Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Levison and King both knew Ben Davis, who for twenty years had been one of the four or five most powerful Communists in the United States. Davis was a Morehouse man. In the early 1920s, when all Morehouse students were required to have jobs, Davis had claimed the position reserved for the richest, most promising young man on campus: chauffeur to the college president. Every morning, Davis arrived ceremoniously in his own chauffeur-driven Pierce-Arrow, then jumped out, donned a chauffeur’s cap, and assumed driving duty in President John Hope’s brand-new green Dodge. After finishing Harvard Law School, Davis had lived quietly at the pinnacle of the Negro aristocracy in Atlanta until 1933, when he defended Angelo Herndon. A teenaged Communist from Chicago, Herndon faced a death sentence—reduced to eighteen years on a chain gang—for distributing to Negroes a leaflet proclaiming that the Communist Party could end segregation and unemployment. On appeal, the Herndon sedition case became second only to the Scottsboro rape case as the most sensational and prolonged racial trial of the Depression. Davis, shattered by direct exposure to primitive hatreds, official and nonofficial, embraced the heresy that American democracy and his own insular Negro prestige were no better than illusions. He renounced them both, along with the blessings of his family, to join the Communist Party in New York, and his name had been whispered among Atlanta Negroes ever since. As a member of the Central Committee, Davis had dismissed Howard Rushmore from the Communist newspaper for succumbing to the “plantation” blandishments of Gone With the Wind, and had personally imposed upon Bayard Rustin the Kremlin’s order to cease anti-segregation work during World War II.* Running openly on the Communist ticket, Davis won regular election to the New York City Council. He served there during and after World War II, until his own 1949 conviction in the first and largest Smith Act trial. After completing more than three years in Atlanta Penitentiary for subversive conspiracy, Davis, with the help of Stanley Levison, raised money to defend dozens of fellow Communists on related charges.

  Levison met King just as the U.S. Communist Party faced extinction. The year of the Montgomery boycott had also been the year of Soviet Premier Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Stalin as a tyrant, murderer, and traitor to Communist principles. Endorsement of these revelations by the Kremlin caused massive psychological trauma among American Communists. Some beat their hands bloody against the wall. Despair only deepened in the fall of 1956 when Khrushchev himself sent Soviet tanks to crush a rebellion by Hungarian workers whom the Kremlin had portrayed as blissfully socialist and free. The steady drain of disillusioned party members swiftly became a flood. By the end of the year, party membership was down from a postwar high of 80,000 to some 5,000. So many of this remnant were FBI informants that J. Edgar Hoover briefly entertained a proposal to take control of the party by throwing the votes of informants behind one faction at the upcoming party convention in February 1957.

  Before the convention, a tiny caucus of the three warring factions debated alternatives to the dissolution of the party. John and Lillian Gates represented the liberals, who wanted to break loose from subservience to the Soviet Union and “Americanize” the party, taking Communist principles into mainstream politics. Ben Davis represented the hard-liners, who scorned such proposals as reformist surrender. Against the evils he had known, Davis could imagine no cure less cataclysmic than another Russian Revolution, and, having given up everything to follow the Kremlin, he snarled at the suggestion that he retreat to Atlanta and join a timid little NAACP picket line. Albert “Doc” Blumberg represented a middle faction loyal to Communist Party leader Eugene Dennis. Blumberg, a former philosophy professor at Johns Hopkins, also functioned as the party’s expert on relations with sympathetic or cooperating external groups, and in that capacity he brought Stanley Levison to the caucus. The leaders solicited Levison’s opinion as to the effect of various compromises on prospects for friendly relations with labor and civil rights organizations and for raising money to defend indicted party members.

