Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  The courtroom bristled with acrimony on Saturday, May 28, the morning of closing arguments. Extra reporters jammed in for the climax of the trial, including one Negro reporter who touched off the day’s first controversy by taking a seat in the white spectator section. Bailiffs ordered him to move. The jury deliberated for some three hours and forty-five minutes, nearly every moment of which was the occasion for new speculative interpretations by someone in the anxious crowd. When the words “Not guilty” were pronounced, Daddy King and Mother King burst into tears along with Coretta, and Delaney’s emotion overcame him as he rose to praise the judge for his conduct of the trial. Judge Carter banged his gavel against the rising tide of hallelujahs, sobs, and moans of relief, and then he ordered the bailiffs to evacuate the courtroom row by row and march the predominantly Negro crowd out of the courthouse in single file in order to forestall demonstrations of joy. Outside, special units of highway patrolmen prevented any clusters or huddles, with the result that the Negroes, too happy or too shocked to do otherwise, marched single file all the way to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. King, who had received the verdict passively, having prepared himself to be marched off to jail, rearranged himself enough to speak a single sentence to the reporters who surrounded him outside the courthouse: “This represents great hope, and it shows that there are hundreds of thousands of white people of good will in the South, even though they may disagree with our views on integration.” Judge Delaney could only say that the acquittal was “the most surprising thing in my 34 years as a lawyer.”

  King joined the long procession back to Dexter for a spontaneous church service, during which he and Abernathy asked the young people to lead them in singing a song called “We Shall Overcome.” It was a Negro hymn dating to the pre-gospel era of the early twentieth century that had been transported by South Carolina tobacco workers to Highlander Folk School, where it had been adapted for protest.* Since Septima Clark’s Highlander workshop in April, the song had been spreading rapidly among the students of the sit-ins. Simple strains and dogged sincerity made the hymn suitable for crisis, mourning, and celebration alike, as many adults discovered when they heard the song for the first time that day.

  On leaving Dexter, Coretta and Abernathy split off to keep church speaking engagements, while King rode home to Atlanta with his mother and father. To the homecoming crowd that filled Ebenezer the next morning, King preached a revealing sermon entitled “Autobiography of Suffering.” He had not spoken out previously about all his persecutions, he said, for fear that people might think he was playing for sympathy. Now he reviewed them in detail—from the bombings of the bus boycott and the near-fatal stabbing in Harlem to all the outrages of the trial just ended. The sermon was a cry of complaints let loose, but the litany was so sweet and self-focused that King seemed to be engaged, if not enlivened, by the record of his own ordeals. This was not a new theme with him. It reached toward the innocent pathos of a messiah, but King did not give in completely to somber melodrama, and he certainly did not entertain the belief that the acquittal was the result of his own mystical powers. He joked about how the state of Alabama had fought to provide him with free housing for a few years, and he described the verdict as a quirk. Perhaps the twelve jurors had discovered a point of identity with King as a common victim of the loathsome tax audit that was stronger even than the separation of the races. Or perhaps this jury, unlike previous ones, had seen some truth too glaring to overlook. In any case, segregation remained. King gave thanks for the welcome verdict without pretending to explain it. “Something happened to the jury,” he told his congregation.

  EIGHT

  SHADES OF POLITICS

  On the Monday after King’s acquittal, Governor Patterson sent a strong message to anyone who may have doubted that the pride of Alabama had been invested in the perjury prosecution: he filed a $1,000,000 libel suit based on the New York Times advertisement that Rustin had written to raise funds for the King defense. Patterson’s suit differed from the one filed earlier by Police Commissioner Sullivan of Montgomery in that he named King himself as a defendant, even though King’s name did not appear as a sponsor of the advertisement. The governor sued the Times in spite of the fact that the newspaper had published, in response to his formal demand, a full retraction of all assertions that may have given offense to Alabama officials. Simultaneously, Patterson launched a retribution that King felt even more closely: he ordered President Trenholm of Alabama State to fire a dozen of King’s friends and supporters on the faculty, including his biographer L. D. Reddick, his old friend Robert Williams, and Jo Ann Robinson, who had helped draft the women’s boycott petition on the night of the Rosa Parks arrest. Reddick was fired outright, and the others resigned in order to spare Trenholm the agony of his decision.

  Aside from hurting King personally and threatening the extinction of his organization, the vendetta compounded the difficulties of his political objectives in the presidential election. Patterson supported Senator Kennedy for President, having formed a political acquaintance at the 1956 Democratic Convention. In fact, Patterson had endorsed Kennedy in 1959, so early and so enthusiastically as to embarrass Kennedy. King was trying to move Kennedy and the Democrats away from Patterson’s segregationist demands. To do so, he needed to find pressures that were strong enough not to compromise his own principles and yet not so strident as to leave the presidential candidates room to cultivate the millions of voters who felt more in common with Patterson than with King. The task was at once delicate and grossly brutal. Most of King’s lobbying was as clandestine as Patterson’s was public.

