Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Prosecutors arranged an unusual Sunday arraignment for Izola Curry. She stood defiantly through Magistrate Vincent Rao’s recitation of the pertinent facts until he stated that she was alleged to have stabbed King with a knife. “No,” she interrupted sharply. “It was a letter opener.” Detectives sustained her correction. She had used an instrument quite different from the kitchen knife common to urban stabbings: a slender Japanese penknife with a gently curved blade and a handle of inlaid ivory. Like her Italian automatic, it was a stylish weapon. As a would-be assassin, Curry had expensive foreign tastes jarringly at odds with her low station as an itinerant Negro maid who had drifted alone for many years since leaving a broken home and a failed marriage. Shortly after the magistrate resumed his presentation, Curry interrupted again to announce that she was accusing King of “being mixed up with the communists,” adding that she had “reported the case to the FBI and it’s being looked into.” These statements landed her at Bellevue Hospital, where she was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Upon order of indefinite commitment to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, Curry disappeared permanently, leaving behind only a single deed of mysterious, unfathomable horror.

  Recovering at home, King settled into a period of relative stillness unique to his entire adult life. He delivered no speeches or sermons outside the Dexter pulpit for many weeks. Nor did he travel. From Virginia, where white leaders locked twelve thousand white and Negro children out of public schools that fall under the state’s new “massive resistance” laws, an old seminary acquaintance named Wyatt Tee Walker appealed to King to lend his presence in a protest march. “What we really need now, Mike, is your support,” he wrote. King begged off Walker’s march, citing his health. He also canceled his appearance at Randolph’s Youth March for Integrated Schools, in which Harry Belafonte and a jaunty Bayard Rustin led a thousand students from New York to Washington, in a novel protest that drew praise from the normally reserved Stanley Levison. “If the young people are aroused from their lethargy through this fight,” he wrote King, “it will affect broad circles throughout the country as well as vertically through the different economic stratifications. In this sense there is a great similarity to the student movement which emerged in the thirties in support of the great liberal issue of that day—the right to trade union organization…. Since I see this emerging around civil rights in that area, I am greatly encouraged.”

  The Edward Davis trial lasted all day on November 21 and well into the night. Complications of race, sex, and religion left every word of testimony subject to contrary interpretation, as many Negro spectators believed that the white prosecutors were really helping the defendant, Davis, and that the defense was really prosecuting the victim, Abernathy. Vivian Davis broke down on the stand as she testified about both “natural and unnatural” sexual acts with Abernathy at the home of a relative, and, pressed for an explanation, she described as unnatural what others called oral sex. Her husband testified that she had admitted the affair to him, and that he had warned Abernathy the previous May to stay away from her.

  In rebuttal, Abernathy offered a radically different account of his conversation with the defendant. Davis actually had come to him offering to kill white opponents of the MIA for money, Abernathy testified, and he had refused to entertain the idea. This testimony served to discredit Davis without going so far as to embrace the theory—widely believed by Negroes but unpalatable to the prosecutors and the all-white jury—that whites hostile to the MIA had hired Davis to ruin Abernathy by means of a spectacularly slanderous hoax. Some Negroes in the courtroom laughed when Davis hotly denied Abernathy’s story, but defense lawyers chipped away at its plausibility. Neither Davis’ character nor his wild daylight attack on the preacher seemed to fit Abernathy’s portrait of a spurned killer-for-hire, they suggested. And, in the absence of evidence that Davis had been paid anything at all, it seemed unlikely that money had induced him to take actions guaranteed to land him in jail, to destroy his wife’s reputation, and to mark him as a political traitor among his own people. The defense case rested on the theory that Davis’ motive was blind, irrational jealousy, which fit the crime.

