Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  “We don’t need your marshals,” Patterson told White, as the two of them stood there before the Alabama cabinet and a host of reporters. “We don’t want them, and we didn’t ask for them. And still the federal government sends them here to help put down a disturbance which it helped create.”

  White responded to the governor’s anger with the calm argument that they shared a common mission of preserving public order. “Everything seems very peaceful this morning,” he said. “Yet yesterday’s violence showed how fast it can erupt.”

  Patterson told White that the Freedom Ride was inspired by Communists. With some sarcasm, he asked White if the federal marshals, in their devotion to law and order, would assist state agents in executing Judge Jones’s order to have the Freedom Riders arrested for violating his injunction. (“I cannot guarantee that,” White replied. “I am not familiar with your injunction.”) Patterson bore in on the issue. “Will you make available all the information you have about the Freedom Riders who came in yesterday?” he asked.

  “No,” said White.

  “You know where some of these Freedom Riders are, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” White replied. “In the hospital.”

  “Do you know where the others are?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “If you knew where some of these people are, would you inform us?”

  “I will never know where these people are,” White replied evasively.

  Patterson warned White that Alabama regarded the U.S. marshals as “interlopers” without special rights or privileges in the state. “Make especially certain,” he said gravely, “that none of your men encroach on any of our state laws, rights, or functions, because we’ll arrest them like anybody else.” The governor dismissed White after forty-five tense, unpleasant minutes.

  These words crackled out over the airwaves, along with news that King and his supporters would meet in Abernathy’s church that night. The Freedom Riders already were hiding in the basement library of the church, hoping that police would not dare to arrest them there. Governor Patterson, who could be sneaky himself, received an intercept report that Byron White called Washington immediately after their confrontation to recommend that the marshals be pulled out of Alabama. Patterson was especially encouraged that White chose to call his old friend President Kennedy rather than his boss, the Attorney General. By going out of channels to express doubts about the wisdom of using the marshals in Alabama, White signaled a warning that the younger Kennedy might be out of his depth.

  People began trickling into Abernathy’s “Brick-a-Day” church about five o’clock, more than three hours before the mass meeting was scheduled to begin. Without a preacher, an organist, or a pianist, they sang and prayed among themselves, relying buoyantly on the familiar hymns. This early ritual was a sign of the old spirit in Montgomery, gone since the bus boycott, but this time students were involved as heroes, victims of mobs, and the governor and even the President were arguing about them in the newspapers. Those making their way into the church could see a dozen or so white men standing outside First Baptist with nightsticks and yellow armbands stenciled “U.S. Marshal,” guarding the church.

  There was a small cluster of whites across the street, in a city park that had been closed under threat of an MIA integration suit, and another around the corner on the fringes of Oakwood Cemetery. A woman standing on the corner of Jefferson and Ripley recruited a third group from the passing traffic with come-on waves and shouts of “Get out of that car!” Among the Negroes, the elderly and the most devout were first to arrive, as usual, often with a bit of food in one hand and a grandchild’s hand in the other, and they had little trouble steering past glares or occasional profanities. As the white crowd grew larger and bolder, however, some Negro families hesitated to run the gauntlet of jeers, and those who did often moved at a brisk trot into the sanctuary of the church. By nightfall, fifteen hundred people jammed First Baptist, with at least twice that many whites gathered outside and around the block.

  Between hymns, Rev. S. S. Seay told the congregation stories about the Freedom Riders’ courage—how they had appeared one by one at his home the previous night, beaten but unbowed. He introduced Diane Nash, who was sitting on the platform in a place of honor, and he revealed that the Freedom Riders themselves were right there among them. He could not introduce them, or even allow them to sit together, because he wanted to reduce their vulnerability to arrest. John Lewis and the others were scattered among the choir members in the loft, but they could not conceal themselves completely, nor did they want to. Whenever Seay pointedly introduced a bandaged young stranger to say a few words or to lead them in singing “We Shall Overcome,” the open secret sent emotional waves of tribute through the church, lifting songs and “Amens” that smothered the ominous noises from the street.

