On February 25, after a planning session at Abernathy’s home in Montgomery, thirty-five Alabama State students walked into the basement cafeteria at the state capitol, asked for food service, were refused, and walked out again. This rather tame incident nevertheless aroused a ferocious reaction that suggested a difference between Montgomery and Nashville, which by Alabama standards was a metropolis nearing border-state flexibility. Almost immediately after the students left the state capitol, Governor Patterson summoned Alabama State president H. Councill Trenholm, the dignified pillar of the Negro community whom Vernon Johns had shamed many years earlier for paying “his semi-annual visit” to church. The governor bluntly ordered Trenholm to identify and expel all the Negro students who had requested service at the white cafeteria. Patterson did not fret about touching off nationwide sensitivities over academic freedom, as in the Lawson case at Vanderbilt. In fact, he underscored his tough line by calling in reporters to make himself clear. “The citizens of this state do not intend to spend their tax money to educate law violators and race agitators,” he recalled telling Trenholm, “and if you do not put a stop to it, you might well find yourself out of public funds.” Trenholm, who with his father had run Alabama State for more than fifty years, gave reporters but a single line of response: “I have no alternative but to comply.” The next day, angry student leaders protested the governor’s public humiliation of their president, saying that they had done no more than to ask to buy food at a public building. Fred Shuttlesworth came in from Birmingham to announce that Patterson’s threat was “totalitarian in spirit.”
Nearly four thousand Negroes, including most of the Alabama State student body, rallied that Friday night at the Hutchinson Street Baptist Church. It was the largest crowd since the bus boycott. Student leader Bernard Lee found himself standing on the platform with Shuttlesworth, Abernathy, and Martin Luther King—who had just arrived in town from Atlanta to surrender on his perjury indictment. The crowd applauded for Lee almost as loudly as for the three most famous Negroes in Alabama. Basking in adulation, Lee felt lightheaded from the effects of his sudden elevation. Until that week, he had been just another college student—a married father of three, veteran of Air Force duty at a Strategic Air Command base in Montana, where he cared for, as he was fond of saying, nuclear weapons so awesome that they would make World War II seem like “a little picnic.” His nickname was “Jelly,” in tribute to his love of food. This quality, plus his relatively advanced age, had propelled him into leadership of the campus cafeteria protests for the past two years, and that experience had pushed him in turn to the forefront of the capitol protest two days earlier. Now he was the one who had signed the press release answering Governor Patterson, and his name was praised unanimously by his fellow students. Their deafening approval of his remarks at the rally swept Lee up into the theater of the new movement. “Boy, they really love you here, don’t they?” laughed King.
That night Lee received an equally memorable initiation into the habits of preacher politics when the three ministers invited him to share their private feast at Abernathy’s house. He glowed in the presence of offstage conversation that bounced from Scripture and pulpit banter to high-level nonviolent tactics, and he marveled at the vast quantities of fried chicken the three preachers managed to consume between words. Lee was transformed. It occurred to him for the first time that he might become a preacher. Nearly four years’ work toward an accounting degree began to fade inexorably from his mind, along with his former plans and his attachments to wife and family. He began to move toward his future role as King’s valet and shadow—toward an identification so complete that Lee came to boast that his moods and whims, even his health cycles, moved in perfect concert with King’s.
Emotions in Montgomery ran high that Saturday, the day of the first mass arrests in Nashville. Rumors of student sit-ins at Montgomery’s downtown lunch counters attracted roving bands of angry white people armed with small baseball bats. There were no sit-ins, but exchanges between the white vigilantes and ordinary Negro shoppers occasionally flashed into violence. While one white man scuffled with a Negro woman on the sidewalk, his companion bludgeoned her from the blind side. There was little doubt about the nature of the encounter or the names of the people involved, because Sunday’s Advertiser carried a photograph with a caption naming the attacker. The white photographer and reporter at the scene both said that the police had stood by passively, and that the crack of the baseball bat on the woman’s head could be heard from half a block away. Governor Patterson announced that he would leave the investigation to local officials. Police Commissioner L. B. Sullivan—who had replaced Clyde Sellers since the bus boycott—blamed the Negro students for causing the original disturbance and the Advertiser for publishing the photograph. Editor Grover Hall, while dividing the larger blame between “rash, misled young Negroes” and “white thugs,” defended his newspaper against the police commissioner. “Sullivan’s problem is not a photographer with a camera,” he wrote. “Sullivan’s problem is a white man with a baseball bat.”
On the Monday following the attacks, King surrendered at the Montgomery County Courthouse on the income tax charges. Booked, fingerprinted, and released on $4,000 bond, he walked six blocks through the downtown shopping area, past the spot where the woman had been struck on Saturday. His purpose, he told the small number of Negroes following him, was to demonstrate at once his rededication to nonviolence and his conviction that Negroes could not allow themselves to be intimidated. King then returned to the heated strategy sessions at Abernathy’s house. The students wanted to have sit-ins in order to live up to the performance of their peers elsewhere in the South, but most of the adult Negroes in town feared for the very survival of Alabama State. President Trenholm was nearly hemorrhaging from the pressure of trying to maintain both the support of the state and the respect of his students. In the end, the students compromised by agreeing to hold a prayer service on the steps of the capitol.
