Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  A few days after the taxi-stand bombing, Montgomery police charged seven white men with that crime as well as most of the prior bombings. Hopes for justice swelled within the MIA, until a jury acquitted the first two defendants in spite of their signed confessions. About the same time, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled against King’s appeal of his “illegal boycott” conviction. It was a technical ruling—Fred Gray had missed a procedural filing deadline—and King ruefully decided not to press the case to the U.S. Supreme Court for fear of losing on the same technicality. He paid his $500 fine painfully, hating to lose, hating especially to be blocked from getting a substantive ruling on the legality of the protest. He hoped that one of the eighty-nine remaining defendants might be vindicated on constitutional grounds, or on the strict finding that the boycotters had “just cause,” but Montgomery prosecutors closed off this avenue by dismissing all these cases. Simultaneously, the prosecutors dropped charges against the remaining white bombing defendants.

  King deplored the import of this twin amnesty, which Judge Carter accepted as a package, because it perversely equated the boycott with the bombings, many of which were capital crimes under Alabama law. He did not attack the linkage publicly, however. Doing so would have accomplished nothing practical, and it would have risked further separating him from the eighty-nine MIA leaders now spared prosecution. King’s helplessness was evidence of the political shrewdness of the prosecutors’ move. Segregationists could take solace from the fact the Negro leader stood proven wrong—tried, convicted, given every chance to appeal, and deemed finally a criminal. They had his money to prove it. The Negro population at large had just absorbed a historical reminder of local law and random violence. What little had been lost to the segregationists in the boycott case had since been avenged many times over. Nighttime bus service was quietly restored, and the bombing attacks ceased.

  E. Frederic Morrow marched in Eisenhower’s second inaugural parade on January 20, 1957. Later that day, by special invitation, he and his wife became the first Negroes ever to sit in the presidential reviewing stand. Clare Boothe Luce—the first female ambassador in U.S. history, and wife of Time founder Henry Luce—introduced herself to King in a fan letter that January. A Republican globalist who had just returned from duty in Italy, she wrote King that “no day passed but the Italian communists pointed to events in our South to prove that American democracy was a ‘capitalistic myth.’…Our enemies abroad have profited greatly from the efforts of these Americans who would deny their own Constitution. No man has ever waged the battle for equality under our law in a more lawful and Christian way than you have.”

  Within a few weeks of Luce’s letter, a Time correspondent was assigned to write the story of Montgomery in the form of a sympathetic, full-length profile of King. Time’s New York editors objected to a mention in the story draft that “Onward Christian Soldiers” was sung at MIA mass meetings, saying that the song’s warlike spirit clashed with Time’s Gandhian slant on King. “Above all,” said Time in describing King’s education, “he read and reread everything he could find about India’s Gandhi.” Many adjustments of image were crammed into the frantic revision period attendant to major stories. An artist prepared a strikingly handsome, close-up portrait of King to fill most of the space within the celebrated red borders of Time’s cover.

  The Time story established King as a permanent fixture of American mass culture. The New York Times Magazine soon followed with a history of the boycott, which was mostly about King, and NBC’s Lawrence Spivak invited him to become the second Negro ever to appear on “Meet the Press.” After the boycott, the mantle of fame fell ever more personally on King, who told Time that he and his father had chosen to call themselves after Martin Luther, the founding Protestant, and that “perhaps we’ve earned our right to the name.” It was a proud but tentative “perhaps.” The boycott had touched him indelibly—astonished, battered, broadened, and inflamed him. Now that it was over, the turmoil within his own world at home served only to drive him more quickly toward a larger constituency.

  In February, just before the Time cover story hit the stands, he spent an evening at Oberlin College in Ohio, where Vernon Johns had gone to school forty years earlier. A campus YMCA official named Harvey Cox, himself fresh out of seminary, arranged for King to address a general convocation. Afterward, Cox hosted a private dinner, at which the invited students and faculty behaved somewhat shyly around King. During the meal, King found himself isolated, with no one sitting on either side of him, but a student did move nonchalantly to sit directly across the table. Introducing himself as James Lawson, he said he had looked forward to this meeting since first reading King’s name in the Nagpur Times more than a year earlier. King’s interest perked up instantly. He asked about India, saying he hoped to go there soon, and Lawson replied with a description of his Methodist missionary work. Lawson had returned by way of Africa, spending a month there with some of the leaders of the independence movements. King brightened again; he told Lawson he had just received an invitation from Kwame Nkrumah to attend the ceremonies marking the end of British colonialism in Ghana.

  The two men fell headlong into conversation. They discovered in a rush that they had similar histories and interests. They knew many people in common and had read many of the same theology books. Lawson had grown up the son of a Republican minister who preached the gospel of love but also wore a .38 on his hip as a precaution against harassment from white people. His mother, said Lawson, was the love influence in his life. As a champion debater in high school and college, he had argued in 1946 that preventive atomic warfare against the Soviet Union was justified to stop the threat of Communism—a memory that made him wince slightly. Two years later, Lawson had decided that the law of love as demonstrated by Jesus did not permit violence except to lay down one’s life for another, and had developed theories linking the conscription and segregation laws in principle as denials of religious conscience. In 1951, while serving as national president of the United Methodist Youth Fellowship, he had refused induction into the Army on pacifist grounds, for which he served more than a year in federal prison. Bayard Rustin had come to Ohio to counsel him. So had Glenn Smiley.