  King had not yet made an entrance. Downstairs in Abernathy’s office, he tinkered with the program, fretting about backstage details. Abernathy, Shuttlesworth, and Wyatt Walker slipped up and down the pastor’s back stairs with late reports on the mood of the crowd. Ushers brought progressively fearful messages from latecomers to the church, who told of seeing broken car windows outside or of dodging rocks. Pockets of whites were raising “nigger chants,” daring the Negroes to come out of the church. Shuttlesworth, observing that James Farmer would not be able to make it through that crowd, volunteered to meet his flight from Washington and bring him personally from the airport. Waving aside all objections, Shuttlesworth ventured out into the mob just as Negroes outside were giving up hope of getting in.

  “We’ve got to go out and see what’s happening,” King announced sometime later. A chorus of dissent went up instantly among those around him. Fred Bennett, a young SCLC aide from Atlanta, told King that it would be suicide for him to face a mob in Montgomery, where his face was so well known. Bernard Lee, who had grown ever more devoted to King in the year since his expulsion from Alabama State, told King he was too valuable to take such risks. When King persisted, runners went upstairs to fetch Walker and Abernathy, in the hope that they could dissuade him. In whispers, the leaders debated several different theories of King’s purpose. Some said he simply wanted to see for himself how bad the mob was before charting his next move. Others said he wanted to attempt the miracle of shaming the mob with his presence, demonstrating in the flesh that he and the other clergymen inside were not afraid. A still more dramatic reading had it that King wanted to give his own life to the mob in order to save the congregation. Walker and Abernathy did not have time to clarify all this when they pushed through to King at the basement door. King was in an emergency mode, tuning out all the clatter around him. “Let’s go,” he told them. “Leadership must do this.”

  A handful of preachers stepped outside, with Bennett and Lee circling watchfully around King, like bodyguards. They moved slowly around the square block of the property to survey a mob that now surrounded them in a continuous line, held back on the far side of the street by the fragile inhibitions of mobs—perhaps by the sight of the marshals and their radios, or the church steeple, or perhaps for lack of a spark. The jeers and the occasional thuds of thrown missiles carried clearly through the early evening air, and soon there rose above them the cry of someone who recognized King. “Nigger King!” it rang out. “Come over here!” King moved slowly toward the challenge, but rocks began to land around him. Then a metal cylinder skidded to a stop at King’s feet. Fred Bennett pounced on the object and threw it toward a vacant spot on the grounds. The entourage pulled King in retreat during a frantic debate about whether the cylinder had been a bomb or a tear gas cannister, and if tear gas, where it had come from since there were no police in sight, and whether the police might be in collusion with the mob. Back in the church, King went upstairs to the pulpit. Stressing the positive, he announced that the marshals were still there and that the people outside remained behind a perimeter across the street. The mood inside rose up as though in contest with the shouts of the mob, a
s a baritone soloist led them all in singing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”

  In Washington, the Attorney General’s office was transformed into a weekend command post, from which Robert Kennedy—clad informally after a Sunday game of touch football—established a permanent open line with Byron White’s staging area at Maxwell Air Force Base outside Montgomery. The staging area was in chaos. White had about four hundred men, including eighty off-duty guards from the maximum-security federal prison in Atlanta, but no sooner did guards arrive from Atlanta and other prisons, it seemed, than their shifts changed and the wardens began to complain about the risk of prison riots in their absence. Some of the guards were leaving already, to be replaced by Immigration and Border Patrol employees due in from Texas and the Gulf Coast. White’s assistants were swearing in the arrivals as deputy U.S. marshals. William Orrick, a San Francisco lawyer serving as Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Division, had checked in with the office that morning upon reading of the assault on Seigenthaler, and only a few hours later he had been commandeered to Alabama himself. Now he was racing around Byron White’s staging area trying to organize the marshals into instant platoons as he remembered them from the Army. With alarming reports coming in by radio from the marshals at First Baptist, Orrick and his colleagues improvised madly. When Army commanders refused, in the absence of orders from their superiors, to allow Army trucks to transport the marshals into an active civil conflict, the Justice team tracked down the local postmaster and demanded the use of mail trucks.

