Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  King worked on his speech, knowing that he would be addressing the largest live audience of his career. On one of his speaking tours before the Pilgrimage, he honed his text with his private editors, Rustin and Levison. Rustin objected strenuously to the most important line in King’s draft—“Give us the ballot!” In a working draft, he substituted the refrain “When we have achieved the ballot…”

  King studied the changes in frowning silence. “Bayard, this just doesn’t sit right on my tongue,” he said.

  “Well,” said Rustin, “tell me exactly what you want to say.”

  “Give…us…the…ballot,” said King, between long pauses. He practically sang the words, as though to emphasize that his concern was how they sounded as opposed to how they looked on paper.

  Taking a deep breath, Rustin explained his criticism. “Martin, colored people don’t want to have somebody ‘give’ them anything anymore,” he said. “Why don’t you say, ‘We demand the ballot!’? Something like that. ‘Give us’ just sort of falls like a pile of dirt.”

  King put on what Rustin called his gentle stare. “Well, Bayard,” he said, “I don’t mind your criticizing my ideas. But I don’t like your criticizing my words, because I’m better at words than you are.” This ended the argument. Rustin, unconvinced, feared that King’s mistake would cause pundits to brand him weak and ineffective.

  The Prayer Pilgrimage took place on May 17, 1957, the third anniversary of the Brown decision. A crowd of some thirty thousand people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial for a high-spirited program that lasted more than three hours. Randolph presided. Mahalia Jackson sang. A military helicopter buzzed overhead during Wilkins’ speech and then vanished during Adam Clayton Powell’s, prompting jokes about the influence Powell had earned by endorsing Eisenhower in the previous election. Most of the other speakers were preachers—Mordecai Johnson, William Holmes Borders, and Fred Shuttlesworth among them—or celebrities from a new crop of entertainers who were breaking out of the Negro market: Sammy Davis, Jr., Ruby Dee, Sidney Poitier, and Harry Belafonte. King came last. By the time Randolph presented him, the crowd had long since forgotten the injunction to maintain a prayerful decorum. Coretta, listening on the radio down in Montgomery, heard them roar when her husband hit his stride in protest of the nearly total disfranchisement of Southern Negroes. An astonished, somewhat chastened Bayard Rustin heard King roll out “Give us the ballot!” refrains like cannon bursts in a diplomatic salute. The crowd cheered lustily even when King strayed from his text to explain the distinctions between eros, filios, and agape, the three Greek words for “love.” Rustin decided that he had overestimated the importance of content. Press commentators would say that King’s performance proved that his Montgomery leadership was no fluke. Rustin already knew that, but he puzzled over King’s ability to move widely divergent audiences with material that seemed suited to a college student’s notebook.

  King wrote his letter to Vice President Nixon so that it would arrive on the day of the Pilgrimage. Reminding Nixon of his invitation in Ghana, King suggested four dates for a meeting in Washington. Nixon promptly confirmed what became, in the popular parlance of the new nuclear age, the first “summit conference” between a Negro leader and Nixon or Eisenhower. Still more promising results came from King’s performance at the Pilgrimage, when, only three days after the speech, cabinet secretary Maxwell Rabb tracked King down at the Statler Hotel in New York to say that Eisenhower himself would be pleased to see him soon.

  Rustin and Levison prognosticated, debated, and drilled King on what he should say to Nixon and to the reporters who would question him afterward. They went so far as to draft long memoranda that included questions anticipated at post-meeting press conferences and recommended responses. “If there is one concept of dominating importance it is that of the non-partisan approach,” they wrote King, concerned that Nixon might lure him into making public statements favoring the Republican Party. The two advisers knew that King was vulnerable to blandishments from the Republicans, because Daddy King and nearly all the most powerful preachers of the National Baptist Convention were lifelong Republicans. By force and repetition, they urged on King a “superhuman vigilance” against partisanship, citing “the extreme importance of this conference for race relations.”

