For Wofford, the charges against Levison were an unwelcome return of McCarthyism. He resisted Marshall’s argument that King was tainted by association. In response to his request for proof, Marshall obtained FBI briefings on exactly what he could and could not say about the evidence against Levison. Essentially, he could say nothing, because the evidence was classified to protect the FBI’s intelligence sources. By the inverted logic of spy cases, the more important the charge, the more closely held was the evidence and the more constrained was the government in taking action.
An unhappy Wofford told King, in words he said had been carefully chosen by his superiors, that the United States government considered Stanley Levison a prime security threat. It was not a matter of leftist beliefs or Communist sympathies, Wofford added, or even of membership in the Communist Party, but that Levison had been identified at the highest levels of the U.S. government as a key element of the Soviet espionage network, a “direct link to Moscow.” The Kennedy Administration was warning King confidentially, but in the strongest terms, to cease all contact with Levison.
King was stunned. He replied that he found it almost impossible to believe such a thing about Levison, who had worked tirelessly and selflessly in King’s behalf for nearly five years. King asked Wofford how the government knew such a thing. Had FBI agents caught Levison taking rubles from the Soviets or sending secret messages to spies? Wofford, who had asked those same questions of Marshall but was now on the other side of the table, could reply only that the evidence was secret. Unlike Marshall, Wofford advised King that his own experience made him doubt the accuracy of the FBI’s suspicions, but he conceded that his doubts counted for little against the word of the FBI Director.
King eventually fell silent in Wofford’s office. The government made it a question of trust, he said finally, and he had far more reason to trust Levison than he did to trust J. Edgar Hoover. King felt ambushed—diverted, perhaps deliberately, from the hopeful agenda he had brought to the White House. To him the new charges were yet another extraneous issue bedeviling his efforts to raise the central moralities of the race question, and it was especially bitter for him to feel so personally the sting of anti-Communist suspicion. The Levison burden was being passed along to him by a chain of people each claiming to be personally removed from the mysterious grievance, each explaining basically underhanded requests in the language of honorable intentions. For King it boiled down to the fact that his best friend in the government was telling him to shun a friend as an alien being, for reasons no more tangible or convincing than suspicion itself.
Deeply depressed, King told Wofford he did not know how he would respond to the warning. He composed himself for his meeting with President Kennedy, which turned out to be a private luncheon in the White House living quarters with Jacqueline Kennedy as well as the President. There was an edge to the arrangements, especially after the delivery of Wofford’s message, in that such privacy could be either an honor or a means of concealing King’s off-the-record presence, and Mrs. Kennedy’s presence could be either a kind social gesture toward King or a signal that business talk was unwelcome. King was accustomed to this sort of ambivalence, and the charm of the Kennedys made for an engaging meal with the First Family. Afterward the three of them went for a tour of the newly renovated White House, featuring Mrs. Kennedy’s cultured tastes and acquisitions, which were the subject of much front-page journalism at the time.
When they passed through the Lincoln Room, King saw a way to break through the pleasantries without offending the President—in a request that was at once casual and significant, and which might appeal to Kennedy’s sense of history. As they passed by a framed copy of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on a mantel, King said, “Mr. President, I’d like to see you stand in this room and sign a Second Emancipation Proclamation outlawing segregation, one hundred years after Lincoln’s. You could base it on the Fourteenth Amendment.” Kennedy responded positively enough to ask King to prepare a draft proclamation for him to consider. King said he would be happy to submit one. This exchange allowed him to leave with a presidential mandate that partially offset the imperious demand for Levison’s head.
Moses said very little during the Atlanta SNCC meeting, where he joined about a score of younger students from across the South. They carried with them in fledgling form the institutionalized memory of the sit-ins and the Freedom Rides, interpreted in the context of prior generations by their ever-present mentor, Ella Baker. What they had was literally embodied in themselves, and they were in a transfused state. Advanced far beyond their years, most of them were star students who recently had seen more than one jail from the inside. They had seen their own names in the newspapers, and they had felt both the concentrated fears and the most extravagant praise of their elders. They were becoming self-consciously aware of the historical present. James Lawson was just then writing a magazine article entitled “Eve of Nonviolent Revolution?”
