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 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 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 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, —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. The story of an Englishwoman who was the “center of attention” hit the headlines in newspapers in Texas, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, California, Wisconsin, Iowa, Ohio, Michigan, Missouri, Arizona, Utah, West Virginia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Maryland, Indiana, Tennessee, and South Dakota.17 Civil rights organizations and African-American reporters also took notice. On the day of Lever’s release, executive director of Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, visited Monroe along with reporters from the widely distributed Baltimore Afro-American and Jet maga- zine. (Walker and the reporters were “thrown down the courthouse steps by a group of white men.”)18 Lever’s arrest was soon headline news in the United Kingdom, too. When Lever’s relatives in California and then England found out about the arrest, they contacted the press, and the popular tabloid, the Daily Express, called her in prison. (The wardress initially rebuffed the Express reporter, but put Lever on the “phone after the reporter said ‘are you crazy, I’m calling from Britain.’”)19 The Guardian and the Times newspapers mentioned Robert F. Williams—on the front page—for the first time, in connection with Lever’s arrest.20 Being British helped Lever’s cause in prison—a vital protection in an envi- ronment where civil rights activists, including women, were often abused and attacked. She explained to Forman, later, that she was repeatedly denied the right to call the British Consul, but when “a member of the Consulate phoned the prison and asked to speak to me,” she was able to make contact, and received advice on the legal case.21 When a UK official then came to visit the jail, her sit- uation changed quickly—bail was reduced from $1,000 to $25, and the trial date brought forward.22 At her trial, the six month sentence was suspended, and Lever was back in England within the week. Being British—and the attention she received in the UK press—most likely helped the cause of her hosts, too. Though the tone of local reporting was “why is this English girl poking her nose in?” Lever suspected “there may have been pres- sure on the local court to be part of the deal whereby we were all released with suspended sentences in return for all freedom riders leaving the state.” Clearly there were higher authorities involved. “Someone from the government was at the airport in New York to make sure I left on my scheduled flight home a few days later.”23 Lever made a lasting impression on her hosts. Her four African-American women cellmates refused to leave prison until Lever was released, and even threatened to go on hunger strike until they were sure she would be. By the time she left prison, Williams had already left town, heading for Cuba, to escape what Lever was convinced were trumped up charges of kidnapping. But he mentioned Lever in his autobiography, as did James Forman, who became one of the most CONSTANCE LEVER 151 influential student civil rights leaders of the era. Lever corresponded for a time with Forman, and with one of her cellmates, who later moved to New York. In turn, Lever’s time in Monroe made a profound impression on her. As she put it later, the visit “completely changed my life. Most important was observing the courage and dedication of ordinary, sometimes even illiterate local Black people such as the four sisters I shared a cell with who had walked through the white riot to find their brother who had been picketing.” More generally, “the Black people of Monroe taught me about the repressed potential of ordinary working people, irrespective of colour.” 24 Anita Lever, her mother, promised “to have a long talk with her” when Constance returned home.25 If the intention had been to persuade her daughter to steer clear of social activism, it had no effect. Not wanting “the experience to fade away as just a holiday adventure,” Constance Lever joined the interna- tional socialists in London, “who had a strong emphasis on rank and file de- mocracy . . . and the potential of revolution to ennoble people.” One of her main activities in London was to help organize Black immigrant private tenants who faced high rents, poor housing, and evictions. In later life, Lever would move to Australia, join campaigns for immigrant and refugee rights and, as a university lecturer, write on the environment.26 On its own, Lever’s story does not change the overall narrative of either the American civil rights movement or of UK student protest. But Lever’s story was not on its own. Hers was a generation of a media and transport revolution, when news could be beamed lived via the Telstar satellite, and crucially, transatlantic air travel became affordable for the middle classes. We do not know how many white students, animated by the antiapartheid movement and eager to learn about the American civil rights movement, made the Atlantic crossing. But clearly many did. And in aggregate, these journeys mattered.27 These journeys mattered in the effects they had on the lives of those who traveled. For example, from Oxford, Anthony Smith joined the on Washington and found himself under the speakers’ platform, a few meters from Martin Luther King, while the following year, another Oxford student, Michael Pinto-Duchinsky, led a group of students to Mississippi—and was arrested for his trouble. From Cambridge, Jonathan Steele went to Yale and took an internship following the civil rights movement, while Anthony Lester joined the student movement in the American South. The list goes on. On return, many of these students joined movements back home to demand equality for UK immigrants—Pinto-Duchinsky was the head of Oxford’s Joint Action Committee Against Racial Inequality, which spearheaded a successful campaign for open housing that fanned out to campuses across the country. And all of these students reflected that they had been transformed by their American sojourn, before heading into prominence in UK life—Smith as director of the British Film Institute, Steele as senior foreign correspondent for the Guardian, and Pinto-Duchinsky and Lester as human rights lawyers.28 These journeys mattered, too, for causing reflection on race relations in the United Kingdom, where a recent rise in immigration from the Caribbean, Africa, and South Asia had led to race riots in 1958 and vehement debates about the place 152 STEPHEN TUCK AND IMAOBONG D. UMOREN

