Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Moses missed most of the new excitement in McComb. He returned quickly to Steptoe’s farm out in Amite County, hoping to repair the damage caused by the harrowing experience of his first three volunteers. Word of his arrest had spread through the county. Steptoe reported that Negroes working around the courthouse had overheard whites talking about how the Moses project was being discussed at meetings of the White Citizens Council. With such fearful news on the Negro grapevine, it took days for Moses and Steptoe to persuade anyone to go near a registration class. Steptoe himself, though bold enough to give lodging to Moses, was not quite ready to try registering. Nor did he want too many people to be seen coming and going near his farm, which sat directly across the road from the home of Mississippi state representative E. H. Hurst. As Steptoe explained it to Moses, Hurst was a pillar of segregation, but the real threat was his daughter’s husband, Billy Jack Caston, whose name had a fearful ring to the ears of Amite County Negroes. Caston had a reputation as a wild, violent ruffian.

  Steptoe did not rest until he had arranged for Moses to hold his registration classes in a one-room Baptist church, way out in the woods—the same church into which the sheriff had burst to confiscate the Amite County NAACP records. (The sheriff, in another touch of Faulknerian reality, was Billy Jack Caston’s cousin.) A few of the boldest Amite County Negroes appeared at the nightly meetings to hear Moses talk about registration. He refrained from pressuring them, to the point of never asking whether anyone wanted to try to register. The unspoken question was left hanging. Finally, nearly two weeks after the first attempt, a farmer named Curtis Dawson volunteered to go down, and an old man known only as Preacher Knox jumped up to join him. Though their offer was applauded heartily in the meeting, Moses and Steptoe discussed it long into the night. Dawson was solid, they agreed, but Preacher Knox was flighty, voluble, and sometimes daft—given to random enthusiasms and endorsements of all opinions. Moses worried about whether it would be correct to refuse Knox’s offer, and if he did, whether it would be fair to let Dawson go alone. Moses decided to take his chances on Knox.

  The next morning, August 29, the three of them found the sidewalk near the courthouse blocked by three young white men. Dawson recognized the one in front as Billy Jack Caston; the second was another of the sheriff’s cousins, and the third was the sheriff’s son. There was very little talk. Caston asked Moses where he was going. To the registrar’s office, Moses replied. Caston said no he wasn’t and struck a quick, swiping blow to Moses’ forehead with the handle of his knife.

  In a mystical discovery even more vivid than the pains shooting through his head, Moses felt himself separating from his body as he staggered on the sidewalk. He floated about ten feet up in the air so that he could watch the attack on himself comfortably. His fears became as remote as Caston’s grunts, and time slowed down so that he could hear Preacher Knox running away on the sidewalk before he saw Caston slapping and shaking him. In peaceful surrender, he saw Caston hit him again behind the right temple, saw himself sink to his knees, saw Caston drive his face to the pavement with a crushing blow to the top of the head. Through waves of concussion, he distinctly heard Curtis Dawson pleading with Caston to stop the beating.

  His first thoughts, upon hearing the feet of his attackers depart were that he could function in spite of his wounds and that it was urgently important to reach the courthouse. “We’ve got to go on to the registrar,” he said, as Dawson struggled to overcome his horror at the sight of the blood flowing down from the gashes in Moses’ head. Preacher Knox returned to help him to his feet. “We can’t let something like this stop us,” said Moses. “That’s the whole point.” Dawson replied bravely that he was ready; Preacher Knox agreed. Moses was deeply moved by their decision, and most especially by Preacher Knox’s unexpected courage, but as the three of them crossed the street toward the courthouse he wondered whether Knox, with shock compounding his scrambled ways, really knew what he was doing.

  The county registrar reserved a practiced, well-what-have-we-got-here look for Negro customers, but it vanished in a gasp at the sight of Moses, whose bloody head and shirt combined with his serene, quiet voice to give him a presence as eerie as Banquo’s ghost. The registrar gamely sought refuge in bursts of businesslike indifference, excessive politeness, and put-upon impatience, before all his bureaucratic poses collapsed under the weight of his nerves. He said he was closing the office and asked the three Negroes to leave.

