Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Early in the new year, Stanley Levison and Bayard Rustin contrived to rescue the Crusade for Citizenship by implanting a very special person as an ad hoc staff commander. They arranged to meet King alone during one of his flight layovers at New York’s La Guardia Airport, where they delicately proposed that he authorize them to recruit Ella Baker for the job. Baker, their partner in a working triumvirate at In Friendship, had joined the NAACP in 1940 and become something of a legend for her prowess in organizing youth chapters in the South. After resigning in 1946 as national director of branches, she had served for a time as president of the New York chapter, the first woman to hold such an office. Since then, she had patched together a meager living as a freelance civil rights consultant, on grants from the YWCA and kindred groups.

  As Rustin and Levison expected, King balked at their proposition. He was not sure that a woman could be effective. He thought the SCLC board might be more comfortable with a preacher, and in any case he wanted to talk things over with his selection committee. Levison and Rustin brushed aside all such objections. This was an emergency, they said. The crusade was scheduled to open simultaneously in twenty-one Southern cities on February 12, Lincoln’s Birthday, but as yet the SCLC had no central office. The plain fact was that the SCLC was muddling toward disaster. Its selection committee had been dancing a roundelay with various preacher candidates for the SCLC job, all of whom wanted to keep their pulpits at least part-time. Baker, by contrast, had no family or job encumbrances. She would cost the SCLC nothing because her living expenses could be raised in New York, and she was much more experienced in the work than anyone the SCLC could hope to find. Levison and Rustin told King that while they were not sure Baker would accept the job, he must let them try to persuade her. King finally agreed, on the condition that Baker be promised no SCLC money and only an “acting” director’s title.

  Leaving the airport with this limited mandate, Levison and Rustin congratulated themselves for having had the foresight to exclude Baker from the initial presentation. They knew that she would have been put off by all the elliptical talk of church protocol and by King’s condescension toward professional women. Baker was sensitive on both issues. Only to close friends did she entrust the confession that long ago she had been married briefly and painfully to a preacher. Now, she said proudly, she belonged to no man. Although a faithful member of Kilgore’s church in New York, Baker often expressed herself tartly about the self-preoccupation of preachers, whom she called “glory-seekers.” It was no surprise to Levison or Rustin that she resented news of being “volunteered,” without her knowledge, for an onerous task, and they were obliged to spend many hours lobbying against her misgivings.

  Ella Baker flew to Atlanta sooner than she had promised and checked into the Savoy Hotel on Auburn Avenue. She began with nothing—not even a telephone or a typewriter—but by the crusade’s opening day a month later she had compiled a list of events in all twenty-one places, produced and distributed literature, collected information on the various states’ registration laws, and established herself as a master of stratagems for surmounting the legal obstacles to Negro registration. The events on opening day consisted essentially of church rallies, for which the SCLC’s leading preachers swapped pulpits. King himself appeared in Miami, where he announced the crusade’s purpose in an impassioned but unusually lean address. “We want the right to vote now,” he said. “We do not want freedom fed to us in teaspoons over another 150 years.”

  The simultaneous rallies were generally enthusiastic and well attended, but by the hard measure of registration statistics they led to very little gain. A month later, the Associated Press released a story that the SCLC’s crusade had produced negligible increases in Negro registration. Ella Baker, who was staying on in Atlanta, defended the program in a report citing ongoing registration drives in a dozen cities, but privately she agreed with the criticism. The SCLC ministers showed little interest in following up the great exhortations with efforts to identify, instruct, transport, and otherwise support potential registrants, she believed. One SCLC preacher went so far as to tell King that he had “packed the church” on Crusade Day himself and therefore did not need Baker’s “superfluous printing.” To Baker, this complaint exemplified the worst of the pulpit mentality. She told King that he needed to work harder to set an example for the other ministers, to convince them that the great emotional events were just the beginning, not the end, of a perilous movement such as voter registration. Baker was careful not to disagree too sharply with King, but subtle sparks flew between them within weeks of her arrival in Atlanta. She had no better luck than anyone else in locating him by telephone, and King’s secretary reported that Baker was “a little abrupt” after being told that he was not available to take one of her calls.

