Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Abernathy was on the phone to Nashville that night, finally telling King that it was certain. The grand jury had returned the largest wholesale indictment in the history of the county. Deputy sheriffs, prosecutors, and white reporters had been busy around the courthouse all day, and now were saying that the dragnet operation would begin the next day. King promised Abernathy he would return to Montgomery first thing in the morning. He made airline reservations to fly back through Atlanta, where he had left his wife and daughter for the week, then skipped the rest of the schedule in Nashville. As his early morning flight touched down in Atlanta, he knew that he must weather a family ordeal before he could step off into the unknown abyss of prison in Montgomery. His mother had been confined to bed for most of the three weeks since the bombing. As for Daddy King, who had never thought his son should go to Dexter in the first place, King was aware that this final crisis could not have come on a worse day. By a telling coincidence, Daddy King was to sign the legal instruments securing a loan of $150,000 for the Ebenezer building program. Few preachers anywhere had the standing to borrow such a sum in 1956. The dollar amount of this ambition had been for some time the centerpiece of Daddy King’s self-description in church programs, and it would remain so until he did something even bigger. King, approaching his parents on the concourse of the Atlanta air terminal, knew by their downcast expressions and slow, trudging walks that he had already ruined what would otherwise be a proud day in their lives.

  Daddy King opened his attack during the drive home to Boulevard. M.L. should not go back to Montgomery at all, he said. Their phone had been ringing all morning with calls. The morning Advertiser said that an incredible 115 Negroes had been indicted and that deputies were beginning a massive roundup, and the news was being broadcast over the radio, even in Atlanta. The elder King said that he had already talked with his friend Herbert Jenkins, the Atlanta police chief, and learned that Montgomery detectives had come to Atlanta in the hope of finding an old charge on which King could be arrested. Jenkins said the Montgomery authorities wanted to get King out of Alabama. That was how serious it was, said Daddy King. Until things cooled down, at least, M.L. should stay in Atlanta, where he had the support of powerful Negroes and even of some powerful whites, like Chief Jenkins and Mayor Hartsfield.

  As usual, King let his father’s monologue run its course. Daddy King said he was sure he was right, but just in case his son had any doubts, he had invited Dr. Mays and some of the other men M.L. most respected to come by the house that afternoon. These men of stature and proven judgment all cared personally for M.L., having known him since he was a small boy. M.L. could hear for himself what they had to say. When the question was put, King agreed to stay for the summit meeting, although the delay meant that he missed his connecting flight to Montgomery.

  At the appointed hour, Dr. Mays was there in the King home, along with President Rufus Clement of Atlanta University, the local bishop of the A.M.E. church, the editor of the Atlanta Daily World, and a half-dozen of the most influential money men on Auburn Avenue. Daddy King repeated his speech for their benefit. If anything, it was more emotional than the one he had made in the car. At its conclusion, those present murmured their assent. This came as no surprise to King, who realized that, given his father’s shrewd willfulness, anyone who disagreed would not have been invited. One by one, the assembled leaders began their own speeches in support of Daddy King, until King finally interrupted in pain. “I must go back to Montgomery,” he said. His friends were being arrested and hauled off to jail at that very moment. How could he hide here in Atlanta?

  The silence that hung in the room was broken only when Daddy King burst into tears, in front of the same men with whom he was to swap six-figure securities that day. His sobs made the stillness all the more excruciating. King looked pleadingly at Dr. Mays, who soon spoke up to say that perhaps young King had a point, that perhaps those in the room would do well to turn their influence toward defending him in Alabama. His words broke the tension in many respects, not least by giving people something to do. One of the lawyers ran off to place a call to no less a personage than Thurgood Marshall. He returned shortly with the good news that Marshall promised to throw the entire weight of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund behind young King’s defense. This and other assurances helped Daddy King recover, and soon he was saying that he was going back to Montgomery himself. He was going to stick by his son. He would accompany him to the jailhouse. Daddy King was himself again, but at the same time he was stalling—at least by the urgent timetable that was beckoning his son. Daddy King was going, but he had the loan business to take care of. And he did not want to fly. He wanted to go by car, but he did not want King or himself or either of the wives to drive. It was too dangerous. He would find a driver for them. They would leave in the morning.

