Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Even the lawyers thought Blayton was milking King’s predicament with an eagerness ill-suited to a longtime family friend. Their sentiments were little consolation to King, however, especially in light of his financial troubles with the lawyers themselves. He had five of them, led by the NAACP board members Wilkins had recommended. William Ming of Chicago and Judge Hubert Delaney of New York were, respectively, a courtroom lawyer and an appeals expert of high reputations. Arthur D. Shores of Birmingham, the senior man among King’s three Alabama lawyers, had been the NAACP’s principal lawyer in the state before the NAACP banning order of 1956, which was still in effect. Fred Gray and S. S. Seay, Jr., were the younger men who were supposed to do the bulk of the preparatory work. Each member of the defense consortium was considered legally or politically indispensable, but they made an unwieldy team. Several of the lawyers were strangers to each other. They came from five different firms in four different cities in three different states. At King’s expense, they duplicated each other’s research and quarreled over the division of responsibility. Worse, they bickered over fees, with the Northerners complaining that the Southerners were charging beyond their competence, and the Southerners complaining that the high-powered Northerners refused to disclose their rates even to their co-counsel. Among the few areas of consensus was a general feeling that King stood almost no chance of winning the tax case before an Alabama jury. This judgment rendered the facts of Blayton’s accounting essentially irrelevant and his exorbitant fees that much more painful. The lawyers tried to conjure up a legal issue that might entice an appeals court to overturn a perjury conviction growing out of the tax laws.

  King found himself soliciting encouragement from any expert who offered hope, no matter how farfetched or expensive. The dire circumstances of the case stretched his pliant nature to its limits, until he felt that he could not afford to alienate anyone who might conceivably be of help. He realized that the fees he was incurring, while larger than he could reasonably hope to pay, were still smaller than the most important professionals felt entitled to charge for their most important cases. Therefore, King felt a keen mixture of victimization and gratitude, helplessness and faith. He lacked the blunt, personal assertiveness of Stanley Levison, who told the assorted lawyers to their faces that they should be ashamed of themselves for letting their concern over fees cloud King’s defense against persecution. Levison lobbied quietly and persistently, protected against resentment by the strength of his own example as the most steadfast and selfless of the professionals who devoted themselves to King. These qualities endeared Levison to King, but King himself was too shy to make demands directly or to equate his interests with those of the civil rights movement. On the contrary, King astonished Levison and Harry Belafonte alike by taking them through long philosophical discussions on the distinction between personal and political obligations. Insisting that he could never allow a penny of “movement money” to be applied to his own personal expenses, King tried to devise unimpeachable guidelines. A traffic ticket was clearly a personal obligation, he stated, but what about the income tax indictment? What circumstances made it political? How could he justify using movement money to defend himself? Belafonte and Levison grew impatient with these quibbles, arguing that Governor Patterson’s statements alone put the tax indictment squarely into politics.

  In New York, the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Freedom in the South, of which Bayard Rustin was executive director, collected enough hard currency by the end of March to pay for a full-page ad in The New York Times. Rustin sat down with Harry Belafonte to draft the fund-raising appeal. Entitled “Heed Their Rising Voices,”* the ad followed capsule descriptions of official reactions against the sit-ins with a brief history of the efforts to prosecute and intimidate King. “In Montgomery, Alabama,” it read, “after students sang ‘My Country ’Tis of Thee’ on the State Capitol steps, their leaders were expelled from school, and truckloads of police armed with shotguns and tear gas ringed the Alabama State College Campus…” King’s perjury indictment, the ad continued, was part of a Southern strategy “to behead this affirmative movement, and thus to demoralize Negro Americans and weaken their will to struggle.”

