Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Before serious reprisal fell upon Greensboro, fresh sit-ins broke out the following Monday in the surrounding North Carolina cities of Raleigh, Durham, and Winston-Salem. Three days later in nearby High Point, students assembled at a church before marching downtown to the segregated lunch counters, and as it happened, Fred Shuttlesworth had come in from Birmingham to preach the midweek service for the minister of that church. Shuttlesworth became the first eyewitness from the tough Deep South states below North Carolina. He saw the well-dressed students step off in good order, like soldiers in the joyous early stages of a popular war, and he heard that it was the same in the other North Carolina towns—only bigger. Shuttlesworth promptly called Ella Baker at the SCLC office in Atlanta. He was not the first to report to her about the sit-ins, but he was the first voice of authority from the inner circle of SCLC preachers. This is it, he told Baker. “You must tell Martin that we must get with this,” said Shuttlesworth, adding that the sit-ins might “shake up the world.”

  The movement first leaped across state lines on the day after the High Point sit-in. An SCLC preacher in Rock Hill, South Carolina, reported by phone to McKissick that his charges were “ready to go.” They went from his church to the lunch counters on Friday, the same day police arrested forty-one students sitting in at the Cameron Village Woolworth store in Raleigh. In handcuffs, the Raleigh students swept across the threshold of the jail with eyes closed and hearts pounding, and, like the bus boycotters four years earlier, they soon re-emerged on bail to discover that their identities had not been crushed. They were unharmed and did not feel like trash. A flood of relief swelled their enthusiasm.

  In Nashville that Friday night, Lawson presided over what turned out to be the first mass meeting of the sit-in movement. About five hundred new volunteers crowded into the First Baptist Church along with the seventy-five veterans of the nonviolence workshop. Lawson and the other adults argued for delay, on the grounds that only a small fraction of the students had received any training. This was not a game, they said. Sooner or later the city would put demonstrators in jail, and their organization—the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference, a local affiliate of King’s SCLC—had less than $100 in reserve. They needed time to raise a bail fund. These and other words of caution gave way to a tide of student sentiment, however, and Lawson found himself giving a crash course on nonviolence late into the night. He told the crowd how to behave in the face of a hundred possible emergencies, how to avoid violating the loitering laws, how to move to and from the lunch counters in orderly shifts, how to fill the seats of students who needed to go to the bathroom, even how to dress: stockings and heels for the women, coats and ties for the fellows. When in doubt, he stressed, the newcomers should take their cue from the behavior of the workshop members who had demonstrated before.

  They broke up that night amid nervous prayers and whispers of “Good luck,” and Lawson’s logistical plan worked smoothly the next morning. Church cars traveled a circuit between the First Baptist Church and designated pickup spots near Nashville’s four Negro colleges—Fisk University, Tennessee State, Meharry Medical, and the Baptist seminary. When all were assembled at the First Baptist staging area, Lawson moved them out five hundred strong. White Nashville, which had changed hands nearly a dozen times during the Civil War, awoke slowly to a kind of invasion force it never had encountered before, as rows of neatly dressed Negro college students filed into the downtown stores to wait for food service.

  The Nashville students—destined to establish themselves as the largest, most disciplined, and most persistent of the nonviolent action groups in the South—extended the sit-in movement into its third state. Their success helped form the model of the student group—recruited from the campuses, quartered in the churches, and advised by preachers. Elated with the early results, Lawson called King, Ella Baker, and Douglas Moore, among others, to exchange reports. Each of them in turn called acquaintances who might help open other fronts. By the end of February, sit-in campaigns were under way in thirty-one Southern cities across eight states. News attention remained scanty for the most part in both white and Negro media, largely because people were conditioned to think of student antics as transient events. Moore predicted that the sit-ins soon would put an end to such complacency. “If Woolworth and the other stores think this is just another panty raid,” he told reporters, “they haven’t had their sociologists in the field recently.”