  All this delay in Atlanta caused King to miss a different kind of drama in Montgomery. E. D. Nixon, the first to be arrested under the boycott indictment, did not wait for the deputies to come for him. On Bayard Rustin’s suggestion, he walked inside the county courthouse to the sheriff’s office and said, “Are you looking for me? Well, here I am.” The deputies looked quizzically at each other and then welcomed Nixon to jail. Within a short time, he was booked, fingerprinted, photographed, and released on bond. No sooner had a smiling Nixon walked past a few Negroes milling around the courthouse than word of his feat began to spread through Negro Montgomery. Nixon had turned the dreaded process of being apprehended into something quite different—quicker and less painful than a trip to the dentist. Soon Nixon’s dignified old pastor walked into the courthouse, and the news flashed that he had actually traded jokes with the deputy who arrested him.

  Such behavior set off a chain reaction. Word of what was happening went everywhere, drawing more indictees and more spectators. Some of the arriving smiles were forced, but the ones on leaving jail were always genuine. As the crowd grew into the hundreds, applause and words of encouragement began to lift the mood. Those already out on bail advised the others on ways to post the $300 bond as quickly as possible. Those picked up by deputies, like Abernathy, passed through the crowd waving and hugging people. Soon the deputies out on the dragnet were coming up empty because so many of the Negroes were on their way downtown voluntarily. Laughter began to spread through the crowd. A joke went around that some inquiring Negroes were upset upon being told by phone that they were not on the arrest list. Some of the white deputies, infected by the good humor, began to enjoy themselves too. Sheriff Butler, exasperated by this perversion of the penal spirit, came outside to shout, “This is no vaudeville show!” But he had little effect. The jailhouse door, which for centuries had conjured up visions of fetid cells and unspeakable cruelties, was turning into a glorious passage, and the arriving criminals were being celebrated like stars at a Hollywood premiere.

  Rustin worked joyfully in the background. When it developed that a shortage of bondable property might pose a threat to the swift release of boycotters yet to be arrested, he persuaded a friend to wire him a loan of $5,000, which he turned over to Nixon. At the end of the day, Rustin took his second consecutive night walk, ignoring repeated warnings from boycotters who said the Montgomery authorities were itching to find an “outsider” upon whom to blame all their troubles. This time he went to the home of Jeanatta Reese, the embattled woman who had withdrawn from the MIA lawsuit. Two police cars still sat outside. Rustin marched up to the officers on sentry duty and asked breezily to see Mrs. Reese. The officers, doubtless having never seen or heard anyone like Rustin, eyed him warily. At first they questioned him on the suspicion that he might want to hurt Mrs. Reese, but the more he talked, the more they simply wanted to know who he was. Their questions posed a threat, as his true identity might expose the MIA to scandal. “I am Bayard Rustin,” he said, drawing himself up to full height. “I am here as a journalist working for Le Figaro and the Manchester Guardian.” The officers wrote that down, as Rustin explained to them something of the importance o
f the French and British papers. It took Rustin ten minutes of persistent conversation to talk his way to Mrs. Reese’s door for a conversation that turned out to be hardly worth the effort. “I had to do what I did or I wouldn’t be alive today,” she told him.

  The King family pulled up to the Montgomery parsonage at nine the next morning, to be greeted by television cameras and a contingent of boycotters still exuberant over the jailings of the previous day. Within a few minutes, King, Daddy King, and Abernathy were off to the courthouse, trailed by a small caravan of Dexter members. On the way, Abernathy briefed them about procedures at the county jail (as opposed to the city jail, where King had been booked a month earlier). He also described his own arrest as one of the best things that had ever happened to him. King, facing jail again, struggled to believe him, and an utterly mystified Daddy King did not believe him at all until he experienced for himself the holiday atmosphere around the courthouse. The crowd cheered all three of them. King was processed again—photographed this time, with jail number 7089 hanging under his chin—and released back into the embrace of his followers. He was the twenty-fourth minister to be booked.