  Accompanied by Abernathy, King arrived at the Formal Room of the U.S. Capitol on June 13, 1957, to keep his appointment with Vice President Nixon, who was seconded by Labor Secretary James P. Mitchell. Photographers were allowed inside to take pre-meeting shots of the four men posing in various combinations. When the doors were closed, King followed the pleasantries with a long monologue on the oppression of Negroes in the South. He repeated his request that President Eisenhower come South to deliver a speech calling for compliance with the Supreme Court’s school desegregation ruling and for the implementation of Negro voting rights. If the President could not come, King said, Nixon should. Nixon replied that he could perhaps arrange to attend a meeting of the President’s Committee on Government Contracts somewhere in the South. He invited King and Abernathy to help him choose the best site, and the three of them finally settled on New Orleans or Atlanta. During the discussion, Nixon established a tone of alliance between himself and the two preachers. The three of them were pitted against the powerful Southern Democrats in the Senate, who wanted no speeches, no hearings, no school desegregation, and no new civil rights bill. The liberal Democrats, he said, were prone to “grandstand” for extreme bills that had no chance of beating a Southern filibuster, while some Republicans were careless or lazy because they had negligible civil rights constituencies.

  The Vice President got so caught up in the politics of passing the Administration’s civil rights bill that he lost track of time. Two hours went by, with seventy reporters still waiting outside. Flashbulbs lit up the faces of King and Abernathy when they finally emerged. As reporters crushed in upon them with questions, Bayard Rustin appeared from the wings to announce that Dr. King would not answer any questions. Shouting above the hubbub, he managed to maneuver King and Abernathy out the door and into a waiting car, leaving some of the Negro journalists especially angry to be left quoteless. King never gave them anything more than the vaguest accounts of the talk with Nixon. Rustin’s logic, to which King acceded, was that King could not discuss the meeting without sounding partisan or risking contradiction from the Administration.

  Privately, King told Rustin that Nixon was a mixture of enthusiasm with pragmatism, whose general stance was that he would help the cause of civil rights if he could do so without getting hurt politically. King’s major reservation about the Vice President was that his relish and conviction seemed so evenly applied to all subjects as to mask his interior substance. Nixon was “magnetic,” King wrote a year later, in a public letter that darted between flattery and suspicion. “I would say that Nixon has a genius for convincing one that he is sincere. When you are close to Nixon he almost disarms you with his apparent sincerity…. And so I would conclude by saying that if Richard Nixon is not sincere, he is the most dangerous man in America.”

  Nixon, for his part, privately told his colleagues at the White House that King had promised to launch a massive voter registration drive if the voting rights bill became law. Both King and Abernathy confided that they had voted Republican in 1956, he said, and they believed most new Negro voters would vote Republican too. In a separate message, Nixon said he thought Eisenhower would enjoy talking with King. He assured the President that King was not “a man who believes in violent and retaliatory pro-Negro actions.”

  Senate debate on the first civil rights bill in 82 years consumed 121 hours and 31 minutes, with South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond breaking the filibuster record by holding the floor for a little more than 24 continuous hours. Aside from such dedicated segregationists, the legislative tangle defied conventional political labels. Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson of Texas worked conspicuously to engineer passage of a bill that would appear more his than Eisenhowe
r’s. Careening around the Senate floor, often waving his arms in a giant windmill motion to spur the pace of Senate business, Johnson whittled the bill down to minimal form on what he thought was the political center of gravity. Then he argued inevitability to both sides, telling liberals that it was as potent as possible and Southern Democrats that it was as weak as possible. Johnson bludgeoned, wheedled, and horse-traded for votes. His opponent, cast in the unlikely role as chief crusader for the strongest possible bill, was the archconservative Republican leader William Knowland of California. Knowland’s family owned the Oakland Tribune, a newspaper notoriously unfriendly to Negroes.