  They retraced their steps from the courthouse, watched by scattered clumps of bystanders. Dawson drove out to the Steptoe farm, where Moses’ weakening condition caused a great stir of mumbled anguish, and then, as there was no Negro doctor in Amite County, they drove back to McComb to visit one newly arrived from Fisk University in Nashville. The doctor, who had taken no part in the voter registration previously, talked with Moses while putting nine stitches into three head wounds. Before he finished, he offered the registration project the use of his car.

  Moses arrived at the Masonic Temple just in time to be whisked off to the first mass meeting in McComb’s history, following its first sit-in arrests. In his absence, Charles Sherrod and others from the influx of Freedom Riders had been conducting classes in nonviolent discipline, much like James Lawson’s Nashville workshops, and the young McComb students—too young to vote, and frustrated by the passivity of the elders they canvassed—had been seized with enthusiasm to do something themselves, like the Freedom Riders. Marion Barry had urged the McComb students to demonstrate against the town library, which did not admit Negroes. During the sit-in, the McComb police had arrested Moses’ two volunteers, Hollis Watkins and Curtis Hayes, for breach of the peace.

  They were in the Pike County jail when Moses came back to McComb with his head wounds, and the furor among the town’s Negroes was such that James Bevel came down from Jackson to address a mass meeting of some two hundred people. With his high-pitched voice and shooting-star images, Bevel preached the fire of nonviolent witness. Moses, in telling of the day’s events in Liberty, spoke reluctantly and almost inaudibly, as always, but the core of his message was the same: that the important thing was to keep going. His offhand announcement that he intended to return to the Liberty courthouse the next day swept the crowd no less than Bevel’s hot gospel. A white reporter from the local newspaper warned his readers that the Negroes might be serious.

  In his reflections later that night, Moses decided that it was imperative for him to act as though he and other Negroes enjoyed the same legal rights as Mississippi white people. Accordingly, he drove back to the Liberty courthouse the next day and told the Amite County attorney that he wanted to swear out a complaint against Billy Jack Caston for criminal assault. This statement unsettled the prosecutor as thoroughly as Moses’ appearance had shocked the registrar the day before. As the seriousness of the request registered, the prosecutor said that of course he had heard about the beating, and it was a terrible thing. He seemed to become more troubled as he talked about his legal duties and Moses’ theoretical rights, and finally he said that, yes, he would put the case to a jury in the name of Amite County. But he stressed the practical reality that if Moses followed through on his complaint, no one could guarantee Moses’ life—or his own legal career—against the wrath of the local white people. He recommended a night’s sleep on the decision, and Moses left the office with the impression that the county attorney was a decent man.

  At Steptoe’s that night, Moses was surprised to learn that although the beating had put a severe fright into nearly all their registration candidates, there was one old farmer named Weathersbee who suddenly was determined to go to the courthouse. Possessed of some choleric defiance that pointed him in the opposite direction from his fearful neighbors, Weathersbee wanted to register the next day if Moses would go with him. Steptoe was less surprised by Weathersbee than by the idea of pressing charges against Caston. With no chance of success, it would enrage every white person in the county and was the sort of notion that did not even oc
cur to sane Negroes.

  The county attorney, who seemed to have braced himself for the appearance of Moses and his two witnesses the next day, arranged with the justice of the peace for a country-style prosecution. They summoned Billy Jack Caston by telephone, impaneled a six-man jury, and put out the word in the courthouse. By the time the trial commenced two hours later, white citizens had driven into town from all across the county, many of them in pickups with shotgun racks. Some were amused by the thought of seeing someone so prominent as Billy Jack Caston in the dock on the word of a nigger. Some were angry, and many were a little of both. Their numbers swamped the tiny courtroom, so that they overflowed onto the courthouse lawn outside. When Moses, Dawson, and Preacher Knox finished testifying for the prosecution, they found more than a hundred white men in a surly mood, inflamed partly by a simultaneous affront on the other side of the courthouse.

