Practically speaking, the fight within the Eisenhower Administration over civil rights was a contest for the President’s ear between Sherman Adams and Attorney General Herbert Brownell. The President asked FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to present a classified briefing about race on March 9, 1956, for the cabinet meeting at which the Administration would decide whether to approve, modify, or cancel Brownell’s plans to ask Congress for a new civil rights bill. No such legislation had passed since Reconstruction.
Hoover arrived with a brace of aides, easels, and display charts. His peek into the inner world of Negro protest, though couched in the language of secret revelation, was superficial and riddled with error. Cursory remarks on Montgomery, for instance, misstated several dates and laws while distorting the nature of the bus boycott. No one in the Cabinet Room knew better, however, and the facts were of secondary importance anyway. Politically speaking, Hoover cut masterfully along the fault line of the Administration. He expressed no sympathy for civil rights and painted an alarming picture of subversive elements among the integrationists. As an example of a clearly subversive development, Hoover informed the cabinet that Chicago mayor Richard Daley had come close to public criticism of President Eisenhower for not taking stronger action in the Emmett Till lynching case. “I hasten to say that Mayor Daley is not a Communist,” Hoover added gravely, “but pressures engineered by the Communists were brought to bear upon him.” These comments hinted at political danger, but Hoover stopped short of saying that Republican civil rights legislation would reflect Communist influence. Instead, he put the imprimatur of the FBI upon some of the worst allegations of anti-Negro brutality by militant segregationists, particularly in Mississippi. He described the White Citizens Councils ambiguously as new organizations that “either could control the rising tension or become the medium through which tensions might manifest themselves.” Overall, his performance left just enough political room for Brownell’s program, minus any anti-lynching legislation. One of the FBI charts showed that the number of lynchings had dropped from twenty to less than three per year since the FBI had begun informal investigations in 1939. Hoover wanted no formal legal responsibility in this area.
Brownell promptly gave the cabinet a speech defending his plan to submit legislation to create an independent Civil Rights Commission to gather facts about voting rights violations and economic reprisals against Negroes. Also, the bill would create a Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department, and strengthen the Attorney General’s legal standing to seek enforcement of voting rights in the federal courts. When Brownell finished, Secretaries Ezra Taft Benson of Agriculture and Marion Folsom of Health, Education and Welfare spoke up in opposition. Benson wanted to wait until there was a Republican Congress. Folsom said that anything beyond the fact-finding commission would be imprudent because it would “anticipate” its results.
The President interrupted. “Where do you think that the Attorney General’s suggestions are moving too rapidly?” he asked. “They look to me like amelioration.” As always, his word shifted the tone of the debate. A few objections as to the practicality of the legislation followed, but Brownell soon asked permission to proceed. “Okay,” said Ike. “But put into your presentation a statement that what is needed is calmness and sanity. The great mass of decent people should and will listen to these voices, rather than to the extremists. Make your statement like your brief to the Supreme Court. Don’t take the attitude that you are another Sumner.”
The most Sherman Adams could win at the cabinet meeting was a delay: Brownell must bring the historic legislative package back to the White House for final clearance. In the interim, Adams benefited by the release of the “Southern Manifesto,” which equated integration with subversion of the Constitution and pledged the entire region to fierce resistance. The document was signed by some ninety Southern congressmen and all the senators except the two Tennessee mavericks, Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore, and the Senate Majority Leader, Lyndon Johnson of Texas. Johnson was saying privately that the manifesto’s only effect would be to push Negro votes into the Republican column in key swing states of the North. In the White House, Adams was hoping just that. He managed to weaken a few of Brownell’s proposals and to make sure that when the bill was submitted to Congress, it came from the Attorney General and not, as was customary for major bills, from the President.
