Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Atlanta student leaders implored King to go along with them on a sit in aimed toward jail. His presence would boost their strength, guarantee headlines, and generate political pressure beyond the capacity of the students alone. King’s own brother A.D., who was trying to finish his Morehouse degree at the age of twenty-nine, put the request to him, along with Lonnie C. King (no relation) and Spelman president Herschelle Sullivan, the co-leaders of the Atlanta student movement. So did Bernard Lee, whose expulsion from Alabama State made him such a hero that the student body of Morris Brown College in Atlanta elected him president shortly after he transferred in as a senior.

  Objections of pride, fear, and politics gorged up within King. If he went along, he warned them, much of the publicity would be diverted from them to him, and, worse, some important civil rights leaders might be less likely to help student groups simply because they were too closely associated with King. That was a reality, he said. Perhaps they should remain independent, as SNCC leaders often suggested. The students argued in rebuttal that Atlanta was King’s hometown. Rich’s—the city’s largest department store and chief target of the planned campaign—was a place where King and his parents and Ebenezer members had shopped all their lives. One of the most prized possessions in Atlanta was a Rich’s charge plate, which the students were now urging Negroes to surrender in protest against the store’s segregation. No, said the students, King never could be an intruder here. Rich’s was a symbol of Atlanta, which was a symbol of the hopes of the South, and King was a symbol of the hopes of the Negro people.

  “Well, maybe I should do it,” said King, but he was not sure. The students snatched bits of time with him at home, at Ebenezer, at the SNCC conference, and points in between. When he left town for a speech, a delegation of them followed him to the airport and huddled with him on the concourse before takeoff. Glenn Smiley, the FOR field secretary King had known since the boycott, came through the airport at the same time, headed in a different direction, and happened upon the sight of King surrounded by a half-dozen students. King was on the verge of tears, holding his face in his hands. Smiley interrupted, calling out a greeting, and the departing flight extended King’s reprieve.

  In Washington, the pressure of a presidential election only three weeks away was weighing on Louis Martin and Harris Wofford. The Kennedy campaign as a whole was scoring on the race issue at the expense of Henry Cabot Lodge, Nixon’s running mate. Lodge, caught up in the spirit of a Harlem rally just after Kennedy’s, had either promised or predicted that a Nixon Administration would appoint a Negro to the cabinet. Senator Kennedy pounced on this statement as “racism at its worst.” He and Lyndon Johnson each pledged that a Kennedy Administration would not consider race or religion at all in cabinet appointments—they would consider only “qualifications.” Vice President Nixon took the same public stance, in what was taken as a mild rebuke of Lodge, and Lodge could not extricate himself from the dispute for nearly two weeks. Although the episode worked to Kennedy’s advantage, Wofford and Martin winced at the underlying reality that this was really a pitch to white voters. Lodge had given Kennedy and Johnson a safe way to attack the Republicans for excessive sympathy for Negroes.

  Wofford and Martin searched for an offsetting gesture to Negro voters. Martin’s constant refrain at the office was “Let’s get all our horses on the track!”—newspapers, the NAACP, churches, Powell, Negro celebrities. One horse not quite on the Kennedy track was King. They had been approaching an agreement with King for some time. Although King told them that he could not formally endorse either candidate, he had been hinting at a willingness to say something favorable about Kennedy’s commitment to civil rights, if Kennedy would do something mildly dramatic to justify it. What King had in mind was for Kennedy to visit him, possibly at an SCLC meeting, in the South. The site of the meeting was vitally important, said King, because Negro voters were becoming sensitive to political hypocrisy. In an era of unenforced court decisions and showcase civil rights planks, it would mean almost nothing for King and Kennedy to meet in New York or Chicago, but it would mean a great deal in Atlanta or Montgomery.