  These names, like almost everything else Lawson said, struck sparks of recognition in King. The affinity between them was such that they could almost anticipate each other even while first getting acquainted. They were two different personalities on the same quest. In many respects, Lawson was ahead of King as an activist, but King had already realized Lawson’s dream of starting a nonviolent mass movement. Now, King said, he was trying to figure out how to extend the Montgomery model across the South. His best idea so far was to work through the Baptist Convention or the NAACP, but he was not sure what that would mean in practice. Most probably nothing, said Lawson, remarking caustically that the NAACP was by nature an organization of lawyers and banquets, limited by the small numbers and cautious temperament of the Negro middle class. King said ruefully that he was probably right, but how could you build something out of nothing to attack the segregation practiced daily by millions of whites and Negroes?

  By the end of the dinner, King was recruiting Lawson to come South to find or create an answer. Lawson said he planned to do just that as soon as he finished the graduate work he had interrupted for prison and India.

  “We need you now,” King implored him. “We don’t have any Negro leadership in the South that understands nonviolence.” Lawson promised to hurry. The two men began an association that lasted until Lawson invited King to Memphis to help the sanitation workers in 1968, but now they shared a vision of destiny unmixed with fate.

  SIX

  A TASTE OF THE WORLD

  As the boycott dissolved in memory to a quaint story of tired feet and empty buses, King groped on a number of fronts to spread what he called the “Montgomery experience” across the South. Deluged with speaking invitations and cheered by enraptured audiences, he hoped that the power of his speech might fuel
a mass conversion, like the Great Awakening of the 1740s. More realistically, he knew that oratory could aspire only to enlightenment, and that enlightenment was not enough. Power was required. Toward that end King devised a number of plans. While trying to build his own organization, he labored also to register several million new Negro voters, enlist the organs of mass communication, harness the influence of the organized clergy, gain the endorsement of the highest white leaders, and mobilize a “nonviolent army” of witnesses. When segregationist resistance threatened these efforts, King tinkered incessantly with strategy, trying many combinations of tactics. He consulted the few professed specialists in racial politics, who, since the prospects for overturning the everyday arrangements of the entrenched white majority were dim, tended to be eccentrics of assorted varieties—pietists, incendiaries, one-worlders, Communists, and other ideologues. King learned gradually to distinguish between kooks and quixotics of promise.

  Among the strangers who had descended on King during the bus boycott was Harris Wofford. A New Yorker of distinguished Southern lineage, Wofford had been educated at Yale Law School, but his interest in the World Federalist Movement dated from childhood. After World War II, his political idealism had driven him to spend several years observing Gandhism in India, where he and his wife Clare wrote a book called India Afire. The couple had returned home filled with the conviction that the proper focus for Gandhians in the United States was the race issue. To the horror of his family, Wofford enrolled for two years at Howard University Law School in Washington, becoming the first white student there since the female suffragists of the 1910s.* Then he found a job at Covington and Burling, Dean Acheson’s blue-chip law firm in Washington, where he divided his time between corporate clients and the few scattered souls agitating for integration, such as Myles Horton at the Highlander Folk School. “I wish some of the Gandhian techniques could be used,” he wrote Horton in 1954. Wofford’s personal contacts ranged from the Luces of Time and Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts to the eminent Negro preacher Mordecai Johnson. He was something of an enigma within both circles.

  Wofford began his campaign for King’s attention in 1956, mailing him a Gandhian analysis of the bus boycott, along with a copy of his book and a pamphlet he had written on nonviolence. When this brought no response, he sent off another letter, reintroducing himself as “your arm chair strategist” and posing the question: “Isn’t this the time for some straight Gandhian civil disobedience?” One of King’s aides wrote “Please read this” across the second letter. This earned a hurried “Thanks for your letter” scrawled by King, meaning that the aide should compose a letter of thanks. Undaunted, Wofford began looking out for advance word of King’s appearances in the North and finally ran across him in New York. He made his pitch on the run: King should go to India to meet the real Gandhians, and Wofford thought he could raise the travel funds.

  Intrigued, King invited Wofford to pursue the idea aboard his orator’s road show, and, shortly after the bus boycott, the Woffords accompanied the Kings to the Baltimore “national conclave” of a Negro fraternity, Omega Psi Phi. Coretta sang in the fraternity’s talent contest, and King delivered a blistering attack on the assembled Omegas for devoting themselves to the pursuit of liquor and luxuries. Turning to what was already his standard theme when addressing the Negro middle class, he dared them to make alliances with, rather than shun, the less fortunate members of the race. The Woffords were struck first by the effrontery of the message and then by the warmth of the reception. The Omegas applauded and cheered, taking no offense at being scolded for their secular sins. King was a hero, and as he spoke, representatives of other Negro organizations were rapping on the door. Unable to resist, King squeezed in quick visits to the local Freemasons and a couple of churches. The Woffords demonstrated the mettle of their interracial experience by behaving naturally on a whirlwind tour of Negro establishments.

