"I SHALL NOW BE MORE POWERFUL THAN YOU CAN POSSIBLY IMAGINE!"

A week ago today, no one who didn’t know Justin Jones, Justin Pearson and Gloria Johnson personally, knew who they were when Jones and Pearson were expelled from the Tennessee Legislature for “violating decorum” and Johnson remained in office by a single vote, for having demonstrated in the well of the legislature for gun control. Today, with both Jones and Pearson returned to the legislature by unanimous vote of their respective county commissions, the world knows who they are. The governor of Tennessee was forced yesterday to issue an executive order mandating background checks of gun purchases in the state and asked the legislature to pass a “red flag” law to allow confiscation of weapons from those deemed dangerous to themselves or others.

In the “good” Star Wars movie (now called “Episode 4: A New Hope”), in the final battle between Obi-wan Kenobe and Darth Vader, Vader strikes what he thinks is the killing blow. As Obi-wan goes down, he says, “I shall now be more powerful than you can possibly imagine.”

That’s the way movements for social/political change work. Provoke the opponent to do their worst, and build off their mistake.

Back in August 1968, we were driving from the house we all lived in over to the Oleo Strut Coffeehouse in Killeen, Texas, outside Fort Hood, to set up for the day; it was the Monday of the week of the Democratic Convention in Chicago, and 5,000 Vietnam Veteran troops from Fort Hood had been sent there the day before, for “riot control.”

But 1,000 of them had a 2" x 2" yellow sticker, with a white hand flashing the “peace symbol” crossed with a black fist hidden in their possession, and were planning to put those stickers on the front of their helmets if they were called into the streets, and some of the more committed had declared their willingness to break their ranks and join the protesters.

When a government puts troops in the street to beat heads, they have to know that all the troops will beat heads. If there are any who won’t, and the authorities don’t know who they are, they can’t put any of them in the streets, because revolutions start and governments fall when the army fails to give full support to the government.

So back to our 1962 Ford Fairlane, driving down 4th Street to Avenue D that Monday morning. Linda and I were in back, and Josh and Jay were in front. Josh was perceived as our leader (and we did look up to him) but he had pushed from the beginning to make certain that any of us could do everything, so that there was no “crucial” individual.

All of a sudden, the police car that pulled out as we drove past turned on its siren and flashing lights. We stopped. The Killeen cop got out and came to our car and before he asked for an IDs, he ordered all of us out of the car. We’d been stopped before, with hassles over IDs and did we have current Texas drivers’ licenses and such, the usual harassment. This was different.

He reached under the driver’s seat, and came up with a bit less than half a smoked joint in his palm.

Yes, we had all smoked marijuana. Before we came to Killeen. None of us did anything illegal like that now, and publicly didn’t partake, due to the possibility of exposure to exactly what was now happening.

Two of the other five KPD cruisers drove up, and we were informed we were under arrest for “possession of narcotics.” We were handcuffed, stuffed in the cruisers and taken to the Police Station a block away, where each of us got our own cell.

This was “serious as a heart attack,” as they say. Two weeks earlier, a SNCC organizer in Houston, who was known not to use drugs, had been found guilty of possession of narcotics after a local vice cop accosted him and discovered a joint in his shirt pocket, and been sentenced to 20 years in Huntsville Prison, a very notorious Bad Place.

The next two hours in that cell were the two most terrifying hours of my life, as I contemplated my fate in Huntsville Prison.

And then they called each of us out and “booked” us. It really pissed them off when they asked Josh and me for our birth places, with him answering “San Antonio” and me answering “Houston.” So much for us being “outside agitators”! The booking sergeant even commented to one of the other cops that he wasn’t a “native Texan.” To rub it in, I told him I’d even been taken to “kiss the Blarney Stone” at the San Jacinto monument as a baby.

