In Birmingham, King, Walker, and Fred Shuttlesworth formed a triumvirate. Shuttlesworth was the longtime face of the Birmingham civil rights struggle, the local preacher whom the Klan could not kill. King was the prophet, gracious and charismatic. Walker stayed in the shadows. He did not allow himself to be photographed with King. Even in Birmingham, many of Bull Connor’s people had no idea what Walker looked like. King and Shuttlesworth were equipped with a certain serenity. Walker was not. “If you get in my way, I’ll run smack dab over you” is how Walker described his management style. “I don’t have time for ‘good morning, good afternoon; how do you feel.’ We’ve got a revolution on our hands.”
Once, in Birmingham, when King was giving a speech, a two-hundred-pound white man charged the stage and began pummeling King with his fists. As King’s aides rushed to defend him, McWhorter writes:
They were astounded to watch King become his assailant’s protector. He held him solicitously and, as the audience began singing Movement songs, told him that their cause was just, that violence was self-demeaning, that “we’re going to win.” Then King introduced him to the crowd, as though he were a surprise guest. Roy James, a twenty-four-year-old native New Yorker who lived in an American Nazi Party dormitory in Arlington, Virginia, began to weep in King’s embrace.
King was a moral absolutist who did not stray from his principles even when under attack. Walker liked to call himself a pragmatist. He was once attacked by a “mountain of a man”—six foot six, 260 pounds—when he was standing in front of a courthouse in North Carolina. Walker didn’t embrace his assailant. He got up and came back at him, and each time the man’s blows sent Walker tumbling down the courthouse steps, he picked himself up and came back for more. The third time, Walker recalled later, “he caught me good, knocked me almost senseless. And I went back up a fourth time. By this time, you know, if I’d had my razor I’d have cut him.”
One famous night, the three of them—Walker, King, and Shuttlesworth—were about to preach to fifteen hundred people at the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, when the church was surrounded by an angry white mob threatening to burn the building down. King, predictably enough, took the high road. “The only way we are going to save the people upstairs,” he told the others, “is we who are the leadership have to give ourselves up to the mob.” Shuttlesworth, imperturbable as always, agreed: “Yeah, well if that what we have to do, let’s do it.” Walker? He looked over at King and said to himself: “This man must be out of his goddam mind.”5 (At the last moment, federal troops came and dispersed the crowd.) Later, Walker would embrace nonviolence. But he always gave the sense that turning the other cheek wasn’t something that came naturally.
“At times I would accommodate or alter my morality for the sake of getting a job done because I was the guy having to deal with the results,” he said once. “I did it consciously; I had no choice. I wasn’t dealing with a moral situation when I dealt with a Bull Connor.” Walker loved to play tricks on Connor. “I have come to Birmingham to ride the Bull,” he announced, eyes twinkling, upon his arrival. He might put on a Southern drawl, and call in some imaginary complaint to the local police about “niggers” headed somewhere in a protest, sending them off on a wild goose chase. Or he might lead a march that wasn’t a march, one that went around and around, through office lobbies and down alleyways, until the police were tearing out their hair. “Oh, man, it was a great time to be alive,” he said, recalling the antics he got up to in Birmingham. Walker knew better than to tell King all that he was doing. King would disapprove. Walker kept his mischief to himself.
“I think Negroes like myself have developed almost a mental catalog of the tone of voices of how a white face speaks to them,” Walker told the poet Robert Penn Warren in a long interview just after the Birmingham campaign ended. “But everything that a white person says is interpreted by the nuance of the tone of voice, or maybe the hang of the head, or the depth of tone, or the sharpness of the tongue, you know—things that in the ordinary, normal ethnic frame of reference would have no meaning, take on tremendous and deep and sharp meaning.”
Warren then brought up the trickster folktales of the African-American tradition. You can almost see a sly smile cross Walker’s face: “Yes,” he replied, he found “pure joy” in poking fun at the “master,” telling him “one thing that you knew he wanted to hear and really meaning something else.”
People called Martin Luther King “Mr. Leader” or, in lighter moments, “De Lawd.” Walker was Brer Rabbit.