More than half the student body walked downtown the next day. Bernard Lee made a short speech. A student soprano’s rendition of “The Lord’s Prayer” so moved her voice teacher, King’s old friend Robert Williams, that he vowed to himself not to flunk her that term in music theory. The students all sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” and marched back to campus. Alabama’s State Board of Education expelled Bernard Lee and eight other “ringleaders” the next day, ignoring President Trenholm’s plaintive request that they merely be placed on probation. From the march and the expulsions, the challenges escalated at a quickened pace.
King went back to Atlanta to prepare for his trial, but he was bombarded with bulletins from Nashville, Montgomery, and the newly erupting campuses across the South. At Orangeburg, South Carolina, on the day of the Montgomery prayer service, some four hundred students from South Carolina State and Claflin College marched downtown to sit at the segregated lunch counters. Forewarned, local police and units of special state agents intercepted them with massed force, firing tear gas and water hoses before they arrested 388 of the student marchers. Doused, choking students, herded into an enclosed park, found themselves as stunned by their own calm as by the ferocity of the police rebuff. Charles McDew, leader of the Orangeburg march, would always recall looking back at the melee from a police car after his arrest, to see one of the hulking local football stars, David “Deacon” Jones, holding in his arms a crippled female student who had been knocked down by the firehoses. The expression on Jones’s face was one of peaceful sadness instead of rage. The sight of it haunted McDew. Although he had little use for nonviolence or even for Christianity, he became convinced that an inescapable power could be buried in doctrines of meekness and humanity.
Orangeburg was the first of some forty new cities that experienced student demonstrations in March, as the sit-in movement spread into Georgia, West Virginia, Texas, and Arkansas. In Montgomery, the Alabama State student body pledged at a mass meeting not to register for spring classes until their nine
expelled peers were reinstated, whereupon the administration, under relentless pressure from the state, banned unregistered students from the cafeteria. In response, Abernathy pledged to lead a prayer march from the city’s Negro churches in support of the students, and in response to that, Police Commissioner Sullivan publicly warned of police reprisals “if the Negroes persist in flaunting their arrogance and defiance by congregating at the Capitol.” Abernathy, trying to lead his march out of Dexter across the short distance to the capitol, found his way blocked by police, fire trucks, and a sizable vigilante mob from the outlying counties. He retreated. The students tried to pick up the campaign the next day by marching around the campus with placards, but the Negro administrators, whipsawed mercilessly between their bosses and their bus boycott memories, tried to protect the school by herding the students off campus. No sooner did the students step off campus, however, than police units arrived in force to make sure they did not demonstrate in the city itself. The students, trapped in a street along the campus border, milled around as police reinforcements arrived with tear gas cannisters, carbines, and even a couple of submachine guns. Finally, the police hauled off thirty-five students in the first of the Montgomery arrests. A woman professor, torn by conflict as to whose behavior was most improper, lectured some of her female students in frustration. “Don’t all of you pile on top of each other,” she said to five of them who had been ordered into the back of a patrol car. “Let them get another car for you.” For this, the officers promptly arrested the professor too, on charges of interference.
With the Montgomery student movement temporarily throttled, and the white authorities thoroughly mobilized, Abernathy found himself isolated among the city’s Negro leadership. In spite of his best efforts to rally them, his own MIA board refused to sanction any statement or mass meeting in support of the students. Unlike the bus boycott, the student sit-ins were openly subject to physical repression and extremely dangerous to the Negro community’s economic center at Alabama State. Nerves frayed under the pressure. When Shuttlesworth privately criticized Abernathy for failing to control the MIA board only five weeks after receiving the gavel from King, Abernathy snapped, “Fred, I’m not a dictator.” He also pointed out that Shuttlesworth himself had been unable to command much adult support for student sit-ins in Birmingham.*
In mood and method, the Southern cities opposing the sit-in movements varied as widely as the sit-in movements themselves. The demonstrations highlighted the divisions among the Negroes as well as those between the races. Abernathy was not the only local leader caught between the urgency of the student protest and the balky hesitation of the most influential Negroes. For King, still traveling constantly, the pressures accumulated on both sides of this internal division. Adding to the strain was his imminent criminal trial in Alabama, for which he desperately needed precisely those commodities least controlled by students and most controlled by the traditional elders: money, lawyers, and accountants.
King tried to go in both directions at once, by a path of his own invention. On March 5, he offered Ella Baker’s SCLC post to Wyatt Tee Walker. In so doing, he signaled his refusal to wait any longer for Abernathy. He was accommodating the preachers of the SCLC board, many of whom had never recognized Baker as anything more than a clerical caretaker,* but he was insisting that the job be filled by someone of Baker’s activist views and King’s own generation. Walker was a hotspur. As a New Jersey high school student in the 1940s, he had heard Paul Robeson say that if being for freedom and equality meant being a Red, then he was a Red. Walker promptly joined the Young Communist League. One of his high school papers was a five-year plan for a Soviet-type economy in the United States, and he dreamed of carrying out technically ingenious assassinations against leading segregationists. In college, he acquired dark-rimmed glasses that gave his face the look of a brooding Trotskyite. No single obsession could contain his ambitions, however, as Walker identified with the richest industrialists and the best painters as well as the fiercest revolutionaries. Whatever he did, he boasted to his peers, he would make a million dollars along the way.
