Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Privately, some of the leaders of the Atlanta student movement went to King with a worry that was emblematic of the times. They feared that one of their supporters might be a Communist. In particular, they suspected a New Yorker who was coming to their meetings, joining their picket lines, making friends with their friends. He was older and more sophisticated than most of them, with strange habits and a volunteer spirit that seemed too good to be true. After much internal debate, the Atlanta students had called him in for what amounted to an interrogation. When this settled nothing, they decided to pass their doubts along to King, because the man in question said he had come South to work as a summer volunteer for the SCLC. Promising to look into the matter, King summoned the suspect to his study at Ebenezer.

  King and Bob Moses were introduced to each other under these unfortunate circumstances. Alone together in the study, they said little and moved slowly. There were long silences. A mutual distaste for the subject at hand—a loyalty investigation—accented each man’s natural reserve. King, distracted by the rush of greater events, retreated into the formality of his preacher’s role, and Moses, too self-assured to fall into hero-worship of King and yet too respectful to assert any of his complaints about the way the movement was being run, waited patiently for King to challenge him. King was slow to do so. Though frail, bespectacled, and soft-spoken to the point of whispering, Moses carried about him the strong presence of an Eastern mystic. There was something odd about him, yet he also managed to communicate a soothing, spiritual depth.

  Ostensibly, the two of them met as world-famous leader and obscure volunteer, judge and accused, Baptist preacher and suspected Marxist, but beneath the trappings of rank the two men were natural competitors in the realms of politics and religion, destined to become opposing symbols for the holy wars within the civil rights movement. Their personalities struck deep notes that were so close together as to be unbearably dissonant. Never—and certainly not at their first strained meeting—were they to acknowledge the range of similarities between them.

  At twenty-five, Moses was only six years younger than King. Born and raised in Harlem, he had been marked as an extremely sensitive child. He was admitted to Stuyvesant High School, a school for gifted students, and even there he distinguished himself by developing a taste on his own for the works of the Chinese philosopher Lao-tze. His grandfather had been an early leader of the National Baptist Convention, a distinguished but overbearing preacher who had moved his family to New York just in time to be struck by a mortal illness and the hard times of the Depression. As a result, the invalid grandfather Moses had been unable to educate or support the last few of his many children. Moses’ father, one of those left out, retained a lifelong bitterness over his lack of education or professional accomplishment. Together with his wife, he encouraged his son’s bookish proclivities and inculcated in him an ambition to succeed at one of the better white colleges, as opposed to the traditional Negro ones, which they dismissed as too “social.” They were thrilled when he won a scholarship to enter Hamilton College in upstate New York, for the fall term of 1952.

  Suddenly, as one of only three Negroes in the student body, Moses had entered a new universe of white middle-class culture. Excluded by race from the all-important fraternity social system, he gravitated toward an integrated Christian study group, whose members, still reeling from the apocalypse of World War II, embraced a Last Judgment fundamentalism as a shield against the vanity-glutted world they saw around them. Moses joined some of them who commuted to New York City to preach in the streets. On many a Saturday night, he stood beneath the lurid bright lights of Times Square and took his turn among the hillbilly preachers and West Indian soothsayers and the other student evangelists—holding up his Bible and urging streams of tourists to repent. His voice was much too soft for the task, however, and a few of his Hamilton professors perceived that his zeal was connected to a more eclectic curiosity about the cosmic questions. Moses became a philosophy major. He read Camus in French, renewed his study of Eastern philosophers, and took an interest in pacifist thought on the issues of war and peace. Admiring professors placed Moses in Quaker workshops held overseas. He spent one Hamilton summer vacation in France living among pacifists whose beliefs had been tested by the Hitler occupation, and he spent the next summer in Japan, dividing his time between a Quaker workshop and the home of a Zen Buddhist monk. His writings about these experiences, plus his mastery of the great metaphysical philosophers, established him as the kind of oddity that was much more respectable to faculty tastes than were street preachers. In 1956, Moses was accepted into the Ph.D. program of Harvard’s graduate department of philosophy.

