At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  Johnson gave Bess Truman the first pen he used to sign into law the amendment to Social Security known as Medicare. He gave a second to Truman and a third to Vice President Humphrey, who had crafted a number of the arcane provisions necessary to win passage. (A religious exemption excluded the Old Order Amish, who believed health insurance impugned trust in providence.) He gave a fourth pen to Representative Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, who had presided over the graveyard of health legislation until his Ways and Means Committee first broke the lobbying power of organized medicine that spring, during the march from Selma to Montgomery. Doctors would reconcile their duty to the new national commitment, Johnson foresaw, so that in Independence “and a thousand other towns like it, there are men and women in pain who will now find ease.” Beaming, grasping hands in jubilation, he said he hoped for no sweeter struggle in public life, “nor any act of leadership that gives greater satisfaction than this.”

  CONTINUING VIOLENCE attracted press attention to Americus, Georgia, on Sunday, August 1. Bottles thrown from a car had hospitalized two Negro boys aged three and six, and rumors circulated that Martin Luther King would detour from the North. National newspapers published a front-page photograph of church elders lined across the top step of First Methodist before morning worship, their arms crossed to block an integrated, kneeling group of six led by SCLC worker Willie Bolden, and fire chief H. K. Henderson barred a dozen outside First Baptist of Americus, saying, “You are wasting your time and mine.” No reporters gathered in Selma, Alabama, but an unobserved silence gripped St. Paul’s Episcopal from the moment Jonathan Daniels arrived with Gloria Larry. One of the volunteer ushers trained for integration incidents went home seething instead, along with several families who left during the hushed prelude. Larry and Daniels took seats near the middle of the stone sanctuary. When they stood with the fourth row beckoned for first-Sunday Communion, all around them stayed seated or sat back down again in staggered unanimity, and they went forward to the altar alone.

  Rev. Frank Mathews hastened from the service to compose a report for his bishops, headed “12:30 PM.” “This is the first time a Negro has attended 11:00 HC [Holy Communion],” he wrote, “so it was definitely a ‘crisis situation.’” He would postpone the monthly session of the governing vestry for two weeks to let time “quieten the souls of distraught men,” Mathews confided. He added that the church budget was “beginning to feel the pinch of withheld payment of pledges.” Separately, a member of St. Paul’s rushed to the diocese his own description of the service. Having arrived late, he had noticed heaviness in the air before he saw “this white man in his near Clerical clothes escorting a negro woman, standing aside for her to be seated, then sitting down by her and they both knelt to pray,” wrote Garnett Cassell. “It was then that I knew what was upsetting the congregation enough for me to feel it.” Cassell said Daniels could keep importing Negroes indefinitely. “All of his many months of activity here in Selma, Ala. has been paid for at the Spiritual Expense to the Congregation of St. Paul’s,” he wrote. “Therefore, the time has come when he must be stopped.” From Birmingham, diocesan officials soon prepared replies upholding both the canonical right to integrated worship and the hope that forbearance would wear out the “very distasteful” practice. “If he [Daniels] is hanging around causing trouble,” Bishop C. C. J. Carpenter wrote Mathews, “I think I will just have to write his bishop and tell him to take him on back to Seminary.”

  Larry and Daniels continued work in Lowndes County on Monday, a regular registration day at the old Hayneville jail. Daniels broke away to accompany a group of parents on the short walk up to the courthouse square, seeking to learn why the school board rejected forty-one of forty-six freedom-of-choice applications for transfer to Hayneville High School. Superintendent Hulda Coleman blocked Daniels at her office door, and received the parents one at a time.

  Bernice Johnson went inside alone. Her husband, a part-time preacher, recently consented to open Friendship Baptist for movement activity in Hayneville, but fearful church members had foiled the first meeting by removing the pews. Mrs. Johnson herself filed the applications for their three oldest children, from Malachi down to Samuel, and when Superintendent Coleman said they had tested too poorly for academic work in white schools, she fell back on the reasoning discussed with Hulett, Lillian McGill, and the other parents. “The Lowndes County schools ain’t no good,” she told Coleman. “That’s no secret, they ain’t no kind of nothing.” The schools turned Negro children out to work in the fields and “passed ’em up” the grades no matter what, Johnson said, which was why the parents wanted the transfer. She tried to hold steady as the superintendent checked names and test scores.

