Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  In addition, King recommended that yet another SCLC peace-seeking mission be dispatched to NAACP headquarters in New York to “clear up what appears to be seeds of dissention [sic] being sown by persons in the top echelon in the NAACP.” King wanted to bargain with Wilkins, but the SCLC preachers were quick to point out that he would reduce his leverage if he hired Rustin, whose background was well known to Wilkins. As always, it seemed, one of King’s goals was hostage to another. The recommendations were postponed indefinitely—at least until Rustin returned from his latest excursion, a political caravan deep into French colonial Africa.

  Limits finally overtook King at the end of the decade. He decided to apply himself directly to strengthening the SCLC, which had been floundering for nearly three years. Almost inevitably, the decision required him to move to SCLC headquarters in Atlanta. This meant the elimination of months of aggregate time spent waiting at the Atlanta airport during layovers. Almost anything moving in or out of the South had to go through Atlanta, and King was no exception. Of course, Atlanta also meant Ebenezer and Daddy King. The elder King, just now turning sixty, had never ceased to remind his son that he looked forward to his return to the pulpit that had been in the family throughout the twentieth century.

  King knew that to return to Atlanta without returning to Ebenezer would grieve his father beyond repair. He also knew that Ebenezer’s membership was falling off—partly, he suspected, because Daddy King was getting tired and was taking the congregation for granted, often preparing his sermons on the church platform during the services. King’s younger brother was just leaving a stint as assistant pastor there, having grown out of his rebellion enough to enter the ministry but not enough to tolerate the daily supervision of Daddy King. King believed that he, unlike A.D., could make a symbiotic co-pastorate work. Daddy King could continue to manage the church; King could draw large new crowds. Indeed, the greater part of the family burden caused by a move to Atlanta would seem to fall on Coretta. She would become co-First Lady of Ebenezer with her mother-in-law, and would live in dependence on Daddy King, who had vociferously opposed King’s marriage to her.

  For some months, King had been cajoling Abernathy to go with him to Atlanta to become the SCLC’s full-time executive director. Abernathy resisted. He loved his job at historic First Baptist, and he liked the prospect of succeeding King in Montgomery as president of the MIA. Most of all, he could not bear to face life in Atlanta without a pulpit. No matter how many times King guaranteed that he could preach somewhere in Atlanta every Sunday—and might even make more money in guest fees than as a permanent pastor—Abernathy protested that it would never be the same. He wanted to follow King almost anywhere, he said, if he could figure out a way to remain captain of a ship.

  King finally lost patience. “Make up your mind,” he said sharply. “I can’t wait on you forever.”

  Abernathy was hurt. “You’ve never talked to me that way before, Michael,” he said. (He and King had fallen into a habit of calling each other by their “real” first names in private matters.) It was unfair, Abernathy complained, to expect him to leave the pulpit when King himself was planning to move to Ebenezer.

  King seemed to be overcome at once by remorse. After a long silence he said, “David, I told you that I remember watching my daddy walk the benches when I was a little boy.”

  “I know,” Abernathy said quietly. “Walking the benches” referred to ministers who leaped from the pulpit in mid-sermon to preach ecstatically as they danced up and down the pews, literally stepping over the swooning bodies in the congregation. Abernathy knew that King considered it the most vaudevillian, primitive aspect of his heritage.

  “He walked the benches,” King repeated, in humiliation and wonder. “He did it to feed and educate his family. Now I’ve got to help him. Don’t you see that?”

  “I know, Michael, I know,” said Abernathy. He protested no more, but neither did he agree to go to Atlanta. When the difficulty passed and they regained their humor, King gave him two weeks to decide.