  Levison excused himself during the debate to place a phone call to Martin Luther King in Montgomery. In the few weeks since Baltimore, he had been sending King suggestions and draft strategies for expanding the integration movement. As the nature of Levison’s call registered on the people in the adjoining room, a new debate erupted. The Gateses argued furiously that Levison was subjecting King to needless, unconscionable danger. If a spy or an FBI wiretap revealed such a call from a gathering of top national Communists, King might be destroyed. King had enough problems already, they said, and party people should stay away lest they ruin him—as they had ruined Paul Robeson—by encouraging him to endorse the Soviets. All this infuriated Ben Davis, who retorted that the Gates faction always blamed the party instead of the reactionaries. America needed a hundred Robesons, he insisted, and if Levison could make one of King, so much the better. The argument raged until Levison returned to shrug it off. King was not a Communist, he said, and he could take care of himself.

  The national convention gathered shortly thereafter, on February 9, in New York’s East Village. Bayard Rustin attended as an observer, guessing correctly that many dedicated people would be available for pacifist and integrationist work as soon as they threw off Communist discipline. The convention itself was filled with bitterness and gallows humor, with informants circulating in conspicuous droves. Resolutions of the liberal Gates faction were passed by temporary majorities but doomed by inescapable logic: the most effective way to democratize and Americanize the party was simply to leave. A last mass defection soon left the party an empty shell, more authoritarian and blindly pro-Soviet than ever. All the leaders from the pre-convention caucus left the party with the exception of Ben Davis, who was too old and hardened to change. To King, Levison, Rustin, and many others, Davis was an object lesson more telling than Robeson. Davis welded himself to the contortions and reversals of Soviet strategy for the remaining six years of his life, growing more dogmatic and irascible than ever. Hounded and prosecuted to the end—New York even tried to deny him a driver’s license—he became to the pragmatic King an example of Communist futility and waste. Nevertheless, he considered Davis a figure of supreme tragedy rather than supreme evil.

  That same February, King, Levison, and Rustin pursued strategies far removed from the labyrinth of Communist doctrine. King’s foremost idea was that power derived from the stature and prestige of leaders. Seeking the recognition of the highest American leaders for his cause, he fixed his sights on the White House. Shortly after meeting Lawson at Oberlin, he reconvened the ministers whose Atlanta conference had been interrupted by the night of church bombings in Montgomery. In the midst of a lurching, long-winded debate over what to call themselves, their chief business was to send out urgent telegrams drafted by Stanley Levison and Bayard Rustin. The most important of these implored President Eisenhower to reconsider his earlier response that it would not be possible for him to make a speech in the South urging law and order. It also called for a White House conference on compliance with integration rulings. “In the absence of some early and effective remedial action,” said the wire, “we will have no moral choice but to lead a Pilgrimage of Prayer to Washington. If you, our president, cannot come South to relieve our harassed people, we shall have to lead our people to you in the capital in order to call the nation’s attention to the violence and organized terror.”

  Eisenhower was in Newport, Rhode Island, prior to heading for a two-week hunting vacation in southern Georgia. On his way out of a church service in which he heard a sermon on the need for new civil rights laws, Ike shook hands with the Navy chaplain and said, “You can’t legislate morality.” News of this instantly famous comment crossed the ministers’ telegrams. Although it dismayed King, the remark provided him with the grist for numerous sermons about how the President misconstrued the essential function of law. Eisenhower was correct that racial brotherhood was ultimately an issue of conscience and morality, King said, but the purpose of law was to establish justice in the lesser realm of o
rdinary life. All laws, whether seeking to prohibit murder or income tax evasion, governed external behavior rather than subjective attitudes. Therefore, King argued, the proper purpose of the desired civil rights laws was to take down “Whites Only” signs and to secure the ballot for Negroes who wanted to vote. “A law may not make a man love me,” said King, “but it can stop him from lynching me.”