  Those outside felt tensions compressed at the color line. Lowndes County people were saying Coleman had closed the Negro schools a week early out of furious embarrassment over the photograph of Rolen School in The Saturday Evening Post, illustrating King’s passage through Trickem on the Selma march. Now, less than a month before the new fall term, the federal Office of Education still counted Lowndes’s among nearly two thousand desegregation plans not yet approved, while local white constituents pushed hard against even minimum concessions. A small group of hostile white people converged upon the waiting parents and demanded to know what a conspicuous outsider was doing in Hayneville.

  “I’m with my friends,” said Daniels.

  CHAPTER 20

  Fort Deposit

  August 3–14, 1965

  THE government of the United States matched King’s pace for the last days of his Northern tour. On Tuesday, August 3, while he pushed from street rallies to a speech at the Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, plus a “unity” photograph with local NAACP president Cecil Moore, then joined five thousand pickets outside segregated Girard College, the House of Representatives passed the voting rights conference report, 328–74. A bomb threat the next day altered King’s departing flight for eight speech appearances in Washington, during which the U.S. Senate passed the identical bill, 72–18, to sweep aside the last parliamentary obstacles along with the dominant political reality since the end of Reconstruction. On the White House lawn, President Johnson was greeting ten thousand college interns as “fellow revolutionaries” in the American tradition, exhorting them to surmount “the tyranny of poverty” and the “oppression of bigotry.” On Thursday, Katzenbach and John Doar informed Johnson that the Justice Department stood ready to file suit against the Mississippi poll tax by one o’clock Saturday, to deploy federal registrars to at least ten counties on Monday, and to file additional suits on Tuesday against the poll tax laws in Virginia, Alabama, and the President’s home state of Texas. Johnson disclosed this breakthrough agenda when King arrived for a small presidential meeting scheduled to discuss conditions in Northern states and the upcoming national conference on race. Thursday night, King returned with several thousand people for an unusual vigil outside the White House gates, rallying for Johnson’s “home rule” bill to let District of Columbia residents elect their own representatives.

  At La Guardia Airport in New York, David Dellinger was delighted to see Bayard Rustin dash aboard his flight early Friday, brimming with news of an invitation to the President’s sudden enactment ceremony for the Voting Rights Act. “Wonderful,” said Dellinger. “Be sure to get one of the pens he uses to sign it.” Dellinger proposed to call Rustin forward at the Vietnam demonstration to sign the Declaration of Conscience with the same pen. The idea sorely tempted Rustin with just the sort of dramatic flair he had pioneered over decades of nonviolent witness. Like Dellinger, he had gone to prison rather than fight even in the “good war” against Hitler. Often since, he had warned of nuclear danger by risking jail on this August 6 anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb, and with Dellinger he had just drafted the Vietnam peace declaration for their common mentor, A. J. Muste, America’s foremost pacifist. Still, Rustin could not bring himself to celebrate the historic partnership with President Johnson and protest his new war on the same day
. He and Dellinger separated uncomfortably in Washington.

  The President and his Cabinet reached the Capitol by motorcade at noon. Two sculptures of Abraham Lincoln flanked a special podium in front of John Trumbull’s imposing Surrender of Cornwallis, which hung on the Rotunda wall. “Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory won on any battlefield,” said Johnson. Reviewing the five tumultuous months since the “outrage of Selma” on Edmund Pettus Bridge, he praised the vote as “the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice,” and urged every Negro to make use of it. “You must learn,” he said, “so your choices advance your interests and the interests of our beloved nation.” To opponents of the new law, those reluctant to “bend long years of habit,” he advised “simply this: it must come…and when it has you will find a burden has been lifted from your shoulders, too.” He beckoned all sides to treat “the wounds and the weakness—the outward walls and the inward scars—that diminish achievement.”