5.
The plan Walker devised for Birmingham was called Project C—for confrontation. The staging ground was the city’s venerable 16th Street Baptist Church, next to Kelly Ingram Park, and a few short blocks from downtown Birmingham. Project C had three acts, each designed to be bigger and more provocative than the last. It began with a series of sit-ins at local businesses. That was to draw media attention to the problem of segregation in Birmingham. At night, Shuttlesworth and King would lead mass meetings for the local black community to keep morale high. The second stage was a boycott of downtown businesses, to put financial pressure on the white business community to reconsider their practices toward their black customers. (In department stores, for example, blacks could not use the washrooms or the changing rooms, for fear that a surface or an item of clothing once touched by a black person would then touch a white person.) Act three was a series of mass marches to back up the boycott and fill up the jails—because once Connor ran out of cells he could no longer make the civil rights problem go away simply by arresting the protesters. He would have to deal with them directly.
Project C was a high-stakes operation. For it to work, Connor had to fight back. As King put it, Connor had to be induced to “tip his hand”—thereby revealing his ugly side to the world. But there was no guarantee that he would do that. King and Walker had just come from running their long campaign in Albany, Georgia, and they had failed there because the Albany police chief, Laurie Pritchett, had refused to take the bait. He told his police officers not to use violence or excessive force. He was friendly and polite. His views on civil rights may have been unevolved, but he treated King with respect. The Northern press came to Albany to cover the confrontation between white and black, and found—to their surprise—they quite liked Pritchett. When King was finally thrown in jail, a mysterious well-dressed man—sent, legend had it, by Pritchett himself—came the next day and bailed him out. How can you be a martyr if you get bailed out of jail the instant you get there?
At one point, Pritchett moved into a downtown motel so that he could be on call should any violence erupt. In the midst of a long negotiating session with King, Pritchett was handed a telegram by his secretary. As Pritchett recalled, years later:
I…must have shown some concern over [it] because Dr. King asked me if it was bad news. I said, “No, it’s not bad news, Dr. King. It just so happens this is my twelfth weddin’ anniversary, and my wife has sent me a telegram.” And he says—I never will forget this and this shows the understandin’ which we had—he said, “You mean this is your anniversary?” And I said, “That’s right,” and I said, “I haven’t been home in at least three weeks.” And he said, “Well, Chief Pritchett, you go home tonight, no, right now. You celebrate your anniversary. I give you my word that nothing will happen in Albany, Georgia, till tomorrow, and you can go, take your wife out to dinner, do anything you want to, and tomorrow at ten o’clock, we’ll resume our efforts.”
Pritchett would not throw King in the briar patch. It was hopeless. Not long afterward, King packed his bags and left town.6
Walker realized that a setback in Birmingham so soon after the Albany debacle would be disastrous. In those years, the evening news on television was watched in an overwhelming number of American households, and Walker wanted desperately to have Project C front and center on American television screens every night. But he knew that if the campaign was perceived to be faltering, the news media could lose interest and
go elsewhere.
“As a general principle, Walker asserted that everything must build,” Taylor Branch writes. “If they showed strength, then outside support would grow more than proportionately. Once started, however, they could not fall back.…In no case, said Walker, could the Birmingham campaign be smaller than Albany. That meant they must be prepared to put upwards of a thousand people in jail at one time, maybe more.”
Several weeks in, Walker saw his campaign begin to lose that precious momentum. Many blacks in Birmingham were worried—justifiably—that if they were seen with King, they would be fired by their white bosses. In April, one of King’s aides spoke before seven hundred people at a church service and could persuade only nine of them to march with him. The next day, Andrew Young—another of King’s men—tried again, and this time found only seven volunteers. The local conservative black paper called Project C “wasteful and worthless.” The reporters and photographers assembled there to record the spectacle of black-on-white confrontation were getting restless. Connor made the occasional arrest but mostly just sat and watched. Walker was in constant contact with King as King commuted back and forth between Birmingham and his home base in Atlanta. “Wyatt,” King told him for the hundredth time, “you’ve got to find some way to make Bull Connor tip his hand.” Walker shook his head. “Mr. Leader, I haven’t found the key yet, but I’m going to find it.”
