Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  On Sunday, July 11, the day before the convention officially began, King, Randolph, and Wilkins led a march of about five thousand people—two or three times the expected number—through the streets of Los Angeles to the Sports Arena. They all gathered on the grounds for an NAACP-sponsored rally, at which a surprise guest appeared in the person of Democratic National Committee chairman Paul Butler, who welcomed the marchers and promised that the party would soon enact a civil rights plank to meet their approval. Cheers went up for Butler. King and Wilkins addressed the crowd, as did Adam Clayton Powell, who vanished before the picket lines were set up at the conclusion of the rally.

  Organized into teams and shifts, the picketers vowed to keep up a round-the-clock vigil until the delegates inside approved the Bowles civil rights plank. The motley line, numbering anywhere from a few dozen up to a few hundred at a time, came to include a carload of white Cornell students who drove cross-country from New York, as well as church groups and off-duty members of Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Through the long days and nights ahead, the spectacle developed as a minor feature story for journalists. King himself took several shifts on the line, where, buffeted by mixed crowds of reporters, well-wishers, and hostile segregationists, he impressed Harrington with his equanimity. After the first day of the convention, Harrington and Jones took turns escaping with King to hideaways, where Harrington found himself in long soulful dialogues on Hegel and Max Weber. King’s discourses on such topics as the similarities between the Social Gospel and the ethical principles of socialism convinced Harrington that he was talking with someone who was essentially a socialist. This drastically altered Harrington’s expectations of a Negro Baptist preacher from the South.

  Clarence Jones was more impressed by King’s lighter side. King teased Jones about his California-paradise lifestyle, including the tropical tree in his living room that grew through the retractable roof of his canyon-side ranch house. Introduced to Jones’s wife Ann, King liked her so much that he quickly began calling her “Doctor,” the honorary title he had bestowed since high school on women he found classy and attractive. “Attorney Jones and Doctor Jones,” he would say grandly, extolling the couple as a Hollywood match. “Aren’t you something?”

  At the Biltmore Hotel, Robert Kennedy stood on a chair to give one of his many briefings to his campaign workers. In such crowd scenes, he seemed to lose the crisp authority and flashing temper for which he had become known in politics. For the moment both his voice and his frame seemed thinner than usual. “Remember,” he shouted out among his commands for the day, “all the way with the Bowles platform.” As the campaign workers dispersed to their tasks, Harris Wofford swallowed his amazement that Robert Kennedy had endorsed the platform in its entirety, including the far-reaching civil rights plank. Having been unable thus far to get Kennedy even to read the civil rights plank, Wofford feared that perhaps he did not realize what he had just done. Or perhaps he had made a calculated decision that supporting the plank would help hold Northern delegates against the threat of Lyndon Johnson. Or perhaps Kennedy had given the order simply because its brevity was worth more at the moment than all the political benefits he could imagine from more complicated alternatives. In any case, Kennedy campaign workers pushed their delegates to support the platform as drafted. A coalition of Southern delegates in hot rebellion presented a minority civil rights plank to the full convention, but it was voted down. Many battles later, Kennedy won the presidential nomination on the first ballot by holding nearly two-thirds of the delegate votes outside the South.

  Into the early hours of Thursday morning, while the corks and flash-bulbs were still popping and the huzzahs being raised in hotel corridors, the new nominee and his advisers debated the selection of a Vice President. Early the next day, Senator Kennedy decided to pay a surprise call on Lyndon Johnson to offer the nomination, which was not expected, so that he could take credit for having done so when Johnson refused. Kennedy did not quite offer the job; he merely took the idea a few inches outside his pocket and flashed it in front of Johnson, as he put it. Moments later, a breathless Kennedy took his brother aside in another hotel room. “You just won’t believe it,” cried John Kennedy. “What?” said Robert. “He wants it,” said the nominee, in utter disbelief. “Oh, my God!” said Robert. “Now what do we do?”