  Led by escorts down a corridor toward the Senate, more than a hundred people jammed into a space twenty feet square, known as the President’s Room because Presidents before Franklin Roosevelt had journeyed there to sign bills into law. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act there on a small walnut table he had used as Majority Leader. He handed signing pens first to Vice President Humphrey and Senator Dirksen, then to more legislators, to leaders of civil rights groups, and, as solemn ritual broke into celebration, to invited guests that included Rosa Parks, Rustin, and Vivian Malone, the first black graduate of the University of Alabama. A souvenir pen reached Detective Sergeant Everett Cooper of the protective unit assigned to King.

  The President escaped clamor by ducking into the Senate chamber, where the startled presiding officer, Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, pretended he was still a member. “The chair recognizes the Senator from Texas, the Majority Leader,” said Morse in a refrain echoed from the 1950s. Johnson sat briefly at his old desk—front row center, carved of mahogany in 1819 to replace the original burned by British troops—and apologized to its rightful owner for the awkward intrusion. “I’m sorry, I forgot,” he told Mike Mansfield, as though he had wandered back in time. Then he recovered his unique, manic perspective to spend the afternoon lashing allies forward by telephone from the White House. “We just got to, you got to make it,” he told Katzenbach, to stiffen his assurance that immigration reform would pass. With House Majority Leader Carl Albert, Johnson lurched from sentimental congratulation to a sudden announcement that no conference report counted as a significant week’s work. “You didn’t do a damn thing,” he charged. Over Albert’s stammering defense—“We’re going to pass one of the big ones next week”—Johnson peppered him with tactical comments: “You ought to have told me, you didn’t call me…. I’ll call every human being that you want…. I can’t get him to pee a drop ’til y’all pee…” Desperate to beat a closing window in history, he invoked the late Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas. “You and John McCormack have got to be Mister Rayburns,” needled Johnson. “Now I’ve been letting you all off…. I’ll tell you what you’ve got to do…”

  Dellinger was among roughly six hundred pickets walking the Pennsylvania Avenue sidewalk in front of the White House. From the vigilant guard of two hundred police and fifteen Secret Service agents, solicitous officers brought out water and a chair to give the eighty-year-old Muste respite from the heat. His fellow marchers carried signs such as “WITHDRAW U.S. TROOPS FROM VIETNAM NOW!” and “JESUS CHRIST DID NOT CARRY A DRAFT CARD.” A remnant of twenty-five pickets would lay unmolested all night on the sidewalk, then rejoin the larger group for weekend events called the Assembly of Unrepresented People, featuring workshops by and about Puerto Ricans, migrant laborers, Washingtonians, children, Pacific Islanders, ordinary voters, American Indians, and the poor, among others.

  Bob Moses of SNCC, still calling himself Parris, brought to the four-day assembly a delegation of thirty black Mississippians. To memorialize John Shaw, killed weeks earlier in Vietnam—nearly four years after he had followed Moses as a teenager into the first bloody demonstrations for the vote in McComb—several of them had written a “McComb statement” for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party newsletter listing five reasons why “Negro boys should not honor the draft here in Mississippi,” and hostile reactions were crackling. NAACP field secretary Charles Evers and the Mississippi movement’s own lawyer denounced them. John Lewis, though he had signed Muste’s antiwar declaration months before, met with President Johnson before attending the Capitol ceremony that day and issued a pained statement dissociating himself from the assembly. MFDP chairman Lawrence Guyot defended the right to dissent but felt obliged to say he would accept military service. On Sunday, the white Mississippi editor most favorable to civil rights would call the McComb statement “close to treason” and flay Guyot for “collaborating in the Communist line.” On Monday, August 9—the twentieth anniversary of the second nuclear blast, at Nagasaki—uniformed American Nazis would throw buckets of paint on Moses, Dellinger, and Staughton Lynd as they led the concluding assembly march of eight hundred. A photograph in the next issue of Life would present the trio as pariahs branded vividly in red, among three hundred assorted pacifists arrested near the Capitol steps. Dellinger, refusing bond, would serve his full thirty days and hear vaguely in his cell of national upheaval later in August.