  Also in Baltimore, King and Wofford met with officials of the Libby Holman Reynolds Foundation, who were interested in putting up the money for King to tour India. On advance information from King, Bayard Rustin appeared at the interview as King’s protector. Rustin wanted badly for King to go to India, but not necessarily under the guidance of Wofford, with whom he had quarreled intermittently since a World Federalist meeting in 1942, when high school student Wofford attacked Rustin’s argument that nonviolence precluded resistance even to Hitler. Rustin and Wofford, independently recognizing King’s immense potential for nonviolence, competed for the role of Gandhian mentor. To offset Wofford’s foundation contacts, Rustin brought with him from New York his own “money man,” Stanley Levison.

  Levison became King’s closest white friend and the most reliable colleague of his life. They were introduced in an offbeat situation that was typical of “Negro work” in that era. Libby Holman Reynolds, who controlled the foundation which bore her name, had made a reputation in show business as a sultry torch singer and companion of actor Montgomery Clift. She inherited her fortune only upon winning acquittal on charges that she had murdered her husband, a tobacco tycoon. Her beclouded image hardly suited King’s or Gandhi’s, but her bohemian tastes produced philanthropy that was available nowhere else. King discussed India with her, the dueling Gandhians Wofford and Rustin (one in pinstripes, the other practically a fugitive), and Levison himself.

  A leftist radical since his college days during the Depression, Levison nevertheless had a firm capitalist side to him. He was a forty-four-year-old socialist who had grown rich off real estate investments, a lawyer who shunned law books and had never practiced law. He had owned car dealerships but never learned to drive. As a longtime official of the American Jewish Congress, the smaller and more liberal counterpart to the American Jewish Committee, Levison had specialized in fund-raising for the AJC and for a host of civil libertarian and radical causes—to save the Rosenbergs, to abolish as unconstitutional the McCarran Act and other restrictions on political expression from the McCarthy era, to assist the defendants in the Smith Act “show trials.” Since 1949, nearly a hundred top officials of the U.S. Communist Party had been jailed or deported under the Smith Act. Working closely and often clandestinely with defense committees, Levison had served in effect as a financial pillar of the Communist Party during the height of its persecution.

  Levison was a fiercely independent thinker, of eclectic political interests. After Joseph McCarthy’s power was broken by Senate censure in 1954 and the Justice Department reduced Smith Act prosecutions, he joined with A. Philip Randolph and others to support the beleaguered Southern Negroes trying to integrate public schools under the Brown decision. Communists officially scorned such efforts, as they had scorned Randolph for decades. In the prevailing Marxist jargon, as laid down from Moscow, integration was a “revisionist” pursuit based on the false hope of progress without world revolution. Moreover, the ideal of integration contradicted the official Moscow goal of “separate national development” for American Negroes, modeled on the Soviet republics. This arcane line made for private Communist derision toward the Brown decision and the Montgomery bus boycott, but it also isolated the party from the aspirations of most American Negroes. None of this was new, nor was Levison bound by such disputes. Early in 1956, after the lynching of Emmett Till, he and Rustin—plus Randolph, Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, the NAACP, and a host of religious and civic groups—formed an emergency organization called In Friendship, which raised money to support the victims of segregationist vigilantes, mostly in Mississippi. In Friendship had included the Montgomery boycotters among the beneficiaries of its Madison Square Garden rally in May 1956, and Levison personally had raised most of the advertising funds for a Coretta King-Harry Belafonte—Duke Ellington concert a few weeks before Rustin introduced him personally to the Kings.

  King’s revealing directness deeply impressed Stanley Levison, who resolved at that moment to get to know him better. As for King, he found nothing objectionable about Levison, least of all his radical connectio
ns. Although King largely rejected Communist doctrine, he never wavered in support of the victims of McCarthyism or in his sympathy with Communist advocacy for the oppressed. He also gave the American Communists enormous credit for their record on the race issue. Regardless of their doctrinal contortions, the Communists advocated and practiced racial equality far beyond any other political organization in the country. King knew of wealthy white Southerners who, converted to communism in the 1930s, had given their lives working among Negroes in textile mills and union shops. It was said that FBI agents spotted white Communists by their ease and politeness around Negroes, or by the simple fact that they socialized with Negroes at all. To Negroes, this was all part of heaven’s mystery—why only the Communists? Even King’s most conservative teachers had drilled into him the minutiae of Communist history on the color question—that Stalin, for instance, had written into the Soviet Constitution a provision that discrimination by color was a national crime. “I think there can be no doubt about it that the appeal of Communism to the Eastern nations today can be traceable to a large degree to the Soviet attitude toward race,” a Morehouse professor wrote to King in 1952.