Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Surgeons at Menorah labored for two hours to stop the hemorrhage in Reverend Wright’s brain. Wright, like Daddy King, was a recognized pillar of the National Baptist Convention, a commanding figure known for his huge congregation as well as a small business empire. Wright’s attorney valued his Detroit real estate holdings in excess of $500,000 and his other investments in like amount. He was a model Jackson lieutenant—a strong, hulking emigrant from the South, clad in a dark suit and suspenders, with a gold watch chain—but Wright and all his vitality slipped into a coma that afternoon.

  In Liberty, Mississippi, on the day the Kansas City convention opened, Bob Moses and Freedom Rider Travis Britt returned to the courthouse. Ordered to wait outside while four Negroes tried to register, they soon drew a crowd of a dozen whites shouting hostile questions about why niggers from New York would come all the way down there to stir up trouble. Moses lapsed into a silent depression under the barrage, almost anticipating the separation again of mind from body as he fell under attack, but a thin old man in a shaking, uncontrollable rage began to pummel Britt instead. Moses tried to summon the sheriff, but the bystanders blocked his path. Then Moses pulled Britt around the waist, trying to maneuver him out of the beating. The old man kept swinging, possessed of a hatred so intense that it seemed to consume what strength he had. Britt finally escaped in the grasp of Moses, having absorbed some twenty blows that did no worse than puff up and bruise his face. They jumped in their borrowed car and retreated eastward to McComb, leaving the four Negroes to get home on their own after their applications were refused. This third beating in a row paralyzed the would-be registrants from Moses’ Amite County registration school.

  Two days later, Nashville Freedom Rider John Hardy made his fourth trip to the courthouse in Tylertown, on the opposite side of McComb from Liberty. It was the seat of the other outlying county from which Negroes had come to petition Moses for a registration school. Hardy, the volunteer teacher, had quickly become a conspicuous, controversial figure in Tylertown, where he arrived wearing his usual khaki safari shorts and knee-high black dress socks over his skinny legs. A fastidious, bookish student, Hardy was known for courage rooted in his study of the principles of freedom. On this particular Thursday, he brought with him Edith Peters and Lucius Wilson, both in their sixties, who as owners of sizable farms were among the relatively prosperous Negro yeomen of the county.

  Registrar John Q. Wood refused to give registration applications to Peters and Wilson. When Hardy stepped forward to ask why, Wood cut him off abruptly. “I want to see you, John,” said Wood as he walked briskly to his desk and pulled a revolver from the drawer. The appearance of the gun froze the room in silence. Wood ordered Hardy to leave the office, and as Hardy was walking out the door, he struck a roundhouse blow to the back of his head with the butt of the gun.

  Peters and Wilson rushed past Wood to support the staggering, bleeding Hardy, and the three Negroes made their way out of the courthouse. A white man advised them to see a doctor, but Hardy, mindful of Moses’ example after the Caston beating, said he wanted to report the assault to the local sheriff. He had scarcely decided to do so when Sheriff Edd Craft came running to meet him in the middle of the street. The sheriff, confronted by Hardy’s demand that he arrest the registrar—which threatened to undermine the fundamental political structure of the county—denounced Hardy bitterly and almost piteously for bringing down such a situation on Mississippi. Then, instead of arresting Wood for assault, Craft arrested Hardy for disturbing the peace. By nightfall, swirling rumors of lynch parties worried the sheriff enough to transfer his prisoner to the Pike County jail in Magnolia, where Hardy was placed in a cell next to the students from the McComb sit-ins.