  Baker’s emergency stint at the SCLC stretched through the spring with no end in sight, as negotiations for a permanent director remained mired in the selection committee. She sent information on the persecution of would-be voters in the South to Levison for inclusion in the In Friendship newsletter, and she conducted an SCLC voters’ conference in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Fewer than two hundred people showed up for the public rally there, on one of the few occasions when King addressed a half-empty house. He delivered a stirring speech on the right to vote, and the SCLC representatives sent off another in their series of telegrams requesting an audience with President Eisenhower.

  Back in Montgomery, King found the usual enormous backlog of correspondence. A man serving a 198-year sentence in New Mexico for statutory rape pleaded for help, declaring his innocence. A girl from South Carolina wrote asking, “is dancing a sin and is Rock and Roll songs a sin when I sings them?” A preacher and part-time college professor wondered why King had not responded to his two previous letters, both of which concerned his application on May 11 to become the first Negro to enroll at the University of Mississippi. This last matter became urgent when Mississippi authorities committed the professor to the state mental institution on the explicit ground that only an insane Negro would seek admission to Ole Miss. King issued a statement of protest, and Ella Baker asked an SCLC representative to visit the new inmate at the sanitarium. In the midst of all this, King received his first call from the White House. A presidential aide asked whether he could come to Washington to discuss a possible meeting with Eisenhower. “When?” asked King. “I can come day after tomorrow.”

  Shifts in the White House bureaucracy facilitated King’s breakthrough. Sherman Adams had asked Rocco Siciliano, an oil-company labor lawyer serving as the President’s special assistant for personnel management, to take over the civil rights duties of cabinet secretary Maxwell Rabb, who had just resigned. Siciliano did not welcome the assignment. His primary mission in the White House was to push for legislation granting higher pay to federal employees in the upper ranks. He also supported the controversial “long weekend” proposal by which President Eisenhower later ordered some federal holidays to be observed on Mondays. Any identification as a “liberal” hurt Siciliano’s advocacy of both causes, and he knew nothing of civil rights. Still, he could not refuse Adams.

  Going through Rabb’s civil rights files for the first time, Siciliano noticed that for five years White House officials had fended off the persistent requests of Negro leaders for a presidential meeting. Moreover, the President’s standing on civil rights had been battered lately by the indictment on income tax charges of his chief Negro supporter, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell. Siciliano decided to explore ways of getting Eisenhower off the defensive. He called King, the Negro preacher down in Alabama whose name currently aroused no special animus among Republicans.

  As usual, ferocious infighting preceded the presidential audience. When King walked into the White House alone on June 9, Siciliano and E. Frederic Morrow quickly made it plain that there were only two issues: which of the many Negro leaders should see Eisenhower, and what they would say to him. They preferred only King and Randolph, and wanted pointedly to
exclude Powell and Wilkins. King made an issue only of Wilkins, saying that it would be “impossible” for him to see Eisenhower without the NAACP leader. Over the next two weeks, King pressed the White House aides to add Lester Granger, executive director of the Urban League. Sherman Adams tried to block the meeting, or at least Wilkins, but then a House subcommittee set off the most spectacular personal scandal of the Eisenhower presidency by accusing Adams of petty corruption. The “vicuna coat” scandal ruined Adams, who soon resigned his office in a nationally televised address. Although his troubles lowered White House resistance, the proposed meeting came under rearguard attack from Adam Clayton Powell. Furious that he was to be excluded, he issued a face-saving statement that it was all his idea and that he himself had named the Negroes who would attend. White House press secretary James Haggerty rebuked Powell with a terse denial, and the ensuing protest grew so intense that E. Frederic Morrow left Washington to escape his phone. King, being pressed for support by his embattled, volatile fellow preacher, asked Rustin and Levison to compose for him a letter of vague but careful endorsement.* The advisers “conditioned” a discreet statement on Powell’s “adherence to principle,” as Levison wrote King. He hoped the veiled warning would “help Adam mature.”

