Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  King did not laugh.* He excused himself to receive the latest alarms from lookouts, who had spotted no rescuers. With defenders brandishing weapons at points of entry to the church, King addressed Kennedy in a voice of taut urgency. “If they don’t get here immediately, we’re going to have a bloody confrontation,” he said. “Because they’re at the door now.”

  Within moments, runners arrived with the news that reinforcements had been sighted. McShane’s men from the mail trucks were waving nightsticks and pushing their way single file through the mob. King dashed off to verify and then back to the phone with profuse thanks. “You were right,” he told Kennedy. “They’re here.”

  Massing in front of the church, the new marshals fired an enormous volley of tear gas that sent the rioters cursing and stumbling backward in flight. Shouts of joy went up from the congregation, followed by prayers and a hymn of praise. It was a dramatic rescue straight out of Hollywood, except that the giant cloud of tear gas drifted slowly back over the church. Some of Abernathy’s deacons were obliged to block panicky people from fleeing into the hands of the mob, while others rushed to close windows. The sudden absence of ventilation, combined with an unusually warm May night and the body heat of fifteen hundred frightened people, quickly turned First Baptist into an acrid sauna. outside, the marshals fell prey to the gas too, as few of them had face masks.

  Advance commandos of an enraged, regrouped mob were dashing back across the field as it cleared. The attackers battered against the front doors, and some of the marshals, hearing cries from within that the doors had been breached, gained entry through the back door of the basement. They ran through the clogged corridors in time to push the rioters back outside with nightsticks and shoulders. A new round of tear gas stopped the main body of rioters, but one of them managed to heave a brick through a large stained-glass window, scattering the terrified occupants under a shower of broken glass. The brick hit an old man on the head, and while a corps of nurses materialized to care for him, Reverend Seay’s thundering voice labored to contain the pandemonium everywhere else. He asked deacons to take the children to the basement, and he asked everyone who could to lie down on the floor. Rocks shattered smaller windows, and tear gas, pouring through all the holes, literally choked off the hymns. Each round of gas, fired nearer and nearer the church, did less harm to the attackers and more to the defenders themselves. The euphoria of the rescue was reduced to a cruel memory.

  Through Cyrus Vance at the Pentagon, Robert Kennedy ordered Army units placed on alert at Fort Benning, Georgia. In the agony of deciding whether to commit them, he maneuvered more diligently than ever to obtain some sign of state consent to the federal presence. He sent messages through Patterson’s aides without result. His only friendly communications with a state official were with Floyd Mann, who was nearly crushed by conflicting duties. Mann, having already violated the governor’s strict refusal to cooperate with federal officials in protecting the Freedom Riders, did take it upon himself to call Byron White at the Maxwell staging area and request that he “commit any reserves.”

  “We’ve committed all we have,” White replied. “They are at your disposal.” This exchange was interpreted in the Attorney General’s office as a breakthrough. Although Mann had not asked for troops on behalf of the governor, he had asked for something, at least, and the significance of his call was magnified with each grave new report from Montgomery. A brick hit a marshal on the head, gashing his forehead. Gunshots were fired into Negro homes on four different streets near the church. A Molotov cocktail bounced off the roof of the church. Tear gas was running low.

  When word of a renewed mass charge came to Byron White, he reported almost plaintively that he did not know whether this one could be contained. His tone helped push Robert Kennedy over the edge. “That’s it,” he said; he would call the President. A legal argument ensued over a technicality concerning the presidential proclamation that was required for the use of the armed forces. They had the proclamation there in the office, but President Kennedy was in Middleburg, out in the horse country of northern Virginia. Would it be legal for them to start the troops moving from Benning to Maxwell before a helicopter could get the proclamation out to Middleburg for the President’s signature?

