Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Abram found Hartsfield in the center of a maelstrom at city hall. Telegrams for and against King were arriving hourly in stacks from all over the country. Police officials were rushing in with reports about the growing threat of violence between white and Negro picketers. Hartsfield, negotiating in the city council chamber with many of the city’s most influential Negro leaders, was offering to begin intensive negotiations toward the desegregation of all downtown stores, and to say so publicly, if the Negroes would come out of jail and refrain from demonstrations during a truce period. The sticking point, Abram learned from the mayor, was that King and the students were refusing to accept release on bail. They would come out of jail only if the charges against them were dropped. This stand entangled mediator Hartsfield in bureaucracy as well as racial politics. As mayor, he could arrange to drop the charges against those in the city jail, but he had no jurisdiction over King and the others held in the county jail pending trial on state charges. These could be dropped only by the state prosecutor or by the criminal complainant, Rich’s department store. Its owner, Richard Rich, was consumed by fear that if he gave in, Negroes would descend on his stores with demands for nothing less than complete desegregation, which would drive white business to Rich’s competitors. This was a fate only slightly worse to Rich than his current one of being exposed in an ugly racial conflict. Rich had broken down in tears on hearing that his board chairman could get King and the demonstrators out of the Magnolia Room only in handcuffs.

  To a wily old politician such as Hartsfield, the best way to run such a formidable gauntlet was to announce the desired settlement before the diverse parties agreed to it. This required more than a little fudging, with its attendant political risk, and the mayor was casting about for a way to avoid taking all the political responsibility for the gambit. When Abram mentioned the call he had just received from Harris Wofford, whom Hartsfield knew as a Kennedy campaign aide, lights seemed to flare up in the mayor’s head. It occurred to him that he might accomplish a great deal by announcing that Senator Kennedy had asked him to get King out of jail. Not only would this buttress the truce with a name of national importance, making it harder for Governor Vandiver and other state Democrats to denounce, but the move might also win Negro votes for Kennedy in closely contested Northern states. The more Hartsfield thought about the brainstorm, the better it seemed to him. He might not only extricate his city from a dangerous, embarrassing racial conflict but perhaps even elect a president of the United States.

  Soon Abram was calling Wofford from the Mayor’s office to broach Hartsfield’s bold proposal. Wofford almost fainted when he heard it. He was feeling even more on the political fringe of the Kennedy campaign, and he knew from hard personal experience that the last thing his bosses wanted was to be associated with King in a Southern racial confrontation. Frantically, Wofford begged Abram and Hartsfield not to go forward with the plan unless Senator Kennedy approved, and he reminded Abram that his own call earlier that morning had been strictly personal, not political. Wofford promised to seek Senator Kennedy’s permission, but, being extremely reluctant to subject himself to further ridicule, he made only halfhearted attempts to locate the candidate, who was barnstorming through Kansas. Then Wofford called the Atlanta mayor’s office again to report that it was impossible to make contact and that therefore the plan was off. By this time, however, a battered Hartsfield was desperate for a solution. He grabbed the phone from Abram and said, “Now, Harris, I’m just so certain that his taking a position will help him with this doubtful Negro vote all over the nation that I’m going to take it on myself to tell this group that Senator Kennedy is asking me to intervene. That he has asked me to turn Martin Luther King loose. Why should he be ashamed of that? I’m going to turn him loose anyway.”

  Wofford’s panic returned instantly. He poured into the mayor’s ear all the arguments that had been thrown at him inside the campaign, about how Kennedy was in danger of losing Georgia, the South, and the entire election because of his association with civil rights. Hartsfield did not believe this, but he promised Wofford that he would contact Kennedy himself. Using Wofford’s private numbers, Hartsfield tracked Kennedy from telephone to telephone in Kansas—now hearing bands playing in the background, now hearing a policeman say Kennedy had just left. Finally, Hartsfield gave up and returned to the city council chamber to bargain with Daddy King and the others. There, under pressure, he invoked Kennedy’s name behind his own truce conditions. A reporter who had sneaked into the chamber quickly put the story of Kennedy’s involvement on the national wires.