Advertiser editor Grover Hall pronounced the mass indictments “the dumbest act that has ever been done in Montgomery.” From the standpoint of local whites, the move backfired immediately by recharging the boycotters’ morale and severely weakening the time-honored stigma of jail as a weapon of social control against Negroes. This was just the beginning of the miscalculation. As days went by, the hordes of reporters attracted to town by the mass indictment wrote stories that stimulated a great shower of public support—and money—upon the MIA from across the nation and even from distant lands. The city fathers, showboating as they delivered what they believed would be a crushing blow, had blithely ignored the possibility that their show would not play well to audiences beyond the horizon. “Everybody now concedes that this was dumb,” Hall wrote.
For the puckish editor, who found himself serving as “duenna and Indian guide to more than a hundred reporters of the international press,” the media influx caused an intense, personal exposure to the vagaries of the race issue on both its grand and prosaic stages. One early effect was that Hall ventured inside Dexter Avenue Baptist to meet King, in his role as escort to reporter Peter Kihss of The New York Times. To Hall, King was “largely inscrutable,” a self-possessed man without humor, in whose statements about death, suffering, and violence Hall found a “conspicuous thread of thanatopsis.” Still, Hall admitted that King was an “authentic intellectual,” and not a polysyllabic charlatan with cereal-box degrees. King’s discourse on philosophy, Hall found, was “comprehending, forceful exegesis.” He committed these judgments to print, along with many others that offended his white readers. When he asked one frantic caller how she knew that the Communists were running the boycott, she replied, “It just stands to reason.” This comment amused Hall enough to publish it too.
By the time the boycott case went to trial, the encampment of Negro reporters and domestic “war correspondents” had been augmented by journalists from more than ten foreign nations, including Japan, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, and Australia. There was M. K. Kamath of the Press Trust of India and Daniel Morgaine of France-Soir. From England came Keith Kyle of the London Economist and, eventually, the distinguished Alastair Cooke of the Manchester Guardian. (Ironically, in view of that paper’s leftist perspective and Rustin’s invocation of its name, Cooke may have been the foreign journalist most sympathetic to the local segregationists. He wrote of King as “the cat’s-paw of the NAACP.”) Of these, Hall’s favorite seemed to be Morgaine of France, who once called just before a scheduled cultural briefing at the Advertiser saying, “I am so soree, Meester Hall. I must break ze appointment, for I have achieved an appointment with the Reverend King.” For Hall, this fawning attention made King like yesterday’s bee sting—a tiny, throbbing thing that tickled and hurt at once, and above all that he could not leave alone. Local prosecutors concentrated the attention into an exclusive preoccupation by announcing that they intended to hold eighty-nine of the indictments in abeyance. They prosecuted King alone as a test case.
Eight lawyers sat around King at the defense table when the four-day trial opened on March 19, 1956. One part of the legal team guided King and other MIA witnesses through a line of defense testimony that flirted with perjury. The minister of Holt Street Baptist could not recall seeing King at his church on the night the boycott began. Graetz testified that he could not remember ever hearing King urge people to boycott the buses. Fear and legalism combined to produce a defense based on evasive denial that King had anything to do with any boycott, if there was one. Other King lawyers tried to establish that the boycott was “not without just cause” by summoning a
stream of Negro women to the stand to testify about cruelties they had seen and endured on the buses.
Neither of the legal strategies mattered very much to the outcome of a trial that had become symbolic to all sides. The judge, who taught a men’s Bible class at a church across the street from Dexter, pronounced King guilty immediately at the conclusion of the summations. He sentenced the defendant to pay a $500 fine or serve a year at hard labor. Newspapers recorded the exact moment, 4:39 P.M., when King emerged from the courthouse to tell a cheering crowd that the bus protest would continue. “Behold the King!” shouted someone, and others answered “Hail the King!” and “King is King!” Returning that evening to Holt Street, where it had all begun, King was presented to the first of that night’s series of enormous mass meetings with the words, “Here is the man who today was nailed to the cross for you and me.” King declared, “This conviction and all the convictions they can heap on me will not diminish my determination one iota.”