  King’s own decision, while wrenching in its formation, was carried out with the utmost formality. He called R. D. Nesbitt, the deacon who first had found him as a student six years earlier, eating a plate of pork chops at Daddy King’s house. The two of them sat on the front porch of the Dexter parsonage as King told Nesbitt he would resign on the last Sunday of November, effective the last Sunday in January, 1960. In making the announcement from the Dexter pulpit on Sunday, November 29, King tried first to heap upon himself all the burdens of fame and responsibility, saying that he had been doing the work of “five or six people,” traveling, speaking, laboring under the demands not only of Montgomery but of the entire nation, suffering “the general strain of being known.” By always “giving, giving, giving, and not stopping to retreat,” he said, he had reduced himself almost to a “physical and psychological wreck.” King exposed in himself all the grand, raw self-pity of the unpolished martyr. Two days later, he revealed the flip side of his mood in an expansive declaration for the press. “The time has come for a broad, bold advance of the southern campaign for equality,” he said. “…I am convinced that the psychological moment has arrived…. We must train our youth and adult leaders in the techniques of social change through nonviolent resistance. We must employ new methods of struggle involving the masses of the people.”

  That same Tuesday, Georgia governor Ernest Vandiver responded publicly to reports that King was moving to Atlanta. “Wherever M. L. King, Jr., has been there has followed in his wake a wave of crimes including stabbing, bombings, and inciting of riots, barratry, destruction of property and many others,” Vandiver declared. “For these reasons, he is not welcome to Georgia. Until now, we have had good relations between the races.”

  King worried about the diplomacy of his return to Atlanta, the South’s most visible and self-conscious city. Atlanta was perhaps the only metropolis in America where the members of an enlightened white oligarchy spoke frankly and easily of themselves as “the power structure.” The Negro leaders did pretty much the same in their own sphere. Consequently, King knew that his every move was under close scrutiny. Constitution editor Ralph McGill said that Atlanta whites were on guard, like “citizens of medieval walled cities who heard that the great plague was coming.” King was returning to the city of “Sweet Auburn” Avenue, Negro banks, and the comfortable homes spreading out through the West Side beyond the Atlanta University complex. His parents had made the move to the West Side, and were now enduring the long commutes across town to and from Ebenezer, but King decided to move his family into a small rented home on the less fashionable East Side, not far from the church. This raised some eyebrows, as did his old 1954 Pontiac, and when word spread through Negro Atlanta that King was thinking of buying a house in the barely respectable Vine City area, which was dotted with slum housing, there was talk that the Kings were too conspicuously humble. They did no lavish entertaining. King drew a token salary of only $1 a year from the SCLC and a middling $6,000 from Ebenezer. His standard of living was perceived to be jarringly beneath his stature in the world.

  King told Negro reporters that he was not coming to take over the Negro leadership but to “render any assistance” he could. In this and other ways, he downplayed his homecoming in order to placate Atlanta’s established Negro leaders, most of whom had known him as a small boy. “I grew up with those people,” he told an SCLC colleague. “They’ll eat me alive if I make a mistake.” But his sensitivities about what he called bourgeois living standards ran deep. The toddler who wanted to “get me some big words” was the same one whose earliest memories were of bread lines in the Depression. He was ambivalent—a humble prince. He stopped to chat amiably with the poorest people he encountered on the street, but he had the SCLC issue a special press release announcing that he had been invited to speak in the chapel of Harvard University. Coretta shared his political values, but she brought her cook with her from Montgomery, and her early moves in the new c
ity established her as adept in the way of the Atlanta aristocracy. To find a babysitter and errand-runner in the new town, she called the wife of the Spelman College president and asked her to send over a suitable student.

  King’s shift back home to Atlanta marked a transition between decades. In Nashville, on successive Saturdays, James Lawson sent a dozen of his most disciplined student Gandhians, John Lewis among them, into the segregated areas of downtown department stores. Their refusal to move on as ordered caused some disruption, but their unfailing politeness and the novelty of their method reduced the tension to about the level of a party-crashing. The students returned to Lawson’s workshops for evaluations of their test demonstrations.

  In San Francisco, at the annual convention of the AFL-CIO, A. Philip Randolph spoke from the floor three times in a single day, each time seeking action against official segregation within member unions. This was one time too many for AFL-CIO president George Meany. “Who the hell appointed you the guardian of all the Negroes in America?” he shouted from the podium. The affront stimulated Randolph to organize a Negro labor federation outside the AFL-CIO in order to bring pressure on Meany.

