Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Meanwhile, the Kennedy people were approaching a voter registration strategy from the top down, by way of Robert Kennedy’s post-election reviews. The civil rights constituency was volatile, politically cheap, and potentially decisive. Such was the lesson of the King phone calls in the campaign, and the advisers were shrewd enough to recognize another sign hidden among the election results. In Fayette County, Tennessee—one of the two counties in Tennessee where John Doar of the Eisenhower Justice Department had sued to protect Negroes—twelve hundred new Negro votes helped turn the county Republican for the first time since Reconstruction. This landslide, going against the general Kennedy landslide, was interpreted to mean that Negroes in the South would reward those who helped them gain the right to vote.

  For Robert Kennedy and his political aides, the circumstances dictated a conscious strategy of “appoint and appoint, elect and elect”—as expressed by Harris Wofford in a political memo. The repetition was deliberate. The idea was to keep appointing Negroes to jobs and to register enough Negroes to render Southern officeholders more sympathetic to their legislative proposals. It was a policy of accretion, with nothing so sweeping or grand as to touch off a segregationist backlash against them. In school desegregation, as in voter registration, the Kennedys planned to work “Negro by Negro,” one by one, in lawsuits and registration campaigns. “The years go by,” wrote a friendly journalist, lamenting the tactical concession to time, “yet there can be no other strategy.”

  Harris Wofford remained a Kennedy insider without portfolio, slightly tainted but possessed nevertheless of a unique blend of contacts that helped King and the Kennedy Justice Department alike. During the changeover of administration, he learned from King of the SCLC’s ambition to acquire foundation grants, and Wofford recommended foundation executives he thought might help. Then he advised some of his foundation friends that the best political brains in the Kennedy Administration had decided to push Negro voter registration, and he completed the circle by telling his Kennedy contacts that King was seeking foundation grants for that very purpose. As a catalyst, Wofford found that people from each of the three sides were happy to hear about the enthusiasm of the other two. King’s people were pleased that the nervy Kennedy types were determined to “make things happen” in voter registration. The foundation people swelled with the prospect of helping the New Frontier and Southern Negroes at the same time, under the implicit protection of the federal government. And the Kennedy people were attracted to the idea of a quiet, well-financed coup. All three sides realized that they stood to lose heavily if the partisan Kennedy role came to public attention. Tax exemptions and political reputations were at stake, as was the new Administration’s duty to act impartially in the sensitive area of voting. Consequently, the exploratory meetings took place in an atmosphere of secrecy.

  In the glare of a crisp, snow-blanketed day, John F. Kennedy delivered an inaugural speech that from its first phrase—“We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom”—was a paean to liberty. The speech defined an American identity by looking outward, projecting a new battle cry of freedom into the Cold War struggle against communism—all set dramatically within an era of ultimate risk in which “man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.” As a liberal, Kennedy tempered militancy with sentiments of moral grace mixed with pragmatism—“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich”—and he dreamed that even the Communists might join the free world to “explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease.” No American president had ever surveyed such a vast domain with such an urgent sense of mission. “In the long history of the world,” Kennedy declared, “only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger.”

  The speech struck the country with a bolt of energy, as Kennedy projected the image of a daring sailor in a gale wind. Some of his excitement reached down among King’s colleagues. In Birmingham, where criminal trials from sit-in cases had pitched Negroes into a continuous crisis, Fred Shuttlesworth walked into the weekly mass meeting at the St. James Baptist Church and paid tribute to Kennedy from the pulpit. “What a wonderful President we have now!” he exclaimed, reminding the crowd that he and the freedom movement had helped put Kennedy into office. The moment inspired Shuttlesworth to come down to sit next to two men who were highly conspicuous as the only white people in the congregation. The bantam preacher made a fuss over welcoming them, shaking their hands warmly, and then he introduced them with relish as members of the police intelligence squad sent by Bull Connor into all the mass meetings. “This is Detective Jones,” he announced. “He voted for Nixon along with the other white people.” Shuttlesworth made a speech breaking all allegiance with the Republicans. “Ike never did nothing for the Negroes in the eight years he was in there,” he said. “No Negro ever played golf with Ike.” He turned the meeting over to a minister who began preaching so fervently from Ezekiel about the dry bones of the faithless that more than a dozen people had to be carried out in fits of uncontrollable excitement, and the deacons finally covered the preacher himself with an overcoat and several scarves, to calm him. This was an old ritual of religious ecstasy that was just being introduced to white teenagers through the performances of rock stars, most notably James Brown.

