Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Attorney General William Rogers had hired Tyler for the express purpose of stepping up the enforcement of the 1957 and 1960 Civil Rights Acts. It was a sign of the times that not a single politically connected Republican, nor any friend of Tyler’s, expressed interest in the high-ranking position of first assistant in the Civil Rights Division. Tyler’s only connection to Doar was that the two of them had overlapped at Princeton, and that some of his friends, after scratching their heads, recalled Doar as a good lawyer who was not on the fast career track and therefore might be interested in the job. Tyler offered the job to Doar over the phone, sight unseen.

  Doar thought it over. All he remembered from Princeton was that the Southern students were always saying it would be a terrible mistake for outsiders to inject themselves into the complicated Negro problem. On the other hand, he had grown up resenting the South’s one-party system because it allowed unchallenged Southern committee chairmen to dominate Congress, penalizing his home state. Having been taught that perpetuation of Southern oligarchs in Congress was related somehow to the exclusion of Negroes from politics, Doar resolved that it would be a service to history and to Wisconsin if he helped create an honest, Wisconsin-style two-party system in the South. He called Tyler from California at six o’clock in the morning and said tersely, “I’ll do it.”

  Doar arrived in Washington in July 1960 and plunged immediately into the two bureaucratic struggles that would mark his career. The first one pitted legal thinking against political calculations. When Doar assumed his duties, the Civil Rights Division had only three pending voting rights cases under the 1957 Civil Rights Act.* Each was a landmark case, and the lawyers for the defendants had resisted with a host of tactics. Most fundamentally, they had persuaded Southern federal judges to declare portions of the new act to be unconstitutional infringements on the rights of the states, which forced the Justice Department to win contrary opinions on appeal before the cases could go forward. This was taking years, and meanwhile the Southerners were discovering other methods of avoidance and delay. For instance, some of the officials charged with refusing to register Negroes to vote simply resigned their offices, whereupon their lawyers moved to vacate the Justice Department suits on the grounds that there was no properly situated defendant. The 1960 law mended this defect by allowing the Justice Department to include the states themselves as defendants, but the constitutional challenges to the new law were just beginning and promised to stretch well into the decade.

  Facing this gauntlet of defenses, Tyler’s predecessor had decided to pursue only the three test cases doggedly to victory—no matter how long it took—in order to establish a legally tested avenue toward binding court orders. Only then, hypothetically, would the government come to the task of enforcing such court orders, and here the famed “jury trial” amendment of the 1957 act would work to the advantage of defendants who refused to obey them. Pending the outcome of the three original suits, Tyler’s predecessor had refrained from filing others, as redundant suits only risked adverse precedents in weaker cases. This reasoning would have prevailed in arid classrooms, but it flew headlong into the political urgency of Attorney General Rogers. To Rogers, the test-case strategy was vulnerable to political attack as a “do nothing” policy on civil rights enforcement. He wanted more suits.

  Doar perceived quickly that politics in the Justice Department gave four sides to every issue instead of the lawyer’s proverbial two. He soon encountered a second bureaucratic obstacle in the way of the Attorney General’s civil rights plans: a sluggish FBI. Doar began to learn the subtleties of FBI work in the case of Haywood County, Tennessee, one of two predominantly Negro counties outside Memphis where voting disputes attracted widespread publicity in 1960. When the Civil Rights Division first asked the FBI to investigate complaints that white Haywood County farmers were systematically evicting Negro sharecroppers who tried to register to vote, Hoover first tried to scuttle the matter in advance by pointing out that it was very difficult to prove a connection between evictions and attempts to register, as required under the 1957 act. The Civil Rights Division asked for the investigation anyway, and Hoover complied promptly and efficiently with the official request, as he always did. The resulting report was practically useless to the Justice Department lawyers, however, because the local FBI did nothing more than interview the original Negro complainant and obtain a repetition of the story that had appeared in the newspapers.

