At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  “There is no cause for pride in what has happened in Selma. There is no cause for self-satisfaction in the long denial of equal rights of millions of Americans.

  “But there is cause for hope and for faith in our democracy in what is happening here tonight.

  “For the cries of pain, and the hymns and protests of oppressed people, have summoned into convocation all the majesty of this great government of the greatest nation on earth.”

  Only a hush greeted the natural pause. The lyrical opening, which followed Goodwin’s first draft almost to the word, sucked away the whole range of normal response from a chamber that seemed stunned and on edge, as though mesmerized to witness the gangling, slow-tongued President leaping suddenly to a rhetorical high wire without a net. Johnson, having claimed for Selma a place among historic moments, and pronounced it a test of free government itself, fastened both the moment and the test to the core of the nation’s only story. “Rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself,” he said. “Rarely are we met with a challenge, not to our growth or abundance, or our welfare or our security, but rather to the values and purpose and the meaning of our beloved nation.

  “The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. And should we defeat every enemy, and should we double our wealth and conquer the stars and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation.

  “For with a country as with a person, ‘What is a man profited if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’”

  Into this pause fell a first lone clap, which spread through the House in tentative applause. Uncommonly, Johnson had pulled off the cadences of Lincoln and the intimacy of a quotation from St. Mark. For that alone he earned credit, and he proceeded to ground the spiritual lilt in the secular base of American ideology. “This was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded with a purpose,” he said. “The great phrases of that purpose still sound in every American heart, North and South: ‘All men are created equal,’ ‘government by consent of the governed,’ ‘give me liberty or give me death…’” Johnson defined his issue by the commitment to freedom, above any dodging confinement of section or race. “There is no Negro problem,” he said, “there is only an American problem, and we are met here tonight as Americans…to solve that problem.”

  The address marched steadily through history into the thicket of modern politics. Johnson decried the “harsh fact” that “men and women are kept from voting simply because they are Negroes.” He told plain stories to illustrate. “No law that we now have on the books—and I have helped to put three of them there*—can ensure the right to vote when local officials are determined to deny it,” he asserted, then outlined his new bill to “strike down restrictions to voting in all elections—federal, state, and local—which have been used to deny Negroes the right to vote.” To confront the issue of federalism, he offered defenders of states’ rights a simple way to nullify the brunt of enforcement: “Open your polling places to all of your people. Allow men and women to register and vote whatever the color of their skin. Extend the rights of citizenship to every citizen of this land.” But he pledged no more to defer the nation’s constitutional mandate where states historically condoned tyranny. “We have already waited a hundred years and more,” President Johnson declared, “and the time for waiting is gone.”

  The senior House Democrat, the seventy-seven-year-old Emanuel Celler of Brooklyn, rose to his feet and a standing ovation spread in waves with the conviction that Johnson was committing hard mechanics of government to his beguiling patriotic music. Above isolated cheers, the noise hung long enough that network cameras slowly panned to broadcast what the New York Times called “remarkable views of the reaction of Congress”: Celler clapping with hands high above his head, Senator Mike Mansfield visibly shaking with emotion, Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina “sitting with arms folded in massive disapproval.” For White House aide Jack Valenti, waiting desperately with a stopwatch, the panning cameras posed one of two threats of searing disgrace.

  When couriers arrived with TelePrompTer tape composed from the only copy of revisions after page twelve, Valenti beseeched cameramen by whisper to focus closely on the podium, then crept unpictured through the well of the House to feed the tape into the TelePrompTer before the President ran naked off his partial text.

  The vote was essential to the “far larger movement” of American Negroes to “secure for themselves the full blessings of American life,” Johnson resumed. “Their cause must be our cause, too,” he said slowly, placing his hands on the lectern. “Because it is not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And—we—shall—overcome.”

