At Canaan's Edge

by Taylor Branch

  A series of urgent surprises eclipsed King’s announcement inside the White House, conveyed first by four memos about Tuskegee that reached the Oval Office with crisis notations timed to the minute. “The white city officials are frightened,” advised one at 10:45 A.M. on Friday, “and some have mentioned that they would like Federal troops or Federal marshals.” President Luther Foster of Tuskegee Institute relayed reciprocal fear among Negroes that angry student demonstrations for the first time could endanger Booker T. Washington’s fabled Atlanta Compromise of 1895, by which Negroes ceded political control to whites in spite of a local numerical advantage of five to one. A sociology professor hoped to “get by Saturday without bloodshed.” John Doar promised to file a Justice Department lawsuit before sundown to address the valid complaints by Foster that segregated Tuskegee restaurants had “turned themselves into sham private clubs in order to avoid Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” President Johnson returned three of the memos with handwritten instructions for aides to call Sammy Younge’s father and President Foster on his behalf, and to “support any action we need to take here.” Only a minute after he scrawled “4:55 P.M.” on his third reply, another inbound memo shifted alarm to the “distressing” new uproar over a “policy statement of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee” about the Younge murder, in which, wrote White House aide Clifford Alexander, “SNCC urged all Americans to seek work in the civil rights movement as a ‘valid alternative to the draft.’” Alexander assured President Johnson that White House officials already were mobilizing Negro leaders to “negate the impact of this story” with countervailing expressions of “wholehearted support” for U.S. war policy in Vietnam. “The most difficult part of the equation is what Martin Luther King will do next,” he added.

  Three words transformed the furor again before it reached King. Asked if he supported his organization’s public statement, longtime SNCC communications director Julian Bond told a reporter, “Yes, I do,” which ignited a bonfire around him as one of the first eight Negroes elected to the Georgia House since Reconstruction. Both the Younge murder and war issue receded beneath the sudden glare of headlines suggesting treason. “REP. BOND’S LOYALTY FACES CHALLENGES,” screamed a Southern newspaper. “Georgians Score a Vietnam Critic/ Negro Elected to Georgia Legislature Faces Expulsion Move,” echoed the New York Times. In Los Angeles, where he had flown from Chicago, King deflected the first inquiries—“We are in a dangerous period when we seek to silence dissent”—but later on Saturday was obliged to clear a further statement by telephone for distribution at a full-fledged Atlanta press conference, protesting that segregationists still misread democracy: “It is ironic that some of the prominent persons who now question Mr. Bond’s willingness to uphold the Constitution of the U.S. have failed miserably in this regard.”

  Julian Bond himself withdrew into disbelieving seclusion through the whirling drama over his fate. The lieutenant governor of Georgia announced that Bond’s war stance “exactly suits the Kremlin.” A veteran legislator delivered what passed for friendly appraisal of his slim chance to be seated when the House convened Monday: “This boy has got to come before us humbly, recant, and just plain beg a little.” From the Sammy Younge funeral, James Forman barged into all-night Atlanta conclaves to denounce as Uncle Toms all those negotiating a compromise by which Bond might “clarify” his statement more favorably to the war. Intimidating, in his trademark SNCC coveralls and wild spiky hair, Forman angrily dismissed explanations by overwrought elders that practical Georgia politics was different from civil rights, shouting, “I’ve been hearing that shit from white folks all my life!” Bond scarcely spoke even in private—while sharing the spotlight of weekend news with the formal debut in California of gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan*—except that he did beseech the counsel of Ralph Abernathy at a chance encounter near Paschal’s restaurant. “Well,” Abernathy replied with a pastoral sigh, “just do something you can live with.”