  The jury required only thirteen minutes to agree, acquitting Davis on all charges. Its verdict surprised no one and proved nothing, as even a white defendant well might have escaped conviction on equivalent facts. Outside the courtroom, the social effects of the case offered a truer test of its impact. Davis soon divorced his wife, and she moved away from Montgomery to seek a new start. Abernathy, who had not wanted to bring charges against Davis at all, delivered a prepared statement to local newspapers branding the case as “another futile attempt on the part of the evil forces in our community to conquer by dividing.” He thanked “friends throughout the nation for the profound and unshakeable confidence which they have expressed in me and their abiding loyalty throughout this trying ordeal.”

  With King and other friends, Abernathy went to the Dexter basement that night to allow the pressure to drain. He was on edge and distraught, Vivian Davis’ testimony having obliterated his normal jocular mood. His friends sought to encourage him with observations that he had fared well, that nobody in his church or the community believed the Davises’ word over his. They predicted correctly that it would all soon be forgotten. Many factors, including the prestige of the pulpit and a gale-force crosswind of politics, helped protect Abernathy among Montgomery’s Negroes. In the great gulf between the races, there was no ground firm enough to support anything resembling an objective opinion. The Abernathy scandal illustrated the power of avoidance more strongly than anything in King’s experience, including the Walter McCall paternity dispute at Crozer. King was soon teasing Abernathy about the nasty things Vivian Davis had said about him.

  In Atlanta, personal strains of a different sort prolonged the ineffectiveness of the SCLC’s Crusade for Citizenship. John Tilley, the elderly Baltimore preacher finally hired as the SCLC’s executive director, was proving to be a disappointment. Tilley drew for King schematic charts of the SCLC’s primary functions and “the secondary functions which will make the primary or basic functions possible.” His gifts in this area had impressed the SCLC selection committee, but they registered few voters and exacerbated Ella Baker’s resentment of the preacher fraternity. Maddeningly to Baker, King was at once the antithesis of the preacher type and its epitome. In private, he was personable, self-effacing, willing to listen, to serve, and to work hard—all qualities that had induced Baker to extend her volunteer SCLC work for a full year, under adverse conditions. Within the SCLC, however, King was a preacher’s preacher, which brought him a degree of adulation that few institutions outside the Negro church could approach. At the third MIA Institute on Nonviolence in early December, the printed program called for a “Testimonial to Dr. King’s Leadership” during the main meeting, with formal speeches from six different preachers and a half-hour reserved for “General Expressions from the Floor.” To Ella Baker, frustrated by the SCLC’s bare solvency and its paralyzed registration campaign, this sort of activity was not mere froth but a harmful end in itself. She finally asked King directly why he permitted all the circular praise—the meetings of his friends to plan the literature that would be distributed at the conference in his honor. “Well, I don’t want to,” King told Baker. “The people want to do this.”

  King’s choices seemed to fuse. To do nothing was to accept praise. To act, to expose himself to further danger, was to seek praise. Even an act of criminal madness had brought him praise, and Abernathy’s private scandal had achieved the same result indirectly. King felt that he did not deserve what he was receiving and that he needed to change somehow. During his semi-withdrawal in the winter of 1958, his wife described him as a “guilt-ridden man” who was fearful of making the slightest mistake and obsessed with his notion of personal redemption through suffering. His friend L. D. Reddick, who was then finishing the first biography of King, wrote that the stabbing was a “natural turnin
g point in his life,” and made so bold as to recommend a “thoughtful reordering” of King’s priorities. Reddick called for more discipline and restraint in King, more political organization and more renunciation of worldly concerns. In short, he wanted King to remake himself in the service of his cause.

  In Washington that January of 1959, one of the more conspicuous changes involved the decor of Senator Lyndon Johnson’s office. The Majority Leader, buoyed by the twenty-eight-vote majority the Democrats had gained in the 1958 elections, annexed spacious new quarters and hired a New York decorator to furnish them in a style advertising a man comfortable with power. The result was a shimmering mixture of green and gold, soon nicknamed the Taj Mahal. From there, Johnson moved quickly to place his personal stamp on the new Senate by controlling its most volatile institutional issue—the cloture rule, which governed the chances of civil rights bills. One by one, he summoned the incoming senators to flatter, cajole, or intimidate them. No matter how many liberals had been elected in 1958, Johnson told each one, he would never permit the radical relaxation of the cloture rule that reformers now thought possible. It would ruin the party in the South, he said, and worse, it would play into the hands of Vice President Nixon, who was using liberal Northern Democrats in a scheme to win Negro votes for the Republicans. In an impressive display of personal influence, Johnson induced many supporters of civil rights to help him crush the cloture reform movement in the new Senate.