Linda, Jay and I were then told we were being “conditionally released” pending “further investigation,” since the “illegal substance” had been found under the driver’s seat. We were free to go on our way, and Josh was taken to the county lockup in Temple, the county seat, 12 miles away. I plead guilty to having to look down and make sure my feet were touching the ground as we walked back to where the car had been left, doors open.

It was obvious what had happened: they had stopped us so they could bust our “leader,” which would harm our work. It was also obvious that the KPD was doing what they were told to do by the U.S. Army.

The Army’s involvement was confirmed that night when the GIs came in. Word of the arrest had flashed around the base, they had been called to formations where their officers told them about it, and warned any of them thinking of going to the “drug den” that they would be putting themselves in danger of arrest too. But the place was filled with a larger crowd than usual.

Later that evening, our attorney Davis Bragg came by. He told us he had been informed by the Bell County District Attorney that they “believed” none of we three were involved with the drugs, and if one of us would testify that we had seen Josh smoke the joint, that all charges against us would be dismissed and our “arrest record” sealed. Hah! He also told us that the best thing we could do was carry on as “normal,” and never to be alone on the street while things proceeded. In the meantime, Josh would stay in jail, since bail had been set at $100,000, since it involved a “narcotics offense.”

It took a month, but eventually the Bell County Grand Jury returned a “no bill” to the charge, having listened to Davis Bragg’s argument that the “de minimus rule” - that you have to possess enough of a drug to use it to get high in order to be charged with drug possession - applied in this case. Josh was back.

(I have to relate this: during that month, we had a sign in the window, “Free Josh!” One afternoon, two high school girls came in and asked if they could have some “free josh.” You can’t make up moments like that.)

And out of all that, we indeed became “more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” The week after Josh was no-billed, two of the leading local “church ladies” came in one afternoon. They wanted to meet us and talk to us. We all sat down and answered their questions, told them about ourselves, why we had come to their town, everything. At the end, they invited us to come to the local Southern Baptist Church that next Sunday and tell people our story. After they left, Josh leaped up and raised his fist, and shouted “Church ladies! We’ve done it!”

What we had done was what Josh had explained at the beginning when we first arrived, that we would practice a “No horns and a tail” policy. We would be absolutely “perfect” in our dealings. All bills paid on time, southern politeness in our responses to people, completely law-abiding. As he put it, it was our only defense. And he had been proven right.

And because we had done that, those Church Ladies came to visit us, because as they had said, they knew how we behaved in town, and didn’t believe “drug dealers” would act like we did, and they were offended by the actions of their town police and county government.

We went to the church and met the congregants. We told them about ourselves and why we were there. I talked about my involvement with the “Tonkin Gulf Incident” and what I knew about what had really happened. Linda talked about her father, the career Marine and what he’d taught her about being true to oneself. In the end, people shook our hands. One man identified himself to me as a World War II veteran and proceeded to tell me a story about how “those guys always screw up” from his experience of the war.

After that, the police treated us correctly. There wasn’t any “like” on their part, but there was a feeling of grudging acceptance of our presence.

The army continued with their court-martials of the Fort Hood 43 - the 43 black soldiers who had refused to get on the planes and go to Chicago, and one our leading organizers on the base got arrested for a military offense and was court-martialed; by then he was defended by leading military defense attorney Michael J. Kennedy, who came all the way from New York, and his sentence was overturned on appeal after a year in Leavenworth. During his trial, a reporter for the local paper had come around and asked us what we knew about things, and our story of what was really going on in the event got published.

Six months later, the wife of Killeen’s mayor - who was one of the Church Ladies who came to meet us - told that reporter about her husband having conspired with the Army to have us arrested and “run out of town.” Her husband resigned his position, and later committed suicide with a shotgun. Two other members of the town council who were implicated also resigned and one moved away.

Linda and I left after a year there and returned to San Francisco, but the Oleo Strut remained in operation till the end of the war; it was the most successful of the four “GI Coffeehouses” that had been organized by Support Our Soldiers.

Authority, when it has been unquestioned, will always over-react when its power is threatened.

And their over-reaction always works against them.

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