  King talked by phone with Martin and Wofford about the pros and cons of various cities and particular statements. This was the zone of negotiation. The Kennedy men, knowing that they would have to sell any proposed deal to hostile superiors, and ultimately to the candidate himself, tried to talk King into a compromise city such as Louisville or St. Louis. They argued that the Kennedy people would not be overly impressed with the kind of “nonpartisan statement” King had in mind—that to their bosses, people were either for Kennedy or not—and that King should be flexible on the city if he refused an outright endorsement. While bargaining, Louis Martin warned King that major civil rights demonstrations before the election would almost certainly ruin any possible agreement. Demonstrations were anathema to Kennedy campaign strategists, who did not want to remind Negro voters in the North that Kennedy was aligned with the Southern officeholders who would repress the demonstrators. At the same time, demonstrations would make it impossible for Kennedy to meet with someone like King, which would risk losing an enormous bloc of Southern white votes. Opinion polls showed that Kennedy might become the first Democrat to lose the South in more than a hundred years.

  Kennedy pressure was also reaching King from Hollywood. Through the contacts of Harry Belafonte and Clarence Jones, King had persuaded Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr., and other entertainers from the Sinatra clique to perform for a civil rights fund-raiser in Carnegie Hall, scheduled for January. Sinatra, whose rendition of “High Hopes” had been the Kennedy campaign song since the early primaries, was unhappy that King was refusing to return the favor by appearing at a Kennedy rally in California. Through Sammy Davis, he sent an ominous message that King should not count on the help of Sinatra if he snubbed Sinatra’s friend Senator Kennedy. Against this veiled threat, Stanley Levison joined Belafonte in supporting the commitment to nonpartisanship. “One point might be stressed with Sammy [Davis],” Levison advised King by letter. “Since you are concentrating on getting the vote in the South, the effectiveness of your efforts would be diminished if you were identified as an adherent of one party…. Sometimes I think these people see you too much as a personality of glamour, not as a leader whose responsibilities will continue over decades and through changes of great magnitude…. Frank, Sammy and the others are not intellectual leaders nor moral leaders[,] so their decisions can be more easily arrived at without the singular weight that attaches to a decision or stand by you.”

  King received Levison’s letter during the SNCC conference, which coincided with the Lodge controversy over hypothetical Negro cabinet members and King’s roving ordeal with the Atlanta students, including his brother. When he returned from his speaking trip, the students caught up with him again at his parents’ home, where Mother King nearly always had some turnip greens on the stove. He was munching the greens, dipping bread into the juice, as the students pressed him toward consent, saying they were ready to move within forty-eight hours, their plans couldn’t wait. Before they got very far, Daddy King burst into the kitchen wearing a glower of disapproval. “M.L., you don’t need to go!” he said urgently. “This is the students, not you.”

  Daddy King scattered the students like bowling pins. King put up his usual soft defense against his father’s arguments, agreeing whenever he could, and maintained a similar attitude when the students circled back to renew their urgent pep talks. All the while, King took phone calls from Harris Wofford in Washington. At one point, Wofford thought he had clearance to offer a Kennedy-King meeting in Nashville, which was “Southern enough” for King but “too Southern,” as it turned out, for Kennedy’s top strategists. The Southern politicians within their telephone networks howled so loudly in opposition that the Nashville plan was revoked. A hundred phone calls and many white lies later, Wofford called King again to offer Miami instead of Nashville, the next afternoon or evening. King was not very happy about the
switch. Wofford repeated the Kennedy arguments that Miami was a “Deep South city,” but he did not do so very forcefully. He said it was the best he could do.

  King thought it over, then told Wofford frankly that one reason he was inclined to accept Miami was that it would overlap with a student demonstration just now boiling up in Atlanta. “I don’t want to have to be there,” he said. Wofford replied that the Kennedy people would not be happy to hear of a demonstration whether King was there or not. He thought it best not to tell them, for fear they would back off the Miami plan. King said he had tried to get the students to delay the new sit-in until after the election, but his heart was not in it. Wofford understood this. His firm Gandhian belief in civil disobedience occasionally shined through the corporate lawyer persona he was stressing for the Kennedy campaign. Louis Martin had seen through it already, and teasingly advised Wofford to become a priest.