Each person was asked to make a short statement of belief and to discuss why he or she wanted to work full time for SNCC. Prayers and dramatic testimonies were offered up until Moses halted the proceedings suddenly by declining to speak on the subject. He said only that he was anxious to get back to Mississippi. He thought the students were grandstanding, trying to surpass one another in eloquence, but he would not say so, any more than he would pressure Mississippi farmers to register, because he recoiled from seeking to dominate others with his presence. Moses was a mystical purist. He valued SNCC for the succor it provided to like-minded people, but he remained aloof from the more pragmatic functions of an organization, such as fund-raising, discipline, and publicity. His experience in Mississippi had left him more suspicious of command, more preoccupied with moral leadership by example.
His silence probably had a greater effect than any speech he could have made. It signaled that he was positively eager to get back to the wasteland of Mississippi. Whereas the consciences of movement people previously had sustained only forays into danger, Moses seemed to require such exposure constantly and to be oppressed by the trivia of ordinary life. He reversed the psychic balance between tension and relief. He was a predominant force within SNCC in spite of himself. One immediate effect of his silence was to dampen the internal power struggle by making its issues seem petty or moot.
Ironically, it was Moses, so mindless of image and self-advancement, who shaped the public perception of the early SNCC. The image of SNCC came to be not so much a sit-in student or Freedom Rider but rather a kind of priest who chose to isolate himself deep behind the lines of segregation for years at a time, armed only with nonviolence. The SNCC worker came to be heralded as a figure of relentless sacrifice, against all conventional ambitions. SNCC mythology, borrowing from that of the early Christians as well as from the labor movement, would focus upon the “organizer” who cared nothing for comfort or recognition, who would meet rejection by cheerfully shaking the dust from his feet and moving on to another outpost. This description, amplified partly as an antipode to the more regal leadership image of Martin Luther King, made “grassroots” a popular term of political discourse in the 1960s.
Returning from Atlanta with a carload of his Mississippi veterans, Moses quickly established that SNCC had not yet snuck from McComb. Their most immediate crisis was that Principal Higgins was refusing to allow the hundred students arrested on October 4 to resume high school classes unless they first signed pledges to refrain from any further racial agitation. The students were holding Higgins to a standoff in daily marches to the school, always with speeches, negotiations, and a march home again after a mass refusal to sign such a pledge. Negro teachers feared that the unprecedented student strike threatened their jobs. There was a nearly continuous danger of violence—both between the opposing Negro factions and from whites hostile to the entire dispute.
To protect student morale from erosion over time, the SNCC leaders created an emergency school of their own, which they called Nonviolent High. Many of the
SNCC teachers possessed qualifications more advanced than the regular teachers, and this fact itself touched off one of the countless subtopics of controversy. The excitement warded off much of the normal classroom boredom, and the teachers found themselves learning as much as the students. In the history class, a young boy rose to ask Charles McDew whether the course would cover “the War for Southern Independence.”
“The war for what?” McDew replied. He was puzzled until he realized that this was one of the diehard Confederate terms for the Civil War, and that even the young Negro crusaders in his class had absorbed unconsciously a great deal of the Southern point of view. Moses, McDew, and the other teachers knew they faced obstacles as subtle as they were enormous. They also realized that Nonviolent High owed its beginning partly to the grace of white authorities who had not yet bothered to concentrate their opposition.
One night during the chaotic first week of the makeshift school, an extremely nervous visitor called on Moses at the Masonic Temple. Louis Allen told Moses that he had been summoned before a grand jury that was to consider the coroner’s findings in the Herbert Lee murder. Allen said he did not want to lie again. He wanted to know if Moses could arrange for the federal government to protect his life if he testified against E. H. Hurst. Admiration welled up in Moses, along with the bittersweet thrill of a murder solved and the joyful hope that some justice might be done in spite of Amite County’s blanket of fear. Moses advised Allen to keep silent until he could make inquiries in Washington.
He relayed Allen’s offer to John Doar, setting off a round of bureaucratic wrangling. Doar had taken a personal interest in the Lee murder since finding the note on his desk three weeks earlier. On October 19, he had filed his third investigative request on the case with the FBI, asking the Bureau to reinterview the witnesses, to question Sheriff Caston about the discovery of the alleged tire iron, and to obtain the minutes of the coroner’s jury testimony. The Bureau had resisted the instruction, arguing that it was fruitless to reopen a civil rights murder inquiry against Hurst in view of the fact that all the county authorities and witnesses agreed that it was self-defense. Doar disclosed to the Bureau that the case was different now because Allen was prepared to change his testimony.