  Still deeply insecure about his ability to compete with white students at a Harvard level, Moses arrived in the Boston area two years after King had departed. Much had changed in those two years. Paul Tillich, the world-famous theologian on whom King had written his dissertation at Boston University but whom he had never met, was now a professor of philosophy and religion at Harvard. Moses attended his lectures, but his perception of Tillich was affected deeply by a historic shift in the prevailing world view of professional philosophers. Tillich was more than out of vogue; his focus on the old questions of truth and being made him irrelevant to modern analytic philosophy. Generally speaking, the analytic philosophers had put aside the ancient riddles until they could find a way to make words as precise and scientific as numbers. Their papers bristled with equations and notations of symbolic logic. Mathematical proof came to replace persuasiveness as the test of good philosophical work. Soon Moses joined the small cliques of graduate philosophy students who sat disapprovingly through Tillich’s lectures. “It was all poetry,” they said derisively, meaning that Tillich was just playing with words. Moses absorbed enough of the analytic school to understand all this, but part of him yearned to hear the religious and philosophical poetry.

  He was well along toward his doctorate when, in February 1958, the news came that his mother had died suddenly. In shock, he went to New York for the funeral. Afterward, his father packed his bags and left for a short trip of escape and recovery. Before Moses could leave for Harvard, the police called with the news that they had picked up Mr. Moses on the street. He had gone mad, apparently. Police officers found him raving, hurting himself, shouting that he was movie star Gary Cooper. They took him to the Bellevue psychiatric unit, where he remained under treatment for many months. He was released not long before police officers brought Izola Ware Curry to the same hospital for evaluation after she stabbed King.

  Moses left Harvard and went home to take care of his father. To support the two of them, he took a job as a teacher of mathematics at the Horace Mann High School in New York. He was still there in 1960 when the sit-ins began in the South. At the New York office of the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King, Moses worked as a volunteer for Bayard Rustin. He had met Rustin years earlier to discuss conscientious objection to the military draft, but Rustin did not remember it. Now Moses found himself engaged again on the issues of moral philosophy that had absorbed him before the interruption of his education at Harvard. On the recommendation of Bayard Rustin to Ella Baker, he took a bus South to work for Dr. King.

  Atlanta, like the Harvard philosophy department, was not quite what Moses expected. There were only three people in the SCLC office, and one of them—Ella Baker—was preparing to return again to New York to make way for the incoming Wyatt Tee Walker. The second was Dr. King’s secretary, Dora McDonald, who spent her time answering the phone, logging King’s phone calls and correspondence, and typing stencils for fund-raising appeals. The third was Jane Stembridge, the SNCC volunteer from Union Seminary. King was away at the political conventions, and no one could quite think of anything for Moses to do every day. At first he kept looking for a “work force” somewhere—for the rooms where volunteers must be stuffing envelopes, canvassers preparing to knock on doors, organizers training to go out into the field—but the New York—style beehive simply
did not exist.

  As the reality sank in that the SCLC was but a church office with three frantic telephones, Moses made friends with Stembridge and consumed long hours with her debating the merits of Paul Tillich. Through her, he met some of the leaders of the Atlanta student movement, who were engaged almost daily in picket lines and planning meetings. Moses, hungry for something to do, joined them on picket lines outside Atlanta supermarkets that refused to hire Negro clerks. On some days, when the students were otherwise engaged in lengthy meetings, Moses was the only one on the line. For the sake of company, he found and joined another picket line in town, and one day the police arrested him and his fellow demonstrators. He was identified in news accounts as Robert Moses of the SCLC. When the Atlanta students called him in shortly thereafter and asked how he had managed to locate an alternative picket line, Moses replied that he had heard about it while attending a mathematics lecture entitled “Ramifications of Goedel’s Theorem.” His answer did nothing to allay the students’ suspicions that this hyper-intellectual Yankee volunteer might be a Communist.