  King, Randolph, Wilkins, and Granger arrived at the White House early on the morning of Monday, June 23, 1958, having stayed up most of the previous night to compose a joint statement. They were greeted by Siciliano, Morrow, and the new Attorney General, William P. Rogers, who would accompany them to see the President. The three Administration officials left the four Negroes in Siciliano’s office while they gave Eisenhower his final advance briefing. As they talked, Siciliano looked anxiously to his two colleagues to remind them of a delicate point they had agreed to make. When neither Rogers nor Morrow responded, a slightly annoyed Siciliano summoned his courage and said, “Mr. President, there are two words that generally cause some negative reaction that I might suggest you not use when you talk with them. These two words are ‘patience’ and ‘tolerance.’”

  Eisenhower frowned. “Well, Siciliano, you think I’m going to avoid good English words?” he replied.

  “No, sir,” Siciliano said uncomfortably. “I was just trying to point out that there are certain things that might cause the wrong reaction.”

  The prearranged format of the meeting gave King an advantage, as he was the only preacher on his side. His three colleagues were skilled bargainers, but Eisenhower was far from ready to bargain with them. He wanted only to listen. After Randolph read the text of a nine-point plan for increased White House leadership in civil rights, King preached a short sermon on the powers of moral leadership. He struck a positive tone, painting vivid pictures of the beneficial effects the President could set in motion with gestures such as speeches, White House conferences, and simple statements on the moral imperatives of racial integration. His role was to try to lure Eisenhower into greater activity by summoning up feelings of duty and glory. Wilkins followed in support of the three legislative recommendations, and Lester Granger closed with an uncharacteristically blunt report, telling Eisenhower that bitterness among Negroes was stronger now than ever in his lifetime. Granger said Eisenhower’s calls for patience made leadership more difficult for Negro moderates, and that more divisive leaders would emerge if the current ones could not soon point to greater progress.

  As soon as Granger finished, Attorney General Rogers spoke up to defend the Administration. As the Negroes were speaking, he had been skimming through the preface to their nine-part plan, which spoke of anger, failure, and despair, and contained Wilkins’ favorite line that the government could not hope to cure segregation “by prescribing an occasional tablet of aspirin and a goblet of goodwill.” Rogers did not like it. Fearing that it would be released to the press, he complained to Randolph that the preface was nothing like the oral presentation he had just delivered to the President. Rogers spoke authoritatively, as he considered the race issue to be his province within the Administration.*

  Eisenhower seconded his Attorney General, saying he was extremely dismayed to hear that after five years’ labor by his Administration, bitterness among Negroes was at its height. If bitterness was the result of progress, he wondered out loud, was it wise to push forward? Like Rogers, Eisenhower cast himself as the aggrieved party, matching his own vexations against the sufferings of Negroes as described by the four leaders. His tone moved Granger to reassure him that the bitterness of Negroes was not directed at him personally, nor at the Administration. Except for Eisenhower’s endorsement of the need for stronger voting rights legislation, nothing was concluded beyond a general agreement that the meeting had been constructive.

  King and his three companions strode briskly to the Fish Room of the White House to face the assembled White House press corps, augmented by at least a dozen Negro correspondents. “May I say that we were received graciously…” said Randolph. “The President manifested a profound interest in this whole question.” Paralyzed by the same logic that had silenced King after his Nixon meeting, the leaders refused to say anything that might alienate the government or that the White House might later deny. They took refuge in political babble, for which they suffered the punishment of irritated reporters. Wilkins parried increasingly barbed questions about why he was refusing to say anything critical about Eisenhower only a month after blasting him for insensitivity and inaction. Finally, when the first Negro member of the Washington Press Club demanded to know whether Eisenhower had “brainwashed” him and the others, Wilkins hastened to terminate the press conference.