  Very shortly, enraged Southern politicians, including Kennedy’s Georgia campaign strategists, called Hartsfield demanding to know exactly how and why the Democratic nominee had been dragged into the King controversy. The mayor dissembled adroitly and then called Wofford with a warning. “Now, I know that I ran with the ball farther than you expected, Harris, my boy,” he said, trying gamely to be casual, “but I needed a peg to swing on and you gave it to me, and I’ve swung on it.” Hartsfield told Wofford not to let Kennedy disavow Hartsfield’s announcement under pressure from Southern governors. In this new emergency, Wofford did manage to reach the Kennedy campaign plane in Kansas City. His report caused shock—“Hartsfield said what? You did what?”—followed by curses and fury. When Pierre Salinger, Ken O’Donnell, and other top aides signed off to draft a statement protecting Kennedy, a chastened Wofford waited to see whether they would call Hartsfield a liar. As it turned out, the statement released was vague and noncommittal: “…Senator Kennedy directed that an inquiry be made to give him all the facts on that situation and a report on what properly should be done. The Senator is hopeful that a satisfactory outcome can be worked out.” This accomplished the primary objective of minimizing the story, which received practically no attention in the press.

  Hartsfield spent the rest of that Saturday trying to sell his plan to the Negro conclave in the city council chamber. After many urgent messages to and from the county jail, it turned out that King and the students would not accept bail on Hartsfield’s promise to get the state charges dropped. Sticking to their “jail, no bail” slogan, they insisted that they could wait until the charges actually were dropped, or until their trials. It was nightfall before the mayor bypassed this last obstacle. He ordered the unconditional release of the students held in the city jail, pledged to have King and the others out of the county jail by Monday morning, and declared victory. There would be no demonstrations on Monday by either Negroes or Klansmen, he said, and he would begin desegregation talks with the downtown merchants that same day. Speaking for the Negro delegation, Reverend Borders praised the agreement, the mayor, and the city. “This was the best meeting we’ve ever held in the city of Atlanta,” he told reporters, adding that “the shortest route to heaven is from Atlanta, Georgia.” All that remained was for Hartsfield to visit Richard Rich and the state prosecutor, separately, and to tell each of them that the other had agreed to drop the charges.

  The next day, Governor Nelson Rockefeller preached Sunday sermons at four different Negro churches in Brooklyn, wearing a gray tie with a little pink elephant on it. Rockefeller managed to endorse the Republican ticket without mentioning Richard Nixon by name. Leaving the hard partisan pitch to his pulpit companion, Jackie Robinson, the governor gave his “fellow Baptists” a talk on the love verses of I Corinthians. “We’ve got to make love a reality in our own country,” he said. “When the great spiritual leader, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, finds himself in jail today because he had the courage to love, we have a long way to go in America.” One of his hosts that day, Daddy King’s old friend Sandy Ray, told the congregation that he was sticking with the Republicans again in the upcoming election, although he was not that happy about the ticket. “To be frank,” said Ray, “most of us wanted the Governor to be the nominee.”

  Daddy King outpreached Rockefeller that same day in Cleveland. Filling in for his jailed son, he preached six different sermons at the SC
LC fund-raisers and then flew home to Atlanta in time to join the jubilant crowd outside the county jail Monday morning, waiting for the release of the prisoners.

  The sense of crisis returned in new form when jail officials notified Negro lawyers that they had received a bench warrant ordering them to hold King in jail on other charges. Cries of betrayal went up. The lawyers eventually established that the warrant was issued on the authority of a judge in neighboring De Kalb County, where Emory University was located. The previous May, King and Coretta had driven writer Lillian Smith to Emory Hospital there for her cancer treatments, and a De Kalb policeman had stopped them for questioning—as was frequently done when patrol officers spotted interracial groups of travelers. The officer, finding that King was still driving on his Alabama license some three months after moving to Georgia, had charged him with the misdemeanor of driving without a proper permit, and Judge Oscar Mitchell had sentenced King to a twelve-month sentence, which he suspended, plus a $25 fine. Now Judge Mitchell asked Fulton County to keep King in jail pending a hearing on whether the Rich’s arrest violated the terms of his suspended sentence in the May traffic case.

