the tension into a riot. During the demonstration on the Sunday afternoon, the crowd carried signs that called for “Death to All Niggers and Nigger Lovers.” Lever, the only white person in the demonstration, was the sole target in the latter category. Given Southern horror at interracial relationships, being a young white women in a group of black men made matters worse. People in the crowd spat on her repeatedly and cursed her for being a “Nigger lover,” sexually. To spare her the abuse, an African-American student leader, James Forman, ushered Lever into a friend’s car. The crowd surged. A policeman yelled, “You ain’t going to put no white woman in a car with a bunch of niggers.” Another policeman handed a gun to a member of the mob, who pointed it at Forman, and told him to stay away from the car and Lever. Forman then did, to quote Lever, “one of the most courageous acts I’ve ever seen.” He put his hand on the car. Forman’s enraged opponent did not shoot, but he smashed the gun into Forman’s face. “At the sight of blood,” one of the Action Committee recalled later, “the crowd turned into a mob . it went on for about twenty minutes. Everyone was beaten up.”13 Or as a local newspaper put it, an 150 STEPHEN TUCK AND IMAOBONG D. UMOREN “hour long battle involving some 300 persons” then commenced.14 In total, that evening, “police arrested more than 50 persons on charges of inciting to riot,” including Lever.15 Lever’s arrest, as an English visitor, made headline news across America. While at the police station—and before they were put in prison—Forman took a call from the United Press International in New York.16 He immediately passed the phone to Lever.
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