  On Monday morning, January 10, Bond’s face and arms were blotched with bumps when a clerk in the packed House prefaced the swearing-in ceremony with a solemn announcement: “I will ask Representative Bond to step aside.” To movement colleagues, chronic hives had been a sign of delicate nerves in Bond since his skin broke out on the picket line and on his one trip to jail in 1960. He had confined himself afterward to full-time publicist’s duty behind self-deprecating admissions of acute fear traceable to boyhood relocation in the fearsomely strange white South. “Mother’d ask me to go down to Rich’s to get some clothes, and I’d say, ‘No, no, I got enough clothes now, don’t need any more,’” Bond drolly told friends. “I thought that down here people stopped you on the street and lynched you just for fun.” His father, Atlanta University dean Dr. Horace Mann Bond—formerly the first black president of Lincoln University, the oldest institution of higher learning for black males in the Western world—was nearly as mortified that his son had dropped out of college to join SNCC. “My God, I didn’t raise my boy to be a Georgia legislator,” he moaned in a fretful lapse of reserve during Monday’s hasty political trial on whether to seat his son. “I’d hoped he would go into a more academic occupation.”

  To seal the charges thrown together over a compressed weekend, legislators played a telephone interview surreptitiously recorded and submitted by a reporter:

  Reporter: Would you say that again, please?

  Bond: I said, “Yes, I do.”

  Reporter: …In other words, you are willing to stand by this as long as it doesn’t cost you anything, but if it’s going to cost you—you are going to be held in treason—then you can’t stand by it?

  Bond: Well, I have to think about it again…. I’m not taking a stand against stopping World Communism, and I’m not taking a stand in favor of the Viet Cong. What I’m saying is that, first, that I don’t believe in that war. That particular war. I’m against all war. I’m against that war in particular, and I don’t think people ought to participate in it. Because I’m against war, I’m against the draft. I think that other countries in the world get along without a draft—England is one—and I don’t see why we couldn’t, too.

  Bond’s unsuspecting mild voice echoed Monday night in a cavernous House chamber beneath the gold-plated capitol dome, where he reaffirmed his words under oath despite insistent demands to renounce them. Charles Morgan, one of his lawyers, argued that democratic principles should inform an extraordinary moment to “demonstrate to yourselves, demonstrate to the world abroad that there is freedom here in Georgia…that we can really exercise those rights here,” but a retired legislator thundered back in righteous disbelief: “Is a man qualified to sit in this House who has to think about whether he would commit treason under a given circumstance?” The House voted exclusion by a tidal-wave count that rolled toward front pages nationwide, 187–12. Bond fought back tears, and photographers aimed flashbulbs at his empty seat. James Forman issued a SNCC bulletin after midnight: “Everyone, including Julian, is in a state of shock.”

  KING CUT short his Los Angeles trip and flew home to an all-too-familiar overload of trauma. President Johnson sent a telegram of condolence to the family of Vernon Dahmer, whose house in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, was firebombed late Sunday night after Dahmer nnounced on radio that the sheriff agreed to let him collect voter registration forms and supply poll tax loans for fellow Negroes unable to pay. When Dahmer died of seared lungs on the Monday that Bond faced the Georgia House—having held off the gunfire of Klansmen long enough for his wife and daughter to escape the flames—Attorney General Katzenbach released an unusually personal statement from Washington that many Justice Department attorneys had admired Dahmer for exercising “the highest kind of citizenship.” Four Dahmer sons converged from active military duty to mourn in uniform over the burned-out hole of their home. Though he had been unknown at large, and was to be obscured on the list of martyrs, Dahmer was revered among civil rights workers as the stalwart host and surrogate father to endangered pione
ers since Bob Moses. Especially for veterans of projects in Mississippi, his murder pounded hard upon the Younge and Bond cases to open a public crack in movement philosophy. “I have simply stopped telling people that they should remain nonviolent,” Stokely Carmichael told Gene Roberts of the New York Times. “This would be tantamount to suicide in Black Belt counties where whites are shooting at Negroes, and it would cost me the respect of the people.”

