On February 27, 1962, the city’s court found King and Abernathy guilty of all charges stemming from the march, but held their sentences in abeyance. Back in Atlanta, King pondered the situation in Albany. Should he risk getting any further engaged there? Could the factious Negro community be united, even under his leadership? He knew this for certain: more than seven hundred of his brothers and sisters were in jail and in desperate need of money for bail and legal fees. He had to help them.
He set out on another fund-raising tour, giving speeches and organizing benefit concerts. He turned up in New York for a luncheon and there met Harry Wachtel, a wealthy Jewish lawyer with powerful business and political connections. King found Harry immensely likable, with his affectionate grin and avuncular ways. Short and barrel-chested, he was a cultivated New Yorker with a mansion on Long Island and a thriving Manhattan law firm. There was something about Wachtel that made him easy to confide in, and he and King became fast friends. Because he wanted to help the civil-rights movement, King retained him as a free legal adviser (he refused any remuneration). In May, Wachtel and several of King’s other friends established the Gandhi Society for Human Rights, a tax-exempt organization that raised funds for him.
On July 5, King was in Atlanta, speaking to the NAACP’s annual convention in sweltering heat one delegate likened to a Turkish bath. With an eye on the Albany Movement, King warned Negroes that “we should not devour each other to the delight of onlookers who would have us corrupt and sully the noble quality of our crusade.” Five days later, he and Abernathy were back in Albany for sentencing in the Recorders Court. After months of delay, the court now ordered them to pay a fine of $178 each or spend forty-five days in jail. In true Gandhi fashion, the friends elected to go to jail, and black Albany stirred again. Chief Pritchett, smiling, happy with himself, told reporters that the Negro leaders were on a cleaning detail. “They’re good workers. We had no complaints from them.” They prayed and fasted together, and King spent his spare time writing on his long-delayed book of sermons.
On July 13, however, Pritchett released them after an unidentified Negro man paid their fines. King protested bitterly: he wanted to remain in jail as a symbolic act of protest, one that would rally black Albany behind the movement. But Pritchett made them go. “I’ve been thrown out of lots of places in my day,” Abernathy remarked at a mass meeting that night, “but never before have I been thrown out of a jail.” King surmised that city officials or Pritchett himself had engineered their release, and he denounced such “subtle and conniving tactics.” But a southern journalist later reported that the Negro who paid the fines was an Albany resident, sent by a coalition of white segregationists and conservative blacks who hoped to get rid of King and stop all the agitation.
King, though, resolved to stay and fight. He could not forget that night in Shiloh Church last December, could not forget the power he had sensed in the people. He now felt called to witness in Albany. Yes, God was summoning him here to do battle with injustice. Also, Negroes and whites alike were accusing him of negligent and lackluster leadership in Albany, insisting that nonviolent protest had failed here. If King did not produce a victory, nonviolence could suffer a serious reversal.
He brought his staff to town and announced that they would launch SCLC’s first community-wide, nonviolent campaign here, seeking across-the-board desegregation of all public facilities in the city. But Walker and Andrew Young had reservations. “We couldn’t see any handles to anything,” Young said later. But Abernathy, speaking for King, argued that the spiritual strength of the people would ensure success. “When you are called on to witness,” Abernathy said, “you can’t always analyze what might happen. You just have to go.”
And so they went in, a young and inexperienced SCLC team in its first real test of nonviolent battle. From SCLC field headquarters in the Negro section, King called on the mayor to open negotiations and consider Negro demands. When the mayor ignored him, King told a thousand cheering, shouting Negroes that they were going to “fill up the jails” and “turn Albany upside down.” With the white establishment castigating him and his men as “interloping meddlers” and “social quacks,” King sent wave after wave of black demonstrators through white Albany, seeking service at lunch counters, libraries, bowling alleys, parks, and movie theaters. Though he commuted in and out of the city, still giving speeches and raising money on the outside, King was in his glory in the mass meetings at Shiloh Church. Here he exhorted his flocks with fervent admonitions and sent them on their missions singing, “I’m walkin’ tall, I’m walkin’ strong, I’m America’s new Black Joe.”