  On the recommendation of Nixon and Abernathy, King invited Rustin to a meeting of the strategy committee afterward, at which it was decided to change the mass meeting into a prayer meeting from that night forward. The idea was to foster spiritual commitment for the long ordeal ahead. Each meeting’s agenda would be organized around five prayers, including one for the strength of spirit to be nonviolent, one for the strength of body to keep walking, and a “prayer for all those who oppose us.” Rustin was impressed by the intuitive Gandhian method at work in the plan. Privately, he told King that he had been all over the world and not seen a movement that could compare with what he had seen already in Montgomery. He wanted to help spread the word, particularly among believers in nonviolence. There were articles to be written, funds to be raised, specialized techniques to be taught. He realized the dangers involved with “outside agitators,” particularly Northerners, but he would work behind the scenes if King thought it wise. King, beholding Rustin for the first time, said they needed all the help they could get.

  Rustin drifted by Abernathy’s church, site of that night’s mass meeting. To his amazement, he found that the church started filling up at four o’clock, and he watched the crowd sing hymns and pray on their own for three hours. The meeting began when all ninety of those arrested thus far walked out onto the church podium. Instantly, the audience of mostly plainer folk rose to its feet, and parents brought their children forward to touch them as the ovation rolled on. King said that the spirit of the boycott was for “all people, black and white.” Abernathy declared that the solidarity of the movement during King’s absence proved that the boycott was “not a one-man show.” The leaders, feeling a superabundance of support, called for a day of thanks—no car pool, no taxis, no private cars. Everyone would walk tomorrow on “Double-P Day,” the day of prayer and pilgrimage.

  What distinguished this meeting from all previous ones was not so much its fervor or content but the presence of some thirty-five reporters from all over the country. For the first time, the Montgomery bus boycott had drawn a press contingent of accredited correspondents. Unfortunately for Rustin, none of these reporters knew him as the man from Le Figaro, but several of them did know of him as a resplendent figure in Greenwich Village. As they talked with the host reporters at the Advertiser, who were constantly in touch with the local police, further doubts sprang up about his identity. These became serious enough that there was talk of calls being placed to Paris and London to check up on him.

  Rustin knew the baleful signs. He called John Swomley, executive director for the FOR, in New York, with an urgent message for Muste and the others. Rustin described what he had seen in Montgomery, saying that the MIA people were at once gifted and unsophisticated in nonviolence. (As an exhibition of the latter, Rustin had in mind his first visit to the King home, when he shouted to stop someone from sitting on a loaded pistol that was lying on the couch.) These people must have somebody come in who was qualified to teach nonviolence. There were only four or five such people in the country, including Rustin, and he told Swomley sadly that he would not be staying long. He knew he had no claim on his old organization, but he implored Swomley to trust his judgment and send someone in on the next plane.

  Rustin attended Dexter services that Sunday and then spent the evening in the King home, going over the history of the boycott in some detail. Coretta remembered hearing Rustin give a speech at Antioch some years earlier. Neither she nor King expressed any objection to Rustin’s long history in left-wing politics, and King spoke knowledgeably of figures like Muste. He was trying to practice nonviolence, he told Rustin, but he did not subscribe to Muste-style pacifism because he believed no just society could exist without at least a police power. Rustin quibbled some, but nevertheless these were not the views he had expected of a Montgomery preacher.

  It was the worst of worlds for Rustin. His affection for the MIA people and his vision of the role he could play expanded even as his position deteriorated by the hour. Word came that the white people were saying Le Figaro had never heard of him and was offering a reward for the identification of the impostor. About that time, an influential Negro reporter from Birmingham got word that Rustin was in town. Knowing Rustin’s background, he burst into a leadership huddle to announce that the white people were sure to find out about him and would use the information to discredit everything the boycott had accomplished thus far. Now Rustin was in a cross fire. On Monday, word came that the whites might arrest him for fraud or for inciting to riot, and the Negro reporter clinched things by threatening to expose Rustin in his newspaper if MIA leaders did not get him out of town. Rustin stalled. He had become fixated on a desire to transfer his informal role personally to the new nonviolence tactician from the FOR staff. The ensuing scenes could have been condensed from a Western movie. Glenn Smiley, the replacement, came into town and received a hurried, rather sad briefing from the departing Rustin, whom he had known for fifteen years. Then Rustin introduced Smiley to King and managed chipper good-byes before King was obliged to have him smuggled to Birmingham in the back of a car.

