At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  ALSO BY TAYLOR BRANCH

  Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963–65

  Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954–63

  Labyrinth (with Eugene M. Propper)

  The Empire Blues

  Second Wind (with Bill Russell)

  Blowing the Whistle: Dissent in the Public Interest (with Charles Peters)

  TAYLOR BRANCH

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 2006 by Taylor Branch

  All rights reserved,

  including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Photography Consultant: Kevin Kwan

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Branch, Taylor.

  At Canaan’s edge: America in the King years, 1965–68 / Taylor Branch.

  p. cm.

  1. African Americans—Civil rights—History—20th century. 2. Civil rights movements—United States—History—20th century. 3. King, Martin Luther, Jr., 1929–1968. 4. United States—History—1961–1969. I. Title.

  E185.615.B67 2006

  323.1196'073 009046—dc22 2005040177

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-5871-2

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-5871-3

  Photo credits will be found on backmatter.

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  For Macy and Franklin

  And for Diane Nash

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  I. SELMA: THE LAST REVOLUTION

  1. Warning

  2. Scouts

  3. Dissent

  4. Boxed In

  5. Over the Bridge

  6. The Call

  7. Devil’s Choice

  8. The Ghost of Lincoln

  9. Wallace and the Archbishop

  10. And We Shall Overcome

  11. Half-Inch Hailstones

  12. Neutralize Their Anxieties

  13. To Montgomery

  14. The Stakes of History

  15. Aftershocks

  16. Bearings in a Whirlwind

  II. HIGH TIDE

  17. Ten Feet Tall

  18. Leaps of Faith

  19. Gulps of Freedom

  20. Fort Deposit

  21. Watts and Hayneville

  22. Fragile Alliance

  23. Identity

  III. CROSSROADS IN FREEDOM AND WAR

  24. Enemy Politics

  25. Inside Out

  26. Refugees

  27. Break Points

  28. Panther Ladies

  29. Meredith March

  30. Chicago

  31. Valley Moments

  32. Backlash

  IV. PASSION

  33. Spy Visions

  34. Riverside

  35. Splinters

  36. King’s Choice

  37. New Year Trials

  38. Memphis

  39. Requiem

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Photographic Insert

  INTRODUCTION

  NONVIOLENCE is an orphan among democratic ideas. It has nearly vanished from public discourse even though the most basic element of free government—the vote—has no other meaning. Every ballot is a piece of nonviolence, signifying hard-won consent to raise politics above firepower and bloody conquest. Such compacts work more or less securely in different lands. Nations gain strength from vote-based institutions in commerce and civil society, but the whole architecture of representative democracy springs from the handiwork of nonviolence.

  America’s Founders centered political responsibility in the citizens themselves, but, nearly two centuries later, no one expected a largely invisible and dependent racial minority to ignite protests of steadfast courage—boycotts, sit-ins, Freedom Rides, jail marches—dramatized by stunning forbearance and equilibrium into the jaws of hatred. During the short career of Martin Luther King, Jr., between 1954 and 1968, the nonviolent civil rights movement lifted the patriotic spirit of the United States toward our defining national purpose.

  James Madison, arguing in 1788 to ratify the novel Constitution of the United States, called upon “every votary of freedom to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.” This revolutionary premise challenged the once universal hierarchy of rulers and subjects along with its stubborn assumption that a populace needs discipline by superior force or authority. Madison also prescribed a bold commitment to the wisdom of citizens at large. This public trust surfaces in close elections, when it becomes more than a theoretical article of faith that the power of a great nation can turn on the last trickle of marginal voters to the polls. Without “virtue in the people,” wrote Madison, “no theoretical checks, no form of government, can render us secure.”

  There remains debate about the relative sturdiness of self-governance and public trust as bedrock features of constitutional design. Is democracy more vulnerable to a loss of collective will or to deficiencies in popular judgment? Rulers from China and elsewhere scoff that both ideals are impossibly unstable for a long run measured in dynasties, and doubters within democracy itself push for authoritarian shelter. However, nonviolent pioneers from the civil rights era stand tall in the commitment to govern oneself and develop political bonds with strangers, rather than vice versa. Teenagers and small children sang freedom songs in the Birmingham jail. Workshops trained nonviolent pilgrims to uphold democratic beliefs against the psychology of enemies. Demonstrators faced segregationist oppressors in the utmost spirit of disciplined outreach, willing to suffer and even die without breaking witness for civil contact. Bob Moses, the mystical student leader, recruited college volunteers to endure scapegoat brutality during the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. On its first night, one of three lynch victims haunted the surrounding posse with his last words. “Sir, I know just how you feel,” Michael Schwerner told a Klansman about to pull the trigger.

