Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  These and countless other phone calls went on until after midnight. By then, King and eight other prisoners had divided up the bunks inside a crowded cell at the De Kalb County jail and King had dropped off to sleep, only to be wakened by a voice calling “King! Get up!” Seconds later came more shouts and a flashlight shining into his eyes. Grabbing his suit, he stumbled out into the hands of sheriff’s deputies, who wordlessly handcuffed and shackled him. He was led clanking through the cell block out into the night, then deposited inside a police car. When he received no answers to his questions about where they were taking him, he fell silent.

  Hollowell called the jail just before eight o’clock that Wednesday morning to advise the authorities that he was on the way with his writ of habeas corpus. The writ would do no good now, he was told, as King had been transferred to Reidsville, the maximum-security prison. Hollowell recoiled in shock. His news swept through Negro Atlanta within the hour, and the alarm calls went out again. Coretta King was nearly hysterical by the time she reached Harris Wofford. She had just received the one phone call King was allowed on arrival at the Reidsville state prison. They had yanked him out of jail in the middle of the night without warning, she said. No one had any idea what would happen next.

  Wofford went to Louis Martin with the latest details, which further undermined their faith in the Vandiver promise. A few retellings of the Reidsville story revealed to them, however, that the Negro and white perceptions of the event were growing ever farther apart. Those who identified with King felt the terror of the shackles and the tough cops, the quick bang of the gavel, and the unscheduled nighttime ride 230 miles out into rural Georgia. Those with more detachment saw the case as a matter of Southern ignorance that would be reversed sooner or later, and to them the issue of how and when King was transferred to Reidsville was relatively unimportant. Morris Abram argued that King actually was safer at Reidsville than he had been at the De Kalb County jail. Such nonchalance undercut Wofford’s efforts to stir up new interest within the Kennedy campaign. In fact, Kennedy’s aides were neglecting to return his phone calls, the better to avoid his nagging.

  Wofford called his own boss, Sargent Shriver, who had been spending most of his time lately in his crucial home state of Illinois, running Businessmen for Kennedy and Johnson. Shriver was in Chicago, where the candidate’s entourage was passing through like a storm. Senator Kennedy had just finished a campaign breakfast with about fifty Illinois businessmen at O’Hare Airport and was huddled with his advisers in a special holding suite near the runway, waiting for his plane to leave. Wofford’s call found Shriver there, and Shriver gave him the kind of flyspeck attention lower aides usually get from officials standing within thirty feet of a candidate for President. In emergency shorthand Wofford blurted out the headlines—King snatched off to state prison, no release from Vandiver, Coretta hysterical, the campaign civil rights office swamped with calls. He said he and Louis Martin had given up the idea that Kennedy should make a public statement, but they had something simpler and less controversial in mind. “If the Senator would only call Mrs. King and wish her well,” said Wofford, “it would reverberate all through the Negro community in the United States. All he’s got to do is say he’s thinking about her and he hopes everything will be all right. All he’s got to do is show a little heart. He can even say he doesn’t have all the facts in the case…”

  “All right, all right,” Shriver said hurriedly. “You’ve got to give me some good numbers.” After money and publicity, accurate phone numbers were the most precious commodity in a campaign.

  Wofford quickly rattled off numbers for Hartsfield, Morris Abram, and others, assuming Shriver would want to lay the groundwork for a call. “No, no,” said Shriver. There wasn’t time for all that. “Where is she? Give me her number.” He took down the King home number in Atlanta, put it in his pocket, and rejoined the huddle around Kennedy.

  Shriver waited, hoping that Sorensen, O’Donnell, Salinger, Lawrence O’Brien, and the other members of Kennedy’s kitchen cabinet would rush off to telephones and typewriters. He did not want to mention Wofford’s idea in their presence. If they did not strangle the idea on sight, the aides, who liked to speculate about how contemplated moves might play in The New York Times, would object that Kennedy could not possibly do anything quiet in the King case, which was on that morning’s front page. Finally, Senator Kennedy said he was not feeling well and went into the bedroom to lie down. Shriver alone followed him. Gently but urgently, he repeated Wofford’s proposition, stressing what he called King’s “lousy treatment” in jail and Mrs. King’s emotional breakdown. “I think you ought to give her a call, Jack,” he concluded.

  Kennedy sat up wearily on the bed. “What the hell,” he said. “That’s a decent thing to do. Why not? Get her on the phone.”

  Shriver quickly pulled the paper from his pocket and dialed the number. The phone rang in the King bedroom, where Coretta was dressing to keep an appointment with Morris Abram. Daddy King, who had decided that this situation was grave enough to require the influence of a white lawyer like Abram, instead of Hollowell, was on his way to take her with him. When Coretta identified herself, Shriver said, “Just a minute, Mrs. King, for Senator Kennedy,” and handed the phone to the candidate on the bed.

  After greeting her, Kennedy said, “I know this must be very hard for you. I understand you are expecting a baby, and I just wanted you to know that I was thinking about you and Dr. King. If there is anything I can do to help, please feel free to call on me.”

  “I certainly appreciate your concern,” said Coretta. “I would appreciate anything you could do to help.”