  In King’s church study, Moses’ passive nature rendered useless one of King’s most valuable traits—his patience as a listener and resolver of conflicts. Forced into the offensive, King recounted what he had heard about the picket line, the arrest, and Moses’ identification as an SCLC volunteer. When Moses offered no challenge to the account, King explained that the group sponsoring that picket line, the Southern Conference Education Fund, was a spin-off of one of Eleanor Roosevelt’s old interracial groups, sponsored by Aubrey Williams and Myles Horton, among others, and now run by Carl and Anne Braden. It was the group Senator Eastland had been investigating for Communist ties back in 1954, when Clifford Durr had gone berserk in the New Orleans hearing room.* “I’m not saying that any of that is true,” King told Moses, “but I advise against any more demonstrations with the SCEF people. Some people think it’s Communist, and that’s what matters. We have to be careful.”

  Moses did not agree, but he did not object. As an SCLC volunteer, he considered himself bound to follow its policies. His only reply was a question on a completely different topic: did Dr. King mind if Moses took the fund-raising appeal over to the Butler Street YMCA so that he could assemble volunteers for collating, addressing, and stuffing? He thought he could get the appeal into the mail much faster that way. King heartily endorsed the idea, and the brief meeting closed on an artificial note of agreement.

  King himself was on friendly terms with the leaders of the SCEF, against which he had just warned Moses. So were Ella Baker and Rustin. There was an element of expediency, even hypocrisy, in the way King handled the controversy over Moses, but for King it was but a small reflection of much larger and more painful conflicts of pragmatism, belief, and personal loyalty. Most troublesome was the purging of Rustin. Ever since King had demanded that his SCLC board hire Rustin as its coordinator and publicist, the internal resistance had been building again among preachers who were put off by Rustin’s homosexuality and Communist past. Pressure against him had increased after the crippling lawsuits were filed over Rustin’s New York Times ad—the preachers conceded that it was not really Rustin’s fault, but they criticized him anyway—and shortly thereafter had come the grotesque blackmail threat from Adam Clayton Powell. These things, added to the memories of smuggling Rustin in and out of Montgomery during the boycott, supported the argument that Rustin would always be a liability. Against these cold facts, King felt loyalties of principle and personal feeling for Rustin, which were only made worse by his awareness that Rustin, nearing fifty years of age, was counting on King for a regular job. Squeezed, King finally appointed an SCLC committee under Rev. Thomas Kilgore—Ella Baker’s pastor and one of King’s preaching mentors in New York—and Kilgore, with King’s blessing, informed Rustin of the committee’s conclusion that Rustin should break off contact with King. Deeply wounded, Rustin faulted King for delegating such a personal matter to a committee and for failing to tell him face to face. He resigned from the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King. Fund-raising for the New York Times libel cases fell off drastically as a result, and lawyers were hounding King for fee payments.

  Moses knew nothing of this strife when he came to Atlanta on Rustin’s recommendation. His quick friendship with Ella Baker might also have made the introduction uncomfortable for King, as Baker was leaving again, crowded out of the SCLC by the noisy arrival of Wyatt Tee Walker. On August 1, Walker moved decisively to establish himself by evicting the one-woman SNCC office from the premises—though he helped Stembridge find space across the street. Even before reaching Atlanta, Walker got King to send out over his signature letters praising Walker’s talents to correspondents across the South. The publicity brochures for Walker’s first SCLC conference touted Walker and King alike as “internationally known” civil rights leaders. On balance, King believed that Walker’s talents greatly outweighed his faults, but for Moses the new Walker regime only accentuated his estrangement from King and the Atlanta students.

  When Jane Stembridge proposed that he escape the discomfort of Atlanta by going on a recruiting trip through the states unrepresented in SNCC, Moses jumped at the chance. He wanted to see the rural South, and he actually preferred to go alone. The idea took hold in a quick spin of preparation. Wyatt Walker provided bus tickets; Moses agreed to pay all other expenses himself. Ella Baker gave briefings on helpful contacts between Atlanta and the Texas border. Stembridge combed through the SCLC mailing lists and sent out letters asking people to take Moses in. After a last flurry of excitement that included “kneel-ins” at seven white churches in Atlanta, Stembridge put Moses on a Greyhound bus on Saturday, August 13, and he disappeared from the innards of Alabama. “SNCC now has a Field Representative,” she wrote proudly.