  All sides waffled through a day of apoplectic indecision. Senator Johnson and his wife, along with Washington Post publisher Philip Graham, were “about as composed as three Mexican jumping beans” as they sat on a bed waiting to hear whether Kennedy would announce his offer of second place on the ticket. Robert Kennedy arrived on a diplomatic mission of the utmost delicacy, suggesting to Johnson that he might want to remove himself because of the ferocious opposition in the North. Instead, the Johnson camp put through an anguished call to Senator Kennedy himself, who backed off, saying, “Bobby is not up to date.” Johnson handed the phone to Robert Kennedy so that he could hear the decision from his brother. These climactic moments humiliated both Johnson and Robert Kennedy, sealing a personal enmity between them. Kennedy, who assumed blame for the confusion so that his brother could remain more presidential, protected himself by telling friends that Johnson had begged him tearfully to be allowed on the ticket. Johnson protected himself with stories about how “that little shitass” Robert Kennedy had tried to jettison him without his brother’s knowledge.

  Most of the rancorous passions had been stuffed out of sight by the following night, when Adlai Stevenson introduced young Senator Kennedy as the one who “will lead our people into a new and spacious era, not for us alone, but for our troubled, trembling world.” The smiling young face that came onto the screen was still new to millions of American viewers. So was the Boston accent. His oration was primarily a display of mood and taste, revealing Kennedy to be an ardent Anglophile with a hunger for noble romance. In his brief address, Kennedy mentioned eight American presidents, four British kings, and two British prime ministers. Citing Lloyd George’s remark that a tired nation is a Tory nation, Kennedy declared that the United States could afford to be neither. He summoned the nation not so much from pessimism as from complacency. “The New Frontier is here whether we seek it or not,” he said. “Beyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered pockets of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.” Kennedy concluded with a quotation from Martin Luther King’s favorite Old Testament prophet, Isaiah: “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary.”

  Unlike Kennedy, whose personality held attention as far and wide as broadcasts and the printed word could carry it, King created a sensation that was confined almost entirely to his immediate surroundings. In Los Angeles, he went nowhere without drawing a crowd, but in the news accounts from the convention he was only a part of the civil rights sidelight. When King returned home to Atlanta, his mail from the public focused on such topics as his use of the word “Negro.” One correspondent, like others before him, chastised King for using a name originating in slavery, and after rejecting the term “black” as inappropriate for people of mixed color, informed King that the proper term was “Afro-American.” (A committee had been formed in New York to promote public education on racial nomenclature.) Another correspondent, Malcolm X, objecting to one of King’s attacks on racial separation, invited him to hear Black Muslim leader Elijah Muhammad at a Harlem rally “and then make a more intelligent appraisal of his teaching.” Malcolm X was gaining a reputation in the white media as an incendiary anti-white orator at the same time that his debating skills were bringing him lecture dates in prestigious theology schools, such as King’s own alma mater in Boston. Rather oddly, he addressed his letter to King at the NAACP office in New York, and King instructed his secretary to decline the invitation with a polite letter beginning “Dear Mr. X.”

  Although moving in relative o
bscurity, King kept up a travel pace nearly as grueling as that of a candidate. From Los Angeles, he flew home to preach at Ebenezer and then to Buffalo for another of the National Baptist Convention’s week-long preliminary meetings, during which he received the good news that Alabama prosecutors were dropping a second perjury charge against him. After preaching at Ebenezer again, he flew to Oklahoma for two SCLC fund-raisers and on to Chicago for the Republican National Convention. There Randolph’s agenda was virtually transplanted from Los Angeles, complete with the march, the rally, and the round-the-clock picketing. Rustin had sent out two advance organizers from New York, and King spent most of the week under the escort of Chauncey Eskridge, the lawyer-accountant who had deciphered his diaries for the Montgomery perjury trial.

