Sen. John McCain feigned righteous indignation at the notion that he and running mate Gov. Sarah Palin might be accused of inciting the crowds at their rallies to some level of violence against Sen. Barack Obama or, given that Obama would not be nearby, taking their collectively stoked anger out on any African-American who happened to be in the neighborhood, like the member of the TV crew who was told (along with other choice epithets) to "Sit down, boy."

McCain praised his crowds as being "fine Americans" (and included something about them wearing hats) but failed to acknowledge that they have shouted a variety of things -- many caught on the audio track of news video, other announced their feelings to cellphone video. McCain would like you to believe that he repudiated all of this and that Rep. John Lewis, civil rights icon, was out of line to make the comparison between the crowds whipped into a frenzy by the pro-segregationists of the era, like George Corley Wallace, Governor of Alabama.

McCain claimed that he and Palin weren't doing anything wrong, but couldn't quite grasp that crowds shouting "traitor" or "terrorist" or "kill him" might progress to something further. McCain also failed to under the basics of crowd psychology: that otherwise good people lose their inhibitions, their self-restraint, their good judgment when it appears that others give their approval for them to do things that these people would ordinarily not do.

One of the surest examples of this kind of crowd-driven behavior is visible when you study pictures from the civil rights era. An iconic one is a scene -- frozen in time -- from the integrating of Little Rock (AR) High School in 1957. (John McCain would have been about 21 years old at the time).  The image of Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Baker is worth studying. (And then compare it to some of the images and video of McCain-Palin supporters leaving one of their vitriolic rallies.)

[Author's Note: difficult language follows.]

On the night of September 1, 1957, Faubus stationed the Arkansas National Guard around Central, ostensibly to prevent violence, but really to keep the black students out. On September 3, a federal judge ordered that desegregation proceed, and late that night, the director of the Arkansas chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., Daisy Bates, instructed the black parents to bring their children to her home the following morning. From there, the students, accompanied by a few ministers--white and black--would proceed to Central as a group. But the Eckfords didn't have a phone, so Bates never notified them.

 

Growing up in the segregated South, Elizabeth had little experience with whites, good or bad. While her parents were apprehensive that first morning, what mattered most to her was looking nice, and in that, she had an edge. Everyone knew that the Eckford girls were expert seamstresses; practically everything they wore, they made, and not using the rudimentary patterns from McCall's or Simplicity, but following the more complicated ones from Vogue. After making sure everyone looked right and had their pencils and notebooks and lunch money, Mrs. Eckford gathered her children around her, and together they read aloud the 27th Psalm.

Then Elizabeth left the house and, four blocks away, boarded the bus heading downtown.

Fifteen minutes later, at the corner of 12th and Park Avenue, two blocks from Central, she hopped off. She'd often walked by Central--it was on the way to her grandfather's store--and instantly she sensed something was awry: more parked cars than usual, the murmur of a crowd. Then the jeeps and half-tracks came into view, along with the soldiers ringing the school. She saw some white children pass quietly through the line, a sign that everything was al right. But the first two soldiers she approached rebuffed her. A mob of several hundred protesters that had gathered across the street quickly caught sight of her. "They're coming!" someone shouted. "The niggers are coming!" Elizabeth walked down the street a bit, then approached a different group of soldiers. This time they closed ranks and crossed rifles. "Don't let her in!" someone shouted.

Elizabeth's knees started to shake. She walked toward Central's main entrance and tried a third time; again, the soldiers blocked her way, but this time told her to cross the street. Now the crowd fell in behind her, shouting: "Lynch her! Lynch her!" "No nigger bitch is going to get in our school! Get out of here!" "Go back to where you came from!" Looking for a friendly face, she turned to an old woman, who spat on her. Before long, some 250 whites were at her heels. She knew she couldn't go back the way she'd come. But if she could only get to the bus stop a block ahead, she thought, she would be safe. She wanted to run, but thought she might fall down.

Recording it all was 26-year-old Will Counts of the Arkansas Democrat. He felt sorry for Elizabeth, but he had a job to do; he just hoped he had enough film. "Lynch her!" someone shouted. "Send that nigger back to the jungle!"

One white girl in the throng stood out: she was "screaming, just hysterical," as Benjamin Fine of The New York Times later put it. It was Hazel Bryan. Unlike many in the crowd, rednecks from the sticks, Hazel was a student at Central--like Elizabeth, about to begin her junior year. Her father was a disabled vet; her mother made lightbulbs for Westinghouse. Hazel's dress was fashionable and a bit too tight, as if to show off her figure. Her good looks brought her lots of boys and a certain license, and she'd always been a bit of a performer. Her racial attitudes mirrored her parents': her father would not let black clerks wait on him, for instance, and when banks started hiring black tellers, he found himself another line.

Marching alongside Hazel, chanting "Two, four, six, eight--we don't want to integrate!" were two friends, Mary Ann Burleson and Sammie Dean Parker. Sammie Dean, immediately to Hazel's right in the picture and wearing a dark dress, was one of the ringleaders of the segregationist students; Mary Ann, the girl carrying the purse at the far left, was largely along for the ride. Each of them was having herself a grand old time. But to Hazel--her friends called her "Kitty"--this was serious business, and her mood, and look, were dark. An alien federal government was foisting blacks into her secure, comfortable schoolgirl world, and she was outraged. While Mary Ann stared ahead amiably and Sammie Dean Parker turned momentarily toward her father, thereby protecting herself from ignominy and posterity, Hazel, her eyes narrowed, her brow furrowed, her teeth clenched as if about to bite, shrieked: "Go home, nigger! Go back to Africa!" Click. Will Counts had his picture.