  Kennedy hesitated on Marshall’s advice. Word soon came that another volley of tear gas was driving back the mob, and during the reprieve came the dramatic news that Governor Patterson had proclaimed a state of martial law. Montgomery policemen were running toward the church in a phalanx, with their commanders shouting “All right, let’s move out of here!” Behind them, the first fifteen white-helmeted soldiers of the Alabama National Guard marched double-time with bayoneted rifles. Another hundred came up shortly. The Guardsmen took positions around the front of the church as policemen chased the rioters out of the area. On orders from Byron White, Chief Marshal McShane promptly sought out the colonel in charge of the first Guard unit and placed the federal forces under state command. The colonel ordered the marshals to withdraw from the scene. Elsewhere near the church, Police Commissioner Sullivan made his first appearance of the night. White teenagers pelted his car with bricks.

  Inside the church, hosannas went up on the first sighting of the soldiers, who were assumed to be U.S. troops sent in by President Kennedy. Reverend Seay and other speakers came to the pulpit to say that it was truly a historic, divinely blessed night of deliverance when the federal government sent marshals and then soldiers expressly to protect Negro citizens against a white mob. This time the reprieve lasted, and although there remained in the church the broken glass, frayed nerves, overwrought children, and a strong residue of tear gas, these badges of the ordeal only made the congregation more determined to receive what they had come for. After hymns and introductions further bonded them to the Freedom Riders, King began to deliver his main address sometime after ten o’clock.

  His prepared speech followed standard King themes of history, love, and injustice, but the crisis prompted him to chastise Governor Patterson for his performance since the Freedom Riders first entered Alabama. “Ultimate responsibility for the hideous action in Alabama last week must be placed at the doorstep of the governor of the state,” he declared. “His consistent preaching of defiance of the law, his vitriolic public pronouncements, and his irresponsible actions created the atmosphere in which violence could thrive.” This departure from his text was preserved by reporters; others were lost. The general impact upon the congregation was what might be expected from a preacher of King’s ability under conditions that seemed drawn from a biblical tale. He and his audience had faced fire, stones, fists, and tear gas for a cause grounded in their beliefs. As midnight approached, some seven hours after the first congregants had arrived, the faces he looked down upon were still wet with perspiration but drained nearly dry of emotion.

  In the Attorney General’s office at that hour, his judgment perhaps dulled by exhausted relief, Robert Kennedy made what he came to regret as the biggest political miscalculation of the week: he permitted a UPI photographer to take a shot of him in his informal clothes with his feet on the desk, talking on the telephone. The picture would accompany national stories on the Alabama siege and provoke a flood of indignant letters criticizing Kennedy for looking sloppy and undignified on the job. Thereafter he avoided work photographs except when wearing a business suit.

  By that time King was plunged once again into despair. The latest shock occurred when the crowd fairly bolted for the doors upon dismissal, only to discover that the troops would not allow them to leave. The National Guard soldiers had their bayonets pointed inward toward the church doors as well as outward toward the departed mob. Although this turn of events completed a certain symmetry in the madness of the night, the congregants were far too tired to appreciate it. To them, their liberators had turned into their guards. All the men protecting them turned out to be under the command of their arch-tormentor, Governor Patterson, and none of the federal men was anywhere in sight. Some who tr
ied to push their way out were repulsed by rifle butts. Some said it was a plot by the state to trap and imprison the Freedom Riders. Some said it was a twist too bitter to be sanctioned by God. There was some cursing and much harsh talk before King went out to parley with the martial law commander, Adjutant General Henry V. Graham.

  To all King’s pleas that the people locked inside the church desperately needed to go home—to eat, to bathe, to take medicines, to recover, to reassure worried relatives—Graham replied that the situation was too volatile. His news was so bad that King maneuvered to have Graham deliver it himself, and the general eventually marched inside the church at the head of a column of aides, one of whom read Governor Patterson’s proclamation of martial law to the congregation. Like all Patterson’s public statements, it was relentlessly hostile to their cause.* General Graham followed it with his own announcement that the congregation would be held in the church “for the time being, probably until morning.”