  The appeal ran in the Times on March 29, after which contributions poured into the King defense committee in sums many times greater than the cost of the ad. A week later, the attorney general of Alabama announced that Governor Patterson had instructed him to examine the possibility of suing the Times and the signatories of the ad for libeling the official representatives of Alabama. On April 8, Police Commissioner Sullivan of Montgomery wrote identical letters to each of the four Alabama preachers listed in the endorsement section of the ad—Abernathy, Shuttlesworth, Joseph Lowery of Mobile, and S. S. Seay, Sr.—demanding “a full and fair retraction of the entire false and defamatory matter.” This notice came as a chilling surprise to the four ministers, none of whom had known of the ad’s existence, much less that their names had been used.

  Instantly, fear and alibis began chasing each other through the telephone lines. The four ministers complained bitterly to King that they had not consented to the use of their names. Fearfully, they pointed out technical errors in the text of the ad. The Montgomery students had sung “The Star-Spangled Banner,” they said, not “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” and the police never had “ringed” the Alabama State campus, in the sense of surrounding it. Instead, the police had massed along one border. The pressure shifted quickly to Rustin, who replied tersely to King that the errors were minuscule. They most certainly were not libelous by any standard. Besides, said Rustin, the four ministers who were complaining about being listed in the paper were the very ones who, in the absence of a threatening letter, would have complained most loudly as SCLC board members if they had not been listed. In its preliminary stages of bluster and petty bickering, Sullivan v. New York Times showed little promise of a landmark Supreme Court case. For King, the most discouraging aspect of the fracas was the pattern: whenever he appealed for help, a reaction seemed to follow that put him deeper into trouble and made help harder to find.

  At Highlander Folk School, Myles Horton had been fighting his own desperate legal battle since the previous summer, when a Tennessee prosecutor led a surprise raid on one of Septima Clark’s workshops. The deputies hauled away a score of prisoners and a truckload of evidence including a washtub full of ice, soft drinks, and beer, plus a jar of coins. With charges of Communist subversion blocked by facts and the Constitution, prosecutor Ab Sloan fashioned a legal noose out of the washtub and the jar. To Highlander, they merely encouraged visitors to chip in for their drinks, but to the state of Tennessee they were critical proof that Highlander was selling alcoholic beverages without a license. Therefore, Sloan argued, Highlander’s charter as a nonprofit corporation should be revoked, and furthermore, since Horton had drawn up the charter without stockholders, under Tennessee law all Highlander property—the land, buildings, even the library—would be forfeit to Tennessee upon dissolution of the charter. It was a confiscation scheme worthy of the Sheriff of Nottingham. Describing Highlander in court as an “integrated whorehouse,” Sloan obliterated the facility within two years.* In a parallel case, he managed to obtain a criminal conviction against teetotaler Septima Clark under the moonshine laws.

  With these gloomy judgments postponed briefly under appeal, Clark hosted the first regional conference of students involved in the sit-in movement. Nearly a hundred students from nineteen states spent the first weekend of April at Highlander, where they exchanged phone numbers, philosophies, and their favorite tips about how to run a demonstration. A Nashville quartet led by James Bevel performed “You Better Leave Segregation Alone” and other original compositions in close harmony “do-wop” style, drawing great enthusiasm from the audience. The students were suffused with energy, frankly amazed by their introduction to one another and to Highlander. Guy Carawan, Highlander’s resident folksinger, taught them old songs that had evolved thro
ugh the 1930s labor movement into the Highlander repertoire: “We Shall Not Be Moved,” “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize,” “This Little Light of Mine,” “I’m Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table,” and “We Shall Overcome.”

  All this was new, and the spirit of discovery ran so strong that many of the same students journeyed to North Carolina less than two weeks later for a second conference, organized by Ella Baker. She persuaded King to guarantee the expenses with $800, even though the costs of his upcoming criminal trial had drained the SCLC treasury nearly to the bottom.† With Glenn Smiley and Douglas Moore, Baker made the arrangements with her own alma mater, Shaw University in Raleigh. The trio agreed that James Lawson would serve as “dean” of the conference, with Moore as his assistant.