  Like Rustin, Smiley had traveled on the FOR staff since his own imprisonment for pacifist resistance to service in World War II. By appearance and temperament, however, the two friends were utterly different. Smiley was a mild-mannered white Methodist preacher from Texas, who looked and sounded like one until he spoke on the subject of violence or race. His first act was to trade in his New York license plates for Georgia ones. His first advice to King was to get rid of the guns around his house. Smiley thought King’s most striking quality was his stubbornness—how he would give in to fears and then almost angrily sweep them aside as irrelevant to the choices at hand. “Don’t bother me with tactics,” he said more than once. “I want to know if I can apply nonviolence to my heart.” At such times, Smiley was much burdened by the inadequacy of his Gandhian advice. For four years, he would go in and out of Montgomery on call, often arriving for midnight MIA strategy sessions. Invariably, King would jump up at two or three o’clock in the morning to say that the work of the Lord could not go forward unless they sent out for some soul food, and Smiley, to the astonishment of himself and his relatives, learned to love pig’s-ear sandwiches. So did the Lutheran missionary, Robert Graetz.

  Within a week of King’s second arrest in Montgomery, cabinet secretary Maxwell Rabb summoned E. Frederic Morrow, the first Negro professional ever to serve on the White House staff, for an old-fashioned chewing out. Rabb was tired of getting Morrow’s memos urging the President to speak out in favor of desegregation, he said, and what galled him most was that Negro voters still seemed to prefer the Democratic Party of Eastland and Byrd in spite of all Eisenhower had done in civil rights, such as the desegregation of nearly all public facilities in the nation’s capital and the official support for the NAACP position in the Brown
case. Negro voters were ungrateful, Rabb charged. He said he was disgusted with the whole issue and would not stick his neck out anymore.

  Morrow swallowed his disagreement in retreat, as he often did. A public relations expert on leave from CBS-TV, the son and grandson of preachers, Morrow had obtained a secretary from the White House pool only after a tearful woman from Massachusetts volunteered, citing the obligations of her Catholic faith, and now staff women were under strict orders to enter and leave his office in pairs, so as to allay suspicions of sexual misconduct. Morrow walked softly. He had been working at the White House nearly nine months but had not yet been sworn in for duty. This was another uncomfortable subject. Morrow and everyone else knew that the Administration had already gotten credit in the Negro media for his presence, and that the traditional ceremony would only generate negative results among white voters. (Morrow would not be sworn in for another three years. A private, unannounced ceremony—without the President—made his prior service retroactively official.)

  A few days after being lectured by Rabb, Morrow was called into the office of the man who hired him, Sherman Adams, Eisenhower’s chief of staff and alter ego. Adams was worried about race again. The previous year it had been Mississippi—the sensational Emmett Till lynching and a rash of lesser atrocities that had generated political pressure to hire Morrow. This year it was Alabama. A federal judge had revoked Autherine Lucy’s suspension from the University of Alabama, only to have the trustees expel her permanently the next day. The case was a bundle of lunacy; Lucy had been suspended and expelled before she had ever enrolled. What worried Adams was the prospect of violence. Alabama whites were crowing about how the riot had “worked”; it had restored segregation. As for the Negroes, the latest FBI intelligence reports revealed that the Communist influence was pervasive, Adams said, and the Negro leaders were not sophisticated enough to control planted insurrectionists. Morrow did not argue. He valued Adams for his personal kindnesses, not for his advanced views on civil rights. In fact, Morrow knew that Adams was the most powerful figure among those urging that Eisenhower do as little as possible in civil rights.