of immigrants in UK society—and whether there should be nonwhite immigra- tion at all. The influential Spectator magazine ran an editorial on Lever’s story. “The moral to be drawn is not simply that these things can happen in the Deep South; it is that they can happen anywhere, if the conditions that breed race ha- tred are allowed to develop—as they are developing in many British towns.” The Spectator continued: “What can be done, and the press should do it, is to pub- licise all cases of discrimination, wherever they occur. Such publicity is whole- some” and much needed to ensure readers would not “countenance in Britain the growth of practices and attitudes which we are so quick to condemn in Georgia or Johannesburg.”29 Or, indeed, in Monroe, North Carolina.

Notes

 1. For brief accounts of aspects of Lever’s trip, see Constance Lever, “Monroe Doctrine,” Spectator (September 15, 1961): 346; , Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), pp. 267–271; James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (Washington, DC: Open Hand, 1985), pp. 190–201. See Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, Robert F. Williams, Negroes With Guns (New York: Marzani and Munsell, 1962), and the documentary Negroes with Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power (http://www. pbs.org/independentlens/negroeswithguns/) for overviews and interpretation of the Monroe movement.  2. High Point Enterprise (August 30, 1961), p. 3. Daily Herald (Monday, August 28, 1961), p. 1; The Robesonian (Monday, August 28, 1961), p. 1.  3. Marshall Evening Chronicle (August 28, 1961), p. 1.  4. Arrest warrant, September 15, 1961, Union County Courthouse.  5. James H Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 1935–61 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), p. 181.  6. “English Girl’s Mother Upset,” Lexington Dispatch (Monday, August 28, 1961), p. 1.  7. On Sharpeville, see Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans, p. 181.  8. Interview, by email, with Constance Lever Tracey, January 13 and 19, 2011, and July 10 and 13, 2014.  9. Interviews, Lever.  10. High Point Enterprise (August 30, 1961), p. 3. Daily Herald (Monday, August 28, 1961), p. 1. Daily Herald (Monday August 28, 1961), p. 1.  11. Robert F. Williams, “Can Negroes Afford to Be Pacifists?” Liberation 4, (September 1959), pp. 4–7; Martin Luther King Jr.,”The Social Organization of Nonviolence,” ibid. (October 1959), pp. 5–6.  12. Tyson, Radio Free, 266; Daily Herald (Monday August 28, 1961), p. 1.  13. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie, 274; Daily Herald (Monday August 28, 1961), p. 4; “Torn by Weekend of Racial Violence, Southern City Plots Peace Moves,” Racine Journal Times (August 28m 1961), p. 10. (Wisconsin). Marshall Evening Chronicle (August 28, 1961), p. 1. Daily Herald (Monday August 28, 1961), p. 1, 4; Marshall Evening Chronicle (August 28, 1961), p. 1.  14. High Point Enterprise (August 30, 1961), p. 3.  15. Daily Herald (Monday August 28, 1961), p. 1.  16. Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, pp. 190–201. CONSTANCE LEVER 153

17. “Center of attention” remark from Grand Praire Daily News (August 30, 1961), p. 7 (Texas). 18. High Point Enterprise (August 30, 1961), p. 3. 19. Lever interviews. 20. “English Girl Arrested in US Race Riot,” Guardian (August 29, 1961), p. 1; “‘STUDENT DOING RIGHT THING’: Race Riot Charge,” Guardian, (August 30, 1961), p. 7. 21. Constance Lever quoted in Forman, The Making, p. 203. 22. Forman, The Making, p. 205. 23. http://www.newstatesman.com/node/140791; Lever interview, July 15, 2014. 24. Lever interviews. 25. “English Girl’s Mother Upset,” p. 1; Francine Stock, “Why can’t the Hispanics?” July 23, 2001, http://www.newstatesman.com accessed March 2010. See too Williams, Negroes with Guns. 26. Lever interviews. See too Lever-Tracy, “Global Warming and Sociology” Current Sociology 56:3 (2008): 445–466, and Stephen Tuck, “The Sit-Ins, in England,” in From Sit-Ins to SNCC: The Student Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, eds. Iwan Morgan and Philip Davies (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2012), pp. 153–170. 27. On student interest in the American civil rights movement, and Atlantic cross- ings, see Stephen Tuck, “’s Visit to Oxford University: US Civil Rights, Black Britain, and the Special Relationship on Race,” American Historical Review 118:1 (2013), pp. 76–103. On television ownership in the United Kingdom, Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 191–195. In 1947, fewer than 15,000 Britons had a television license. Within a decade, 4.5 million did (and twice that number had a radio licence). 28. Our thanks to each of those former students listed for sharing their stories in conversations. 29. “Race or Colour,” Spectator (September 14, 1961), p. 4.