  King’s cellmates mutinied over the news. While jail officials were processing their release papers under the Hartsfield agreement, the students were banding together in a pledge not to leave the jail without King. They accused Hartsfield of bad faith, and it took some time for the mayor to convince them that he was as upset about the bench warrant as they were. He suspected political machinations on the part of Governor Vandiver, who held a press conference that morning to announce that he had talked personally with Senator Kennedy and received assurances that the candidate had “no authority, intention or desire” to intervene in Georgia’s criminal processes. Even as Hartsfield was countering this move with his own press conference, in which he made fuzzy statements about just who had urged him on Kennedy’s behalf to release King, he was scrambling to persuade angry Negroes not to renounce the deal. He argued that Judge Mitchell had no case against King. The traffic charge was a minor misdemeanor in the first place, and the charges were now dropped in the Rich’s case. King’s lawyers sustained him with a dozen technical arguments, saying the De Kalb matter could be cleared up quickly. To reassure King’s cellmates, Daddy King and other adult leaders were permitted into the cell block to make speeches. “M.L. will be all right,” he said. King himself made a speech urging his cellmates to abide by the agreement, and when the other thirty-seven marched out regretfully, but peacefully, to freedom, he spent his first night in jail alone.

  The students reassembled outside the Fulton County jail early Tuesday morning in a vigil of support, waiting for King to be transferred to De Kalb County for Judge Mitchell’s hearing. A group of white theology students, in Atlanta on a mission to encourage the sit-ins, joined them in quiet prayers until the first sight of King turned all their hopeful apprehension into cold fear. Emerging from the jail between two De Kalb County detectives, King wore not only handcuffs but also leg and arm shackles. The students fell silent enough to hear the clang of metal as King was marched briskly to a squad car and put into the backseat next to a police dog. The car sped away, leaving the students behind, helpless. As for King, who was trying not to look at the ferocious German shepherd beside him, it was a sudden return to the terror of his first arrest nearly five years earlier in Montgomery, when visions of lynching had undone him. Now that he had given the white authorities a tiny legal opening at the Magnolia Room, it was they and not he who would control his exposure to danger.

  Nearly two hundred King supporters—including Roy Wilkins, who was in town, and four presidents from the Atlanta University complex—crowded into Judge Mitchell’s hearing. The De Kalb County territory was alien to the Atlantans. Worse than unfamiliar, it was fearful, as everyone knew that county officials recently had sanctioned a Ku Klux Klan parade through the corridors of that same courthouse. The hearing was permeated with an atmosphere of latent race violence, and with survival instincts more suited to a murder trial than a traffic case. Solicitor Jack Smith demanded a harsh penalty, saying that King had shown “no sign of penitence or remorse.” Donald Hollowell, King’s chief attorney, presented character witnesses and a host of arguments, but Mitchell banged the gavel, revoked King’s probation, and ordered him to serve four months at hard labor on a state road gang, beginning immediately. The spectators gasped in shock. Hollowell jumped to his feet to ask that King be released on bond pending appeal of both the current ruling and the original traffic sentence, but Judge Mitchell denied the motion. He ordered the sheriff’s deputies to take King away.

  The emotion in the courtroom was such that the dignified Samuel Williams—Morehouse philosophy professor, preacher, SCLC board member, Atlanta NAACP president—flung himself forward to cry out against the injustice. Deputies wrestled him to the floor and soon pitched him into the holding cell with King. When Williams recovered his composure, he was brought back into court for a lecture from Judge Mitchell and then released. The judge allowed the King family a parting visit in the holding cell. As King saw his wife and his sister Christine approaching the cell in tears, he said, “Corrie, dear, you have to be strong. I’ve never seen you like this. You have to be strong for me.” His pleading tone, and the tiredness that had crept into his face after six days in jail, only made Coretta collapse further into weeping. Daddy King was so upset that he scolded her for it. “You don’t see me crying,” he said. “I am ready to fight.”

  King tried to make peace. “I think we must prepare ourselves for the fact that I am going to have to serve this time,” he said. There was not much to say, and the family soon left him behind. Coretta, who was six months pregnant, gave way to self-pity as she contemplated bearing their third child with her husband in jail.