  King spoke to the press after a private conference with Julian Bond. “I have a personal concern about the lack of representation in the 136th District because I live there,” he said, announcing that he would join Bond as co-plaintiff in a federal lawsuit to overturn the exclusion. (The New York Times already reported skepticism among legal experts: “Little Chance Seen for Bond in Court.”) On January 14—Bond’s twenty-sixth birthday, the day before his own thirty-seventh—King led a protest march through downtown Atlanta to the Georgia capitol. Bond stayed home on the instruction of counsel, but his father walked from Ebenezer among the crowd of 1,500 who heard King speak from the back of a flatbed truck in blustery cold rain. He denounced legislators for blatant hypocrisy in their claim to uphold the Constitution. To support Bond’s pacifism, beyond his right to speak, King cited a letter unearthed by historian Arthur Schlesinger among the personal papers of a bitterly war-weary young sailor and future President John F. Kennedy: “War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.”

  King declared a collective purpose “to make it clear that we love America…so much that we are going to stand up with all of our might to remind her when she is wrong. We are not newcomers here. We do not have to give our credentials of loyalty. For you see, we worked here and labored for two centuries without wages.” He gained preaching rhythm on his themes of black heritage—“Before the pilgrim fathers landed at Plymouth, we were here…”—accelerated through perorations to go forward “with this faith…” and “let freedom ring…” until Isaiah’s mountains were laid low and “the wrinkled stomachs of Mississippi will be filled” and “Julian Bond will be back in that state legislature.” King closed with the mass chant of a political rally—“We want Julian Bond! We want Julian Bond!”—and left a remnant of marchers to circle the capitol with songs recalling Joshua’s trumpet campaign around ancient Jericho.

  On the third circuit, Willie Ricks of SNCC exhorted fifty followers to break open a pathway through the guarded capitol doorways, leading a skirmish that drew gleeful publicity about a woman who struck a trooper with her handbag and unruly Negroes eager to fight everywhere but Vietnam. King issued a pained statement against the breach of nonviolence, but did not swerve from public endorsement of SNCC. “I want it heard loud and clear that I believe in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,” he said, “and I cannot join the chorus of those who are so ready to condemn.” The chorus jeered broadly without him. The Wall Street Journal branded Bond’s position “puerile and repugnant.” Time magazine pronounced the Vietnam statement “typically intemperate.” More sympathetic outlets condemned both Bond and the Georgia House for falling into SNCC’s “trap.” Prominent Atlanta Negroes called for SNCC members to be jailed or drafted to front lines in Vietnam. Even the author Lillian Smith scolded her SNCC friends famously in print for succumbing to “a mixed up mess of 19th century anarchism and 1930s communism…. I’ve warned them; but they don’t listen.”* Roy Wilkins rebuked SNCC on behalf of the NAACP, and Jack Greenberg of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund blocked participation in Bond’s lawsuit behind a defensive claim that Georgia “would have refused to seat a white person for the same reason.”

  King knew better—that race powerfully affected standing to criticize war—from the accepted frankness of Senator Richard Russell and others. (Tom Watson, the Populist-turned-Klan-revivalist, had resisted a formally declared World War I as the curse of “our Blood-gorged Capitalists,” and yet stood venerated in heroic bronze on Georgia’s capitol grounds.) King wrestled with Vietnam’s immense gravitational pull on national politics in fitful departures from Sunday’s prepared sermon. “Whether people like it or not, some voices must cry out,” he told Ebenezer, sketching history at a trot—“Vietnam declared itself independent…then came the Geneva Accord…”—apologizing for the capsule detours as he warned against following France into “a war that is at bottom perpetuating white colonialism,” suddenly decrying violence with Isaiah once more: “Get out of my face—don’t pray your long prayers to me—don’t come to me with your eloquent speeches—don’t talk to me about your patriotism—your hands are full of blood.” King begged for citizen education, wisdom, and courage. “Be assured that we will not stop communism with bombs and guns and bullets and napalm,” he declared. “We will stop communism by letting the world know that democracy is a better government than any other government, and by making justice a reality for all of God’s children.” Then he snapped back to his text with a quiet apology. “I didn’t mean to get off on this,” King said, “but every now and then people must hear the truth.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Refugees