  For the civil rights people, everything about Chicago was bigger. The march drew twice as many people as the one in Los Angeles, and the picket lines were correspondingly fuller. On the day before the convention opened, there were two NAACP-sponsored rallies instead of one—both of them in Negro Baptist churches. New York governor Nelson Rockefeller was the featured attraction at the first rally. He had just concluded an extraordinary eight-hour negotiating session with his rival, Vice President Nixon, the result of which was an alliance behind Nixon and a joint statement of principle. The two of them vowed publicly to strengthen the civil rights plank of the Republican platform. Their last-minute pact was being denounced by conservative leader Barry Goldwater as “the Munich of the Republican Party,” as “immoral politics,” and as a “surrender” by Nixon to “the leader of the Republican left.”

  Goldwater’s hostility helped make Rockefeller a hero to nearly six thousand people who jammed in and around the Liberty Baptist Church for the afternoon rally. Introduced by Roy Wilkins as the man who “made a backbone plank out of a spaghetti plank,” Rockefeller delivered a rousing speech that the crowd interrupted thirty-three times with applause. King and Fred Shuttlesworth of Birmingham addressed an even larger crowd that night. The leading Republicans seemed to be on their side. “Nixon Says Rights Plank Must Be Made Stronger,” announced the lead headline in The New York Times, above a story quoting Nixon in favor of the sit-ins and against “balancing” his ticket with a Southerner. The next day’s lead headline read “Nixon Wins Civil Rights Fight.”

  President Eisenhower arrived in Chicago for a ticker-tape parade and a televised speech to the convention. By far the most popular man in the United States, Eisenhower was the secret weapon of the Republican Party. However, the Nixon-Rockefeller pact four days earlier had compounded his personal doubts about Nixon’s capacities. What troubled the President was not so much the civil rights provision as the call for increases in the defense budget. (“There must be no price ceiling on America’s security,” Rockefeller and Nixon had declared in their joint statement.) Disgusted, Eisenhower protested to Nixon by telephone. How could Nixon expect to run on the Eisenhower record of peace and prosperity and also pander to Kennedy’s charges that Eisenhower was betraying the nation’s security? How could he run as a fiscally sound Republican and also run up deficits to buy new weapons without military justification? A squirming Nixon replied that Rockefeller had slipped the weapons into the statement on his own. This was Nixon’s dilemma. He needed the support of both Rockefeller and the President, but he knew that Eisenhower held Rockefeller in even lower personal regard than he did. The President disdained the New York governor as a weak-minded spendthrift who promoted himself with idiotic schemes such as building a federally subsidized bomb shelter in every American basement.

  Nixon tried to patch over the differences, but Eisenhower made his triumphal entry into the Chicago Amphitheater still steaming over the Rockefeller pact, the U-2 disaster, and other accumulated insults to his military expertise. In his televised address, he scarcely mentioned Richard Nixon or the Republican Party. Instead, he declared that “just as the biblical Job had his boils, we have a cult of professional pessimists, who…continually mouth the allegation that America has become a second-rate military power.”

  Rockefeller promptly supported Eisenhower’s dim view of his competence by misintroducing the new nominee as the “man who’ll succeed Dwight D. Eisenhower next January—Richard E. Nixon.” Gasps sounded through the Amphitheater before an alert bandleader covered them up with music. Richard M. Nixon, ignoring the slip, came to the podium to deliver an acceptance speech no doubt taxing to his listeners—about twice as long as Kennedy’s and devoid of classical allusions or witty quotations. Nixon lengthened and diverted his argument with his style of chatty self-debate.* He also felt obliged to straddle the gap between Eisenhower’s pride and Kennedy’s charges that “American prestige is at an all-time low,” repeating at length that “a record is not something to stand on but something to build on.” In spite of these forensic drawbacks, Nixon’s speech was one of the most successful of his life. Thorough and responsible, without grudges or threats, his survey of government problems conveyed a workmanlike comprehension, and he evoked the traditional idealism of the plain people: “And I know, my fellow Americans, I know tonight that we must resist the hate. We must remove the doubts, but above all we must be worthy of the love and the trust of millions on this earth for whom America is the hope of the world.”