  Reverend Wright died in Kansas City two days after his injury, on the morning John Hardy was beaten. News of the unprecedented fatality imposed a sedative pall upon the hosts of preachers, choristers, and lay worshippers. Its immediate effect was to concentrate hopes of surmounting the shameful internecine warfare upon D. A. Holmes, the special election monitor, who, dressed in formal black suit and white tie, soon entered the auditorium under full police escort. Leaning on the arms of court-appointed assistants, one of whom was a municipal judge, the stern octogenarian made his way to the podium and laid down edicts of compromise procedure. To the Jackson forces went the technical recognition of incumbency: Kansas City police would admit to the floor only those Taylor delegates who exchanged their credentials for those issued by Jackson, and Jackson would be recognized to deliver the traditional President’s Address. To the Taylor forces went Holmes’s assurances that he would use tellers, ballot-box watchers, and anything else necessary to insure a fair election, no matter how long it took. “We are going to behave,” he declared, “and we are going to be honest from A to Z.”

  Jackson returned to preach. Ten thousand Baptists filled the auditorium, and many of them, eager for a sermon that would lift them above the unpleasantries of earthly politics, responded more positively than ever. When Holmes called for the delegates to be qualified for voting, Jackson delegates from the entire nation stood up to be counted with those from the first state called, which was Alabama, a Taylor stronghold because of King and Shuttlesworth. Jackson, by such obfuscatory tactics, forced Holmes to qualify the delegates one by one instead of state by state, in a laborious tally that went on into the night. Then Jackson had his delegates place on record a nonbinding resolution that the Holmes rules were usurpations of the president’s authority, and that they were participating in the election under protest. The Taylor delegates booed. King and other Taylor leaders believed that Jackson was laying down a pretext for a walkout or a coup against Holmes, should the election go badly.

  Nevertheless, King decided at the last moment not to nominate Taylor, nor to make a seconding speech. He mustered all his courage to explain to Taylor that he thought his presence might be too inflammatory in the wake of Reverend Wright’s death. Taylor asked Abernathy to make a seconding speech in King’s place, after which Taylor and Jackson solemnly took seats no more than three feet apart on the stage, each flanked by a half-dozen retainers. The long procession of preachers filed past the ballot boxes until nearly dawn, with Abernathy and Benjamin Mays standing by vigilantly as official poll watchers for Taylor.

  There was no argument with the results: Jackson won by a vote of 2,732 to 1,519. His ensuing retribution was swift. Assuming extraordinary powers of appointment by voice vote, Jackson stripped King of his prestigious title as vice president of the Convention’s Sunday School Board. This was the most severe punishment available to him, carrying the sting of a summary court-martial or excommunication. Applied to someone as prominent as King, whose name meant far more out in the white world than that of any preacher in the hall, Jackson included, the rebuke spread an awed hush through the convention. A numb King went to see Gardner Taylor. “Can you believe what he just did?” he asked.

  Jackson was not finished. At his victory press conference, he interpreted the week’s tragedy for reporters who were baffled by such violent chaos among preachers. The coroner may have been technically correct in ruling Reverend Wright’s death an accident, he said, but in his opinion the real cause was a planned insurrection. Absolving Gardner Taylor as the figurehead, he charged that it was Martin Luther King who “masterminded the invasion of the convention floor Wednesday which resulted in the death of a delegate.” With that, he left for Detroit to sharpen the attack at Wright’s mammoth funeral. “The disrespect for law in the move for freedom has opened the way for criminals to come in their midst…” he declared. “Too many preachers have the cloth on the outside but don’t have the Gospel on the inside. There are hoodlums and crooks in the pulpits today.”

  By naming King publicly as the culprit in what he all but called a murder, Jackson framed an accusation so clear and compelling that it threatened to leap across the chasm of race. The story moved on the news wires and had already surfaced as a tiny item on a back page of The New York Time
s. For King, this lit the fuse of disaster. If the white newspapers of the South noticed, they could fashion a lasting multiple scandal: homicide and riot by the champion of nonviolence, plus rejection of King’s integration agenda by his fellow Negro ministers. King retreated to Atlanta for emergency consultations with a panel of lawyers and SCLC advisers. Wyatt Walker set up a nationwide communications network to poll influential Taylorites. King wanted to force Jackson to retract his charges, but like most potential libel plaintiffs he realized that he might only draw attention to the original allegation. Even worse, he realized that any public controversy initiated by him was almost automatic news within the white press, whereas most white reporters had never heard of J. H. Jackson.