  At the White House, President Eisenhower brooded about the property confiscations and other anti-American actions taken by the revolutionary government in Cuba. “Castro begins to look like a madman,” he fumed to his aides, and he briefly entertained a plan to strangle Cuba with a naval blockade. As always, however, Eisenhower kept his alarm to himself. Having used his avuncular patience and his military steadiness many times over the past decade to muffle crises that threatened renewed world war, he was not about to change over a small island. Similarly, he restrained his burning fury against those he considered responsible for creating an atmosphere of feverish demand to spend more money on weapons. The demand had more to do with greed and anxiety than with military judgment, he believed, and was subverting both politics and military professionalism. Entering his last year as President, he denounced as “damn near treason” the behavior of military officers who lobbied through politicians and reporters for weapons that had been rejected with the government.

  With Stanley Levison, King confronted the last hurdles blocking the move to Atlanta: nettlesome tax audits by both the IRS and the state of Alabama. An auditor ordered King to prove that the money that passed through his bank account in excess of his declared income was not taxable—a challenge that hit King’s weak spot. Having routed all expense monies and donations through his own accounts, he found it almost impossible to substantiate those sums as legitimate deductions. He was especially hard pressed to satisfy the Alabama auditor, who refused to accept donations to the SCLC or the MIA as nontaxable contributions. King found it easier to pay under protest than to fight. He settled with the IRS for nearly $500 in back taxes, and his parting gift to Alabama was a check for $1,667.83.

  The King family returned to Montgomery at the end of January 1960 for King’s last official service at Dexter. They received from the congregation an engraved silver tea service and countless tender expressions of farewell. On the following night, Abernathy hosted a much more extravagant “Testimonial of Love and Loyalty,” at which the extreme sentiments of humility and royalty bathed each other in a warm harmony that was attainable almost nowhere else. The packed crowd rocked with “Amens” when told that Negroes in Montgomery remained psychologically and politically downtrodden—that too many of them still filed to the back of the bus in disregard of their boycott victory, that there were still no Negro bus drivers and not a single Negro policeman “to escort our children across the streets at the school as the white children are escorted.” Very few in the audience were allowed to vote, and even King himself could not get the “White” and “Colored” signs removed from the entrances to public places. These laments only highlighted the contrasting adulation of King, who, like Jesus, was praised as a savior on a donkey. No fewer than nine church choirs performed before the service began with a processional hymn called “The Integration Song,” in which the traditional Baptist refrain “When we all get to heaven” was changed to “When we all know justice.”

  During the service itself, five additional choirs saluted King. Representatives of Montgomery’s major Negro guilds and associations—the barbers, merchants, beauticians, doctors, preachers, and others—came forward in succession to pay tribute to King before he formally transferred the MIA’s official gavel to Abernathy. At the end, bearers came forward to present King with a last expression of homage: a wooden box filled with cash, as broad and deep as King’s shoulders, reaching from his midsection to his chin. King accepted all this like a monarch, but then, in the sort of gesture that made people shake their heads in wonder, he directed that the money be divided between the MIA and the SCLC. “And I mean every penny of it,” he quipped, in a backhanded tribute to the clergy’s reputation for accounting tricks. “I cannot claim to be worthy of such a tribute,” he added seriously. When he finished, they all sang “Blest Be the Tie That Binds” and received the benediction.

  King severed his last connections to Montgomery. In many respects, the first phase of his career had brought years of frustration. Even his trips abroad, like his White House audience, brought vexations, and the prodigious energies he had thrown into a thousand speeches had exposed as an illusion the hope that his larger purpose could be accomplished by political evangelism. These things were more troublesome to King than most people around him could have guessed, and yet they had benefited him more than he could know. The stale glories chipped away at the headiness and false wisdom attendant to early fame. They strengthened his already remarkable steadiness. The oratorical illusion had propelled him so rapidly around the country that he made in only a few years a lifetime supply of acquaintances, some of historic importance. The speeches also helped King learn to read audiences of every composition and above all to acknowledge the limits of his own special gift, oratory.