  Martin Luther King famously exhorted the nation to “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed,” but he paid tribute to vanguard students for teaching him that oratory alone was not enough. He reinforced a cry for democracy with political sacrifice, and dreams of brotherhood collided in his anguished voice with the cruelties of race. To combat distortions in historical perception, King balanced an imperative for equal votes with the original prophetic vision of equal souls before God. He grounded one foot in patriotism, the other in ministry, and both in nonviolence. The movement he led climbed from obscurity to command the center stage of American politics in 1963, when President John F. Kennedy declared racial segregation a moral issue “as old as the Scriptures and…as clear as the American Constitution.” A year later, after President Lyndon Johnson signed a landmark law to abolish segregation by sex as well as race, King accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality,” he said, echoing the Founders’ lyrical hopes for freedom. “But what,” wrote Madison, “is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

  In this third, concluding volume on America in the King Years, King has willed himself from the pinnacle of acclaim straight to “the valley” of a new campaign to seek voting rights for black people. By early 1965, he has been beaten and arrested again through two months of arduous demonstrations in Selma, Alabama—highlighted once more by children marched to jail, with a young black man shot to death in a v
igil—and has attracted very little notice. For all its resonant success to win the courtesies of democracy, the freedom movement has evoked lethal opposition at the color line of political power—the vote—from a nation that long ago enshrined but essentially forgot a Fifteenth Amendment guarantee of this most fundamental right.

  Marchers stand here on the brink of violent suppression in their first attempt to cross Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, after which thousands of ordinary Americans will answer King’s overnight call for a nonviolent pilgrimage to Selma. Three of them will be murdered, but the quest to march beyond Pettus Bridge will release waves of political energy from the human nucleus of freedom. The movement will transform national politics to win the vote. Selma will engage the world’s conscience, strain the embattled civil rights coalition, and embroil King in negotiations with all three branches of the United States government. It will revive the visionary pragmatism of the American Revolution.

  In adjacent Lowndes County, where no member of the black majority has dared to vote, sharecroppers will risk their lives to enter politics. Torment over distant Vietnam will destroy a historic collaboration between King and Lyndon Johnson at the signal divide from the 1960s—whether to pursue democracy by force of arms. Actors on all sides will confront persistent blind spots of violence and race. At their best, like the Founders, allies of the nonviolent movement will turn rulers and subjects into fellow citizens. Literally and figuratively, they still change the face of the country we inherit.

  AT CANAAN’S EDGE

  I

  Selma: The Last Revolution

  CHAPTER 1

  Warning

  February 28, 1965

  TERROR approached Lowndes County through the school system. J. T. Haynes, a high school teacher of practical agriculture, spread word from his white superiors that local Klansmen vowed to kill the traveling preacher if he set foot again in his local church. This to Haynes was basic education in a county of unspoiled beauty and feudal cruelty, where a nerve of violence ran beneath tranquil scenes of egret flocks resting among pastured Angus cattle. Across its vast seven hundred square miles, Lowndes County retained a filmy past of lynchings nearly unmatched, and Haynes tried to harmonize his scientific college methods with the survival lore of students three or four generations removed from Africa—that hens would not lay eggs properly if their feet were cold, that corn grew only in the silence of night, when trained country ears could hear it crackling up from the magic soil of Black Belt Alabama.

  Lessons about the Klan arrived appropriately through the plainspoken Hulda Coleman, who had run the county schools since 1939 from a courthouse office she inherited from her father, the school superintendent and former sheriff. After World War II, when Haynes had confided to Coleman that the U.S. Army mustered him out from Morocco with final instructions to go home and vote as a deserving veteran, she explained that such notions did not apply to any colored man who valued his safety or needed his job in her classrooms. Haynes stayed on to teach in distinguished penury with his wife, Uralee, daughter of an engineer from the Southern land-grant colleges, loyally fulfilling joint assignment to what their Tuskegee professors euphemistically called a “problem county.” Not for twenty years, until Martin Luther King stirred up the Selma voting rights movement one county to the west, did Negroes even discuss the franchise. There had been furtive talk since January about whether Haynes’s 1945 inquiry or a similarly deflected effort by an aged blind preacher qualified as the last attempt to register, but no one remembered a ballot actually cast by any of the local Negroes who comprised 80 percent of the 15,000 residents in Lowndes County.

  Despite ominous notices from Deacon Haynes, Rev. Lorenzo Harrison was keeping his fourth-Sunday commitment when the sound of truck engines roared to a stop outside Mt. Carmel Baptist on February 28, 1965. Panic swept through the congregation even before investigating deacons announced that familiar Klansmen were deployed outside with shotguns and rifles. Harrison gripped the pulpit and stayed there. He lived thirty miles away in Selma, where he knew people in the ongoing nonviolent campaign but was not yet involved himself, and now he switched his message from “How can we let this hope bypass us here?” to a plea for calm now that “they have brought the cup to the Lord’s doorstep.” He said he figured word would get back to white people that he had mentioned the vote in a sermon. Haynes reported that some of the Klansmen were shouting they’d get the out-of-county nigger preacher before sundown, whether the congregation surrendered him or not.