  Already on Friday afternoon, the assembly’s first picket line drew transfixed stares. “Sometimes I wish I had their degree of involvement,” one bystander mused, but most reacted viscerally. Xenophobes jeered. Some Negroes and civil rights veterans bristled at the mostly white peace marchers for spurning the hard-won day of jubilee for the Voting Rights Act. Jack Newfield of New York’s Village Voice disparaged an “incestuous” gathering of “hyper-militants and the authoritarians.” Moses, a legend of the black movement in the midst of the peace assembly, floated as usual above crossfires of sentiment. In remarks to a rally of the pickets in Lafayette Park, he analyzed why Americans reacted more intensely to the obscure McComb statement than to the equivalent call for Vietnam war resistance in Muste’s Declaration of Conscience, which was signed by five thousand petitioners and handed publicly through the White House gate. He traced much of the disparity to race. Untamed tribal instincts, flushed to the surface, still demanded that minorities submit to prescribed battle lines or be designated enemies themselves. “Negroes better than anyone else are in a position to question the war,” Moses said softly through a bullhorn. “Not because they understand the war better, but because they better understand the United States.”

  CONFLICTED TRIUMPH scattered to worlds apart on Sunday, August 8. King preached at New York’s Riverside Church and addressed a convention of morticians. John Lewis was arrested with SCOPE volunteers at one of two renewed kneel-ins outside the biggest churches in Americus, Georgia, while from deep inside Lowndes County, Stokely Carmichael composed a warning against the illusion of change. “I have my own personal fears about how the Federal Government can swallow us up,” he wrote. “Signs of this are appearing in Alabama daily. My own feeling is that SNCC is about to be isolated. If indeed we feel that we should have nothing to do with the ‘Establishment,’ then it is imperative that we form coalitions of people without power.”

  Carmichael sent out his proposal for an autumn assembly of unrepresented people from across the South, and presided that night at the first mass meeting yet dared in Fort Deposit. A convoy of thirty cars drove bumper to bumper for nearly twenty miles along remote country roads, southward from Highway 80 into what SNCC records called “the toughest area in Lowndes County.” SNCC workers Bob Mants and Jimmy Rogers had been “run out by the Klan” there, Carmichael indicated in reports, but they kept returning until they gathered “forty local kids under a tree.” One of them, John McMeans, had prevailed upon his sister-in-law to give Rogers lodging, and Bessie McMeans finally prevailed upon her divided church elders to open a door to the movement itself. Most of the local
people arrived on foot to greet the convoy of relative veterans from White Hall, forming together a spirited crowd of some four hundred inside Bethlehem Christian Church, singing hymns, hearing John Hulett and others give testimony as registered voters. Rabbi Saperstein was presented and received as a welcome amazement, but Carmichael seemed too busy to appreciate the freedom message he tried to deliver in the call-and-response of black Christians. There were whispered huddles at the doors, then a supervised evacuation. Just outside, FBI agents held back five carloads of menacing whites until the convoy departed. Carmichael told the Sapersteins to lay across laps to keep their white faces below the window of his back seat, and the cars streamed across the railroad tracks safely out of Fort Deposit.

  Early on Tuesday, August 10, crowds of both races were milling tensely around the Lowndes County courthouse when official sedans glided conspicuously into Hayneville, bearing the attorney general of Alabama from Montgomery to investigate radio reports about enforcement of the new national law. Known as a golden orator from Dothan, Richmond Flowers had been elected in 1962 with his friend and schoolmate George Wallace, whom he hoped to succeed as governor, but Flowers had forfeited his history as the more diehard segregationist by announcing that he would tolerate no violence. Since then, rumors encouraged by the Wallace camp marked him as “soft” on race. Meeting only puzzled shrugs on the courthouse lawn, Flowers walked with his aides across the street to the post office.