  Weathersbee was trying to register. Travis Britt, a Freedom Rider from New York, had come over from McComb to be with Weathersbee while Moses testified. The registrar had ordered Britt to wait outside, alone and beleaguered under a shower of taunts, and as Moses moved through the crowd to join him the blast of several gunshots sent everyone ducking. No one was hit. It may have been a malicious prank, but it was enough to make the sheriff notify Moses that he and his friends were due for an emergency police escort to the county line. They read in the next day’s newspaper that the jury had acquitted Caston.

  Back in McComb, there was a fever of commotion on both the white and Negro sides of town. The local students, further inspired by James Bevel’s invitations to nonviolent direct action, had staged a sit-in the day before at the Greyhound lunch counter. Police had arrested three of them, and what stirred much of the controversy within both races was the particular fact that one of them, Brenda Travis, was a sixteen-year-old girl. Whites were saying that it was irresponsible of the Negroes to allow a mere child to bear the brunt of such dangerous, illegal business, and Negroes were furious that the white authorities put Travis in the Pike County jail with adult criminals. Unable to make bail, she served thirty days there and missed the first month of school.

  Her trial in McComb and Caston’s in nearby Liberty occurred on the last day of August. These events marked the end of Moses’ first month in Mississippi. There still were no registered Negro voters in Amite County, and only a few new ones in Pike County, but Moses was no longer alone. Already his name, borrowed from the most famous figure in the Old Testament, was acquiring a Christlike ring within SNCC, where the story was repeated that he had clasped his hands and looked heavenward during the Caston assault, saying “Forgive them.” This apocryphal story was within the realm of belief, as his solitary, mystical, stubborn meekness had nicked the heart of Mississippi. Wondrous things were happening fast on the fringes of the impossible. Among the freshly legendary Freedom Riders, Moses himself was a budding legend.

  Isolated jail-ins and confrontations erupted simultaneously across the South, including a particularly messy skirmish in Monroe, North Carolina. Wyatt Walker broke away from Monroe in time to meet King at the end of his vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. The church crisis was upon them. King was scheduled to nominate Gardner Taylor against J. H. Jackson at Kansas City. He and his fellow conspirators had spent a year recruiting preachers to come to Kansas City as Taylor men, pledged to uphold the validity of Taylor’s election in Philadelphia, and they had printed their own “official” credentials and literature, parallel to Jackson’s. The idea was that they would bring their claim of legitimacy to Kansas City and then bargain with Jackson over the rules of election and the distribution of offices. The Taylor people spared no effort to make an impressive display of strength on the convention floor. One of King’s colleagues on the SCLC board raised a cash “flash bundle” of $25,000 to advertise the health of the Taylorites’ treasury.

  For all this, the strategy was flawed. A head count showed that while about half the preachers said they would vote for Taylor, less than a thousand of them were willing to contest Jackson’s right to run the convention as the incumbent. This was not enough, and the irony of his predicament drove King to despair. He was snared in the same trap that had plagued his larger ambitions in the segregated South since his “Give Us the Ballot” speech of 1957: he knew the votes were there to effect a political revolution, but the votes were useless without a prior revolution to make them count. His dream of mobilizing the power of the Negro church to break the hegemony of white segregationist voters was now hostage to the church hegemony of his father’s dear old friend, J. H. Jackson.

  King faced choices so cruel that he delayed going to Kansas City and stunned his friends by hinting that he might not go at all. When the convention opened on Tuesday, September 5, Gardner Taylor and his advisers tacitly surrendered their challenge for physical control of the convention. They sent their lawyers into Judge Richard H. Koenigsdorf’s courtroom to ask for an injunction barring both J. H. Jackson and Gardner Taylor from the election. In a contest of rival popes, this conciliatory move was viewed as a sign of weakness. The most Judge Koenigsdorf would do for Taylor was to appoint an eighty-four-year-old preacher to supervise the counting of the ballots.