  The earliest wave of student protests spanned the two weeks preceding King’s first two sermons as the new co-pastor at Ebenezer. More ominously for King, they coincided with the arrival of ugly rumors that Alabama officials were not satisfied with the back taxes they had extracted from him on January 18. Talk filtered out of the courthouse to the effect that lawyers for the state were putting King’s name before a grand jury on charges that could send him to prison for a decade or more. The growing intensity of the rumors alarmed King enough to seek legal and financial help in advance. He sent urgent telegrams to Harry Belafonte and actor Sidney Poitier, and he asked Roy Wilkins to help him find the best criminal defense lawyers in the country. Wilkins recommended two of his NAACP board members. King wrote a guarded letter to one of them, Judge Hubert T. Delaney in New York, asking him to receive his “special assistant,” Bayard Rustin, for a briefing about a confidential matter. As the third week of sit-ins began, King himself conferred with potential defenders in New York.

  On the way home, he stopped off in North Carolina to see Douglas Moore. Abernathy, up from Montgomery, joined him for a visit to the F. W. Woolworth lunch counter in downtown Durham, which company officials had closed in the vain hope that delay would make the students forget about the protest. That night King spoke at a rally in support of the continuing sit-ins in the clustered cities of central North Carolina. “Men are tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression,” he said, repeating the trigger line of his first speech during the bus boycott. “The underlying philosophies of segregation are diametrically opposed to democracy and Christianity, and all the dialectics of all the logicians in the world cannot make them lie down together.”

  These were familiar King themes. A significant departure lay in his unequivocal early endorsement of the protest, which he said was “destined to be one of the glowing epics of our time.” Alone among the established leaders of either race, he praised the students as a mature force in adult politics: “What is fresh, what is new in your fight is the fact that it was initiated, led, and sustained by students. What is new is that American students have come of age. You now take your honored places in the world-wide struggle for freedom.” The respectful tone of his remarks was highly unusual in an era when student achievements of any kind were customarily relegated to a junior, preparatory role in the public mind—and the novel, extralegal sit-in method was mainly attracting puzzled frowns and widespread suspicion. Even the major Negro newspapers were reporting the sit-ins cautiously. They registered as a newfangled teenage rumble with a partially redeeming purpose. They were not controlled or approved by the adult civil rights organizations, and for that reason alone the NAACP Legal Defense Fund refrained from defending the first students arrested.

  King embraced the students for taking the step he had been toying with for the past three years—of seeking out a nonviolent confrontation with the segregation laws. He had traveled halfway around the world to wrestle with obscure Gandhian conundrums, and declared countless times that he was prepared to die for his beliefs, but he had never been quite willing to follow his thoughts outside the relative safety of oratory. With a simple, schoolboyish deed, the students cut through all the complex knots he had been trying to untie at the erudite Institutes on Nonviolence. His generosity of spirit made it easy for him to give the students credit for their inspiration, and his own lingering fears no doubt added to his admiration of their courage. Even now, King himself was not ready to join them at a lunch counter or otherwise force a test of the segregation laws with his person. He made no pled
ge to do so at Durham, but the pull of it fueled his exhortations to the assembled students. “Let us not fear going to jail,” he declared. “If the officials threaten to arrest us for standing up for our rights, we must answer by saying that we are willing and prepared to fill up the jails of the South…. And so I would urge you to continue your struggle.” “Fill up the jails” was a new battle cry for King, an incendiary one by the standards of both races.

