A Cauldron of Hate

A sign on U.S. Highway 50 on the Eastern Shore of Maryland proclaims: CAMBRIDGE IS NOT JUST A PLACE IT'S PEOPLE MAKING PROGRESS.

That boast seemed grotesquely inappropriate last week. Torn by bloody race violence, the city of Cambridge (pop. 13,000) was under martial law, its streets patrolled by a unit of the Maryland National Guard. As in many another city beset by the Negro revolt, responsible Negro leadership in Cambridge had suddenly given way before the thrust of militancy.

A Grim Surprise. Led by a dedicated woman named Gloria Richardson, Cambridge Negroes had been demonstrating for months for a city ordinance guaranteeing equal access to restaurants, movies and other public accommodations and an end to other forms of segregation.* In mid-June, violence reached such a pitch that the local authorities asked Governor J. Millard Tawes to send in the National Guard. The Guard kept order, relatively speaking, for 25 days. During that time, leaders of both races negotiated a truce. Mrs. Richardson said she would keep her demonstrators off the streets for a few weeks to give the white community time to show good faith on various desegregation promises. But an hour after the Guard pulled out of Cambridge, early last week, militants pressured her into agreeing to a new demonstration. Eleven Negro and white demonstrators marched downtown and tried to push into a cafe called Dizzyland, operated by a vociferous segregationist by the name of Robert Fehsenfeld.

A fleshy six-footer, Fehsenfeld blocked the doorway of Dizzyland with his own bulk. The demonstrators knelt on the sidewalk, prayed and sang. A crowd gathered to jeer the Negroes and cheer Fehsenfeld. Inspired, Fehsenfeld kicked a few demonstrators, picked up a Negro girl and dragged her away from the door, smashed an egg on the head of a white demonstrator.

During the next few days, tension wound tighter in Cambridge. Gunshots rang out in the night. Negro and white mobs glared at each other in the streets. Late in the week demonstrators again descended upon Dizzyland. This time Fehsenfeld was not standing in the doorway, and a few demonstrators walked inside. "You are not wanted in here," cried Fehsenfeld. "Understand, you come in here at your own risk." Then he locked his door. The demonstrators looked around--and got a grim surprise. Waiting in the restaurant were more than a dozen white toughs. They charged into the demonstrators and beat them up while angry Negroes outside, hearing the screams and groans inside Dizzyland, pounded on the locked door.

A Chaos of Noise. That night gunfire erupted again in Cambridge. Seven white men were wounded. Through the early hours of the morning, an incessant chaos of ugly noises resounded in Cambridge--shouts of hate and rage, cries of fear, the sounds of careening cars and shattering glass, and, piercing through all the competing noises, the bang, bang, bang of gunfire. Finally, with the local police and state troopers unable to restore order, Governor Tawes ordered the Guard back into Cambridge.

At week's end, under the Guardsmen's guns, Cambridge was quiet. The bars were closed, a 9 p.m. curfew was in force, firearms were prohibited. But the peace was, all too clearly, only temporary. Cambridge was not just a place--it was a seething cauldron of hate.

* Maryland actually has a new public-accommodations law, but it exempts, on local option, eleven counties including Dorchester, of which Cambridge is the county seat.

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