  Byron White was not communicating with the Negroes in the church, more or less because he did not want to appear to be aiding the Freedom Riders. White and Kennedy, acutely sensitive to Governor Patterson’s strident declarations that Alabama was maintaining order, had sent out only token forces of marshals to likely trouble spots around the city. They knew that the need to reinforce them in great numbers was growing critical—not a single city policeman had been sighted at First Baptist during the three hours that the mob had been swelling, and the only state officials were two plainclothes detectives slipped in by Floyd Mann—but they did not want to move in without a request from Patterson. State officials were riding a sharp edge between refusal to protect the Freedom Riders and refusal to ask for federal help; federal officials were caught between willingness to protect the Freedom Riders and a need to be asked.

  During the war of nerves, the only communication Byron White received from Alabama authorities was an abrupt telephoned question from Police Commissioner Sullivan: if all Montgomery policemen and firemen went on strike that night to protest federal intervention, Sullivan wanted to know, would the federal marshals assume responsibility for traffic control and fire alarms? This tricky question soon ensnarled Justice staff lawyers in Kafkaesque puzzles about whether intervention at the church might open the federal government to millions of dollars in liability if Montgomery citizens allowed parts of their city to burn.

  Fred Shuttlesworth found a much more unruly mob on his return to the church than he had warned Farmer to expect. A block from First Baptist, as they were pushing gently through the crowd jamming a side street, the whites surrounded their car and rocked it from side to side. The driver threw the gearshift into reverse and peeled out backward. On the advice of a Negro taxi driver, they abandoned the car to approach the church on foot through Oakwood Cemetery, only to come up behind yet another swirling wall of angry people. “They’ve got the church hemmed in,” said Shuttlesworth after a moment’s hesitation. “All right, Jim, follow me.” With that, the wiry, diminutive Shuttlesworth bellowed, “Out of the way! Come on! Let him through! Out of the way!” He wafted the startled white people out of his path with wild arm motions, as Farmer cringed behind him through the parting mass.

  Safely inside the church basement, where they were fussed over like reinforcements at the Alamo, the two of them went up the pastor’s staircase into the church. King joyfully presented Farmer to the congregation as the national director of CORE and author of the original Freedom Ride. Farmer was introduced to Diane Nash, then embraced John Lewis, the only veteran of both legs of the journey. After hearing tributes to the symbolic moment of union and giving a brief speech, Farmer was excused to join the leadership conclave downstairs in Abernathy’s office. There he listened to Southern preachers in hurried analyses of various distant white men—Kennedy, Patterson, White, Sullivan, Mann—who might control their safety that night.

  Farmer was a leader without a staff, a newcomer among people who worshipped King and had never heard of CORE, by and large. Having scorned the pulpit and abandoned the South twenty years earlier for a life among bureaucrats, bohemians, and intellectuals, he was quickened but detached at the eye of the crisis, with much to represent but little to do. As he listened to the excited talk of strangers against a background of hymns about salvation through Jesus and Rebel yells from outside, fear loosened its grip on him, routed by disordered reality. Only days after burying his father and an hour after in-flight meal service, Farmer was still almost hypnotized by images of Shuttlesworth’s lunatic charge through the mob.

  Not long after eight o’clock, King and the others rushed to investigate chilling reports that a car had been overturned near the corner of Ripley and Jefferson. Glances through windows confirmed that it was true: the car lay wheels-up on the street, circled by triumphant rioters who fled when an old man threw a lighted match near the gas tank. The car soon exploded into flame, illuminating the scene in the primeval light of a bonfire. By then, there was a flutter of panic around King, as the same message was coming from all directions: fear was infecting the congregation. People were saying that one destroyed car would never satisfy a mob that size. Much smaller mobs had burned one bus and beaten two groups of Freedom Riders that week, and now the congregation was trapped inside what amounted to an enormous bus without wheels.