  On February 4, Attorney General William Rogers told a White House meeting of Republican leaders that the Administration must submit a new civil rights bill in spite of the cloture defeat. There were technical flaws in the Voting Rights Act of 1957, he said, and at the very least a new proposal would reduce political resistance to the present law. Most Republican leaders, especially House Minority Leader Charles Halleck, wanted no part of a new civil rights bill. They reminded President Eisenhower of his speculation that the 1957 act would be the last for a decade or two, but Eisenhower said that he was friendly to any new bill addressing proven subterfuge against Negro voting rights. Chief of Staff Persons advised Rogers that no bill could go to Congress anytime soon, because the President had promised privately to give ample notice to Senate Majority Leader Johnson.

  This news visibly alarmed Rogers. “Excuse me, Mr. President,” he said quickly. “I think it would be a terrible mistake to tell Lyndon Johnson what we’re going to do. He’ll steal our bill and make it sound like the whole idea was his. I think he’s setting you up.”

  Eisenhower frowned. “Do you really think Lyndon is doing that?” he asked. He sent a message asking Johnson to come immediately to the White House. The Republican leaders drifted away, leaving Rogers and the President gossiping alone until the Majority Leader arrived. “Bill, if Lyndon tries to get around my desk, block him off,” Eisenhower said. “I can’t stand it when he grabs me by the lapel.” Sure enough, not long after bursting into the President’s office, Johnson jumped to his feet and began to circle the desk, and Rogers quickly interposed himself, absorbing the shoulder-thumping and finger-jabbing with which Johnson characteristically supplemented his conversation. By meeting’s end, Eisenhower was satisfied that Johnson would take only as much credit for the civil rights bill as was necessary to get it through the Senate. Such assurances became moot when the bill languished all year in committee.

  The civil rights issue intruded widely upon Eisenhower’s political dealings, including his uneasy alliance with Vice President Nixon. In disastrous campaign performances the previous fall, Nixon had tried an unusual rhetorical mix. Prevented by Eisenhower from advocating defense increases in the wake of Sputnik, he had courted the hardshell vote with diatribes calling the Democratic Party a “haven for socialists” and worse. At the same time, prevented by Eisenhower from being too specific about civil rights, he had sought liberal and Negro votes with vague promises in race relations. Each of his pitches was faulted for excessive partisanship, and they clashed so sharply in tone as to renew doubts about Nixon’s sincerity. The 1958 elections had forced him into a career reappraisal.

  At a political meeting that winter, Nixon suggested that the Administration push strongly to enact tax credits for tuition paid to private schools. The idea, he explained, was to reach out to the growing number of families that would like to send their children to private schools but were pained by the cost. He wanted the Republicans to run on what he called “the erosion of the middle class,” by appealing to resentment against social leveling and a perceived loss of privilege. Nixon’s presentation moved Eisenhower to contradict him in the presence of the other Republican leaders. The middle class was not disappearing, said the President. It was more prosperous and far larger than ever in history. What was disappearing were the laboring classes, who were sending their children to college in staggering numbers. Eisenhower emphasized the astonishing breadth of progress during his own lifetime, but Nixon held his ground through an increasingly personal debate. New professionals and others rising to the middle class felt threatened, he insisted. Middle-class people believed they were “sinking.” Politically, Nixon was beginning to depend less on theory and more on the status desires of people like himself. He was becoming less of a civil rights man, more grasping, more of a demographer. Comparatively speaking, Eisenhower was an idealist.