  Harrison kept urging the choir to sing for comfort above the chaos of tears and moans, with worshippers cringing in the pews or hunched near windows to listen for noises outside, some praying for deliverance and some for strength not to forsake their pastor even if the Klan burned the whole congregation alive. There were cries about whether the raiding party would lay siege or actually invade the sanctuary, and Harrison, preaching in skitters to fathom what might happen, said he had been braced for phone threats, night riders—almost any persecution short of assault on a Sunday service—but now he understood the saying that bad surprises in Lowndes could outstrip your fears. Deacons said they recognized among the Klansmen a grocer who sometimes beat debtors in his store, a horseman who owned ten thousand acres and once shot a young sharecropper on the road because he seemed too happy to be drafted out of the fields into the Army, then with impunity had dumped the body of Bud Rudolph on his mother’s porch. There was Tom Coleman, a highway employee and self-styled deputy who in 1959 killed Richard Lee Jones in the recreation area of a prison work camp. Such names rattled old bones. Sheriff Jesse Coleman, father of Klansman Tom and school superintendent Hulda, successfully defied the rare Alabama governor who called for state investigation in a notorious World War I lynching—of one Will Jones from a telegraph pole by an unmasked daytime crowd—by pronouncing the whole episode a matter of strictly local concern.

  Noises outside the church unexpectedly died down. Uncertain why or how far the Klan had withdrawn, deacons puzzled over escape plans for two hundred worshippers with a handful of cars and no way to call for help—barely a fifth of the county’s households had telephone service, nearly all among the white minority. A test caravan that ferried home sick or infirm walkers ran upon no ambush nearby, and a scout reported that the only armed pickup sighted on nearby roads belonged to a known non-Klansman. The task of evacuating Harrison fell to deacon John Hulett, whose namesake slave ancestor was said to have founded Mt. Carmel Baptist in the year Alabama gained statehood, 1819. Hulett, a former agriculture student under deacon Haynes, was considered a man of substance because he farmed his own land instead of sharecropping and once had voted as a city dweller in Birmingham. He recruited a deacon to drive Harrison’s car, put the targeted reverend down low in the back seat of his own, and by late afternoon led a close convoy of all ten Mt. Carmel automobiles some fifteen miles north on Route 17 to deliver him to an emergency way station at Mt. Gillard Missionary Baptist Church on U.S. Highway 80, where Harrison’s father was pastor.

  Celebrations at the transfer were clandestine, urgent, and poignant, being still in Lowndes County. Until Hulett pulled away to attend the stranded congregation back at Mt. Carmel, Harrison kept muttering in terrified regret that one of them had to follow through on this voting idea no matter what. “If I have to leave, you take it,” he told Hulett with a tinge of regret, as though cheating his own funeral.

  Just ahead lay fateful March, with a crucible of choice for Martin Luther King and President Lyndon Johnson. The Ku Klux Klan would kill soon in Lowndes County, but its victims would be white people from Michigan and New Hampshire. Lowndes would inspire national symbols. It would change Negroes into black people, and deacon John Hulett would found a local political party renowned by its Black Panther emblem. Beyond wonders scarcely dreamed, Reverend Harrison would vote, campaign, and even hold elected office for years in Selma, but never again in the twentieth century would he venture within ten miles of Mt. Carmel Church.

  CHA
PTER 2

  Scouts

  February 28–March 1, 1965

  SOME fifty miles from Mt. Carmel, on the other side of Selma, James Bevel was preaching against an outbreak of fear in Perry County that same Sunday. He recited from the twelfth chapter of Acts about how King Herod of Judea had “laid violent hands” upon the followers of the Jesus movement by killing “James the brother of John with the sword,” and how Herod, seeing that his vengeance pleased the public, “proceeded to arrest Peter also.” The modern Herod was Governor George Wallace of Alabama, said Bevel, and the modern martyr James was Jimmie Lee Jackson, whose name was bound in grief to the crowd at Zion’s Chapel Methodist because he had walked with them from this same church in a night vigil that had been set upon by state troopers under Colonel Al Lingo. Even the segregationist Alabama Journal called the ensuing mayhem “a nightmare of State Police stupidity and brutality,” as officers first shot out streetlights, disabled news cameras for cover, and beat reporters into the hospital or distant retreat, which compelled a New York Times correspondent to report the ensuing rampage by ear: “Negroes could be heard screaming and loud whacks rang through the square.” An officer put two bullets into the stomach of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a twenty-six-year-old pulpwood worker whose application to register for the vote had been rejected five times.