  King’s heart was with Taylor, and for the rest of his life he would mourn the failure to acquire this institutional base for the civil rights movement, but the realist in him knew that the more publicly he aligned himself with Taylor’s last charge, the more his reputation would suffer from the certain defeat. On the other hand, he worried that if he did not make the nominating speech for Taylor, his friends would think he had made a deal with J. H. Jackson. From this notion grew the haunting fear that if they thought so—if they thought his refusal was selfishly motivated—nothing would etch their suspicions more permanently than his absence from the convention. Therefore, the more convinced he became that he should refrain from nominating Taylor, the more convinced he became that he must be with Taylor and his friends in spite of the personal discomfort. This calculus made no sense to Wyatt Walker, who, satisfied by telephone reports that Taylor would lose, had no desire to be present for the galling moment of Jackson’s victory. He stayed behind in Atlanta as King flew after midnight into Kansas City, where the Jackson and Taylor forces were headquartered on opposite sides of the Missouri River.

  King’s confederates at least pretended to understand his explanation. As a last desperate gamble, their plan was to implant Gardner Taylor on the speaker’s platform—in plain view, near the microphone—before J. H. Jackson delivered his annual President’s Address. Jackson’s reelection would most likely come in the emotional afterglow of that sermon, with a motion to suspend the rules and a quick gavel of acclamation, and if Taylor did not rise instantly to make his challenge—to demand a head count by the court-appointed monitor—the moment would not come again. Tests of convention security established that the invasion could not be done by stealth, because there were too many Jackson people at the doors. Therefore, with as much surprise as possible, the Taylorites tucked Gardner Taylor into a “flying wedge” of several hundred preachers and stormed through the largest entrance to the convention floor. Pushing aside the officials who objected to their improper credentials, they shouted the name of their deposed president as they headed for the podium in a thundering mass. King remained outside.

  The flying wedge electrified the auditorium, but it failed to catch J. H. Jackson completely off guard. He had seated several hundred of his most loyal followers protectively around him, and as the Taylor people charged, scores of Jacksonites jumped forward to barricade the approaches. Above the din of shouting spectators, the two masses of preachers collided at the foot of the platform. There followed at first a struggle of shoulders, like a giant rugby scrum, then scuffling broke out. Along the crush of the dividing line, the opposing preachers shoved, wrestled, and slugged each other out of the way.

  When the Taylor wedge gained a few feet of territory, the force of the advance ran by conduction through the Jackson defen
ders until it compressed those on the far side of the platform. Rev. Ben F. Paxton of Chicago was among those who stumbled in retreat against a row of Jackson dignitaries seated along the edge. He hit the chair of Rev. A. G. Wright of Detroit, member of the national board and close friend of J. H. Jackson. Wright leaned back to steady himself against the wall, but the wall turned out to be merely a curtain. “Hold me!” Wright shouted in a panic, grabbing Paxton’s arm as he tumbled backward into space. Paxton tumbled after him, flailing at the air and landing with his full weight on Wright just after Wright’s head struck the auditorium floor some four feet below, fracturing his skull.

  Cries for an ambulance brought Kansas City policemen on the run, but they failed to quiet the escalating conflict on the opposite side of the platform. On the contrary, screams that Wright was badly hurt only spurred both sides. The battle went on for nearly an hour, long after Wright was wheeled away to emergency surgery at Menorah Medical Center. A staircase to the platform collapsed under the weight of the antagonists jammed on it, scattering and bruising dozens of people but halting the struggle only momentarily. A preacher lost three teeth in one of many fistfights along the battle line. Eighty Kansas City riot police finally pushed their way around the platform in a protective cordon, but order was not restored until police cleared a wide path for H. Roe Bartle, Kansas City’s three-hundred-pound mayor. From the microphone, Bartle pleaded for calm in what eventually became a fairly respectable layman’s sermon invoking the love of God toward the peaceful settlement of disputes. Musicians then sustained the truce with sedate background spirituals.