  It was over within two minutes. Coretta called Mother King fairly bursting with the news, and Shriver sneaked out the back door of the suite before the aides arrived to whisk Senator Kennedy to the plane.

  At Reidsville state prison, clad in striped prison garb, King was being held in solitary confinement until the custodians finished processing him into prison duties. His presence already had attracted the special attention of the inmates. Some Negro prisoners sent messages reminding him that they had written him for advice about how to appeal convictions for various heinous crimes; other messages informed him that there was a movement to stage a hunger strike in his honor. King discouraged the idea.

  That afternoon, he wrote his first letter from prison, to Coretta. “Hello Darling,” it began.

  Today I find myself a long way from you and the children…I know this whole experience is very difficult for you to adjust to, especially in your condition of pregnancy, but as I said to you yesterday this is the cross that we must bear for the freedom of our people…. I have the faith to believe that this excessive suffering that is now coming to our family will in some little way serve to make Atlanta a better city, Georgia a better state, and America a better country. Just how I do not yet know, but I have faith to believe it will. If I am correct then our suffering is not in vain.

  …I understand that everybody—white and colored—can have visitors this coming Sunday. I hope you can find some way to come down…. Also ask Wyatt to come. There are some very urgent things that I will need to talk with him about. Pleas[e] bring the following books to me: Stride Toward Freedom, Paul Tillich’s Systematic Theology Vol. 1 and 2, George Buttrick The Parables of Jesus, E. S. Jones Mahatma Gandhi, Horns and Halo, a Bible, a Dictionary and my reference dictionary called Increasing Your Word Power. This book is an old book in a red cover and it may be in the den or upstairs in one of my bags. Also bring the following sermons from my file[:] “What is Man” “The Three Dimensions” “The Death of Evil”…[He listed fifteen more sermons.] Also bring a radio.

  Give my best regards to all the family. Please ask them not to worry about me. I will adjust to whatever comes in terms of pain. Hope to see you Sunday. Eternally yours, Martin.

  On the campaign flight to Detroit, Senator Kennedy mentioned casually to Pierre Salinger that he had made a personal call from Chicago to Mrs.
Martin Luther King. It was not quite a confession and not quite a warning, but Salinger and the others had no trouble figuring out that Shriver had slipped something past them, probably on the urging of the pesky Wofford. Salinger was concerned enough to call Robert Kennedy on the radiophone.

  In general, Kennedy aides were admired for just what Salinger now feared of Wofford: daring, unorthodox maneuvers to unearth political treasure. The biggest hero inside the campaign was the lawyer who had pried out of the Eisenhower State Department a secret poll showing U.S. prestige to be in decline around the world because of the U-2 incident and the crises in Cuba and the Congo. In order to protect Kennedy from charges that he was using classified information for partisan purposes, the lawyer helped leak the poll to The New York Times with assurances that the campaign would not be identified as its source. Then, citing the Times story, Senator Kennedy was free to demand release of the poll and to hammer away on what he called “a threat to survival.” In the last month of the campaign, Kennedy made more headlines with the prestige issue than with any other. What Salinger and his colleagues feared was that Wofford was just enough of a Kennedy man to apply these hard-headed tactics to a softheaded issue.

  This was precisely what Wofford and Louis Martin had in mind. To protect himself inside the campaign, Wofford first called Coretta King and told her that it was vitally important for her not to tell any reporters about Senator Kennedy’s call without Wofford’s consent. Then he and Martin began to guide reporters toward a story in Atlanta, moving delicately and indirectly, mentioning Abram and others who knew of the call while trying to keep themselves hidden as sources. The game ended abruptly when a New York Times reporter called Wofford wanting to know why Coretta King was saying that she would not talk to reporters without clearance from Wofford. (Wofford had neglected to tell her that she must not only follow his instructions but keep the instructions themselves confidential.) Shrugging, he called her back and told her it was all right to talk now.

  At the Kennedy campaign headquarters in Washington, Robert Kennedy’s first move after hearing that reporters were onto the story was to call Sargent Shriver in a quiet fury. When Shriver disclosed the facts of the phone call from the Chicago airport, Kennedy tongue-lashed and belittled him in a tirade that permanently strained the family relationship between them. “You bomb-throwers have lost the whole campaign,” he said. When he hung up on Shriver, he sent orders for Wofford and Martin to report to his office at once.

  The summons was received in the civil rights office as a calling card from the executioner. “Well, I think you’re the best one to tell Bobby what happened,” Wofford said to Martin.

  “He said both of us,” Martin protested, trying to laugh. He agreed, however, that Wofford was much more exposed as the culprit, and finally went to Kennedy’s office a few minutes ahead of Wofford, hoping to soften the blow.

  Robert Kennedy picked up with Martin where he had left off with Shriver, in a stream of curses delivered in an ominously quiet manner. As Martin waited for an opening to defend himself, it seemed to him that Kennedy’s outburst was strangely disconnected from the facts—that his ranting was the nervous frustration of a campaign manager only thirteen days from the election, burdened by a million problems. “Well, one reason we did it,” Martin interjected at first chance, “was that they took Dr. King out of Atlanta on an old traffic charge of driving without a license. Then they sentenced him to four months on the chain gang, denied bail, and took him off in the middle of the night to the state prison. All in one day.”