  The Bureau was not inherently or inevitably slow. Agents could move with intelligent, concentrated force, even in civil rights cases, as they had demonstrated in the Mack Charles Parker lynching a year earlier. But lawyers in the Civil Rights Division concluded that Hoover’s attitude could fine-tune the hypersensitive FBI bureaucracy to produce anything from galloping initiative to tarpaper resistance—all within a pose of eager cooperation. The Haywood County case was getting the tarpaper. To several more Justice Department requests into the summer of 1960, the FBI replied with reports that invariably contained the narrowest conceivable answers to the questions specifically posed, and nothing more. On July 22, just after Doar arrived in Washington, a white woman in Haywood County gave the FBI copies of two lists she said were circulating among the white people. The lists named those Negroes marked for eviction, credit squeezes, or other forms of reprisal; the woman thought it was wrong. The FBI report to the Justice Department merely noted the woman’s claim without forwarding the lists as evidence or making the slightest effort to verify her information. These omissions necessitated still more requests from the Civil Rights Division. Privately, supervisors at FBI headquarters called Tyler and other supervisors at Justice to recommend that the investigation be curtailed or postponed, especially on registration days. The presence of FBI agents at tense scenes only increased the chances of hostility toward the agents. J. Edgar Hoover, as every graduate of the FBI Academy knew, had built his Bureau explicitly on the role model of the small-town banker. This worked splendidly for the agents’ usual work of tracking car thieves, bank robbers, Communists, and other outcasts, but the image made it wrenchingly difficult for the agents to take the side of the outcasts themselves.

  Lawyers at Doar’s level, dependent on the Bureau for basic information, determined that they had no alternative but to play by Hoover’s rules. Taking up the game, the lawyers invented elaborate “coaching” or “box” memos, which were designed to eliminate every vestige of discretion left to FBI field agents. They directed that specific questions be asked of specific people, and then, guessing at the possible responses, directed that a range of specific follow-up questions be posed. These requests soon approached the structure of giant latticework molecules. In time, a single one of them ran to nearly two hundred pages in length.

  Doar remained enough of a country lawyer to sense that this bizarre coaching process demeaned both sides and was unlikely to produce realistic information about what was going on in Haywood County, Tennessee, or anywhere else. Accordingly, he decided that summer to go poke around a little himself, talk to a few people. This was what he had always done in Wisconsin, and perhaps he was too new to Washington to realize how zealously the FBI regarded its dictum that “prosecutors prosecute; the FBI investigates.” Almost casually, Doar ventured outside the policymaking sanctum of Washington. In Haywood County, he sought out a Negro schoolteacher and asked how he could see for himself what was going on in the county. Quickly Doar found himself agreeing to drive far into the back country to attend some of the regular church meetings. On the first night, he walked into a dimly lit clapboard church packed with Negro sharecroppers who had tried to register to vote. Called to the front, Doar announced nervously that he was from the Department of Justice and was there to help. He asked, as a matter of curiosity, whether any of the people there had received notices of eviction. Nearly every hand in the church went up.

  It was a moment of shock that Doar never forgot. Staring into all those faces, he doubted that the drive to prevent Negro voting could be so widespread,
until he collected fifty affidavits from sharecroppers who had saved their written eviction notices and were willing to testify. Doar poked around the county some more, and located other white people who were willing to testify that the organized whites had gone so far as to obtain legal opinions on how best to prevent Negro registration without getting caught in federal violations. Doar soon added the names of nearly fifty white defendants to the U.S. complaint in District Court. He returned to Washington knowing that he still needed the FBI and still would have to speak the bureaucratic language of policy. Nevertheless, he had opened a new eye, learning more from a few days on his own than he had gleaned from thousands of pages of memos. His pioneering trademark thereafter was to act partly as his own FBI agent. Like Bob Moses, he was being drawn into the rural South as his own “work force,” and the experience would make it impossible for him ever to go home to Wisconsin.