  In the aftershock outside, Mayor Hartsfield worked diligently to dissociate his city from the De Kalb proceedings. “I have made requests of all the news agencies that in their stories they make it clear that this hearing did not take place in Atlanta, Georgia,” he announced. Governor Vandiver’s press spokesman, on the other hand, warmly praised Judge Mitchell’s decision. “I think the maximum sentence for Martin Luther King might do him good,” he said, “might make a law-abiding citizen out of him and teach him to respect the law of Georgia.” At the SCLC, Wyatt Tee Walker fended off Negro reporters who wanted to know why he had not responded to the sentence by setting up protest pickets around the De Kalb County courthouse. There was “too much tenseness,” he said, and it was too dangerous to operate away from “home ground.”

  Instead, Walker spread an alarm by telephone in advance of headline news. For the time being, he forgot partisanship, protest, and even segregation, believing that the only issue now was King’s life. The state road gang meant cutthroat inmates and casually dismissed murders. King had to be freed or he would be dead. This was the emergency message that Walker and a band of colleagues sent to every person they could think of who might conceivably have influence. Stanley Levison called lawyers, union leaders, Rockefeller aides, politicians. Harry Belafonte called every entertainer he knew, as well as aides on both sides of the presidential race—Robert Kennedy, Sargent Shriver, E. Frederic Morrow, Jackie Robinson. All the while, Donald Hollowell was hurriedly preparing a writ of habeas corpus, arguing that Georgia law did not permit a judge to withhold bail in a misdemeanor case. This was unassailable legal ground, but those around King had lost faith in the law.

  In Washington, Harris Wofford responded to the alarm that same day by drafting a dignified statement of protest for Senator Kennedy to make. His draft was promptly buffeted around inside the Washington campaign headquarters and over the wires to the Chicago suburbs, where Kennedy was making speeches. Inevitably, phone calls buzzed down into Georgia and back by the dozens, and Wofford was soon hearing that Governor Vandiver had promised to get King out of jail on the condition that Kennedy make no public statement about the matter. Vandiver wanted to send out a strong, clear signal of segreg
ationist resolve in Georgia; he made the Gestapo tactics Wyatt Walker was describing sound like a small tactical maneuver. The governor and his allies won the quick round of infighting within the Kennedy campaign, which earned the loser, Harris Wofford, a quick mollifying call from Senator Kennedy that night. “What we want most is to get King out, isn’t it?” Kennedy asked.

  Wofford agreed. Still, he was miserable when Coretta King called soon thereafter wanting to know if he could help. He could not tell her about the Vandiver agreement, for fear that public news of it would make Vandiver renege on his promise, and he had no other good news to offer. Disconsolate, Wofford went out for an after-work beer with Louis Martin. The two of them groped for ideas. They wanted to do something to help, but it had to be something that would not run them into the political buzz saw inside the campaign. Out of these constraints came their idea of getting an important personage to call Coretta with encouragement. This was only a small gesture, but it was something that would make them feel better. Politically, they knew that there might be some advantage if they could keep the gesture beneath the threshold of white attention. If Vandiver and his allies were not aroused in anger, the Kennedy campaign might be able to spread the word privately among Negro voters.

  Recharged by this idea, Wofford managed to reach his old mentor Chester Bowles, who, as it happened, was entertaining Adlai Stevenson at his home for dinner. Bowles readily agreed to call Coretta King at once with his personal good wishes and the best assurances he could give her that all was being done to free King. This he did, and after Stevenson went home Bowles reported to Wofford that his call seemed to lift her spirits. The only hitch, he told Wofford, was that Stevenson had refused to take the phone even to say hello to Coretta, saying it was not proper as he had not been introduced to her. Bowles and Wofford puzzled over their friend’s skittishness. It might be traced to political caution—Stevenson hoped to be Secretary of State if Kennedy was elected—or, as Wofford thought more likely, to Stevenson’s simpler, more personal discomfort in the presence of Negroes. This trait, which Wofford had observed firsthand, was one of the factors that had moved him to switch from Stevenson to Kennedy early in the election year.