The breakthrough came on Palm Sunday. Walker had twenty-two protesters ready to go. The march would be led by King’s brother, Alfred Daniel, known as A.D. “Our mass meeting was slow getting together,” Walker recalled. “We were supposed to march at something like two-thirty, and we didn’t march until about four. In that time, people, being aware of the demonstration, collected out on the streets. By the time they got ready to march, there were a thousand people up and down this three-block area, lining up all along the sides as spectators, watching.”
The next day, Walker opened the newspapers to read the media’s account of what had happened, and to his surprise he discovered the reporters had gotten it all wrong. The papers said eleven hundred demonstrators had marched in Birmingham. “I called Dr. King and said, ‘Dr. King, I’ve got it!’” Walker recalled. “‘I can’t tell you on the phone, but I’ve got it!’ So what we did each day was we dragged out our meetings until people got home from work late in the afternoon. They would form out on the side and it would look like a thousand folks. We weren’t marching but twelve, fourteen, sixteen, eighteen. But the papers were reporting fourteen hundred.”
It was a situation straight out of one of the most famous of all trickster tales—the story of Terrapin, a lowly turtle who finds himself in a race with Deer. He hides just by the finish line and places his relatives up and down the course, at strategic intervals, to make it seem like he is running the whole race. Then at the finish line, he emerges just ahead of Deer to claim victory. Deer is completely fooled, since, as Terrapin knows, to Deer, all turtles “am so much like annurrer you can’t tell one from turrer.”
Underdogs have to be students of the nuances of white expression—the hang of the head, the depth of tone, or the sharpness of the tongue. Their survival depends on it. But those in positions of power have no need to look at the weak. Deer had disdain for the lowly Terrapin. To him, a turtle was a turtle. The comfortable elite of Birmingham were just like Deer. “They can only see…through white eyes,” Walker explained, gleefully. “They cannot distinguish even between Negro demonstrators and Negro spectators. All they know is Negroes.”7
Connor was an arrogant man who liked to swagger around Birmingham saying, “Down here we make our own law.” He sat drinking his bourbon every morning at the Molton Hotel, loudly predicting that King would “run out of niggers.” Now he looked out the window and saw Terrapin ahead of him at every turn. He was in shock. Those imaginary one thousand protesters were a provocation. “Bull Connor had something in his mind about not letting these niggers get to city hall,” Walker said. “I prayed that he’d keep trying to stop us.…Birmingham would have been lost if Bull had let us go down to the city hall and pray. If he had let us do that and stepped aside, what else would be new? There would be no movement, no publicity.” Please, Brer Connor, please. Whatever you do, don’t throw me in the briar patch. And of course that’s just what Connor did.
A month into the protest, Walker and King stepped up the pressure. One of the Birmingham team, James Bevel, had been working with local schoolchildren, instructing them in the principles of nonviolent resistance. Bevel was a Pied Piper: a tall, bald, hypnotic speaker who wore a yarmulke and bib overalls and claimed to hear voices. (McWhorter calls him a “militant out of Dr. Seuss.”) On the last Monday in April, he dropped off leaflets at all of the black high schools around the county: “Come to 16th Street Baptist Church at noon on Thursday. Don’t ask permission.” The city’s most popular black disc jockey—Shelley “the Playboy” Stewart—sent out the same message to his young listeners: “Kids, there’s gonna be a party at the park.”8 The FBI got wind of the plan and told Bull Connor, who announced that any child who skipped school would be expelled. It made no difference. The kids came in droves. Walker called the day the children arrived “D Day.”
At one o’clock, the doors to the church opened, and King’s lieutenants began sending the children out. They held signs saying “Freedom” or “I’ll Die to Make This Land My Home.” They sang “We Shall Overcome” and “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.” Outside the church, Connor’s police officers waited. The children dropped to their knees and prayed, then filed into the open doors of the paddy wagons. Then another dozen came out. Then another dozen, and another, and another—until Connor’s men had begun to get an inkling that the stakes had been raised again.