  Moses and Stembridge were not the first nor the last to be smitten by the romance, religion, and danger of the movement. From Talladega, from Shuttlesworth’s house in Birmingham, from Alabama country churches and on into Mississippi, Moses reported his recruitments to her in letters of giddy impressionism. “I plooped on front lawns, lawn chairs, kitchen chairs, back porches, straw and purple velvet with a high back,” he advised in his first dispatch. Moses typed out the names and addresses of dozens of people he had met who expressed interest in SNCC.

  “You are doing mucho great job,” Stembridge replied. Her letters kept Moses abreast of the growing excitement over the October SNCC conference. Ella Baker, proving that she would not abandon the students even after leaving the SCLC, had visited from New York just to help with the planning. A. J. Muste was coming, and so was Bayard Rustin. “If there is ANY capacity in which Bayard can work,” Stembridge wrote Moses, “he will do so.”

  Moses met his future in Cleveland, Mississippi, in the person of Amzie Moore, a World War II veteran and gasoline station entrepreneur. Moore’s voter registration efforts, and the opposing campaign to strangle his businesses, had been dramatic enough to gain the attention of faraway J. Edgar Hoover in 1956, and the support of his cause had been one of the prime reasons for the founding of In Friendship that same year, by Rustin, Ella Baker, and Stanley Levison. Four years later, Moore still had the filling station, and he had an amiable business relationship with his ex-wife, whose beauty shop was partitioned off inside the mechanic’s area. “Amzie is the best I’ve met yet,” Moses wrote Stembridge, “but then I should have known from Miss Baker; I would trust him explicitly and implicitly, and contact him frequently. He works in the Post Office, two hours a day for the last two years, and lives like a brick wall in a brick house, dug into this country like a tree beside the water.”

  Amzie Moore took Moses’ recruitment pitch and turned it backward. It was fine for SNCC to recruit young people from Mississippi, he said, but it would be better for SNCC to send a work force of students into Mississippi to register voters under the protection of the new civil rights laws. “Amzie thinks, and I concur, the adults here will back the young folks but will never initiate
a program strong enough to do what needs to be done,” Moses wrote Stembridge. Sentence by sentence, the intoxication of his letters grew into clear-headed fantasy or revelation. “Amzie thinks he can lay his hands on a bus if we can gas it up,” he wrote. “The idea is to tackle the 2nd and 3rd Congressional Districts, about 25 counties in all…. The main thrust is to take place next summer…. Nobody starry eyed, these are nasty jobs but we’re going to find some nasty people to do them, so put me down ’cause I’m not only getting mean I’m getting downright nasty.”

  “I cannot believe your letters,” Stembridge replied. “…I got so excited that things almost happened to my kidneys. This VOTER REGISTRATION project is IT!” She was telling Ella Baker, Rustin, and everyone else she could find that Moses, who had left on the Greyhound hoping to find a carload of students for the conference, now had her scrambling to find money to print some 200,000 copies of the Mississippi state constitution, the better to educate the would-be new voters.

  On August 26, during a campaign stop in Atlanta, Vice President Nixon was greeted at the airport by a dozen of the most influential Negroes in the city. Moses slipped back into the city by Greyhound a few days later, laden with more addresses and ideas. His return was an occasion for both celebration and regret. As much as he ached to stay on in the South, he told Stembridge, he could not renege on the last year of his teaching contract nor yet leave his father. He headed North to meet his math classes after Labor Day, promising to be back.

  That same summer, a white lawyer from a small town in Wisconsin embarked on a parallel odyssey of revelation. John Doar was lanky, taciturn, and plainspoken. In 1960, still building a general courthouse law practice, he counted it as a small step of success that a client paid him to go all the way to California to work on a paternity suit. He was there when Harold Tyler, chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, tracked him down by telephone.