  On April 15, nearly 150 students from nine states poured into North Carolina, where the first sit-ins had erupted ten weeks earlier. Very few of them had heard of Lawson, but his keynote address on the first night created a mass of instant disciples. He spoke in a manner as learned and idealistic as King’s. “Love is the central motif of nonviolence,” he declared. “Love is the force by which God binds man to Himself and man to man. Such love goes to the extreme; it remains loving and forgiving even in the midst of hostility. It matches the capacity of evil to inflict suffering with an even more enduring capacity to absorb evil, all the while persisting in love.” In the same speech, however, Lawson balanced these lofty statements with trenchant realism. “Most of us will be grandparents before we can lead normal lives,” he said. He directed withering criticism at the NAACP as “too conservative,” charging that The Crisis, Du Bois’s NAACP journal, was no more than “the magazine of the black bourgeoisie.” Lawson denounced the NAACP for its preoccupation with fund-raising and lawsuits. Such a strategy unjustly and unwisely exposed the courts to disrepute, Lawson insisted, by heaping upon them tasks that were inherently political. He attacked the NAACP for begging, for failing to develop what he called “our greatest resource: a people no longer the victims of racial evil, who can act in a disciplined manner to implement the Constitution.”

  This was strong stuff. Lawson lifted the taboo against NAACP criticism much more directly than did King, who was content to praise the students for “moving away from tactics which are suitable merely for gradual and long-term change.” Like Lawson, King swept away the crowd with his speech. He remained the conference’s celebrity, but Lawson’s frankness carried the appeal of revealed secrets. Many of the students adopted Lawson as their own private discovery. Together, the two leaders inspired an enthusiasm for nonviolent activism such as neither had ever seen. It was the defining, animating zeal of the conference, so readily accepted that the students put the word “Nonviolent” into the name they chose for themselves: Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. They were the first civil rights group ever to do so.

  This religious fervor coexisted with boisterous student politics. After a vigorous contest between a Morehouse man from Atlanta and a Wyatt Tee Walker protégé from Virginia, the presidency of the new organization went to Marion Barry, who was the most politically skillful of Lawson’s Nashville delegation.* Further jockeying broke out over a plan to send SNCC (pronounced snick) representatives to the Democratic and Republican conventions that summer. Ella Baker and King wrangled briefly over who the student delegates should be and how they should travel to the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles. In fact, the mild undercurrent of tension between Baker and King became a subject of wonder and gossip at Shaw. Some of the students were astonished to see a woman contradict a man of King’s stature. Her character itself was a cultural revelation. As for Baker, who was on her way out of the SCLC again after chafing for more than two years beneath the indifference and condescension of its commanding preachers, she embraced the sit-in movement with the special fervor of a rescued victim. She began to devote herself singlemindedly to the cause of the students, encouraging their independence, warning them against ceremony, educating them on the foibles of their elders.

  In later years, a SNCC historian would write that Baker “smashed” King’s plans to dominate the students at the Shaw conference. This melodramatic pronouncement greatly exaggerated the sectarian divisions at that time. It was Baker, not King, who drafted testimony for the students to deliver before the platform committees of the two mainstream political parties, and it was Baker who tried to smooth over Lawson’s criticisms of the NAACP. “There is no fight,” she told reporters, asserting that only a “difference in emphasis” separated the NAACP from the SCLC and the student movement. In philosophy of leadership, Baker was much closer to King than either was to James Lawson, who vigorously opposed all forms of status distinction within the movement, even elections. Lawson, an extreme communalist, believed that leadership hierarchies were invidious—similar in nature to the racial caste system against which they were struggling. Under his influence, the Nashville student movement was structured so that the role of spokesperson rotated among all those who desired to serve.

  At Shaw, the prevailing spirit dissolved rather than swelled leadership divisions. Just before King left Raleigh for Washington, where he defended the sit-ins on the “Meet the Press” television show, Lawson and Douglas Moore drew him off for an isolated conference in the bleachers of the Shaw gymnasium. Lawson made an announcement in hushed tones. If King was still serious about the offers he had made over the years, he and Moore would drop everything to work as full-time SCLC staff members.