  On the Tuesday after Labor Day, more than 35,000 anxious National Baptists crammed into Philadelphia’s Convention Hall for a pre-convention musical extravaganza. The crowd, hailed as the year’s largest gathering of Negroes under one roof anywhere in the world, was enormous even by the fantastic standards of the NBC, as delegates flocked in from all over the country to witness the great showdown with J. H. Jackson. This presidential election, not the contest between Kennedy and Nixon, absorbed King’s partisan energies in 1960. The challenge to the NBC president, which King had been contemplating for several years and planning feverishly since sealing an agreement with his fellow conspirators in January, was the most daring political risk a preacher could take within the profession. If successful, the Northern insurgents agreed to establish the SCLC—the only church-based civil rights organization—as an “official auxiliary” of the Convention. By winning over the institutional Negro church, King believed, he could break out of the crippling parochialism of the tiny SCLC and bypass the internecine conflicts with the NAACP.

  King himself was not the candidate who would challenge J. H. Jackson, of course. He was much too young to have a chance, and a politically fatal number of preachers would have voted against him simply because he lacked sufficiently impressive credentials. Ebenezer was a powerful church, but it was far beneath the league of the titanic congregations from which Convention presidents had sprung. King’s candidate was Gardner Taylor, whose reputation was such that white clergymen had elected him president of the New York State Council of Churches, and whose thunderous sweet preaching had attracted more than 11,000 members into his congregation at Concord Baptist in Brooklyn. (It was there, in Taylor’s newly completed $2.5 million church, that King had preached to 10,000 people on his first trip to New York during the boycott.) All the preachers knew it was no idle matter to plot a coup against Old Jack, who already had purged state presidents from the Convention for lesser acts of disloyalty, and had once packed several preachers off to jail. In the event of failure, every overt Taylorite would become a marked man. Swirling apprehensions meant that much of the campaigning was clandestine and furtive, spoken in code words of “Alabama” leaning one way and “Ohio” another.

  Mahalia Jackson maintained a regal presence in both warring camps of preachers. As the queen of gospel, she personified much of the Convention’s identity, including the great World War I migration of Negroes up the Mississippi River to Chicago. A food lover, she described her life’s journey as a transfer from New Orleans, where she had learned to cook baby alligators, to Chicago, where her generation of Negroes taught the Chicago stockyards that it was better to make chitlins of hog guts than to throw them away. In Chicago, young Mahalia Jackson had promptly fallen in with Thomas A. Dorsey, the father of gospel music, and the two of them were stigmatized within the established church for “hollering” and wild rhythms that degraded the race and upstaged the preacher. Jackson had been muffled and hidden for twenty years at her beloved National Baptist Convention meetings, where she had diapered young Aretha Franklin and gotten to know Mother King from Atlanta at the music planning sessions. Finally, shifts in Convention politics and her 1950 breakthrough to fame on the Ed Sullivan television show made her an institution among Baptists as the “official soloist” of the National Baptists.

  Determined to preserve that status as a key to her livelihood, Mahalia Jackson arrived as a known friend of King, who had stayed in her home during the Republican Convention weeks earlier, and also as the loyal vassal of Old Jack. Her retinue included a new lawyer, Chauncey Eskridge, who was reeling from his first exposure to the bizarre atmosphere of the Convention, where charged politics surged under and around the central balm of what amounted to a continuous church service. From the singer, Eskridge learned what could safely be said to whom, as he watched her trying to maintain her neutrality. The impending battle touched deep beliefs of religion, politics, and race, with personal followings of a strength bordering on idolatry. Schism was in the air. Secretary T. J. Jemison—son of Jackson’s predecessor, leader of the Baton Rouge bus boycott of 1953, King’s old friend and first adviser as a protest leader—believed privately in everything Taylor and King stood for, but he decided painfully that his own presidential ambitions were best served by remaining a Jacksonite. Or so believed the Taylorites, who said they did not trust Secretary Jemison to count the votes for president.

  Pennsylvania governor David Lawrence, who had delivered Lyndon Johnson’s vice presidential nominating speech in Los Angeles under instructions from Senator Kennedy, officially welcomed the National Baptists to Philadelphia on Wednesday. The balloting for president took place the next day, and on Friday a small wire-service story appeared on page 60 of The New York Times, one of the only white newspapers to mention the event at all. “Negro Baptists Pick a Brooklyn Pastor,” said the Times, which quoted a Gardner Taylor victory statement that the election would put the National Baptists “in the forefront of the civil rights struggle.” The story represented fairly accurately the political hopes of the Taylor wing, but it bore only a superficial relation to actual events.