He had been a public figure among Montgomery’s Negroes for nearly four months, but now fame spilled into the outside world. W. E. B. Du Bois himself, who had known Negro leaders stretching back to Frederick Douglass, wrote that if passive resistance could conquer racial hatred, which he doubted, then Gandhi and Negroes like King would have shown the world a way to conquer war itself. Jet magazine put King on its cover, calling him “Alabama’s Modern Moses.” The New York Times, in a “Man in the News” profile published during the trial, described King as a man who believed that “all men are basically good,” and whose pulpit oratory “overwhelms the listener with the depth of his convictions…. He is particularly well read in Kant and Hegel.”
King learned immediately that the astonishing personal impact of the trial reached far beyond Montgomery. At his first Northern fund-raiser since the boycott began, he received in New York what one newspaper called “the kind of welcome [the city] usually reserves for the Brooklyn Dodgers.” Some ten thousand people tried to crowd into Gardner Taylor’s Concord Baptist Church to hear him. Collection plates gathered $4,000 for the MIA. The president of the City Council made an appearance at the church. Mobs of admirers pressed upon King, and the Negro press reported sighs among groups of doting women.
The phenomenon of mass adulation far from home struck like a sudden bolt, but King had to work for other support gained on the New York trip. Harry Belafonte responded cautiously to his invitation for a private meeting at Adam Clayton Powell’s church in Harlem. Belafonte could be temperamental. He had recorded but not yet released the calypso album that would make him an international star—the first solo album ever to sell a million copies—and he wondered why King insisted that they meet alone. He was wary of preachers and established Negro leaders, partly because he thought they never had supported his idols Du Bois and Paul Robeson. Only curiosity about this new kind of preacher lured him to the church. King said he had heard that Belafonte cared deeply about the race struggle, quite apart from his career in show business. This flattered Belafonte’s political side, but what broke down his resistance was King’s air of humility, in sharp contrast with the circus of adulation surrounding him. While he found King sophisticated, clearly not the hick or holy roller he had feared, King’s offstage personality struck him as a mixture of determination and almost doe-like vulnerability. “I need your help,” King said repeatedly. “I have no idea where this movement is going.”
Within a week of the mass arrests in Montgomery, King and the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins had entered what would become a long-standing quarrel over money. King protested in a letter to Wilkins that the NAACP seemed to be gathering money for itself “in the name of our movement.” Wilkins defended his instructions that all proceeds from the boycott fund-raisers be routed through his office, saying that the NAACP expected to absorb many of the MIA legal expenses, but he did not specify which ones. He added a warning to King: “I am certain I do not need to stress that at this time it would be fatal for there to develop any hint of disagreement as to the raising and allocating of funds.” NAACP officials, who saw themselves in the climactic stages of a twenty-year legal battle to integrate public institutions such as the schools, were reluctant to endorse the radically new approach of a mass boycott. Negotiations over legal support stalled further, so that by the time of King’s trial only one of his eight lawyers came from Thurgood Marshall’s legal staff. During the trial itself, the NAACP issued a droll statement that it would await the final outcome of the boycott before deciding whether passive resistance techniques could be useful.
Wilkins became more accommodating when the trial established King as a national symbol. Three weeks after the conviction, he notified King that the NAACP would pay all costs for its attorneys to represent King and any of the other mass-indictment defendants brought to trial, as well as the MIA in its federal suit against bus segregation and Rosa Parks in her own ongoing case. In addition, Wilkins offered to pay half the $9,000 fee charged by one of the local Alabama firms in the King case. Oddly enough, Wilkins extended this generous offer at a time when fame had made the fledgling MIA wealthier than the national NAACP, and King accepted the offer even though he did not need the money at the time. The MIA cases might wind up in the U.S. Supreme Court, King reasoned, where the NAACP lawyers had an unsurpassed record in civil rights cases. “We are quite conscious of our dependence on the NAACP,” King wrote Wilkins in a conciliatory letter, mentioning that his church had just purchased a $1,000 life membership in the NAACP. Within a week, Wilkins invited King to address the NAACP’s annual convention in San Francisco.