  Early that February in New York, King met his traveling companions for the India trip: Coretta and L. D. Reddick. Crusader Without Violence, Reddick’s biography of King, was just coming off the press, which added to the excitement of departure. At a final rendezvous, Rustin provided a new stack of materials about India that included an essay on Gandhi’s shanti sena, or “nonviolent army,” which Rustin called “the latest thinking on the latest concept in the Gandhi movement.” King wanted time to absorb Gandhism as a discipline that might help him escape a drift toward stagnation as a glorified after-dinner speaker. Personally, he wanted to study Gandhi’s lifelong struggle to harmonize his own life with his philosophy. King found much to tease himself and Coretta about on these accounts. Embarking on a trip to study Gandhi, a man who had renounced wealth, sex, and all clothing except his loincloth, the Kings carried trunks stuffed with suits and dresses to wear at the most elegant of the hotels built during the British Raj. Their first act on the trip was to pay a large tariff for excess baggage.

  This was the sort of thing that annoyed Reddick, who was devoted to King but prickly by nature and highly independent of mind. Reddick thought King was too passive. Ironically, Reddick himself proposed a distraction that nearly wrecked the trip at the outset. He persuaded the Kings to abort their stay in London to spend a few days in Paris with Reddick’s old friend Richard Wright, author of Native Son, then catch their scheduled London—New Delhi flight during a stopover in Zurich. All went well until the King party learned that their plane from London had been ordered to bypass Zurich’s dense fog and head straight toward Delhi. Geography, weather, and foreign languages combined against them, with the result that they found themselves on a train through the Swiss Alps when the plane that was supposed to be carrying them was passing over Iran. In Delhi, a crowd of some five hundred people gathered at the airport, many bearing garlands. By the time investigators established that King never boarded his ticketed flight in London, the airport crowd had dissolved in confusion.

  King tried desperately to reach Delhi by the second night of his India tour, but he failed. At the hour when he was supposed to be entering Prime Minister Nehru’s sandstone palace for dinner, he had given up for the night in Bombay. Alone on the airport bus, like ordinary tourists, he and his companions recoiled from the sight of emaciated people densely packed on the sidewalks and in doorways along Bombay’s narrow streets—an immense human carpet of homelessness. Sudden exposure to India’s starkest extremes did little to console them for the disaster of missing Nehru.

  A small replica of Sunday’s crowd convened two days late to greet the embarrassed King party at Delhi’s Palam Airport. Each of the two organizations s
ponsoring the visit had assigned a guide for the duration of the trip—James Bristol for the American Friends Service Committee and Swami Vishwananda for the Gandhi Memorial Trust. The two guides gave King a piece of extraordinary good news: Nehru had agreed to reschedule the King dinner for that very night. Government experts considered this nothing less than a miracle, given the ramifications likely to befall Nehru for being willing to shift his schedule to benefit a man without diplomatic rank.

  The Prime Minister greeted the King party wearing the white jacket that had made him famous in world fashion, with a rose pinned to the breast. Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, served as hostess. The other guests were Nehru’s confidante Lady Mountbatten and Pamela Mountbatten, the wife and daughter of Lord Mountbatten, the last British Viceroy of India, with whom Gandhi and Nehru had negotiated the details of Indian independence a dozen years earlier. At dinner, Nehru impressed King with knowledgeable remarks about the Montgomery bus boycott and King’s subsequent career. He strongly defended India’s foreign policy of “nonalignment,” arguing that it was not passivity in the face of the ideological struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, but rather an aggressive strategy to induce the superpowers to see each other through eyes less blinded by hatred and pride. King spoke so often about his desire to learn more of Gandhi’s nonviolence that Nehru felt obliged to remind him that it was impossible to say how the surprisingly pragmatic Mahatma might have dealt with the concrete problems of modern India, let alone the problems King faced in the United States. His replies disappointed King slightly, but the two men discussed race, colonialism, Gandhi, communism, and nonviolence largely without interruption for nearly four hours. The other guests listened politely but somewhat restlessly; Coretta retained vivid memories of the splendor and the parlor courtesies.