  Among the Democrats, King had a well-positioned ally in Congressman Chester Bowles, the former governor of Connecticut and ambassador to India. Bowles was chairman of the platform committee for the Democratic Convention, and as such possessed considerable influence over the party’s civil rights plank. He was enough of a regular politician to be on Harry Truman’s approved list of presidential candidates, but he shared with King a passion for Gandhian nonviolence as well as a longtime acquaintance with Harris Wofford. The three of them, in concert with Bayard Rustin and many others, worked to draft an “ideal” civil rights plank for the Democratic platform, and to advance it against Southern opposition with tactics that included plans for a picket line outside the Los Angeles Convention Center. The conspirators worked secretively. Wofford especially did not want his Kennedy bosses to know that he was working with King and Bowles, because he knew they harbored a dislike for Bowles as an egghead. Worse, the top Kennedy aides believed Bowles was a rival for the nomination, using the civil rights issue to establish himself as the liberal dark-horse candidate.

  Wofford operated from an insecure position within the Kennedy campaign, roughly analogous to that of E. Frederic Morrow in the White House. He held what was traditionally a separate and minor portfolio in national political campaigns, tasked with “getting out the black vote” by whatever means necessary. Although Sargent Shriver, his immediate boss, was married to a sister of John and Robert Kennedy, Shriver was merely an in-law, teased for being too liberal. His nickname within the family was “Boy Scout.” Ted Sorensen, Senator Kennedy’s closest aide, advised Wofford at their first meeting not to become too closely associated with Shriver, because the insiders thought of him as the “house Communist.” As always, it was said partly in jest, but the attitude was daunting to Wofford. Those closest to Senator Kennedy were driving hard to reach the average voter in the fifty-first percentile of victory. If they thought of Sargent Shriver—the highly successful manager of patriarch Joseph Kennedy’s Chicago Merchandise Mart, himself the scion of a preRevolutionary Maryland family—as sentimental, impractical, and pinkish, they were not likely to be enamored of King.

  It was all Wofford could do to schedule a meeting between Kennedy and King, as Harry Belafonte had suggested. This was finally arranged for breakfast on June 23, in the New York apartment of Kennedy’s father. It turned out to be a hurried introduction and a general talk. In
Washington, Wofford waited as anxiously as any matchmaker, hoping the two of them would like each other. When it was over, he chose to put a positive interpretation on the rather neutral reports he received from the two sides. All Kennedy had to say was that he felt he had “made some progress” in winning King’s support. King, who was rushing to go overseas, told Wofford that the meeting had been pleasant but that Kennedy lacked a “depthed understanding” of the civil rights issue.

  Shortly after meeting King, Senator Kennedy made his most direct campaign statement on the lunch counter sit-ins, telling a group of African diplomats that “it is in the American tradition to stand up for one’s rights—even if the new way to stand up for one’s rights is to sit down.” Such favorable comments may have been partially the result of King’s lobbying, but Kennedy seemed to aim them more pointedly at Jackie Robinson. A week after the King breakfast, Kennedy held a summit meeting with Robinson, the result of which was a publicly released letter from Kennedy promising full support for Negro rights. Robinson told reporters that he was “not nearly as critical as I have been,” but he stopped short of endorsing Kennedy.

  By then, King had flown to the convention of the Baptist World Alliance in Rio de Janeiro, where he urged his fellow Baptists to recognize the religious context of political freedom. More than a few conservative ministers were uncomfortable with King, but evangelist Billy Graham supported his church ambitions by hosting a banquet in King’s honor. While in Rio, King received a nasty introduction to the underside of presidential politics. An emissary from Congressman Adam Clayton Powell contacted him with the message that if King did not call off his plans to picket the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, Powell would tell the press that King was having a homosexual affair with Bayard Rustin. In a panic, King decided to call A. Philip Randolph, his co-sponsor for the picket lines, but Randolph was out when the international call came through, and the person who picked up the phone in New York was none other than Rustin, who frequently worked out of Randolph’s office. King, in acute discomfort, gradually disclosed to Rustin the substance of the threat. The two men kept asking each other if the threat was real. Both knew that the mercurial Powell was capable of bizarre deeds of political intimidation, but this was stretching the bounds. If Powell did carry out his threat, however, it would matter very little that his charge was untrue. The mere assertion would be extremely damaging, especially since many reporters and most of the active Negro preachers knew of Rustin’s homosexual “problem,” which lent credence to the charge.

  Randolph’s first reaction was to find out what Powell was up to. He knew that Powell was under enormous stress. Some of his congressional aides had been convicted of kicking back part of their government salaries to Powell, who had just been saved by a hung jury himself at another of his tax trials. Powell faced others, including imminent libel action by a Harlem woman he had denounced on television as a “bag woman” for corrupt police.* Worst of all, Tammany Hall Democrats, still bitter over Powell’s endorsement of Eisenhower in 1956, were working through their alliances in the national Democratic Party to deny Powell his chairmanship of the House Education and Labor Committee. By seniority, Powell was in line to become the first Negro chairman of a major standing committee in the history of the U.S. Congress.