  For King himself, it remained to be seen how much Kennedy’s ideas of freedom overlapped with his. Kennedy never mentioned segregation, civil rights, or race in his inaugural address, and to some degree the new President was using his political gifts to make his summons to freedom intoxicating to both Negroes and white Southern Democrats. Still, King had to find it encouraging that Kennedy occasionally condemned racial prejudice as “irrational,” and that he seemed so much more comfortable in the presence of Negroes than had Eisenhower. Kennedy danced with Negro women on Inauguration night and included Louis Martin and his wife among the members of his political “family,” as introduced on the platform of the inaugural gala.

  These were signals. And certainly Kennedy and King connected in the visible sphere of glitter and stardom. By and large, Kennedy’s celebrities supported King, and vice versa. Frank Sinatra produced and starred in the Kennedy gala, bringing to the stage an interracial cast that included Nat “King” Cole, Jimmy Durante, Mahalia Jackson, Sidney Poitier, Leonard Bernstein, Ella Fitzgerald, Peter Lawford, and Harry Belafonte. Lawford, married to the new President’s sister Patricia, was part of Sinatra’s casino-hopping, moviemaking “Rat Pack,” whose extravagances were splashed regularly in the tabloids and fan magazines. The only member absent from the gala was Sammy Davis, Jr. His recent interracial marriage to a Swedish actress made him, like King, too controversial for a mainstream political gathering.

  Exactly a week after the Inauguration, Sinatra reassembled the celebrities for a five-hour tribute to King at New York’s Carnegie Hall. Sammy Davis, Dean Martin, Count Basie, Tony Bennett, Nipsey Russell, and other popular entertainers joined Sinatra’s cast. Although the event attracted no national attention, it raised $50,000 for the SCLC and established King as the possessor of a celebrity drawing power that ambitious politicians could not ignore. Advisers to New York governor Nelson Rockefeller built up a thick file of memos debating the fine points of Rockefeller’s participation. Worries that Rockefeller might become tainted by association with the racy, gangsterish Sinatra crowd, for example, were dismissed with the observation that the Rat Pack was “already firmly associated in the public eye with Jack Kennedy.” The advisers decided that Rockefeller could get away with buying a $400 box of tickets unless the benefactors were listed by name and category in the program, in which case political considerations required him to buy the top box at $800. In the end, Rockefeller paid the $800. He also sent a cordial telegram to Carnegie Hall, as did President Kennedy.

  From New York, King flew on to Chicago, Philadelphia, and Salt Lake City for speeches on successive days. In
Chicago, he stayed with Mahalia Jackson, who was about to sing for Pope John XXIII on another of her European tours. They consumed a lavish soul-food feast, during which word came that Coretta had gone into labor with her third child. “You better name it Mahalia,” laughed Jackson. As King shuttled between the dinner and the phone, receiving bulletins from the Atlanta hospital, she kept up such banter that King agreed in a show of surrender to let Jackson or one of her best friends name a baby girl. If it was a boy, he said, the name would be Dexter, after his former church in Montgomery. A few calls later, he came back with a happy announcement: “It’s Dexter.”