But King’s movement, for all its fervor, went nowhere. As fast as his nonviolent columns reached their targets, Chief Pritchett put them in paddy wagons and dispatched them to jails in other counties. Movement leaders could never muster enough recruits to fill all the jails at his disposal. Then, too, Pritchett treated the marchers with unruffled decorum; he had done his homework on King, studied his Gandhian speeches and methods, and planned to overcome nonviolent protest with nonviolent law enforcement. When demonstrators knelt in prayer, Pritchett bowed his head, then arrested them with a puckish smile. He never clubbed anybody, never called anybody names, and never let his men do so either. Consequently, reporters who covered the Albany campaign saw no brutality on the part of local police to photograph and report. “We killed them with kindness,” chuckled one city official.
Pritchett also placed King under round-the-clock police protection, which irritated him and sent him complaining to the chief. But Pritchett was taking no chances. If King was attacked or killed, he said, “the fires would never cease.” As the campaign progressed, King and Abernathy developed a grudging respect for him. Once King even canceled a demonstration so that Pritchett could spend the day with his wife. It was their wedding anniversary.
On July 20 the movement received a crippling blow when U.S. District Judge J. Robert Elliott, a Kennedy appointee and an avowed segregationist, handed down a temporary injunction against all forms of civil disobedience in Albany, specifically enjoining King, Abernathy, and other leaders from further civil-rights activities. At Dr. Anderson’s home on unpaved Cedar Avenue, King and his lieutenants were in a quandary. Should they violate the injunction and go on marching? Yes, it was unjust and unconstitutional, King said. But he did not want to alienate the federal courts and the Justice Department. “The federal courts have given us our greatest victories,” he said, “and I cannot, in good conscience, declare war on them.” At a press conference in Anderson’s backyard, King announced that he and the other leaders would obey the injunction and “work vigorously in higher courts to have it dissolved.” Until then, those cited would lead no further demonstrations.
The next day a local minister himself conducted a march to city hall. “They can stop the leaders,” King exulted, “but they can’t stop the people.” Still, his decision to obey the injunction cost him dearly. SNCC and many others in the black community were infuriated and questioned his credibility as a leader. Moreover, with King and his colleagues out of action, the movement simply lost its momentum.
On July 24, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta overruled Elliott’s injunction, and King announced that he would lead a mass march on the morrow. But that night violence flared in the streets of Albany. A pregnant wife of a movement leader had taken food to demonstrators in a prison thirty-five miles from the city. There was a scene, and a sheriff’s deputy knocked her unconscious and kicked her so viciously that she later miscarried. When city police arrested a protesting group at city hall, Albany blacks could no longer restrain their anger. By nightfall, July 24, some two thousand of them were on a rampage, fighting police with bottles and stones. “You see them nonviolent rocks?” Pritchett yelled at reporters. The governor offered 12,000 National Guardsmen to help restore order.
King was inconsolable. Now he and the movement would be blamed for inciting Negroes to riot. The next day he canceled his scheduled
march, declared “A Day of Penance,” and confined direct action for the rest of the week to small prayer vigils. He took the idea from Gandhi, who, after the Punjab disturbances of 1922, had suspended civil disobedience until nonviolent discipline could be restored. Then King toured the restaurants, dives, and pool halls in Albany’s “Harlem” area, beseeching people to embrace nonviolence. “I hate to hold up your pool game,” he told some fellows in one place. “I used to be a pool shark myself.” Then he grew serious, his brows furrowed, his voice rising as though he were addressing a crowd. “We are in the midst of a great movement, and we are soliciting the support of all the citizens of Albany. We have had our demonstrations saying we will no longer accept segregation. One thing about the movement is that it is nonviolent. As you know, there was some violence last night. Nothing could hurt our movement more. It’s exactly what our opposition likes to see. In order that we can continue on a Christian basis with love and nonviolence, I wanted to talk to you all and urge you to be nonviolent, not to throw bottles. I know if you do this, we are destined to win.” He said much the same at smoky beer halls, talking about “a sense of dignity within” to tough, sullen men in work clothes and soiled hats.