A police officer spotted Fred Shuttlesworth. “Hey, Fred, how many more have you got?”
“At least a thousand more,” he replied.
“God A’mighty,” the officer said.
By the end of the day, more than six hundred children were in jail.
The next day—Friday—was “Double-D Day.” This time fifteen hundred schoolchildren skipped school to come down to 16th Street Baptist. At one o’clock, they began filing out of the church. The streets surrounding Kelly Ingram Park were barricaded by police and firefighters. There was no mystery about why the firefighters had been called in. They had high-pressure hoses on their fire trucks, and “water cannons,” as they were also known, had been a staple of crowd control since the 1930s in the early days of Nazi Germany. Walker knew that if the demonstrations grew so large that they overwhelmed the Birmingham police, Connor would be sorely tempted to turn on the hoses. He wanted Connor to turn on the hoses. “It was hot in Birmingham,” he explained. “I told [Bevel] to let the pep rally go on a while and let these firemen sit out there and bake in the sun until their tempers were like hair triggers.”
And the dogs? Connor had been itching to use the city’s K-9 Corps. Earlier that spring, in a speech, Connor had vowed to combat the civil right protesters with one hundred German shepherd police dogs. “I want ’em to see the dogs work,” Connor growled, as things began to get out of control in Kelly Ingram Park—and nothing made Walker happier than that. He had children marching in the streets, and now Connor wanted to let German shepherds loose on them? Everyone in King’s camp knew what it would look like if someone published a photograph of a police dog lunging at a child.
Connor stood watch as the children came closer. “Do not cross,” he said. “If you come any further, we will turn the fire hoses on you.” Connor’s jails were full. He couldn’t arrest anyone else, because he had nowhere to put them. The children kept coming. The firemen were hesitant. They were not used to controlling crowds. Connor turned to the fire chief: “Turn ’em on, or go home.” The firemen turned on their “monitor guns,” valves that turned the spray of their hoses into a high-pressure torrent. The children clung to one another and were sent sprawling backwards. The force of the water ripped some of th
e marchers’ shirts from their bodies and flung others against walls and doorways.
Back at the church, Walker began deploying waves of children to the other end of the park to open another front. Connor had no more fire trucks. But he was determined that none of the marchers cross over into “white” Birmingham. “Bring the dogs,” Connor ordered, calling in eight K-9 units. “Why did you bring old Tiger out?” Connor shouted at one of his police officers. “Why didn’t you bring a meaner dog—this one is not the vicious one!” The children came closer. A German shepherd lunged at a boy. He leaned in, arms limp, as if to say, “Take me, here I am.” On Saturday, the picture ran on the front page of every newspaper around the country.
6.
Does Wyatt Walker’s behavior make you uncomfortable? James Forman, who was a key figure in the civil rights movement in those years, was with Walker when Connor first deployed the K-9 units. Forman says that Walker started jumping with joy. “We’ve got a movement. We’ve got a movement. We had some police brutality.” Forman was stunned. Walker was as aware as any of them just how dangerous Birmingham could be. He had been in the room when King gave everyone a mock eulogy. How could he be jumping up and down at the sight of protesters being attacked by police dogs?9
After D Day, King and Walker heard it from all sides. The judge processing the arrested marchers said that the people who “misled those kids” into marching “ought to be put under the jail.” On the floor of Congress, one of Alabama’s congressmen called the use of children “shameful.” The mayor of Birmingham denounced the “irresponsible and unthinking agitators” who were using children as “tools.” Malcolm X—the black activist who was in every way more radical than King—said “real men don’t put their children on the firing line.” The New York Times editorialized that King was engaged in “perilous ventures in brinkmanship” and Time scolded him for using children as “shock troops.” The U.S. attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, warned that “schoolchildren participating in street demonstrations is a dangerous business,” and said, “An injured, maimed or dead child is a price that none of us can afford to pay.”10
David and Goliath: The Triumph of the Underdog Page 15