  Nixon came out of the convention with a lead over Kennedy in the polls. Privately, Eisenhower criticized him for choosing U.N. ambassador and former senator Henry Cabot Lodge as his running mate. Lodge was too liberal on civil rights and too genteel to be an effective campaigner, thought the President, who had lobbied for a rich Texan and for a general on the grounds that they had proven they could manage people and dollars in the millions. Still, Eisenhower occasionally found himself outraged over signs of racism at the convention. He sat proudly in the VIP lounge at the Amphitheater as E. Frederic Morrow, who had flown with him to the convention aboard Air Force One, strode to the platform to make a brief but historic televised speech. “One hundred years ago my grandfather was a slave,” Morrow began. “Tonight I stand before you a trusted assistant to the President of the United States.” By the time he uttered these words, Eisenhower was cursing his television screen because the network producers had chosen to cut away. The networks had blacked out Negro speakers at both conventions for fear of offending Southern stations. Although the race issue was bubbling up strongly enough to make both political parties take platform stands of unprecedented clarity, it was still too sensitive for television.

  King returned home to Atlanta thinking there was not much difference between Kennedy and Nixon on civil rights. Both on principle and on the relative merits of the candidates, King was inclined to be neutral in the fall election. This put him at odds not only with the highly partisan Daddy King but also with the Atlanta Daily World, which was run by family friend and Ebenezer trustee C. A. Scott. The World scarcely waited for the conclusion of the Republican Convention before declaring in a headline, “Nixon and Lodge Are Best to Fight World Communism.”

  On the Morehouse campus, King joined student leaders who had been meeting periodically since their SCLC conference back in April. Their spirits were high, and with good reason, as the sit-ins of the previous spring had been reverberating through the adult world all summer. City officials in Durham, North Carolina, were taking steps to end segregation “quietly” in many downtown stores. Two drugstore chains based in Virginia had agreed to end lunch counter segregation—which news, announced at the NAACP convention, inspired jubilant youth delegates to lift Roy Wilkins to their shoulders like a triumphant football coach. The U.S. Attorney General, William Rogers, had represented Vice President Nixon during the civil rights battles at the Republican Convention and then proceeded directly into negotiations with the owners of chain stores across the South. News stories out of the Justice Department indicated that the owners were willing to integrate their lunch counters if they could do so all at once; their fear was that Southern legislatures would enact more laws requiring segregation. Meanwhile, Trailways offici
als announced that they would desegregate the restaurants in their bus terminals throughout the South. The company would continue to maintain separate lunch counters and restrooms as a public service, said the beleaguered officials, but customers of all races would be free to sit anywhere.

  Victories and rumors of victory swelled the hopes of the student leaders. Their movement had not only captured the attention of the highest officials in the land but also pushed segregationists into defensive, ridiculous compromises. At their Atlanta meeting, the students discussed ambitious plans to push into new areas and attack other segregated institutions, such as churches and public parks. Their crying weakness, everyone agreed, was that the organized student movement was of negligible size in proportion to the vast opportunities created by the sit-ins. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s office was merely a corner of King’s SCLC office, which itself was no bigger than a three-man barber shop. The sole SNCC staffer was a volunteer student on leave from Union Theological Seminary. Only nine student delegates could be mustered for the Atlanta conference, one of whom represented both the District of Columbia and the entire state of Florida. There were no delegates at all from rural areas or from the tough states of Mississippi and Louisiana, and the SNCC delegates were outnumbered at their conference by observers such as King, reporter Carl Rowan, and the recently fired professor L. D. Reddick. In the face of all these deficiencies, the SNCC delegates borrowed a maneuver from the SCLC: they resolved to recruit more people for yet another conference two months hence, at which time they hoped to establish SNCC as a permanent organization. They boldly invited Senator Kennedy and Vice President Nixon to attend.