  As Graham marched out with his entourage, King rushed downstairs to place another emergency call to Robert Kennedy, who excused himself from a post-midnight interview with a Time reporter. “You shouldn’t have withdrawn the marshals,” King protested, with such force that Kennedy held the phone away from his ear. King’s distress spilled over as he said that Kennedy had abandoned his people to the hostilities of Patterson’s National Guard, acting now under plenary powers. There might be heart attacks or strokes, with so many people stuffed into the church under such stress. He asked what kind of justice there could be in a land where the authorities permitted churchgoers to be terrorized and then forced them to huddle all night under inhuman conditions. He said he felt betrayed.

  Kennedy—weary of being asked to do more, and sensitive about having deferred instantly to Patterson in spite of the governor’s record of manifest contempt for the rights of the Freedom Riders—lost his patience. “Now, Reverend,” he said. “Don’t tell me that. You know just as well as I do that if it hadn’t been for the United States marshals, you’d be dead as Kelsey’s nuts right now!”

  There was a long silence on the telephone. King no doubt puzzled over the meaning of “Kelsey’s nuts,” an obscure term Kennedy had heard in Boston politics. There was no question about the force of Kennedy’s sentiment, however, and King, after swallowing dozens of rejoinders, collapsed in resignation. “All right,” he sighed. “All right.” He signed off and returned to help Seay organize the most cheerful possible submission. A one-minute rule was established for the hundreds of people lined up to call home over the church’s one phone line. Children were to sleep on tables in the basement, and old people received preference on Abernathy’s burgundy pew cushions.

  Governor Patterson called Kennedy shortly after King hung up, breaking two days of phone silence now that he had been forced to act. “Now you got what you wanted,” he said heatedly. “You got yourself a fight. And you’ve got the National Guard called out, and martial law. And that’s what you wanted.” He blamed Kennedy for all the violence. Kennedy insisted that he had acted only with reluctance, to prevent violence. During their raging argument, Kennedy managed to ask whether the Negroes would be allowed to leave the stifling church building now that Patterson had everything under control. The governor replied that the National Guard could guarantee the safety of all the Negroes except for King. They could not guarantee King’s safety.

  “I don’t believe that, John,” said Kennedy. “Have General Graham call me. I want him to say it to me. I want to hear a general of the United States Army say he can’t protect Martin Luther King.”

  Patterson shrieked into the telephone that Kennedy was missing the point. The issue was not military capability but the public perception that Patterson was giving succor to the most despised name in Alabama. “You are destroying us politically,” he said.

  “John, it’s more important that these people in the church survive physically than for us to survive politically,” Kennedy said, clinging to the high ground that he had previously abandoned to King.

  Toward dawn, Byron White sent William Orrick to the field headquarters of the National Guard’s Dixie Division to seek a truce with General Graham. Ushered into a room full of tension and Confederate flags, Orrick felt as though he were a Russian officer suing for peace. “General, I came over here to negotiate,” he said, “and we want to know whether your troops are going to leave that church and let the people go home.” Graham replied that this was a matter for the governor to decide, but after Orrick blurted out that he was tired and had to have an answer to prevent a war between federal and state authorities, a compromise was soon reached.

  The first groups left the church at four thirty that morning in National Guard trucks. To the irrepressible Shuttlesworth, the lesson of the night was that Alabama had been forced to protect Negroes in the very act of fighting Alabama segregation. Mixing mirth and gall, Shuttlesworth began calling Governor Patterson “Pat” in honor of their new partnership. “When I left the church this morning,” he boasted to a congregation later that day, “Pat’s soldiers carried me home.”