  No one stood. Applause battled disbelief and renewed astonishment to hear such words from the first Southern President in a century. When it registered that Johnson with unmistakable intent had adopted the signature phrase of Negro protest, a Southern representative on the floor quietly muttered, “Goddam,” and fell numb. To friends in the U.S. Senate, Richard Russell sadly pronounced his dear friend and protege “a turncoat if there ever was one.” Watching in Selma, Mayor Joseph Smitherman recoiled as from “a dagger in your heart.” Still puzzled later, he said, “You know, the South is very patriotic, but it just destroyed everything you’d been fighting for.” Blocks away from Smitherman on Lapsley Street, pandemonium erupted in the living room of Sullivan and Jean Jackson, where colleagues of Martin Luther King stared at Johnson’s image and shouted to each other, “Can you believe he said that?”

  King himself, from an armchair drawn close to the Jackson television, wordlessly occupied a charged space apart. The address for him already was more than an answered prayer. Not only did Johnson embrace the fused spiritual and patriotic grounding of the nonviolent movement, but he committed the national government to vindicate its long-suffering promise of equal citizenship. A tear rolled down King’s cheek.

  He watched the President lift up by adaptation more themes of his message for and from the movement. “The real hero of this struggle is the American Negro,” Johnson told his audience. “And who among us can say that we would have made the same progress were it not for his persistent bravery, and his faith in American democracy?” His address in the House chamber burst through resistance to applause as Johnson raised the stakes still higher. “The time of justice has now come,” he declared. “And when it does, I think that day will brighten the lives of every American. For Negroes are not the only victims.” He told the story he had urged on Goodwin only hours before, of his first job teaching Mexican-American children of Cotulla, Texas. “My students were poor, and they often came to class without breakfast, hungry,” said the President. “And they knew even in their youth that pain of prejudice. They never seemed to know why people disliked them. But they knew it was so…

  “Somehow you never forget what poverty and hatred can do when you see its scars on the hopeful face of a young child.

  “I never thought then in 1928 that I would be standing here in 1965…that I might have the chance to help the sons and daughters of those students, and to help people like them all over this country. But now I do have that chance, and I let you in on a secret: I—mean—to—use—it.”

  A second standing ovation answered the peek behind the veneer of Johnson as oil-state politician. Its personal revelation added consistency to the surprise force of the voting rights address, and tumultuous acclaim engulfed the President’s exit from the House floor. “Manny, I want you to start hearings tonight,” he shouted to Celler through a sea of outstretched arms. Beaming, electrified, he waved off the Judiciary chairman’s abashed reply that the voting rights bill—not yet introduced—was rushed for next week. “This week,” said Johnson. “And hold night sessions, too.”

  Noise collapsed to quiet adrenaline in the presidential limousine. No one spoke for blocks. “Jack, how did I do?” the President finally
asked. Goodwin and Moyers shrank from the enormity of the question, but Valenti was ready with stabilizing facts of the White House trade: thirty-six interruptions for applause consuming eight minutes, forty seconds; total delivery time, forty-five minutes, twenty seconds.

  CHAPTER 11

  Half-Inch Hailstones

  March 15–17, 1965

  APOCALYPSE briefly wore a smile of dizzy surprise. “There cannot be anyone alive,” wrote columnist Murray Kempton, “who knows the names of all the children who carried us and Mr. Johnson to the place where he stood last night.” The Atlanta Constitution surrendered to the “unanswerable detail” of Johnson’s argument for Negro voting rights, and many Southern newspapers frankly expressed awe for his unabashed idealism. “Rarely has the American conscience been so deeply stirred,” said the Houston Post. In the New York Times, James Reston hailed Johnson’s gift for oratorical ambush, saying he “waited out his critics…to channel all these emotions and struggles into legislation at the right moment.” Other public voices offered gasps instead of the usual guarded appeals to reason. Joseph Alsop saluted “the speech of a big man dealing with a big problem in a big, bold way.” William S. White opposed Johnson’s voting rights bill as a violation of state prerogatives “at the very heart of this Republic,” but he openly admired the sudden revelation of a President who “lifts this terrible pack uncomplainingly upon his back.”