  Scattered members of the mob darted across the no-man’s-land of Ripley Street to throw rocks at closer range, from church property. Each of them retreated quickly, but soon the crowd began to inch forward along the whole line of Ripley Street to the rallying cry “Let’s clean the niggers out of here!” In response, the U.S. marshals ran briskly to positions spread thinly—every twenty feet or so—along the church side of Ripley Street. They held up their nightsticks in a barrier pose as the two state detectives ran along the mob line ahead of them, pushing people back toward the curb. Against thousands of people worked up by hours of hate-mongering and spurred on by the flaming car, they knew the armbands and nightsticks were nothing more than a tissue of restraint. The marshals radioed distress to Byron White, who summoned Chief U.S. Marshal James McShane after a tense conversation with Robert Kennedy. “Get those marshals in cars and get down there!” White ordered. McShane, a puckish ex-cop who had been rewarded with his present job for campaign work as John Kennedy’s bodyguard and chauffeur, roared off for the church with three mail trucks, followed by straggler groups in whatever cars could be grabbed.

  Inside the church, they were singing “Love Lifted Me,” an old hymn of refuge:

  Love lifted me.

  Love lifted me.

  When nothing else could help,

  Luuuuhhhhhve lif—ted meeeeee.

  Chorus after chorus rang out as the marshals fired their first tear gas cannisters into the advancing crowd. Each round offered a few minutes’ reprieve while the coughing rioters retreated pell-mell, but then the marshals themselves retreated as an angrier crowd came on again. Rocks began to fly, and one of the marshals went down when a brick hit his shin. Crudely fashioned Molotov cocktails, lobbed toward the church, burned themselves out on the open ground behind them. Byron White, hearing the mounting turmoil on the radio, asked for Robert Kennedy on the open phone line. “It’s going to be very close,” he said. “Very touch and go.”

  From the pulpit, Reverend Seay stopped the hymn periodically to exhort the crowd to remain calm. Then he called for another chorus. “I want to hear everybody sing, and mean every
word of it!” he shouted, and most of them did. From the outside, the church seemed to lift off the ground in song, but some of the men who had prepared for this moment were slipping out of the pews, reaching for knives, sticks, and pistols in their coat pockets. There were heated whispers in the wings as some of them told the preachers that they were not about to let the mob burn or bludgeon their families without a fight, even in church. Reports of considerable arms within the congregation reached King along with the news that skirmishers from the mob had reached the locked doors of the church. “All right, I’ll call him,” King said.

  Wyatt Walker’s sense of protocol, finely honed within the National Baptist Convention, dictated that he, as the number-two man under King, should address Robert Kennedy so that King could be reserved to speak with his parallel officer within the government, the President. Accordingly, Walker placed an emergency call to Robert Kennedy at the Justice Department in his own name, “acting for Dr. King,” and when the Attorney General came on the line Walker told him that only immediate federal action could save their lives.

  “I know,” said Kennedy. “We are doing everything we can. Is it possible for me to speak with Dr. King?”

  Walker surrendered the phone. As King was ticking off the signs of grave peril—the burned car, the firebombs—Kennedy interrupted. “The deputy marshals are coming,” he said repeatedly. Seeking a point of identity with King, he recalled hearing stories from his grandfather, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, about how anti-Catholic mobs had burned nunneries in nineteenth-century Boston.

  King excused himself to ask Walker and Abernathy to rush upstairs with the glad news that Attorney General Kennedy himself promised help. Then he asked when the help would arrive, and Kennedy, who had no idea, could only maintain a posture of hopeful government authority. Soon, he assured King. Very soon. Hearing the hymns being sung in the background, he changed the subject with the trademark gallows humor of his family. “As long as you’re in church, Reverend King, and our men are down there, you might as well say a prayer for us,” he suggested.