After the night of violence, King and his colleagues had a terrible time getting volunteers for jail duty, and the movement seemed on the verge of collapse. In desperation, King and Dr. Anderson turned to Washington for help, imploring the Kennedys to pressure Albany officials to negotiate with them. The Kennedys did urge negotiations, but otherwise refused to intervene. King and his people became incensed at the administration, and Young even claimed it “worked against us.” In their view, the Kennedys seemed more concerned with quieting the movement down than with removing the practices it opposed. A gubernatorial primary campaign was under way in Georgia, with arch-segregationist Marvin Griffin running against Carl Sanders, who considered defiance of federal law bad for business. The adminstration was worried that demonstrations might help Griffin and said so to King. Young recalled that King got into “a pretty long argument” on the phone with Robert Kennedy and Burke Marshall, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. Sanders was a segregationist, too, and not going to do much for Negroes, and King was not about to quiet down. It was one of the few times Young saw him lose his temper. “You know,” King complained, “they do not understand what we are up against.”
Alas, King was up against more than white obstinance. Within the movement itself, SNCC leaders were growing increasingly fretful. At a backyard war council with King in the Negro section, they challenged SCLC’s right to monopolize the movement. King denied any such intent, but the students pressed on. They thought him too conservative, error-prone, and aloof. Moreover, after the kicking of the Negro woman, they were no longer so dedicated to passive resistance, and they regarded a day of penance as demeaning. Another movement leader said that King showed amazing forbearance. He welcomed the students’ criticism and admitted he had made mistakes. While the students respected his commitment, they left the parley far from reconciled. The rift between him and SNCC was deeper than he probably realized.
Many local leaders were disillusioned, too. “There is a limit to the number of people who feel the way to protest is to walk down Jackson Street into jail,” said one man. “Some of us think we can do the job less wastefully”—that is, by fighting in the courts in the manner of the NAACP. Moreover, those who expected King to bring freedom “here and now” had dropped out of the movement when he failed to do so. As a result, even the mass meetings had subsided in size and fervor. “It took Gandhi 40 years to achieve independence,” King said with a sigh. “We can’t expect miracles here in Albany.”
He made a last, desperate attempt to hold the movement together. On July 27, he and Abernathy led a small demonstration to city hall and deliberately got arrested and imprisoned. Recalling how Gandhi had shamed the British and aroused all India with his jailings and fasts, King intended to remain in jail until the people were marching again and the city agreed to negotiate.
Chief Pritchett was decent enough to the two prisoners. He had their cell cleaned up with disinfectant, and he let King have books and a radio. King wrote an article about Albany for New York’s Amsterdam News and worked some more on his book of sermons, to be called Strength to Love, On August 5, Coretta turned up at the jail with the children, including a new baby, Dexter, who was born in January. The children had never visited King in jail, and he worried how they would react. So that they would not have to see him behind bars, the jailer let him come out to a shoeshine stand in a front corridor. There he enjoyed a fifteen-minute reunion with his family. Coretta looked very nice, dressed in a pleated dress and pearl earrings and a necklace. She told him how Yolanda had been crying for him, saying, “I want to see Daddy. I want him to come home.” When Coretta explained that Daddy was in jail so that all people might go where they liked, Yoki said, “Good, tell him to stay in jail until I can go to Funtown.”
After King returned to his cell, the older children frolicked in the foyer of City Hall while Coretta spoke to newsmen. “He looks well,” she said of her husband. “I think he feels much better after seeing the children. It gave him a lift.”