Walker’s college advisers steered him toward the pulpit, and his gifts landed him the historic Gillfield Baptist Church of Petersburg, Virginia. Organized in 1797, Gillfield was a regional center for the Negro aristocracy, much like Dexter in Montgomery. Until shortly before Walker’s arrival in 1952, the Gillfield congregation had segregated itself by skin color, with the lighter Negroes sitting on one side and the darker ones on the other. To preach against the class divide, Walker sought the advice of Vernon Johns when the renowned preacher drifted to Petersburg upon his downfall in Montgomery. Walker fell under Johns’s spell. He copied his preaching style, borrowed his books, and sold eggs for one of Johns’s farm cooperatives. The news of the Brown decision flashed on the radio when Walker was chauffeuring Johns to a co-op meeting, and the two preachers knelt on the shoulder of Virginia’s Highway 460 to offer a prayer of thanks.
Six years later, Walker proved his own enthusiasm for the sit-ins by going to jail before King’s job offer reached him in Petersburg. Spurning the role of supervisor, he took his wife, his two children, a few other preachers, and several students to the all-white Petersburg public library. His budding media consciousness inspired him to appear wearing a clerical collar for the first time in his life. His flamboyant admiration of Vernon Johns inspired the peculiar act by which he violated the segregation laws: before the eyes of the gathered police and reporters, Walker asked the librarian to give him the first volume of Douglas Southall Freeman’s biography of Robert E. Lee. Johns, who admired some of Lee’s qualities while despising his cause, often had cited Freeman’s book to Walker in his Civil War discourses, and it tickled Walker to think that white Southerners would arrest him for trying to read about their most cherished hero. The Petersburg police chief came forward politely with an offer to post bond for Walker and the others there at the library and thus spare them the indignity of jail, but Walker asked to be treated no differently than normal prisoners. They all spent three days in jail before accepting bail.
Complications of salary and pulpit arrangements delayed Walker’s answer to the SCLC offer for months, but the arrest itself only whetted King’s desire to hire him. He sent Walker and his companions a telegram of support. Not long thereafter, he sent a similar telegram to Fred Shuttlesworth on his arrest in Birmingham, and he welcomed the invocation of his name by students who escalated the “jail-in” movement in mid-March. From her cell in Tallahassee, having led a march of one thousand students, Pat Stephens issued a public statement: “We could be out on appeal, but we strongly believe that Martin Luther King was right when he said, ‘We’ve got to fill the jails in order to win our equal rights.’” Stephens and four other students became the first to serve out their full sentence, which was sixty days. King praised them, declaring that there was “nothing more majestic and sublime” than their willingness to suffer for a righteous cause.
Only in Atlanta did King mute his praise of the sit-in movement. On March 9, the same day he sent a telegram to Eisenhower protesting what he called a “reign of terror” in Montgomery, King said nothing about the publication of “An Appeal for Human Rights,” which had been composed by the Atlanta students. Nor did he comment six days later when the students rebelled against the counsel of the university presidents and mounted sit-in demonstrations. The students, the police, and even the gawking bystanders were almost uniformly courteous. Spelman women wore stockings and gloves as they rode off to be booked. Nearly all the seventy-seven students arrested identified themselves on the police blotter merely by the name of their college.
The Atlanta protest lasted only one day before being smothered under the combined influence of the Negro and white power structures, who appealed for reason and negotiation. Some student leaders complained bitterly of vanity and obstructionism on the part of their elders. C. A. Scott, editor of the Atlanta Daily World, had required them to pay the full advertising r
ate to print their manifesto—either out of greed, they said, or out of a desire to protect himself with the white people against charges of aiding the protest. The students also resented Scott’s patronizing editorials, which praised them for having a worthwhile objective but consistently urged them to quit making trouble and leave things in steadier adult hands.
These disputes cut close to King. C. A. Scott was not only an old friend of Daddy King’s but also a trustee at Ebenezer, and thus technically one of King’s bosses. Furthermore, as editor and controlling partner of the only Negro daily in the South, Scott helped regulate the light in which King himself would be presented to his primary constituents. King had been reared to look at the world through the eyes of established figures like Scott, and he was practical enough to recognize his dependence on them. Jesse Blayton, another pillar of Ebenezer, raised a more pointed reminder to King of his difficult position. Over the years, Blayton had built an accounting business into a parallel career as president of the Citizens Bank, of which Daddy King was a trustee. Since King’s indictment in Alabama, Blayton had been going through King’s financial records in order to help prepare a defensible accounting. To King’s discomfort, Blayton viewed these services more or less the way Scott viewed the publication of the student manifesto—as a commercial transaction. Off the top, he billed King $1,000 for “two weeks studying thesis of case in order to decide patter[n] of working paper procedures,” and before he was through he had charged King nearly as much to audit two tax returns as King earned from Ebenezer in an entire year.
Parting the Waters Page 41