  “I’ll do it,” King told Wofford. “But you should tell Mr. Kennedy that I will be obliged to issue a pro forma invitation to Mr. Nixon.”

  Wofford’s heart sank. “Do you really feel you have to do that?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said King. “I don’t think Mr. Nixon will accept, but I have to give him the chance.”

  When King hung up, it appeared that he had maneuvered himself into a choice of safe, prestige politics over the gritty, dangerous protest. The students would be angry, but they would have to accept a meeting with one or both of the presidential candidates as a legitimate reason for missing a demonstration. Daddy King, on the other hand, would be relieved that his son was out of the sit-in but unhappy that he was moving toward Kennedy.

  When Wofford hung up, he decided that this latest twist was something he should take directly to Senator Kennedy himself, if possible, because his aides would certainly shoot it down. He squeezed in a minute or two with Kennedy, who was getting ready to leave for Miami, to explain the condition of a parallel invitation to Nixon. “The hell with that,” Kennedy replied instantly. “Nixon might be smart enough to accept. If he does, I lose votes. I’m taking a much greater risk in the South than Nixon, but King wants to treat us as equals. Tell him it’s off.”

  The next day, Tuesday, October 18, Daddy King joined the leadership of the Atlanta Baptist Ministers’ Union in an endorsement of the Nixon-Lodge ticket. These were the city’s senior Negroes, for the most part—men who had grown up with a loyalty to the “party of Lincoln” and whose status within their community as relatively big businessmen reinforced that identity against the Democratic encroachments since Franklin Roosevelt. This year, there was an additional factor binding them as conservative Baptists to the Republicans: Kennedy’s Catholic faith. Perhaps for that reason they took the unusual step of signing their names to a declaration of Republican support.

  In Miami that day, both Kennedy and Nixon made headlines with addresses to the national convention of the American Legion. Nixon called for a full economic quarantine against the “intolerable cancer” of communism in Cuba, but Kennedy drew more applause by charging that Nixon’s preference for economic solutions indicated a lack of military resolve. “I have never believed in retreating under fire,” said Kennedy. He ridiculed Nixon for having said to Khrushchev, in the famous kitchen debate, “You may be ahead of us in rockets, but we are ahead of you in color television.” Kennedy drew laughs and cheers from the legionnaires when he added, “I think I’ll take my television in black and white.”

  Also that day, Atlanta student movement leader Lonnie C. King called his pastor at Ebenezer to make a final plea for the demonstration. “You are the spiritual leader of the movement, and you were born in Atlanta, Georgia,” he told King. “And I think it might add tremendous impetus if you would go.”

  “Where are you going to go tomorrow, L.C.?” asked King.

  “I’m going to be on the bridge down at Rich’s.”

  “Well, I’ll meet you on the bridge tomorrow at ten o’clock,” said King. With these words, he took his first deliberate step toward prison.

  NINE

  A PAWN OF HISTORY

  Eighty demonstrators, their watches synchronized, requested service in eight different segregated establishments at precisely eleven o’clock the next morning, October 19. King’s group was refused service at a snack bar in the covered bridge that connected buildings of the Rich’s complex on either side of Forsyth Street. Company officials did not ask the foregathered police officers to arrest them, however, and the demonstrators then took an elevator to the sixth-floor Magnolia Room, the store’s most elegant restaurant for shoppers. There the board chairman of Rich’s interceded personally. Failing to persuade the demonstrators to leave, he had them arrested under a state anti-trespass law.

  As the first to be arrested, and the only nonstudent among the defendants, King was first to speak in court that night before Judge James E. Webb, who set bond at $500 pending trial. “I cannot accept bond,” said King. “I will stay in jail one year, or ten years.” In a brief, nervous courtroom oration, King explained that he did not want to go to jail, nor to “upset peace,” but that his decision to choose jail was in accord with the principles of a movement that went “far beyond” dining room segregation and other Southern folkways. He urged the judge to vacate the charges. When Webb refused, King was hustled off to spend the first night of his life behind bars. Thirty-five students followed him in quick succession.