  Publicly, the Eisenhower meeting remained an empty still-life, framed but devoid of substance. This was considered a blessing in the White House, and Siciliano reported to Eisenhower that the meeting had been “an unqualified success—even if success in this area is built on sand.” Privately, Siciliano took his own forebodings to heart. He decided that the civil rights assignment was hazardous to his career when Business Week published a photograph of the post-Adams White House staff with a caption identifying him as “Rocco Siciliano—Minorities.” Furious, Siciliano marched into the office of General Wilton Persons, the new chief of staff. “I can’t do this any longer,” he said. Persons, a native of Montgomery, did not object, and the Eisenhower White House never again assigned anyone to the civil rights portfolio.

  In mid-August, a group of prominent Indians led by R. R. Diwakar, chairman of the Gandhi Memorial Trust, made a pilgrimage to Montgomery to see King. While the Indians were happy to hear that he was still planning to visit India, Diwakar in particular took it upon himself to warn King about hardships ahead. Pointing to lessons from Gandhi, he advised King to prepare not just to talk about suffering but to endure physical sacrifice himself. The path of his life dictated such a course. King said he was ready. But for the moment his attention was diverted by the latest enhancement to his reputation. After the Indians departed, he sent an inscribed copy of his new book to Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Stanley Levison wrote him on August 15 with the good news that Harper & Brothers already had ordered a second printing, even though the book would not be published for another month.

  Troubles continued to hound Ralph Abernathy. The dispute within the MIA over its next desegregation target was nineteen months old, having already outlived the campaign to repair the bomb damage to Abernathy’s church. One leadership faction still wanted to attack the segregated facilities at the local airport, while Graetz and a group of lay leaders wanted to integrate the parks, playgrounds, and other municipal properties. In spite of much fanfare and preparation, neither plan produced results. Among many other effective countermoves, the city commissioners firmly declared that they would close all the parks before they would integrate them. Pressure to devise a new strategy fell heavily on Abernathy, as King was so frequently out of town, and Abernathy found no relief in his parallel duties as treasurer of the SCLC. In August, Ella Baker was reminding him yet again that the office still lacked a se
cretary and a mimeograph machine. These elementary deficiencies reflected poorly on an organization that claimed to be running voter registration drives in ten states.

  Late on the afternoon of Friday, August 29, 1958, Abernathy was working in his basement office at First Baptist when the husband of one of his church members walked in unannounced. “I guess you know why I have come,” said Edward Davis. “I have come to kill you.” With that, he pulled a small hatchet from his shirt and struck Abernathy with the handle. Terrified, Abernathy reached for the phone during the struggle that followed. Davis then stuck a pistol into his back, but when he hesitated to fire, either by plan or because inhibitions still checked his rage, Abernathy bolted out of the office screaming, “He wants to kill me!” He ran past his secretary, Alfreda Brown, up the stairs, and out the door.

  Davis was right behind him, brandishing the hatchet high in the air as he chased Abernathy down the middle of Columbus Avenue for two blocks. Among the astonished witnesses were two officers in a Montgomery police cruiser, who managed to catch Davis before he overtook Abernathy. Davis threw the hatchet when he saw them coming. There were conflicting reports as to whether he threw it down to get rid of it, or at Abernathy in a final burst of anger, but there was no doubting the pandemonium and shock. Davis, still almost berserk, flung his pistol out of the back of the police car. It went off when it hit the pavement, frightening and then enraging the policemen, who had been sloppy in their arrest procedure. At the station, Davis gave them an even bigger surprise by declaring that he had attacked Abernathy because the preacher had been having a sexual affair with his wife since she was fifteen years old. This stunning accusation against the second most important civil rights leader in Montgomery soon led to the interrogation of Vivian McCoy Davis, who, mortified by the news of what her husband had done and said, pitched such a fit of indignation that the police arrested her too, on a charge of disorderly conduct. Meanwhile, back at the police station, a shaken Abernathy, who had suffered bruises and minor cuts, refused to sign a complaint warrant against Davis, who was denying that he had ever touched the gun found in the street. A police officer signed a warrant based on his own eyewitness statement, and both Davises were bound over for arraignment.