  On January 28, the new President held an unusual Saturday meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House. All staff aides were barred from the top-secret review of plans to overthrow Fidel Castro’s Cuban government by clandestine invasion. The Pentagon leaders pressed for greater force to insure the success of the military mission, while Secretary of State Dean Rusk pressed for either no operation at all or a much quieter one, the better to protect the U.S. diplomatic position in the world from charges of illegal intervention. President Kennedy kept saying he wanted to achieve both goals at once—success and anonymity. CIA officials proposed to do so by derring-do and deception. This was the first of ten White House meetings that led to the Bay of Pigs invasion in April. Although the United Nations already had debated and voted on formal Cuban charges that an American-sponsored invasion was imminent, war preparations remained a non-subject in public simply because the government treated them as such.

  In King’s world, scattered crusaders were as intent upon gaining recognition for their freedom plans as Kennedy was determined to conceal his. James Bevel and his student group announced a nonviolent campaign for desegregation of Nashville’s movie theaters on February 1, the anniversary of the first Greensboro sit-in. Other student groups across the South were preparing “jail-ins.” The New York Times, reviewing the year of “stand-ins at theatres, kneel-ins at churches and wade-ins at public beaches,” declared that Negro protests threatened to “assume the proportions of a national movement.” In Birmingham, where Fred Shuttles-worth was running out of appeals on one conviction for which he faced a sentence of sixty to ninety days at hard labor, Alabama authorities gained court permission to seize his automobile in partial settlement of the libel judgment against him in the Sullivan case, which also was still on appeal. The same authorities seized personal property of the three other Negro defendants in the suit, including Abernathy’s car and some land he had inherited. The car brought $400 at auction, the land $4,350. King protested these actions as blatant persecutions by Alabama officials, but the stories played no better than blurbs. The race issue remained generally avoidable, as measured by the public mood. Reporters asked President Kennedy no questions on the subject at his first televised press conference.

  Still less known was a letter written on the second day of the Kennedy presidency by an obscure Air Force veteran in Mississippi named J. H. Meredith. Inspired by a broadcast of the Kennedy inaugural speech, Meredith decided that his best contribution to democratic rights was to seek admission to the University of Mississippi. He wrote for an application and then promptly sought the counsel of Mississippi’s NAACP field secretary, Medgar Evers. Evers, who felt wounded personally by the gruesome fates of the last two Negroes who had tried to integrate Mississippi’s white universities, was none too happy to hear of Meredith’s ambition. But he recognized the stubborn, military precision with which Meredith was pursuing his goal, and put him in touch with Thurgood Marshall’s NAACP lawyers.

  When the President insisted on the appointment of his brother Robert as Attorney General, the younger Kennedy added to the worries of a political manager the duties of the cabinet officer most directly responsible for progress in civil rights. Kennedy sent a terse directive—“tell me what you’re doing”—down into the various parts of the Justice Department, including the Civil Rights Division. John Doar, his boss having resigned, replied for the division as the senior Republican holdover, though he had only seven months’ experience himself. Doar was just back from a successful series of court appearances in which he had convinced judges that eviction notices served on Negro sharecroppers in Tennessee were illegal reprisals against them for registering to vote. On behalf of the U.S. government, Doar had won court orders vacating the eviction of some three hundred sharecroppers. Others, evicted already, were encamped in tent cities known as “Freedom Villages,” whose struggle to exist was being chronicled daily in Negro newspapers across the country. Mahalia Jackson sang a song over the telephone for a rally benefiting the embattled sharecroppers, who repaid her by naming a strip of mud “Mahalia Jackson Avenue.”

  Doar was only slightly less a hero to the inhabitants. Voting records from counties all over the South, recently obtained under the new Civil Rights Act of 1960, had been wheeled into his office on dollies and stacked high against the walls. As Doar and his staff pored through the records, he put pins in a map of the South indicating counties practicing the most egregious, systematic, and effective repression against Negro voters. Some lawsuits were filed already; many others were in preparation. Doar’s summaries of them made the most compelling reading of the report he sent to Robert Kennedy, who, like his predecessors under Eisenhower, came quickly to the conclusion that voting rights were the strongest political and moral opportunity for the Justice Department in the field of civil rights. Squeezing Doar into one of his planning meetings, Kennedy said briskly, “I want to move on voting.” He asked Doar to stay on in the new Administration even though he was a Republican.