 

Will Counts Collection/Indiana University Archives. The face of anger personified: Hazel Bryan (center, next to woman in dark dress) taunts Elizabeth Eckford after she was denied entrance to Little Rock High School on September, 4 1957.

As for Hazel, Mary Ann Burleson recalls, she was "rather pleased with herself"--so much so that two days later, she was in front of Central again, telling reporters that no way would she attend an integrated Central High School. "Whites should have rights, too!" she barked at a television camera, as Mary Ann and Sammie Dean looked on with approval. "Nigras aren't the only ones that have a right!" At first, Mrs. Huckaby couldn't place the screaming white girl in the picture, but she later remembered her from the previous winter: Hazel had played hooky to be with her boyfriend, and had failed some courses. The school notified her parents; her father said he did not want to beat her, but sometimes couldn't help himself. Hazel subsequently swallowed some poison, and was briefly hospitalized; Mrs. Huckaby sent a teacher to check on her. The story even made the papers.

Now Hazel was in them again, far more prominently, and the irate vice principal hauled her into her office. Hatred destroyed haters, the older woman said. Hazel only shrugged; "breath wasted," Mrs. Huckaby later wrote. And she was right: the following Monday, Hazel was at Central again, telling newsmen that had God really wanted whites and blacks to be together, "he would have made us all the same color." "The boys and girls pictured in the newspapers are hardly typical and certainly not our leading students," Mrs. Huckaby wrote her brother in New York. "The girl (with mouth open) behind the Negro girl is a badly disorganized child, with violence accepted in the home, and with a poor emotional history." Hazel's parents promptly pulled her out of Central and put her in a rural high school closer to her home. America had seen its last of Hazel Bryan for the next 40 years--except, that is, for the picture, which popped up whenever Little Rock in the 1950s, or the civil-rights movement or race hatred, was recalled.

As for Hazel, Mary Ann Burleson recalls, she was "rather pleased with herself"--so much so that two days later, she was in front of Central again, telling reporters that no way would she attend an integrated Central High School. "Whites should have rights, too!" she barked at a television camera, as Mary Ann and Sammie Dean looked on with approval. "Nigras aren't the only ones that have a right!" At first, Mrs. Huckaby couldn't place the screaming white girl in the picture, but she later remembered her from the previous winter: Hazel had played hooky to be with her boyfriend, and had failed some courses. The school notified her parents; her father said he did not want to beat her, but sometimes couldn't help himself. Hazel subsequently swallowed some poison, and was briefly hospitalized; Mrs. Huckaby sent a teacher to check on her. The story even made the papers.

Now Hazel was in them again, far more prominently, and the irate vice principal hauled her into her office. Hatred destroyed haters, the older woman said. Hazel only shrugged; "breath wasted," Mrs. Huckaby later wrote. And she was right: the following Monday, Hazel was at Central again, telling newsmen that had God really wanted whites and blacks to be together, "he would have made us all the same color." "The boys and girls pictured in the newspapers are hardly typical and certainly not our leading students," Mrs. Huckaby wrote her brother in New York. "The girl (with mouth open) behind the Negro girl is a badly disorganized child, with violence accepted in the home, and with a poor emotional history." Hazel's parents promptly pulled her out of Central and put her in a rural high school closer to her home. America had seen its last of Hazel Bryan for the next 40 years--except, that is, for the picture, which popped up whenever Little Rock in the 1950s, or the civil-rights movement or race hatred, was recalled.

But Hazel's conscience bothered her: 

Elizabeth, now 21, was visiting Little Rock in the summer of 1963 when she got a most surprising message. Someone had called whom she'd never heard of before. Her name was Hazel Bryan.

At 16, Hazel had married a schoolmate, Antoine Massery, then dropped out. But Hazel, by now the mother of two and living off a gravel road in South Little Rock, had an intellectually curious, independent streak: she chafed at the regimentation and racial intolerance of her church, for instance, and was eventually kicked out of it. Seeing Martin Luther King and the civil-rights protesters on television made her think of Elizabeth, and what she'd done to her six years earlier. Never mentioning it to her husband, she called the first Eckford in the phone book--Elizabeth's grandfather--and left several messages for her. Finally, Elizabeth got back to her. "I just told her who I was--I was the girl in that picture that was yelling at her, that I was sorry, that it was a terrible thing to do and that I didn't want my children to grow up to be like that, and I was crying," Hazel says.

Read the rest of the Vanity Fair story.

In the crowd at the McCain-Palin rallies, you see children of all ages. And like Hazel, they absorb what their parents are saying -- or screaming. And once those thoughts and feelings are unleashed, their effects are far graver than the momentary "rush" these people get cheering for their candidate.

John Lewis -- and all of the other people who called out McCain and Palin for their rhetoric -- was right to do so. Again, Lewis didn't call McCain a racist (or play the race card) or compare him to George Wallace, but just wanted to remind McCain -- and all of us watching -- how easy it is to go from "rah-rah" to riot.

If you have the stomach for it (and it can be very disturbing), study the photos of lynch mobs. Not for the torture of the poor man or woman who is the target of the violence, but for the faces of those on the periphery. They do not look shocked. Instead it is the sweaty excitement, the smug self-satisfaction, and in some, the outright glee. Their hands may be clean of the horrific deeds, but their hearts and minds are just as tainted and guilty.

John McCain should study those pictures, but John McCain just doesn't get it.