  All these factors militated against a lawsuit, but King could not bring himself to let Jackson’s remarks go unchallenged. From Atlanta, he sent a telegram to Jackson that hinted of a libel suit and also exposed King’s sensitivity to publicity. “As you know,” King told Jackson, “my whole philosophy of life and social action is one of love and nonviolence and for one to give the nation the impression that I am little more than a hoodlum with a reckless disregard of the lives and safety of persons is both libelous and injurious to my public image. I, therefore, ask you in a Christian spirit to retract this statement immediately and urge the press to give as much attention to the retraction as it gave to the original accusation. Please send a copy of the retraction to me.”

  Anticipating that Jackson would not reply, King and his allies worked frantically by telephone to recruit Negro Baptist leaders from twenty-five states to lend their names to a joint telegram similar to King’s. The final version asserted that Jackson’s statements “will only serve the purposes of the segregationist forces in America” and concluded: “If this character assassination is not righted, it will be a disservice to the Baptists, the Christian family, to the Negro community in America and to God.” Benjamin Mays signed on, as did Gardner Taylor himself. The King camp’s most prized signatory was Rev. D. A. Holmes, who had supervised the Kansas City election. The telegram opened a line of compromise for Jackson by suggesting that perhaps the reporters had misquoted him.

  The crafted nuance was wasted, however, as Jackson retracted nothing. His victory was complete. Unlike King, Jackson had no image to protect beyond the confines of the Convention. The most sordid controversy involving his name would receive little more attention in the white world than a knife fight among hoboes.

  King was left with the painful irony that the same racial barriers he was battling to destroy now protected him from scandal in his first major failure. He was obliged to deny complicity in the Wright death with an alibi based on something he was not proud of—his last-minute retreat from the forefront of Taylor support—and he concealed the true motive for that retreat in a bit of disingenuous rhetoric: “…my overcrowded schedule made it impossible for me to attend a single strategy session of the Taylor team,” he had said in his telegram to Jackson. Both his moral crusade and his expedient calculations came to grief. The bitter result of the long campaign against tyranny was to cleanse Jackson with a democratic victory. It was on this last point that King’s regrets eventually came to settle. He reproached himself for having surrendered to the logic of coups and intrigue. “I never thought Jack would allow a fair vote,” he sighed repeatedly.

  All the Kings were now ostracized from an institution that had been near the center of the family’s church identity since before Daddy King was born. Neither King nor his father would address the Convention again in their lifetimes, and J. H. Jackson stood as a colossus against all King’s hopes of using the organized national church in the civil rights movement. “The smoke has cleared,” Wyatt Walker wrote a friend, “and evil is once more strongly entrenched upon the throne.”

  The Kennedy Justice Department intervened to block John Hardy’s state trial, which was scheduled for September 22. This was a historic move. To challenge the right of a state to bring a criminal prosecution under its own laws was both legally and politically extreme, not least because the circumstances required the federal government to endorse the testimony of Negro witnesses against that of white elected officials. But the lawyers of the Civil Rights Division found the federal voting rights connection to be so egregious—the beating of Hardy by the registrar, inside the registrar’s office—and the subsequent state indictment of Hardy so perverse that the case made a mockery of the federal government’s powers to enforce voting rights. John Doar put the case for emergency action before Burke Marshall, who authorized him to seek a temporary restraining order against Mississippi, on behalf of Hardy and the United States.