  Organized labor further complicated the political alignments by weighing in largely on the side of the Southerners. Because too many strikes had been broken, they argued, by state militia acting on the authority of a single judge’s injunction, labor leaders supported an amendment that guaranteed the right of a jury trial to state officials accused of violating court orders on voting rights. Wilkins argued vehemently that such an amendment effectively would nullify the voting rights provision, as it was generally accepted that no Southern jury would return convictions against state officials in Negro voting rights cases. Nevertheless, many labor leaders joined the anti-labor South, and Wilkins sided with an old nemesis, Senator Knowland.

  The climactic moment came just after midnight on August 2. Johnson, having deleted from the bill a provision empowering the Justice Department to sue for the enforcement of school desegregation, brought the jury trial amendment up for a final vote. A few liberal Democrats and Republicans—squeezed between Negroes and Eisenhower on one side and Johnson, the Southerners, and organized labor on the other—sided with Johnson. Senators Henry Jackson and John F. Kennedy went with Johnson at the last minute, a defection that civil rights leaders would not soon forget, and the jury trial amendment passed by a vote of 51-42. Reporters who swarmed onto the Senate floor heard Vice President Nixon denounce the Senate’s action as “a vote against the right to vote.” Nixon collared Johnson in the cloakroom and conceded only temporary defeat, vowing to pass a stronger bill the next year. The NAACP’s Clarence Mitchell was astonished to see the tough old-guard Minority Leader, William Knowland, break into tears in his office because of the setback to civil rights. At a cabinet meeting later that morning, Eisenhower called the jury trial amendment one of the worst political losses of his Administration. Having been rebuffed on voting rights, the one area in which he strongly supported the Negro movement, Eisenhower faced renewed pressure from Negroes on issues where his private sympathies lay with the Southerners.

  The amended civil rights bill passed the Senate less than a week later. Once again, the occasion itself was more important than the content. Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson praised the bill as “one of the great achievements since the war,” and The New York Times called it “incomparably the most significant domestic action of any Congress in this century.” Such enthusiasm strained the bounds of credulity, certainly in the minds of civil rights leaders themselves. Roy Wilkins convened a meeting in the Washington office of Joseph Rauh—a well-known white labor lawyer and founder, with Reinhold Niebuhr and others, of Americans for Democratic Action—at which the sole topic of discussion was whether to urge Eisenhower to veto the weakened measure as worthless. The argument raged all day in the crowded room, as coffee cups and phone messages piled up on the desks. When Wilkins finally decided to take the bill, and King announced later that he agreed, leading Negro newspapers attacked both of them for their moderation. “How silly can you get?” the Chicago Defender asked of King. Wilkins defended the decision in his customary style. “If you are digging a ditch with a teaspoon and a man comes along and offers you a spade,” he said, “there is something wrong with your head if you don’t take it because he didn’t offer you a bulldozer.”

  Although King and Wilkins both endorsed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the effect of the law was to highlight the differences between them. To Wilkins, the law meant that the NAACP’s legislative campaign was making its first meager gains. Civil rights was no longer a “virgin,” he said. To King, the lesson of the bill was that Negroes should place less reliance on white institutions and take more responsibility upon themselves. On the same day that the Senate finally passed the Johnson bill, King called his council of preachers together in Montgomery for another meeting. The preachers changed the name of their new organization for the fourth and last time, becoming the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. On King’s recommendation, they adopted a permanent structure that was carefully designed to minimize friction with the NAACP. King’s SCLC was established as a consortium of institutional affiliates—mostly churches and civic groups. Unlike the NAACP, the SCLC had no individual memberships, and therefore the two organizations would not compete for members. SCLC leaders emphasized that theirs was a supplementary body whose purpose was to enable the region’s Negro leaders to plan activities parallel to those of the NAACP. Their first goal was to register two million new Negro voters before the 1960 presidential election.