  Past midnight, then all day Tuesday, President Johnson harvested the tribute of potentates turned gushy. Chicago mayor Richard Daley called to praise the address as “terrific, magnificent, and impressive,” adding that all his aldermen and precinct captains agreed. “They said one of the greatest they’ve seen,” the mayor reported. “Do more of them. That’s what people want to hear from you. God bless you and Mrs. Johnson.” The President kept interjecting, “Bless your heart, Dick,” as Daley bubbled on: “One of the greatest presentations on this subject since Lincoln. Talked about the government. Talked about the people. Obey the law, the Constitution. Know your duty. This is the only way to treat people…above all they had hope on that television…. May the Lord continue to give you good health. I’ll be talking to you.”

  IBM president Tom Watson wanted to discuss Selma instead of Johnson’s search for a new Secretary of the Treasury. “That was a terrific speech you made last night, sir,” he said. “I think that thrilled the whole nation.”

  “I don’t know,” Johnson replied. “Did the best I could.” Down-home modesty evaporated as the President recited the exact running count of White House response: 1,436 pro telegrams and 82 cons. He read the text of a stirring wire from Harry Truman, repeating the ex-President’s name with warm satisfaction, and rose to full dramatic ardor in reliving for Watson how he had coaxed Republicans to their feet through his peroration about teaching Mexican-American children. “I just put my head back and I’d look at them,” said Johnson, “and I’d look at the camera. They looked at all the damn cameras on them, and I wish you’d seen them get up.”

  He and Watson roared with laughter. “I saw them get up,” said Watson, “but I didn’t know how you pulled it off.”

  “Yeah, that, that’s what I was doing,” beamed Johnson.

  “I’ll be darned,” said Watson.

  “They all of them had glue in their britches, and they were just stuck, and they wouldn’t come at all,” Johnson boasted. “And when they saw that camera start circling around on ’em, that little red light—it was the funniest thing I ever saw.”

  “Well, that was a stroke of genius,” said Watson. “Well, they damn well ought to have gotten up, because it was magnificent.”

  Before the end of the day, Johnson applied the full energy of boyish celebrations to hard business. He summoned Vice President Humphrey and the entire Democratic leadership of the House—Speaker John McCormack, Majority Leader Carl Albert, Majority Whip Hale Boggs, and all eighteen assistant majority whips—for a strategy session on his determination to use the cresting tide of national support to secure four new cornerstones in American law: federal aid to education, Medicare, voting rights, and immigration reform. The fourth and least heralded bill would replace the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 among others back to the nation’s first immigration law in 1790, all heavily restricting immigrants by race or nationality to the favored “stock” of northern Europe. Johnson’s reform sought to limit newcomers by number but not by origin, which promised slowly to absorb all the world’s faces and cultures under the Constitution. Each of the bills established a landmark national commitment—to the young, the elderly, minorities, and even aspiring foreigners. Together they extended America’s distinctive horizontal bonds of popular strength, in keeping with the founding principle of equal citizenship.

  Johnson exhorted the House leaders to pass these four above all others. This year, he said, while the momentum of Selma augmented the political mandate of the 1964 election. He worked them over, then retired upstairs in the White House to dicker toward the same goal with Senate Republican leader Everett Dirksen.

  SEMINARIANS JUDITH Upham and Jonathan Daniels suffered an acute letdown when Selma woke up Tuesday unchanged. They debated whether speeches and tumultuous marches were more than vanishing noise, and agreed that demonstrations were “sort of stupid”—making a spectacle of themselves to communicate a simple point in a stubborn world. Outside Brown Chapel, where James Bevel told morning crowds he hoped to have court permission soon to march to Montgomery, eager new arrivals tried to circumvent the blockades. Negro seminarians from Atlanta confronted Sheriff Clark, and a group of three hundred sat for hours in witness on Sylvan Street. Upham and Daniels meant to go back to school, but missed another departing bus. Paralyzed—“blinded,” wrote Daniels—they could not bring themselves to wrap up Selma in one “slam-bam” visit, like tourists in ministry, and it registered within hours that they could leave only on a solemn pledge to return for keeps. “The imperative was too clear,” Daniels explained in a letter, “the stakes were too high, my own identity was called too nakedly into question…and the road to Damascus led, for me, back here.” Liberated by resolve, they headed for Boston just long enough to drop seminary for the term and pack Upham’s Volkswagen.