  “How could they do that?” Kennedy asked doubtfully. “Who’s the judge? You can’t deny bail on a misdemeanor.”

  Martin decided that Kennedy may have lost sight of the essential fact that King was a Negro—a detail Southern politicians carefully avoided in their protests against interference in the King case. “Well, they just did it,” said Martin. “They wanted to make an example of him as an uppity Negro. That’s why it’s so dangerous to us in the campaign. I’ve heard that Jackie Robinson is trying to get Nixon to hold a press conference and blame the whole thing on the Democrats. Those are all Democrats running things down there.” Martin stopped. For all he knew, the Jackie Robinson story, which he had invented on the way to Kennedy’s office, might be true.

  Kennedy paused for a number of seconds and then said, “Uh, goddammit,” in a weary expletive that could have cut in many directions.

  When Wofford joined them, Kennedy chewed him out for insubordination, for pushing Senator Kennedy into a politically explosive controversy. He commanded the civil rights office to do nothing else controversial for the duration of the campaign—no literature, no press conferences, no little schemes, nothing that might get into the newspapers—and then dismissed them curtly. After they left, Kennedy asked his aide John Seigenthaler to drive him to the airport to catch a plane to New York for a speech. On the way, he wondered out loud if there was something he could do to draw fire away from his brother in the King case. His anger darted furtively toward all those involved, except for Senator Kennedy. Seigenthaler advised him to do nothing.

  Later that night, the Kennedy campaign plane also landed in New York. As the candidate stepped off the plane, a reporter asked him if it was true that he had called Mrs. King earlier that day. “She is a friend of mine,” said Kennedy, who had never met Coretta and never would, “and I was concerned about the situation.” As he brushed past the reporter, he said something softly about having a traitor in his camp.

  Still, the reporter had a confirmation. The next morning’s New York Times contained a two-inch item on page 22 noting that Senator Kennedy had made a sympathy call to Mrs. King, and that a Republican spokesman said Vice President Nixon would have no comment on the King case. The Times played it as a minor story, and most of the nation’s major news outlets gave it even less attention. Politically, this was just what Wofford and Martin had wished. They would have had an opening to publicize among Negro voters an event that went practically unnoticed among whites. But now, under Robert Kennedy’s explicit gag order, they ruefully let the opportunity pass.

  In Atlanta, Donald Hollowell dispelled a far more intense gloom that morning when he trumpeted the news that Judge Mitchell had changed his mind and signed an order to release King on $2,000 bond. In a mad scramble of joy, Wyatt Tee Walker raided the SCLC treasury to charter a private plane, grabbed Ralph Abernathy, and took off for Reidsville ahead of three other private planes filled with lawyers and reporters. It was soon recorded that King emerged from the prison at 3:46 P.M., free after eight days and nights in three different prisons. The rest of the King family met the caravan of planes outside Atlanta at 5:57 P.M. A reporter who was seeing King for the first time as he tumbled out of the plane and hugged Coretta wrote that he “had a look of vulnerability about him—not softness, naivete, but somehow hurtable.”

  Daddy King escorted his son into a Cadillac limousine big enough to hold the entire family, including the children and Christine’s husband, and the caravan of planes turned into a triumphal procession of automobiles. A hundred sit-in veterans were waiting in cars at the Fulton County line, on the way into Atlanta. King’s caravan pulled over to the side of the road on sight of them. People spilled joyfully out of the cars into the road, where they sang “We Shall Overcome.” Then the combined line of cars made its way to Ebenezer for a spontaneous mass meeting. King was the object of thanksgiving, but Daddy King was the master of the overflow crowd. He spoke of God and courage and fear, and then chose that moment to make the announcement he had promised Harris Wofford earlier that day. “I had expected to vote against Senator Kennedy because of his religion,” he declared. “But now he can be my President, Catholic or whatever he is. It took courage to call my daughter-in-law at a time like this. He has the moral courage to stand up for what he knows is right. I’ve got all my votes and I’ve got a suitcase, and I’m going to take them up there and dump them in his lap.”

  The crowd roared approval, and roared ag
ain when Ralph Abernathy said it was time to “take off your Nixon buttons.” But King himself, almost visibly compressed by the sudden shift from prison to politics, spoke more personally about jail as a test of faith. “We must master the art of creative suffering,” he said. All he said about the presidential election was that he would never let a candidate’s religion determine his vote.

  About the time King’s plane from Reidsville touched down near Atlanta, David Brinkley of NBC’s “Huntley-Brinkley Report” called Harris Wofford to verify a wire service story that “a brother of Senator Kennedy” had called Judge Mitchell personally to secure King’s release. Wofford denied the story, telling Brinkley that it was so implausible as to defy belief. The press office at campaign headquarters was also denying the story, on the orders of John Seigenthaler.

  When Robert Kennedy checked in by telephone that night, Seigenthaler told him about the press rumor: “Guess what that crazy judge says in Georgia? He says you called him about King not getting bail.”

  There was a long pause on Kennedy’s end of the line. “Did he say that?”