  Monday morning found an aching John Seigenthaler home in Washington, ordered to bed for two weeks by his doctors. Other participants in the ongoing siege held positions near telephones, mostly in Montgomery. Elsewhere, millions of people who had spent the May weekend in ordinary activities learned of the conflict down in Alabama through news stories heavily influenced by public relations. Byron White told reporters that the Sunday riot had “not nearly” reached the point at which he would consider the use of U.S. troops. Attorney General Kennedy built a rosy story of federal-state cooperation around Floyd Mann’s single phone call for reserves, and The New York Times accepted Kennedy’s version in a page-one account headlined “Alabama Asks U.S. Help As New Violence Erupts.” Governor Patterson, at a triumphant day-after news conference, held up stacks of telegrams running 75-to-1 in favor of his stand against both federal intervention and the Freedom Riders. “Congratulations!” wired a group of Princeton students, and segregationist encouragement flooded the Alabama capital from as far away as California and Canada.

  Because the beaming Patterson made no mention that his National Guard units were still dispersing whites loitering around the bus station and still patrolling Negro neighborhoods to guard against bomb throwers, it remained for the iconoclastic Grover Hall to raise these unsettling facts for Montgomery readers. “Patterson started out by saying that he would not nursemaid the agitators and he might arrest the U.S. marshals,” Hall wrote in the Advertiser. “But before it was over Patterson was baby-sitting the agitators all night in a church and the highway patrol was working in harness with the federal troops.” Hall heaped sarcasm upon the governor for making Alabama the only state in the South to have “a problem” with the Freedom Riders. Roy Wilkins, taking a wildly different slant on the same point, told the Negro press that the Freedom Riders did not run into trouble until they arrived in the state where the NAACP was banned.

  The Freedom Riders themselves were all secluded in the home of Montgomery pharmacist Richard Harris. King was there, too, along with Wyatt Walker, James Farmer, and Diane Nash. By nightfall, James Bevel and James Lawson arrived from Nashville, the former having aborted his New York furniture-hauling trip. In all, more than twenty people from the major strains of American nonviolent protest were gathered together under one roof in the city of the bus boycott, just across the street from the Dexter parsonage where King had lived for five years. What kept the Freedom Riders publicly muted for the better part of two days was not the arrest warrants or the mobs, nor even the leadership mechanics of a new coalition. Instead, the silence masked a renewed student campaign to have King join them in witness. “Where is your body?” they asked in their standard refrain. Wyatt Walker, Bernard Lee, and others close to King objected that King was too valuable in his present role. He was needed for fund-raising speeches, high-level negotiations, and other functions that could not be done from a bus seat.

  Di
ane Nash called Atlanta almost hourly to consult with Ella Baker, who had left her unhappy tenure at the SCLC to develop a warm and deepening role as confidant to the sit-in students. Baker’s interpretation of King’s reluctance to join the Freedom Ride was consistently that of a disappointed mother. “Oh, he’s just worried about his little group,” she said, meaning that King was preoccupied with the image and financial health of the SCLC. Baker said the same thing about Farmer, who was declaring that the ride would continue immediately with five CORE volunteers from New Orleans. The Nashville students knew, however, that no volunteers had arrived yet, and Farmer’s references to the Freedom Ride as “my show” stunned them as empty and parochial. The Nashville students were already there twenty strong, ready to ride, suffused with an egalitarian zeal that made fund-raising, posturing, and political calculation cheaply profane to them. Even the mild-mannered John Lewis recoiled from Farmer as pompous and worldly. The Nashville students did not even bother to ask Farmer whether he intended to join the ride.

  King was different. Diane Nash, once Ella Baker had coached some of the awe out of her, asked King point-blank to go with them. He would set an example of leadership that might raise the standard of nonviolent commitment everywhere, she said. King replied that he agreed with her. He wanted to go but was not sure, he said. Daddy King and others on the SCLC board had pelted him with caution by then, and his aides, having talked with the lawyers in Atlanta, jumped in with the argument that King was still on probation from his 1960 traffic arrest in Georgia—the sentence that the judge had reimposed on him just before the Kennedy-Nixon election. If arrested now on the Freedom Ride, King faced an additional six months in a Georgia prison, said Walker and the others, and what would the movement gain by having King in jail on a traffic charge?