  The search for a Democrat to replace Doar’s boss passed through the Kennedy talent-scouting operation, headed by Sargent Shriver, where Harris Wofford screened candidates for the government job he wanted most himself. To Shriver’s mind, Wofford was by far the most qualified person available to head the Civil Rights Division—based on his legal education and experience, his service to the Kennedy campaign, and his voluminous personal knowledge of the people and issues of civil rights. Unfortunately for Wofford, however, Shriver’s recommendation ran into the opposition of Byron R. “Whizzer” White, the All-American football player from Colorado, Rhodes scholar, and national chairman of Citizens for Kennedy. Robert Kennedy made White deputy Attorney General over Wofford’s objection that he was stubborn and humorless. White returned Wofford’s low opinion in full measure. He convinced Robert Kennedy that Wofford could never conceal from hostile Southern congressmen his long history of sympathy for Gandhi, King, and the doctrines of civil disobedience.

  Shrewdly, White recommended to Kennedy as a neutral candidate Wofford’s friend and law partner Burke Marshall, whom White had known at Yale Law School. Marshall was a highly respected corporate lawyer who had represented Standard Oil, the Du Ponts, and other powerful clients in some of the biggest antitrust cases of the previous decade. Only two items in his career—both traceable to Wofford’s recruitment—jarred slightly against the popular image of the gray-flannel lawyer: he had once taught a course on corporate law at the predominantly Negro Howard University Law School, and he had once read Arnold Toynbee in an executive reading group led by philosopher Scott Buchanan. Marshall knew none of the civil rights leaders and had contributed to none of the civil rights organizations, nor had he ever shown any interest in race issues. To Byron White, it was precisely his lack of expertise in the substance of civil rights that recommended Marshall to head the Civil Rights Division. In no other legal field was ignorance a qualification, but the race issue was so controversial that any history of personal interest was tantamount to a political statement. Wofford himself half agreed, and he put Marshall’s name on the recommendation list in spite of his antipathy for White.

  Robert Kennedy invited Burke Marshall to his office for a talk that soon became legendary in the Justice Department as the “silent interview.” Like Kennedy, Marshall was slight of build, wispish and reedy of voice, though much less rumpled and windblown than the thirty-five-y
ear-old Attorney General. Also like Kennedy, he could be extremely sparing of words. When they met, Marshall knew he was being considered for a post, but he had no idea which one. He presumed that it would be in the Antitrust Division, in which event he planned to decline. The Civil Rights Division was mentioned in passing, but neither man had much to say about the issue except that there were laws which must, of course, be enforced. And since both men preferred silence to small talk, they divided the better part of half an hour into long silences broken by mumbled civilities. When the interview was over, Marshall believed he had blown his chance for any job in the Justice Department, but Kennedy, to the surprise of his aides, decided he had found just the man for the Civil Rights Division. To him, Marshall was an elite lawyer too smart to make mistakes, too self-possessed to blunder compulsively into controversy, too honest to claim he had all the answers.

  King wrestled with offices and appointments during his own period of transition, relying heavily on Gardner Taylor at the juncture of politics and religion. With Harry Belafonte, Taylor helped King design a voter registration plan that would bypass the foundations and other large funding sources with a direct, “dollar per person” appeal to Negro churchgoers. When Alabama officials continued to confiscate the property of King’s colleagues, Taylor raised and delivered personally to Atlanta a $5,000 contribution for the defense in the New York Times libel case. At the same time, Taylor gently told King that if Abernathy and Shuttles-worth felt so oppressed in Alabama that they must abandon the South for safer pulpits in the North, King must let them go with his blessing. Early in 1961, Taylor sponsored Abernathy in a trial sermon at the Mount Lebanon Baptist Church in Brooklyn.