  All across the board, Randolph figured, Powell was moving to protect himself with the regulars, while King and Randolph were plotting with the mavericks. Powell favored Lyndon Johnson or Stuart Symington, the presidential candidates supported by the congressional leadership. He was courting organized labor, which he would need for his chairmanship, at the same time that Randolph’s quarrel with AFL-CIO president George Meany over union racism was growing into a public standoff. Powell also remained friendly with J. H. Jackson. In the end, Randolph decided not to delve into the mess or talk with King at all. His method was simple: he instructed Rustin to call King in Rio with the message that Randolph was going ahead with the plans he announced, and that if King pulled out, Randolph would have no choice but to say King had done so at the request of Powell. In effect, this was friendly counter-blackmail.

  Rustin made the call, which was at least as difficult for him as for King. He was still very much a closeted homosexual. Moreover, Rustin knew that his personal liabilities were once again burdening not only King but possibly the cause itself. This was not a pleasant thought for him. King received the message with a stoic acknowledgment that bordered on approval. He flew from Rio to Los Angeles as planned. Nothing changed except for the personal feelings among the four men, which never fully recovered.

  In Los Angeles, the frantic machinations of an undecided contest boosted the normal convention chaos to a hyperkinetic state. Kennedy was picking up delegates by the handful and was said to have nearly enough to win, but his front-runner status failed to win over the stalwarts of the party. Eleanor Roosevelt and Walter Lippmann publicly urged him to step aside in favor of the more seasoned Adlai Stevenson. Negro voters disliked Kennedy, Mrs. Roosevelt declared, adding that he would do better “to grow and learn” as Stevenson’s running mate. A spokeswoman for Lyndon Johnson charged that Senator Kennedy suffered from Addison’s disease, which was true, and “would not be alive today if it were not for cortisone,” which was probably not true, but the Kennedy campaign, running hard on youth and vigor, flatly denied it all. Lyndon Johnson himself attacked Kennedy by alluding to the reputation of Joseph Kennedy as an appeasing isolationist during his prewar service as U.S. ambassador to Great Britain. “I wasn’t any Chamberlain umbrella policy man!” he shouted. “I never thought Hitler was right!”

  The hotels surrounding the convention hall swarmed with dealmakers and rumors of deals. A few minutes after non-candidate Hubert Humphrey first arrived at the Statler-Hilton, his longtime supporter Joseph Rauh rushed up puffing to the door of his suite. Rauh, the ADA founder and veteran civil rights lobbyist, pushed partway inside before being firmly repulsed by unseen doorkeepers. “I’ve got to see Hubert!” Rauh shouted, pounding the door in flustered surprise. He had an urgent deal to propose: if Humphrey would endorse Kennedy immediately, securing his nomination, Kennedy might make Humphrey his running mate. Rauh ran around to another door. This time he heard the unmistakable belly laugh of Lyndon Johnson—arch-foe of Kennedy, civil rights, and Rauh alike—but before Rauh could force his way inside to find out what Johnson was doing there, a Humphrey aide shoved Rauh back into the hallway and decked him with a punch to the jaw. It dawned on Rauh even as the concussion rattled through his head that he was too late. Humphrey would endorse Stevenson as part of a convoluted three-step scheme just sealed with Johnson. In step one, Humphrey would hold his small bloc of delegates for Stevenson long enough to deny Kennedy the nomination on the first ballot. Realistic delegates would then desert both Kennedy and Stevenson to nominate Johnson in step two, and step three was that Johnson would name Humphrey as his running mate.

  At the Shrine Auditorium, Wilkins, Randolph, King, and Adam Clayton Powell presided harmoniously over a meeting of some 250 Negro delegates. Each of the presidential candidates was invited to appear in person, or to send a message to the group. Kennedy came himself and was booed so lustily on making his entrance that the NAACP’s Clarence Mitchell had to shout for decorum. Kennedy’s witty candor earned scattered applause at his exit, but it could not match the reception accorded Hubert Humphrey, who declared that he would rather stand up for civil rights than attain any political office in the land, including the presidency. When the candidates had departed, Adam Clayton Powell outdid them all. He began to preach, and all the delegates jumped to their feet in cheering applause as he called for “a revolution of passive, massive resistance.” Then came King, speaking in his deeper tones and slower rhythms but building to the same heights. “We have a determination to be free in this day and age,” he declared.

  The three student sit-in leaders who had been selected at the Raleigh conference back in April were allowed to testify before the platform committee, reading a st
atement drafted mostly by Ella Baker. King also testified, then disappeared in the company of Clarence Jones and Michael Harrington, the two men Bayard Rustin had recruited to staff the civil rights agenda for the convention. Jones, a California entertainment lawyer married to a wealthy white publishing heiress, most reluctantly had provided some paid legal research for King’s defense on the perjury charge. In manner and appearance, he and his working partner were an odd pair—Jones with his handsome ebony face, sports car, tailored suits, colognes, European accessories, and brisk executive style, and Harrington with the weathered impish face of an Irishman who had been discussing socialism every night for ten years in the same New York bar, wearing blue jeans and a Dodgers baseball cap. Together, they briefed King about the past month’s infighting among the local civil rights activists.