On June 1, 1956, some weeks before the NAACP convention, Alabama attorney general John Patterson obtained an extraordinary court order banning most NAACP activities within the entire state of Alabama, including fund-raising, dues collection, and the solicitation of new members. Patterson based his request for the order on the assertion that the NAACP was “organizing, supporting, and financing an illegal boycott by Negro residents of Montgomery.” The order transformed this old rumor into the factual predicate for effectively outlawing the organization, and when the NAACP resisted a corollary order to surrender its membership and contribution lists to Patterson, the judge imposed a $100,000 contempt fine as well. It took the NAACP eight years and several trips to the U.S. Supreme Court to void these sanctions. During all that time, the Alabama NAACP was disbanded. On one level, this shocking development threw King and Wilkins together as common defendants. But Wilkins could hardly forget that it was King’s boycott that had put the NAACP out of business in an entire state, at a critical time in the school desegregation cases, and this handicap would grow more serious as other Southern states tried to follow Alabama’s example.
One hidden effect of the Patterson order was to drive some of Alabama’s former NAACP leaders into closer alliance with King. The most unusual and significant of them was Fred Shuttlesworth in Birmingham, a volatile, rough-cut man who had been raised in the backwoods of Alabama. Convicted of running the family still in 1941, Shuttlesworth had wandered around Alabama as a truck driver and cement worker, discovering in the process that the natural gift his mother so prized in him, his memory, was well suited to the work of a country preacher. Accepting the “call,” Shuttlesworth bought a cow to help support him and his young wife while he pitched himself into colleges and seminaries, built a house out of World War II scrap materials, and preached as many as five times each Sunday. At his first full-time pulpit in Selma, Shuttlesworth had quarreled ceaselessly with his deacons over the prerogatives of the minister, finally receiving what he called a vision from God telling him to persevere and subdue them.
Only a few days after the Patterson court order, Shuttlesworth received another divine message, saying, “Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.” He interpreted this to mean that the demise of the faction-ridden NAACP was a blessing in disguise, and that he should replace it with his own organization, like King’s in Montgomery. He knew King, having gone to Montgomery several time
s to deliver contributions, and the idea of an organization free of the NAACP bureaucracy appealed strongly to him. His public summons to create a new group attracted publicity in the white press as a blatant circumvention of the court order banning Negro agitation, as well as an unprecedented challenge to Birmingham’s pugnacious police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor. One troubled Negro preacher went so far as to tell Shuttlesworth that he had received his own vision from heaven, in which God told him to tell Shuttlesworth to cancel the meeting. “When did the Lord start sending my messages through you?” Shuttlesworth hotly replied. “The Lord has told me to call it on.” Ordinary folk, drawn by the tension and the publicity, packed the church on the night of June 5 to hear Shuttlesworth announce the formation of his own Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. This deed first singled him out as the preacher courageous enough or crazy enough to defy Bull Connor.
In Montgomery, King and the other MIA leaders were celebrating a tangible victory. On June 4, a panel of three federal judges ruled in the MIA’s favor in the suit Fred Gray had filed back in February, two days after King’s house was bombed. By a 2-1 vote, the judges struck down Montgomery’s bus segregation ordinances as unconstitutional. Attorneys for Montgomery and for the state of Alabama immediately appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. Although the segregation laws remained in effect pending that ruling, which for the boycotters meant that months of walking and car-pooling stretched ahead, thousands of hallelujahs were raised at mass meetings in Montgomery. For the first time, they were on the winners’ side in a white man’s forum, and now would go into the Supreme Court seeking to sustain the ruling of three white Southern judges. The odds for ultimate legal victory shifted heavily in their favor.
Parting the Waters Page 27