  This diplomatic mimicry was small consolation to Wilkins, who realized that the preachers around King represented prominent Negro churches in the South, which were the principal source of NAACP revenue. “What sound reason is there for having two organizations with the same goal when one has been doing such an effective job?” asked the Pittsburgh Courier a few days after the Montgomery SCLC meeting. Wilkins saw the SCLC moving into a vacuum that was partially King’s own creation. The NAACP was entangled in twenty-five separate lawsuits challenging its right to operate in the South, most of them filed by hostile states and municipalities. The pioneer action, which had effectively abolished the NAACP in Alabama, had been aimed at King’s Montgomery bus boycott. Wilkins feared that mass actions of the sort proposed by King might put the NAACP out of business in the South altogether. It was mass action by hostile white people that NAACP strategists saw as the greatest threat to their long struggle for school desegregation. They saw the Little Rock crisis as a timely demonstration of their point.

  On September 4, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus ordered the National Guard to prevent nine Negro students from enrolling in previously all-white Central High School. School administrators, who had been preparing for this day since the Brown decision three years earlier, were patrolling the school corridors urging unruly students to refrain from “incidents” and to think of themselves, the school, and the nation at all times. Some faculty members grumbled about having to cook their own meals and sweep their own classrooms, after Faubus’ troops barred Negro service workers as well as the nine new students, but most teachers behaved with scrupulous rectitude. So did most of the white students. Nearly all of them opposed integration, but those who shouted out the window about “getting the niggers” generally came from the same minority of troublemakers who refused to tuck in their shirts.

  The day’s events opened the spectacular public phase of what became known as the Little Rock crisis. An ever larger mob of angry white adults gathered outside Central High each morning to make sure the troops turned the Negro students away, and a corresponding corps of reporters arrived to write about the troops, the mob, the students, the governor, and, eventually, President Eisenhower. The prolonged duration and the military drama of the siege made Little Rock the first on-site news extravaganza of the modern television era. Faubus became the center of national attention as he sparred with federal courts over their authority to make him rescind his orders to the troops. Legal experts agreed that Faubus, by using the armed forces of a state to oppose the authority of the federal government, had brought on the most severe test of the Constitution since the Civil War. King and Wilkins were among those sending telegrams calling for the President to take a firm stand.

  Ten days into the crisis, Faubus flew to Newport, Rhode Island, for a private conference with Eisenhower. To the President and his aides, Faubus seemed to have a split personality. One moment he was an anguished politician searchin
g for a way to end a confrontation that had gotten out of hand, and the next moment he was a publicity genius ranting about federal plots to have him dragged off in chains. White House aides puzzled over the governor’s personal psychodrama, which seemed to weave in and out of the public arena. Faubus’ own father, who was attacking him for racism in pseudonymous newspaper letters, was said to believe that the governor’s true motive was to embarrass the white patricians who had fled to the Little Rock suburbs, leaving him with the race problem. Whatever his motives, Faubus annoyed Eisenhower by agreeing to a draft statement but then changing the words before he released it back home. Eisenhower stated repeatedly that the law must be obeyed but that he could think of few things worse than using federal force to overpower Faubus’ troops. Faubus seized upon the statements to claim that the President was working secretly with the segregationists.

  After another week of mounting crisis, the federal court finally cornered Faubus with an ironclad contempt citation, and the governor, negotiating furiously with congressmen, lawyers, White House aides, and other intermediaries, appeared willing to shift the mission of his Guardsmen: instead of protecting the white school from the nine Negro children, they would protect the nine Negro children from a white mob that had reached the size of a battalion. “Now begins the crucifixion!” the governor declared in a dirge of surrender that made headlines, but on Monday, September 23, he crossed up the White House again by simply withdrawing the National Guard from the scene, leaving the school to the mob. By midmorning, angry whites had beaten at least two Negro reporters, broken many of the school’s windows and doors, and come so close to capturing the Negro students that the Little Rock police evacuated them in desperation. Central High was segregated again before lunch, and students joined the mob in cheers of victory.