  January 1966

  PRESIDENT Johnson prepared for his State of the Union address that week. “I feel a good deal of the ice cracking under me,” he confided to General Maxwell Taylor, “and slipping on the domestic scene.” Johnson had extended a one-day Christmas bombing pause over North Vietnam to advertise frenzied overtures for settlement talks with “more than a hundred governments,” and he continued the pause past January 9 with a simultaneous U.S. infantry assault launched in strict secrecy from the South Vietnamese government, for the first time, to forestall betrayal by allies only nominally in charge of their cause. With millions of Americans stirring to peace prospects even as others still awakened to serious war in a small country, Johnson elbowed frantically for room on all sides. He told General Taylor that Vietnam costs figured to drive up the next military budget by 40 percent, but he included only a fraction of the realistic $20 billion increase in the January message. “I want a minimum in that defense budget to get by,” he instructed McGeorge Bundy. “You’re absolutely right,” McNamara separately agreed. “You’d just absolutely destroy your Great Society program.” Johnson planned to return to Congress for supplemental Vietnam funds only after securing domestic appropriations, and he used the specter of war in turn to stall his fledgling War on Poverty below its second-year peak of $1.7 billion.

  Early in January, the President had locked away his top aides to write what became known as the “guns and butter” speech. Charged with an alchemist’s task—to amass both without promising new money or favoring one over the other—they cast a wide net for ideas among Johnson’s most trusted friends beyond the administration. From the Supreme Court, Abe Fortas boldly proposed to cede the entire Vietnam conflict to the United Nations with a pledge to withdraw American forces in less than three years. By contrast, novelist John Steinbeck recommended massive, erratic bomb strikes based on his experience in the World War II London blitz: “People can get used to anything except what they don’t expect.” Steinbeck’s literary empathy with the Dust Bowl poor still made him a security risk in FBI files, but he forwarded a bellicose mix of strategic advice and amateur designs for unconventional weapons: crop bombs of bright methyl dye, on the theory that Vietnamese would not eat blue rice, plus a “napalm grenade” and spray shotguns for close jungle warfare. “I never knew anyone to hit anything with a .45,” he wrote the White House on January 7, “unless he shoves it in his opponent’s mouth.”

  Johnson rejected the final draft at four o’clock on the morning of January 12. Speechwriter Richard Goodwin, recalled again for ad hoc emergency duty, slumped over his typewriter and did not revive until a White House doctor gave him an injection to start over at dawn. Still banished from Johnson’s actual presence for suspect loyalty since quitting the staff, Goodwin fell to the margins in a day-long Oval Office flurry of reshuffled sections and shouted orders
to ad hoc phrasemakers, including Justice Fortas and Clark Clifford. The State of the Union, as set forth that night before a joint session of Congress, blended raw passions for justice, war, and peace. Johnson pressed the breakthrough in civil rights with proposals that made separate front-page headlines: for new laws to “prohibit racial discrimination in the sale or rental of housing,” to integrate juries, and to make it a federal crime to murder or cause malicious injury to civil rights workers. In like spirit, he asked Congress to “prosecute with vigor and determination our war on poverty,” to rebuild crumbling cities “on a scale never before attempted,” and to begin a historic cleansing of the environment. “Of all the reckless devastation of our natural heritage,” said the President, “none is really more shameful than the continued poisoning of our rivers and our air.”

  He promised to pursue these goals and also stand fast for freedom abroad: “I believe we can continue the Great Society while we fight in Vietnam.” Five separate times he raised the “brutal and bitter conflict” where “tonight the cup of peril is full,” until Vietnam consumed half the hour-long speech. Johnson called a universal hunger for independence not only “the strongest force in today’s world” but freedom’s long-range ally to help dissolve Communism, and praised nationalism for “eroding the unity of what was once a Stalinist empire.” Military urgency overrode ambivalence on this core issue, however, along with financial realism. Johnson announced that Vietnam costs would increase by only an estimated $5.8 billion in fiscal 1967. Furthermore, he said vigilant pruning would reduce the year’s overall deficit on the federal budget of $113 billion to $1.8 billion—“one of the lowest in many years”—while wiping out the small international trade deficit. “Time may require further sacrifices,” he told the national audience. “And if it does, we will make them.” Above qualification and deceit, he smothered doubt with a bared yearning to make his figures come true. “Let us choose peace,” he said, “and with it the wondrous works of peace.”