  No sooner had King warmly embraced the student protest movement than his forebodings of danger came to life in another quarter. Two Georgia sheriff’s deputies appeared at the Ebenezer church office on the day after the Durham speech, armed with a warrant for King’s arrest on Alabama perjury charges. King surrendered to them and was led off as a prisoner to the county courthouse, leaving behind a wave of shock and rumor that quickly radiated from Auburn Avenue to the West Side. Daddy King rushed to the courthouse. He led a gathering crowd of lawyers and other prominent Negroes trying to fathom the nature of King’s alleged crimes. The news that they were felonies was received, doubted, confirmed, and finally accepted as a stinging blow. The further news that they grew out of King’s Alabama tax problems puzzled and then outraged the lawyers, some of whom knew that King had already paid the disputed back taxes for the years in question. It was almost unheard of for a taxpayer who accepted and paid the state’s assessment to be prosecuted as a criminal, and even then the normal procedure was for the state to bring charges of tax evasion—a misdemeanor. King was the first citizen in the history of Alabama to be prosecuted for felony tax evasion, the technical charge being that he had perjured himself in signing his tax returns for 1956 and 1958. Governor John Patterson, who as attorney general had led the fight against the bus boycott and the state NAACP, did nothing to contradict speculation that Alabama was stretching state power to its limits in order to make a political example of King. While signing the papers requesting King’s extradition from Georgia, Patterson made a merrily sarcastic public statement. “If you dance,” he quipped, “you must pay the fiddler.”

  The confluence of the sit-ins and the perjury indictment slapped King with a cruel irony. Just as he was deciding that he should aim his political influence at filling the jails with idealistic young protesters, Alabama struck at the most sensitive spot of such resolve. If convicted on tax charges, even in the white courts, he would take to prison the tarnished public image of a lying, greedy, sham preacher. This was everything King had resolved most devoutly not to be himself and to change in his church if he could. His entire life’s struggle as a preacher had begun in rebellion against what he saw as the cynical pabulum and exploitative uses of fundamentalist doctrines. For Governor Patterson to make a mockery of all that threatened not only to extinguish his own identity but to impugn the foundation of his beliefs. Never before or after was King so distraught about his future. Returning home from his arraignment on the day of the arrest, he canceled speaking engagements in Chicago and California. He felt he could not face an audience, hold his head up, or be sure of his courage. Then he decided that if he did not keep going, he would have lost already. In a fit of energy, King rebooked his speeches and caught a later flight to Chicago that same afternoon.

  Although the tax indictment was not a front-page story in the nation’s leading newspapers, word of it spread rapidly through communities friendly to civil rights. Roy Wilkins declared publicly that the NAACP would do everything in its power to defend him. Negro newspapers denounced the indictment as political. King, though buoyed enormously by the outpouring of support, recognized its limits. Even those who extolled his character could not unequivocally assert his innocence of the charges. There was a tiny seam of doubt—even if King had slipped up a little on his taxes, they temporized, he was being persecuted as a leader of his race. This was the crevice that King would fall through if convicted and sent away to prison. Desperately, he sought to create an alternative tribunal that might stand against the full judgment of the Alabama courts. He tried to recruit a blue-ribbon commission of prestigious white leaders—the deans of the Harvard law and divinity schools, the head of the National Council of Churches, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention—to examine his tax records, but the efforts failed.

  On the same day that Atlanta’s most distinguished Negro preachers met to formulate a statement deploring King’s indictment—an event that received banner headlines in the Negro press—a parallel group of the city’s leaders met more quietly with the express purpose of heading off the threat of student sit-ins in Atlanta. The Rev. Dr. Samuel Williams—King’s Morehouse philosophy professor, who doubled as a Baptist preacher and was also a charter officer of the SCLC—joined all six presidents of the colleges in the Atlanta University complex at the latter meeting. Benjamin Mays of Morehouse warned the students that any “flare-ups” in Atlanta would be blamed on King, and the students eventually agreed to draw up a statement of their grievances, patterned after the Declaration of Independence. This was the proper way to do things in Atlanta, which was different from the other cities. The compromise remained vague as to whether the manifesto would be a prologue to or a substitute for a sit-in. Julian Bond of Morehouse—son of an Atlanta University dean and former president of two Negro colleges, whose own childhood had been favored not only with his scholarly initiation by W. E. B. Du Bois himself but also by an audience with Albert Einstein—undertook to draft most of the manifesto, for submission to the college presidents.