On August 8 he got another lift. The city was seeking a permanent injunction against the movement in Judge Elliott’s court, but the Justice Department was disputing the move, on the grounds that the city had no right to an injunction because it maintained segregated public facilities. King considered this “no solution to the problems”—what was needed was strong federal action against all forms of segregation. Nevertheless, he was grateful for the “legal and moral support” of the Justice Department and claimed that its argument vindicated the movement’s position.
Two days later King and Abernathy came to trial in the Recorders Court, and several associates, expecting them to be convicted and returned to jail, scheduled mass protest marches. But the city wanted to get rid of King and Abernathy and ax the movement once and for all. The court therefore suspended their sentences and ordered their release. They were free, thrown out of jail again.
By now, King had lost all control of the Albany Movement. In gloom, he suspended demonstrations and temporarily returned to Atlanta, in hopes that this would give negotiations a chance. On August 15 the City Commission did meet with local Negro leaders, but categorically rejected their demands. King himself returned to Albany several times and chastised city officials for their obstinacy, but it was no use. The Albany Movement was over. After months of Negro protest, the only public facility that was integrated was the library, but only after the chairs were removed to avoid interracial seating. The city shut down its parks and sold its swimming pool, and lunch counters and white schools all remained closed to Negroes. “Albany,” chortled Chief Pritchett, “is as segregated as ever.”
It was a staggering defeat for King, and he took a pummeling from his critics. Some pronounced themselves “appalled” at his lack of leadership; others accused him of grandstanding in jail and then fleeing town when the movement collapsed; still others declared that nonviolence itself was both impractical and moribund.
King suffered from such criticism. But he told Abernathy that “we must go on, anyhow.” In a post-mortem analysis of the campaign, he and his staff conceded that they should not have obeyed the federal court injunction and that it had “broken our backs.” King’s inability to stay in jail had also hurt the movement, and so had Chief Pritchett’s clever tactics. “We were naive enough to think we could fill up the jails,” said one despondent aide. “Pritchett was hep to the fact that we couldn’t. We ran out of people before he ran out of jails.” Worse still, SCLC had charged into Albany without proper planning and preparation. “There wasn’t any real strategy,” Andrew Young recalled. “I remember being around and not knowing what to do…. We didn’t know then how to mobilize people in masses.” “Our protest was so vague,” King confessed, “that we got nothing, and the people were left very depressed and in despair.”
Had they concentrated on a single target like the bus station or the lunch counters, they might have won a symbolic victory that would have “galvanized support and boosted morale.” But given SNCC’s hostility to SCLC and given the internal fighting and “tribal jealousies” within the movement, perhaps it had been doomed from the start.
King, Walker, and Abernathy pointed to something else, too. Albany had “too many Uncle Toms” who opposed the movement lest they lose their favored status and their connections with the white establishment. “There are Negroes who will never fight for freedom,” King lamented. “There are Negroes who will seek profit for themselves from the struggle. There are even some Negroes who will cooperate with their oppressors. The hammer blows of discrimination, poverty and segregation must warp and corrupt some. No one can pretend that because a people may be oppressed, every individual member is virtuous and worthy.”
Finally, there was the insensitivity of federal officials, from the Kennedys in Washington to FBI agents in Albany itself. King and his people could not forget that Robert Kennedy had congratulated the mayor for keeping “peace” in Albany. Nor could they forgive the Justice Department for its flagrant double standard after the movement ended. Though a local sheriff had caned a Negro man and seriously wounded another with pistol shots, the Justice Department refused to prosecute him, offering the lame excuse that FBI agents hadn’t produced enough evidence to warrant federal action. But the truth was that they hadn’t really tried. When Albany Negroes boycotted the store of a white juror, however, agents “were thick as hogs,” complained a Negro leader, as eighty-six of them carried out a thorough and energetic investigation for the Justice Department, which then prosecuted Dr. Anderson arid eight other Negro activists for “obstruction of justice.” “They almost made an anarchist out of me,” said an embittered Negro. “They played politics pure and simple.” Said a Negro woman: “Son, I done found out that even the government is a white man.”
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