  King wanted to make his case to Eisenhower personally—and to be seen doing so—but the President ducked. Eisenhower supported the basic citizenship rights of Negroes, which was why he allowed the resubmission in 1957 of his proposed voting rights legislation, but he bridled at the company of Negroes. This discomfort extended to school desegregation laws and to any other proposals that would foster more than minimal contact between whites and Negroes, even in public places. Forty years in a segregated Army conditioned Eisenhower to think of Negroes as inherently subordinate. His condescension was so natural and paternal as to seem nearly well-meaning. Only his private secretary winced with embarrassment when he passed along the latest “nigger jokes” from his friends at the Bobby Jones golf course in Augusta. During his vacation at Thomasville, Georgia, where King’s telegram reached him, Ike shot his first wild turkey. His hunting party rode around Treasury Secretary Humphrey’s farm in wicker carriages pulled by white mules and driven by what a friend called “the old colored retainers.” Eisenhower never had received a Negro delegation at the White House to discuss civil rights, and he did not reply to King’s telegram.

  The first head of state King met turned out to be an African, Kwame Nkrumah. He rushed off with Coretta to the ceremonies that transformed the Gold Coast into Ghana, the first independent nation of sub-Saharan Africa. Judged by the deference and attention granted him, his stature grew in proportion to the distance he put between himself and his Montgomery home. In New York, reporters singled him out among the large entourage of Negroes making the journey, paying scant attention to more established leaders such as Ralph Bunche, Adam Clayton Powell, Mordecai Johnson, and A. Philip Randolph. Out over the Atlantic, members of the flight crew recognized King from the Time cover. They invited him into the cockpit, and the captain let him take a playful turn at the airliner’s controls. In Accra, capital of the new nation, the Kings were treated to a private luncheon with Nkrumah. During the rounds of receptions, dinners, and balls, King ran across Vice President Nixon, head of the official U.S. delegation. Nixon had not bothered to answer King’s telegrams, but he was shrewd enough to recognize that the joy he witnessed at the birth of Ghana was part of an imminent world change. There were three billion people in the world, he grew fond of saying—roughly a billion each in the Soviet and Western blocs, and a third billion in the emerging poorer nations such as Ghana. Nixon said that whites were only a tiny minority of the third billion which held the balance of world influence. In Accra, where Nixon treated his Negro countryman with the courtesy due an ambassador, he invited King to come to Washington for private talks on civil rights. Having traveled halfway around the world to secure the audience that had eluded him at home, King did not miss the political lesson. The logic of diplomacy gave him a stature that he lacked as a political nonentity in the South. His experiences in Ghana helped secure his belief that the Zeitgeist, or spirit of the age, was rising to the defense of oppressed peoples. Everything he saw tended to confirm it.

  As fresh world travelers, he and Coretta returned through Rome, Geneva, Paris, and London, hearing everywhere a clatter about what would become of restive colonies on the southern portion of the globe. In April, King entered the Dexter pulpit to report on his journey. His congregation had made the trip possible with a bonus of $2,500—the equivalent of more than a half-year’s salary—and King, like his father, did his best to reward his church members with a reenactment of the high moments of the journey they had made possible. This time he preached a sermon that went far beyond diary or travelogue. He achieved in oratory a prescient self-awareness that ran ahead of his deeds.

  Beginning simply, King reminded his listeners where Africa was, how many people it contained, and listed the names of some of its countries. He sketched the history of the Gold Coast as a colony down to the moment of triumph on March 5, 1957, when some five hundred international dignitaries watched the close of the British-ruled parliament. “The thing that impressed me more than anything else that night,” King told his congregation, “was the fact that when Nkrumah walked in with his other ministers who had been in prison with him, they didn’t come in with the crowns and all of the garnish of kings, but they walked in with prison caps and the coats that they had lived with for all of the months that they had been in prison.” He told of one sight that particularly impressed him: Nkrumah dancing with the Duchess of Kent at the state ball. They had whirled about the floor in each other’s arms—the new prime minister dancing with the representative of the British crown. For King, who was plainly enchanted with the notion of Nkrumah and the duchess—“dancing with the lord on an equal plane”—the return trip through London had become almost a journey of temptation. “I never will forget the thoughts that came to my mind when we went to Buckingham Palace,” King continued. “And I looked there at all of Britain, at all of the pomp and circumstance of royalty. I thought about all of the queens and kings that had passed through here. Look at the beauty of the changing of the guards, and all of the guards with their beautiful horses. It’s a beautiful sight.” He dwelled fondly on descriptions of grandeur, but then haunting thoughts of colonialism overtook him by ambush. “I thought of many things,” he said. “When I stood there in Westminster Abbey, with all of its beauty, I thought about all of the beautiful hymns and anthems that the people would go into there to sing, yet the Church of England never took a stand against this system. The Church of England sanctioned it. The Church of England gave it a moral stature. And all of the exploitation perpetuated by the British Empire was sanctioned by the Church of England. Something else came to my mind. God comes into the picture even when the Church won’t take a stand. God…has said that all men must reflect the dignity and worth of all human personality…. Seems this morning that I can hear God speaking.”