  They passed through confusion at the Montgomery airport, where SNCC recruiters intercepted pilgrims bound for Selma and diverted them to downtown Montgomery. From Jackson Baptist Church, James Forman led a crisis march of some six hundred students to answer Monday night’s violent siege near the Ben Moore Hotel, which had gone virtually unnoticed. They intended to deliver a voting rights petition to Governor Wallace, but police blockaded them at the corner of Decatur Street and Adams Avenue. Montgomery County sheriff Mac Sim Butler led a charge of fifteen mounted horsemen into the standoff, “wearing a cowboy hat”—wrote an observer confirmed by photographs—“and swinging a cane by the tip end.” Howls and screams sounded. One handful of demonstrators protectively circled Forman, many clutching a telephone pole until blows forced them to scatter backward. Helmeted possemen followed the horses on foot. A rabbi among the demonstrators spun from a yard with a lit cigar between his teeth, holding a sheaf of papers with one arm and the legs of a wounded Negro girl with the other; a SNCC worker in bib overalls and a dress shirt held her shoulders, shouting, “Can we get a doctor?” When one blow struck a skull in an eerie moment of quiet, “the sound of the nightstick carried up and down the block,” wrote correspondent Roy Reed for the New York Times. “Across Decatur Street, the larger crowd was almost hysterical…. When the smaller group was routed, the mounted officers waded into the larger one.”

  The demonstrators retreated to the street outside Jackson Baptist, where an exasperated Bevel, having rushed over from Selma, dragged Forman aside to find out why he invited such punishment. Couldn’t he tell from the President’s speech that the right-to-vote movement was on the brink of success? An equally exasperated Forman dismissed the address as empty politics. “That cracker was just talkin’ shit,” he said.

  �
��Naw, the man was preaching,” said Bevel.

  They muted their ongoing dispute for the benefit of a shaken crowd. From atop a wooden crate, Bevel preached nonviolence and suggested that they save themselves for a more decisive march. Forman followed with an argument that LBJ must guard the right to petition for voting rights until he could deliver them. They stepped down to wait for Martin Luther King to arrive for mediation. The crowd cheered both of them. There were students from Tuskegee, Alabama State, and local high schools, plus mostly white travelers still holding up “One Man-One Vote” placards with identifying signs from nineteen scattered schools, including Antioch, Spokane, Wilberforce, Harvard, Carnegie Tech, Duke, and Wayne State.

  THE IMPACT of Selma reverberated worldwide, with responses to new events feeding off others in the pipeline. In Budapest that Tuesday, embattled under Communist rule, the Hungarian Council of Churches celebrated the twentieth anniversary of liberation from Hitler by a letter of appreciation to King (“We are deeply astonished at the death of Rev. James J. Reeb…”). From one campus alone, which already had sent some people to Selma and fifty others to picket the White House, another 250 Wayne State University students joined Governor Romney of Michigan for a second Tuesday march of ten thousand around the federal building in downtown Detroit. Some of these gathered afterward for discussion at the home of the Episcopal chaplain, where a number resolved to leave immediately by caravan for Alabama. “Prior to today I felt that any personal contribution I might offer to those individuals in Selma was of little or no consequence….” wrote one of them. “Nevertheless, upon reading the content of our president’s speech today, I am no longer able to sit by while my people are suffering…. I examined carefully my own possible reaction if I were one of the Selma victims, not just a spectator.” By “my people,” Viola Liuzzo meant fellow citizens. She was the daughter of a Tennessee coal miner, now a married part-time student nearly forty, with five children, and by nature determined. When all the other student volunteers canceled or postponed their trip by morning, Liuzzo, over the fearful protest of her family, headed south in her Oldsmobile alone.