  Fate could have designed no better culmination of these lessons than events occurring simultaneously with the Testimonial of Love and Loyalty. That same night of Monday, February 1, students at the Negro colleges around Greensboro, North Carolina, were electrified by reports of what four freshman boys had done that day. Even the words that had started it all were the stuff of new myth. At a bull session, one of them had said, “We might as well go now.” Another had replied, “You really mean it?” The first had said, “Sure, I mean it,” and the four of them had gone to the downtown Woolworth’s store and slipped into seats at the sacrosanct whites-only lunch counter. The Negro waitress had said, “Fellows like you make our race look bad,” and refused to serve them, but the four freshmen had not only sat there unperturbed all afternoon but also promised to return at ten o’clock the next morning to continue what they called a “sit-down protest.” That night, the four instantly famous students on the campus of North Carolina A&T were meeting with elected student leaders, and rumors spread that others were volunteering to join them in the morning. With telephones buzzing between campuses, word flashed that even some white students from Greensboro College wanted to sit in with them. The student leaders were arranging it so that students could sit down in shifts so as not to miss classes. Nineteen students sat with the four freshmen at Woolworth’s on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the number swelled to eighty-five as the “sit-in” became a contagion.

  SEVEN

  THE QUICKENING

  No one had time to wonder why the Greensboro sit-in was so different. In the previous three years, similar demonstrations had occurred in at least sixteen other cities. Few of them made the news, all faded quickly from public notice, and none had the slightest catalytic effect anywhere else. By contrast, Greensboro helped define the new decade. Almost certainly, the lack of planning helped create the initial euphoria. Because the four students at Woolworth’s had no plan, they began with no self-imposed limitations. They defined no tactical goals. They did not train or drill in preparation. They did not dwell on the many forces that might be use
d against them. Above all, they did not anticipate that Woolworth’s white managers would—instead of threatening to have them arrested—flounder in confusion and embarrassment. The surprise discovery of defensiveness within the segregated white world turned their fear into elation.

  The spontaneity and open-endedness of the first Greensboro sit-in flashed through the network of activists who had been groping toward the same goal. On the first night, the first four protesters themselves contacted Floyd McKissick, who, as a maverick lawyer and NAACP Youth Council leader, had joined Rev. Douglas Moore in the Durham ice cream parlor case and other small sit-ins. McKissick and Moore rushed to nearby Greensboro. Simultaneously, the news traveled along parallel lines of communication with such speed that a vice president of the mostly white National Student Association was in Greensboro on February 2, the second day, before any word of the sit-in had appeared in the public media.

  On the third day, when the number of protesters passed eighty, Douglas Moore called James Lawson in Nashville with a volley of bulletins. The protest would continue to grow, he reported, as enthusiastic student volunteers were only too eager to absorb the organizing discipline of the adults who had arrived to work in the background. The sit-in “command center” at North Carolina A&T was operating with crisp, military efficiency—briefing new protesters on nonviolence, quashing rumors, dispatching fresh troops as needed. Most important, Moore reported, sympathetic sit-ins were about to begin in Durham, Raleigh, and other North Carolina cities. Moore, who knew already that Lawson had been preparing for new Nashville protests, urged him to speed up the schedule so that the movement could spread into other states. Lawson promised to try. Moore then made other calls, including one to the FOR’s Glenn Smiley. McKissick called Gordon Carey, the CORE official who had worked on Wyatt Walker’s Richmond march and the Miami sit-ins the previous year. Carey flew from New York to Durham at the end of the first week. By Saturday, the Greensboro sit-in counted some four hundred students, and Kress, the other big downtown dime store, had been added to the target list. A bomb scare that day interrupted the demonstrations. Later, Klansmen and youth-gang members crowded inside the stores to menace the protesters. Store managers who had been desperately polite all week now threatened to call in legal force.