  In Nashville, the students in Lawson’s workshop had completed their second week of daily sit-ins on Friday, February 26, when the chief of police let it be known that their grace period was over. He warned that the downtown merchants had requested trespassing or disorderly conduct arrests if the demonstrations continued. This was the challenge for which the students had braced themselves. John Lewis stayed up all night composing a list of nonviolent “do’s and don’ts” to guide the students through the trauma of being arrested. The secretary to the semi nary’s president typed them on a mimeograph stencil, ending with Lewis’ earnest admonition: “Remember the teachings of Jesus, Gandhi, Thoreau, and Martin Luther King, Jr.”

  Each student carried one of the mimeographed sheets the next day as the column marched silently back downtown to the designated stores. Hostile white teenagers shouted “Chicken” and “Nigger.” The police allowed some of the whites to attack Lawson’s unresisting troops with rocks, fists, and lighted cigarettes before moving in to arrest seventy-seven Negroes and five white sympathizers—to the applause of several hundred white onlookers. When a policeman said “You’re under arrest” to John Lewis, a lifetime of absorbed taboos against any kind of trouble with the law quickened into terror. He tried to blot out everything but his rules as the police frisked, cuffed, and marched him to the paddy wagon. Then, riding to jail with the others, his dread gave way to an exhilaration unlike any he had ever known. They had held steady through the worst, he believed, and by the highest standards they knew there was no doubt that they had been in the right. Their fervor rose to such heights that Lewis and some of the other workshop veterans made a pact that weekend to escalate their Gandhian witness.

  At their trials on Monday, the twenty-ninth, their chosen speaker stood up in court to interrupt the monotonous drone of guilty verdicts and fines. Diane Nash—a Chicago native as dedicated as Lewis and much more articulate—informed the judge that a group of the defendants had decided to choose jail instead of a fine. “We feel that if we pay these fines we would be contributing to and supporting the injustice and immoral practices that have been performed in the arrest and conviction of the defendants,” she announced nervously. Nash, Lewis, and fourteen others were soon led off to jail, making good on the Gandhian gesture King himself had tried unsuccessfully in Montgomery a year and a half earlier. The emotional force of their example was so strong that more than sixty of their fellow defendants changed their minds, pocketed their fine money, and joined them in jail. Outside the courtroom, many Negroes were shocked at the
news that their city, forced to choose, had imprisoned some of the finest students in the area instead of the white hoodlums who had attacked them. Some also felt shame at remaining aloof from the protests while such treatment was being meted out to the nonviolent students. Among those most deeply affected was James Bevel, who came down from his bathroom soliloquies to lead the next wave of demonstrators by the same route to jail, where he was greeted by an overjoyed John Lewis.

  The spectacle of the sit-ins had worked the critical degree of conversion in Bevel, and similar changes spread so rapidly through an aroused Negro population that Mayor Ben West made a conciliatory move. In exchange for a halt in the demonstrations, he offered to release the jailed students and appoint a biracial committee to make recommendations about segregation at downtown stores. Nash, Lewis, Bevel, and the other students emerged from jail as heroes who had forced a Southern city to grant one of the long-denied requests of the established civil rights groups. Hard upon the news of this victory, however, came the news that the trustees of Vanderbilt University had summarily expelled James Lawson from the Divinity School without a hearing or the approval of the faculty. The expulsion was reported on the front page of The New York Times, beginning national coverage of the onrushing clash between the university and the Vanderbilt faculty. About four hundred Vanderbilt teachers came to resign in protest, ultimately forcing Lawson’s reinstatement. Meanwhile, the intrepid Diane Nash led a band of protesters to the lunch counter at the Greyhound bus terminal, which was not covered by the truce with the mayor. There, to the surprise of the entire city, the management served the students without incident. Segregation was broken at Greyhound even as the Vanderbilt trustees were counterattacking against Lawson. The pattern of the early sit-ins was established: constant surprises, all-night meetings, serial victories, and setbacks, with the elders of both races often on the defensive against their young.