  Tension gave way to euphoria shortly after the new prisoners found themselves in a special cell block of the county jail, in the care of Negro guards who supplied games, books, and phone messages. The first prison meal—steak smothered in onions—wiped out any lingering doubts that these particular prisoners had been marked for favorable treatment. The high quality of the food quickly seduced them out of plans for a prison fast. The students, realizing that the worst was over, turned with enthusiasm to the task of creating a communal regimen that would see them through weeks, even months, in jail together. Bernard Lee eagerly claimed the bunk just above King’s. He noted with scarcely concealed pleasure that their co-prisoners in the female cell block were sending messages envious of the males for having King among them. King was a special prize to the students generally and to Lee in particular. He joined with them in organizing a prison routine—sang with them, participated in their workshops, and addressed them in sermonettes on nonviolence. Lee was delighted to find that he could beat King regularly at checkers, and King, pondering the checkerboard, vowed playfully that he would get even as soon as he could catch Lee around a pool table.

  Boredom had no chance to penetrate the cell block, especially since news filtered in hourly about how their arrest was gripping the city of Atlanta and beyond. Mayor William Hartsfield was holding meetings. Atlanta police chief Herbert Jenkins was giving the demonstrations his personal attention. Reporters counted as many as two thousand Negro student picketers around segregated targets on Thursday, the second day. Three more prisoners came into the cell block, and twenty-two others went into the city jail. No nerves failed—no one bonded out.

  On Friday, jail authorities allowed King and student leaders to hold a press interview, at which King spoke quietly, almost shyly, about his reasons for joining the student protest. “I had to practice what I preached,” he said. He spoke proudly of the fact that his fellow prisoners included five of the six student body presidents from the Atlanta University complex, plus two “college queens” and a number of honor students. Of his own sacrifices, King mentioned only the loss to the SCLC of revenue from his scheduled speeches during the most lucrative quarter of the year. “I was to have been in Cleveland on Sunday,” he said. The Cleveland preachers had guaranteed the SCLC $7,000 from the event.

  That night, 85 million Americans watched the fourth and final debate between Kennedy and Nixon. Confined by agreement to issues of foreign policy, the debate was an unrecognized milestone of American politics in that it featured the clandestine preoccupations that had been growing within the U.S. government since World War II
. Kennedy, who later maintained that his CIA briefings had not covered the subject, criticized the Republicans for not doing precisely what they were doing: helping Cuban exiles prepare to overthrow Castro by covert warfare. Nixon, who already had helped launch this plan, decided he must protect the operation’s secrecy by opposing his own policies. He criticized Kennedy in the debate for making “probably the most dangerously irresponsible recommendations” of the campaign. If the United States followed Kennedy’s prescription for secret warfare, Nixon declared, we would violate no fewer than five treaty commitments prohibiting intervention in the internal affairs of Latin American nations. All through the debate, Kennedy and Nixon attacked each other in coded language that was not always clear to each other—let alone to most viewers, who still knew little more about the CIA than they had known about the Manhattan Project before Hiroshima.

  Although he worked in the Kennedy campaign, Harris Wofford responded to the surface realities like almost everyone else, and he found himself in the uncomfortable position of agreeing with Nixon. At his home the next morning, Wofford heard radio reports that the Ku Klux Klan was marching in opposition to student picketers on the streets of Atlanta. King was spending his fourth day in the county jail. Wofford, as one of King’s few friends outside Atlanta who knew how badly he had wanted to avoid this ordeal, chastised himself for doing nothing to help. Wofford impulsively started calling Atlanta contacts, among them a prominent attorney named Morris Abram, who agreed to talk with Mayor Hartsfield about getting King out of jail.*