  Unfortunately for the Justice Department, Doar wound up in the Federal District Court of Judge Harold Cox, the Kennedy Administration’s first judicial appointment in the South. Cox was the son of the sheriff in Sunflower County, home of his powerful sponsor, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman James Eastland. As a segregationist who was to make himself notorious with remarks from the bench in which he called Negroes “baboons,” he was not favorably disposed toward the Justice Department’s audacious motion. He denied it, whereupon Burke Marshall flew to Atlanta to seek review by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

  There the issue was technical. Under federal rules of procedure, the denial of a motion for a temporary restraining order was not considered “final” enough to merit judicial review. Marshall, knowing that the issue would be moot before a hostile Judge Cox got around to hearings on a permanent injunction, argued that this extraordinary situation justified a reversal. In what became a pattern of the civil rights movement, two Eisenhower judges agreed with the Justice Department against one of the Administration’s own Democratic judges. They issued an order that effectively forestalled Hardy’s state trial. Mississippi appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

  Two of the Civil Rights Division’s staff lawyers returned to Washington with a scouting report. One of them was a protégé of John Doar, from the same hometown in Wisconsin, and his first field trip affected him no less deeply than had Doar’s own trip to Tennessee a year earlier. Around the courthouse in Jackson and on visits to Tylertown, McComb, and Liberty, Doar’s friend felt the climate of fear as a prickly sensation under his collar. Like Doar, he drove out to Negro country churches to meet those making the registration complaints, and he was moved by the courage of those who persevered without protections. His dominant impression of Moses was that he was hauntingly peaceful.

  Doar flew to Mississippi to investigate for himself. On September 24—a Sunday when King was introducing the illustrious Mordecai Johnson as special guest preacher at Ebenezer—Doar drove out to Steptoe’s farm and met Moses in person, some five weeks after accepting his collect call from the Pike County jail. What he first noticed were the still-unhealed head wounds from the Caston beating. Because the FBI report on the beating had made no mention of cuts or stitches and had included no photograph, contrary to Bureau procedure in cases of substantial injury, Doar had assumed that Moses had suffered only minor bruises. And because Moses, for all the detail in his letters about the incident, never had set forth the gory specifics, Doar had suspected that Moses as the plaintiff in the case had understandably exaggerated the seriousness of a minor assault. Sight of the fresh scars caused Doar to reevaluate the quality of the FBI reporting as well as his estimate of Moses’ character.

  After listening to long, careful reports from Moses and Steptoe, Doar was convinced that there were grounds for their forebodings of further violence against voter registration workers in Amite County. Steptoe explained the reasons why he felt particularly menaced by Representative Hurst and the Caston family. He feared reprisals against himself and two other local farmers. One of them, Herbert Lee, had volunteered on occasion to drive Moses around the county. Lee, like Steptoe, had nine children, but he was a younger man, still actively farming. His wife had never attended the registration classes and was fearful for her husband. Lee, a small, wiry man, had attended many of the class
es, but he said little and had not yet attempted to register. In trying to account for the threats against Lee, Moses could only speculate that whites were angry because they had seen Moses riding in Lee’s car. Or possibly they were angry because Lee had once arrived late for a registration class and come upon a group of whites taking down the license numbers of cars parked outside the church. Moses had reported Lee’s discovery to the Justice Department and the FBI, and the word had either seeped back into Amite County from there or spread from someone who recognized Lee at the church. Somehow, Moses reported, Herbert Lee was being singled out for resentment as a detective or “spy” for the Negroes.

  Doar took these reports seriously enough to ask Moses and Steptoe to take him out to Lee’s farm for a talk. Lee was not there, however, and Doar had to leave for Washington that night. When he walked into his office at the Justice Department the next day, Doar found a phone message that Herbert Lee had been murdered.

  The message was from Moses. With SNCC chairman Charles McDew, he had been working at the Masonic Temple that morning when a call came in from Dr. Anderson, the man who had sewed up Moses’ head wounds. In a chilled voice, Anderson reported that he was at a McComb funeral home with a mysterious corpse, which had lain amid a crowd for some hours in the parking lot of a cotton gin over in Liberty. No white or Negro in Liberty would touch it. When the McComb hearse arrived from across the county line to fetch the body, summoned by a cryptic message from Amite County authorities, no one at the scene dared to disclose even the victim’s name. These circumstances led Anderson to suspect that it was someone from the voter registration classes. Moses soon identified the body as Herbert Lee. It lay on a table with a single bullet wound in the left temple.