  What happened at the convention was bedlam. The noise began when Old Jack made his entrance to the hall for the Thursday morning business session, surrounded by swarms of his supporters. As the cheers finally died down, the Taylorites, who had prepared for the moment by hiring at least two uniformed bass drummers from a parade band, struck up a counterdemonstration to prove they could not be intimidated. When J. H. Jackson’s gavel hammered down enough order to begin business, Taylorites moved to “qualify the house,” meaning to separate the visitors from the voting delegates, and to tally the votes for president by a roll call of the states. They cheered when Jackson recognized the motions, contrary to most expectations, and cheered again when they carried. Some Jacksonites wondered whether the president might be giving up, but then the president of the Kansas chapter made a surprise announcement that his nominating committee found Dr. Jackson to be preeminently qualified over Dr. Taylor, and he moved that the Convention adopt the committee’s recommendation that Jackson be reelected unanimously. All order ceased as of that moment, as shouts of approval competed with cries of “No!” Frantic parliamentarians debated whether such a motion could supersede the roll-call election.

  When Jackson, above the din, ruled out of order a motion to separate the nominating committee report from the election itself, Taylorites surged toward the podium in huge numbers. The bass drums resumed. Rival caucuses paraded through the hall bearing placards for Taylor or Jackson. Two preachers and a woman banged a piano with their forearms. Roars of “We want Jackson!” and “We want Taylor!” and “Qualify the house!” and “Khrushchev!” occasionally rose above the deafening noise. Jackson tried to call for a voice vote on the motion, but someone yanked the plug on the public address system. Reporters standing under the podium less than six feet away from Jackson’s head later wrote that they could not hear a word he shouted nor anything else but noise for the next full hour. A plea by a Philadelphia police inspector restored enough order for the delegates to join in singing “Glory t
o His Name” and “Oh Lord, Stand By Me,” but the chaos resumed on the first mention of business. Finally, Jackson banged a silent gavel and made his way out of Convention Hall back to the Benjamin Franklin Hotel, surrounded by a squad of white policemen.

  In his wake, Jacksonite lieutenants announced that Dr. Jackson had been reelected by voice-vote approval of the nominating committee motion, and that Jackson had adjourned the convention for the day. Jubilation, relief, and outrage followed, as thousands streamed out of Convention Hall to analyze these stupendous proceedings. Inside, the Taylorite lieutenants reached a crisis decision to go forward as though Jackson’s exit had been nothing more than a temper tantrum. They managed to find a Convention vice president who could claim to have the authority to preside in the absence of the president, and the Taylorites struggled to go forward with the roll call against impediments of confusion, noise, and hostility. Some three hours later, the tabulation was announced: Taylor had won by a vote of 1,864 to 536.

  On the floor, King rose immediately to speak, hushing the crowd with his presence. Making his sympathies irreversibly public, King moved for the election of the Taylorite slate of NBC officers. It was a shrewdly politic list. T. J. Jemison and some of the most recalcitrant Jacksonites were purged, but several Jacksonites were retained in an effort to promote reconciliation. King’s list was approved by a shouted voice vote, and only then did Gardner Taylor himself make an entrance to the hall. By then the Jacksonites were returning in great numbers to prevent the consummation of the ouster, and they raised such a clamor that the triumphant Taylor was forced into helpless silence on the stage, where he was fanned by supporting preachers. Some time later, J. H. Jackson marched back into the hall within a phalanx of Jacksonites. He managed to reach the podium with the evident intent of expelling the usurper, but Taylor clung fast to the microphone. The two rivals faced each other in a frozen pose for hours, until city officials began turning out the lights at ten thirty. On his way out of Convention Hall, King talked with reporters. “The people voted overwhelmingly for Dr. Taylor,” he said. “It is really unfortunate that Dr. Jackson will not honorably give up.” A reporter noted sadly that the delegates had savagely beaten a concert grand piano, among other noisemakers, for a cumulative total of nearly five hours.