  In a fit of oratory, he tried to tear himself from the lures of power and distinction, cutting his own path between the ancient poles of worldly glory and spiritual triumph. “Then I can hear Isaiah again,” he said, “because it has a profound meaning to me. That somehow ‘every valley shall be exalted, every hill shall be made low, the crooked places shall be made straight, and the rough places plain. The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.’ And that’s the beauty of this thing. All flesh shall see it together. Not some from the heights of Park Street* and others from the dungeons of slum areas. Not some from the pinnacles of the British Empire and some from the dark deserts of Africa. Not some from inordinate, superfluous wealth and others from abject, deadening poverty. Not some white and some black, not some yellow and some brown, but all flesh shall see it together. They shall see it from Montgomery! They shall see it from New York! They shall see it from Ghana! They shall see it from China! For I can look out and see a great number, as John saw, marching into the great eternity, because God is working in this world and at this hour and at this moment. And God grants that we will get on board and start marching with God, because we got orders now to break down the bondage and the walls of colonialism, exploitation, and imperialism, to break them down to the point that no man will trample over another man, but that all men will respect the dignity and worth of all human personality. And then we will be in Canaan’s freedom land. Moses might not get to see Canaan, but his children will see it. He even got to the mountain top enough to see it, and that assured him that it was coming.” King closed the service by asking the congregation to sing the traditional Baptist hymn of invitation, and the members of the prim little church filed out to the strains of the organ postlude, having sampled not only London and Ghana but King’s own vision of apocalypse.

  Ou
t of the pulpit, King still pursued influence by guile. He delayed following up on his invitation to visit Nixon because he was afraid the audience might jeopardize the Prayer Pilgrimage to Washington, which was predicated upon the Administration’s refusal to hear Negro grievances. King wanted to have the march. He and Randolph had discussed it in Ghana, and in New York they proposed it to Roy Wilkins in a way that forced him to go along. For Wilkins, who did not like marches, the Pilgrimage was acceptable because it was couched primarily as a mass supplication in support of the Administration’s voting rights bill. King agreed to speak to the crowd about voting, leaving the preeminent issue of school desegregation to the exclusive attention of Wilkins and the NAACP.

  To prepare for the Pilgrimage, the leaders relied heavily on the new coalition, In Friendship. Stanley Levison concentrated on money matters, contracts, and advertising, while Bayard Rustin drafted strategy memos and delivered organizational pep talks in church basements. Wilkins worked the inside game in Washington, where he alone had a staff. His people petitioned the government for permission to use the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The Administration stalled, on the belief that to allow thousands of discontented Negroes to gather in the heart of the capital was a formula for annoyance, if not disaster. Wilkins and his Washington representative, Clarence Mitchell, convinced White House aides that they had headed off a plan by King to march on Washington in protest against Eisenhower’s “failure.” This line, along with private remarks by NAACP counsel Thurgood Marshall that King was an “opportunist” and a “first-rate rabble-rouser,” helped ingratiate the NAACP with the Administration as the more responsible, businesslike wing of the Negro movement. Maxwell Rabb assured his superiors in the White House that the “entire character” of King’s plan had been modified so that the President “will not be adversely affected.” The NAACP campaign advanced parochial interests in the process of achieving the common goal of White House clearance for the Lincoln Memorial permit. This was inside politics.