  King responded emotionally. “Oh, yes!” he exclaimed. “That’s the best news I’ve ever heard.” It was clear that he recognized the magnitude of the sacrifice his two friends had decided to make. They were willing not only to leave their own pulpits but also to serve under King, their age peer, who had come to nonviolent activism long after they did.

  When Lawson asked about Wyatt Walker, whom he knew to be negotiating for Ella Baker’s job, King replied that it did not matter. What was important, he said, was to get Lawson and Moore teaching nonviolence to student recruits all over the South. He would find the money somewhere, he said. Lawson and Moore could go into new cities, train nonviolent brigades, and launch demonstration campaigns. King could come in to rally the support forces. Perhaps they could hit two new cities at once. The three of them let loose some of their fantasies before Moore started teasing King about the SCLC board. Would all those Baptists really put two troublemaking Methodists on their payroll? It was well known, quipped Moore, that while Baptists understood kingship, it took a good sober Methodist to build a sound structure. A buoyant King soon left them with a promise that he would make the arrangements within two weeks.

  Back in Atlanta, all five of King’s lawyers privately delivered a grim appraisal of his chances of spending the new decade outside of prison. As yet they had not settled on a defense strategy. Worse, as they had become acquainted with one another and with the case, none of the five had committed himself to a recommendation as to the most favorable line of argument. They were in a bind. The constitutional issues that the NAACP lawyers had developed in civil rights cases over the years did not apply well to criminal cases involving the tax code. As to the plain facts of the case—whether or not King’s income had exceeded what he reported on his tax forms—the lawyers expected the jury to go against them, and they all agreed that King had little chance of getting an appeals court to overturn a jury verdict. This was the dismal picture.

  William Ming, an eminent Chicago trial attorney, carried out a delicate mission for the defense team.* The lawyers desperately needed to know how bad things were—how much unreported income King actually had enjoyed—but they despaired of ever learning from Blayton, who seemed happily awash in check stubs and bank statements. Ming privately introduced to King a young lawyer named Chauncey Eskridge, whom he had brought along from his firm. Explaining that Eskridge was a tax specialist with training as an accountant, Ming asked King’s help in getting Blayton to accept help from Eskridge. Ming needed all the diplomacy he had ever used in a courtroom j
ust to make this request of his client. Not only was he asking King to bear the expense of a second accountant, he was also asking him to help push aside Daddy King’s friend and benefactor Jesse Blayton, a touchy man certain to resent the intrusion. The lawyers already were fretting among themselves about the harm that a resentful Blayton might do to them on the witness stand, and their sensitivity about such matters raised the tension that permeated Ming’s request: he was pressuring King to establish his own innocence. Even in the privacy of consultations with his lawyers, King was still maintaining that he had not diverted to his own use any of the tens of thousands of dollars that passed through his hands every year. Yet he had conceded to newspaper reporters that there “may be some little unintentional mistake[s] in my returns.”

  Eskridge, who had already heard some of the lawyers laughing among themselves at King’s claims of innocence, was left alone with his new client in King’s Ebenezer study. He asked how King had prepared his tax returns, and King replied rather sheepishly that he had relied almost exclusively on his diaries. Under prodding, he explained that he always wrote his daily receipts and expenditures into the pocket diary that contained his schedule. Blayton had expressed no interest in the diaries, saying they were not financial records. Hearing this, Eskridge perked up instantly. Diaries could be admissible as tax evidence, he said, although defendants rarely submitted diaries, which were usually more rather than less damaging to them. This was all news to King. When Eskridge asked where his old diaries were, King said he had no idea but that Coretta would probably know. He called home, and when Coretta said she thought the diaries were buried away in an old trunk, he relayed Eskridge’s request that she find and deliver them to the church right away.