FBI agents eventually returned to Liberty to comply with Doar’s request. Louis Allen took the fateful step and told them officially that he had seen no tire iron and that Hurst had simply shot Herbert Lee in a rage. The agents also reinterviewed the only other witness, a white man who had testified that he saw Herbert Lee raise a tire iron against Hurst. Now this witness conceded that he never saw the tire iron until “it was removed” from beneath Lee’s body. The passive construction “was removed” appeared four times in the FBI interview report, without any sign that the interviewing agent ever asked who it was that had removed the tire iron. Such neglect of logical, urgent investigative leads drove Doar to despair. The judge who had presided at the coroner’s inquest was interviewed, as Doar requested, but the interviewing agent did not obtain the minutes of the inquest, nor even report that he had asked for them.
Doar reported only a summary of this to Moses, leading to the decision that the Justice Department would file no indictment in the Herbert Lee case. This cruel finality compounded the moral conundrum haunting both of them. They knew that without a federal indictment there would be no effective protection for Louis Allen. Therefore it would be almost pointless, as well as dangerous, for Allen to testify against Hurst in the grand jury. Moses and Doar found themselves in the miserable position of cautioning Allen against the consequences of telling the truth—warning him in effect that he should lie again. For Moses it was a betrayal of Allen’s courage and of his own philosophical approach to his mission in Mississippi.
Even worse, it was too late to pull back. Nearly everyone in the county, it seemed, already knew of the renewed FBI investigation and of Allen’s willingness to accuse Hurst before the grand jury. Allen was a marked man even after he declined to do so. Whites who had bought his loads of pine logs for years began to say they did not need them. Donis Hawkins’ gas station cut off his credit, and so did Daryl Blaelock’s. Allen’s ominous plight left Doar and Moses with the worst of both worlds: they had exposed him to mortal risk without gaining even a chance of justice. From the standpoint of Allen’s well-being, it would have been better had they advised him from the beginning to lie or keep silent—to follow the rules for good niggers in Mississippi. Louis Allen had perceived this clearly on the day of the murder, but the movement philosopher and the minister of U.S. justice came around only after they had coaxed Allen fatefully toward a different truth.
Doar tried to restrain Moses in his criticisms of the FBI, arguing that Moses never could hope to make headway by fighting both the segregationist powers of Mississippi and the Bureau. The key to the FBI lay in its name—Bureau. Buried within its labyrinthine bureaucratic ways and its extraordinary domination by the personality of J. Edgar Hoover were levers that might be used for civil rights. The FBI abhorred embarrassment and public failure, for example. Most of its agents were Northern Catholics, not Southerners. The Bureau’s traditional cooperation with local authorities was nearly always undercut by rivalry—with sheriffs and policemen resenting the high and mighty Bureau, and the FBI agents looking down on the provincial ways of the locals. Doar stressed that it was a practical imperative to study and cajole the Bureau, and to fasten the FBI’s vast institutional pride to the new job of enforcing the civil rights laws.
Although it was not easy to say such things to Moses, Doar persisted in his usual terse manner. He had to do so—not only to keep functioning himself but to signal to Moses that the fault was not entirely with the FBI. What Doar could not say was that he and his colleagues had prepared a powerful “b-suit” based on the Lee murder and a number of the lesser plagues in southwest Mississippi. Doar had come to like Louis Allen personally, and he believed that Allen’s plainspoken, fearful honesty could make him a convincing witness. He also knew that it could have a sobering effect on segregationist officials just to see Hurst arrested and tried, regardless of whether a jury convicted him. Following Justice Department rules, Doar kept all this to himself because he did not want to confess that Burke Marshall had rejected the case. Marshall feared chaos, and felt a need to maintain the government’s posture of control. Doar grudgingly accepted the judgment, but some of his assistants—especially those few who had worked in Mississippi—remained in a state of open dissent. Among other objections, they argued that the policy made a perversion of the Justice Department’s ongoing effort to convince civil rights groups that the federal government would protect them in voter registration. Doar told them that nowhere else could they make their case as freely as under Marshall. Nowhere else were line prosecutors so close to the top. They should keep plugging.
In McComb, some of the students surrendered to Principal Higgins’ pledge. The SNCC leaders arranged hurriedly for scores of others to be taken in by a Negro college that offered high school courses. All this was accomplished by October 31, when nearly the entire faculty of Nonviolent High went on trial for the October 4 protest march. After a quick trial, Moses, McDew, Zellner, and fifteen others were taken in handcuffs to the drunk tank of the county jail in Magnolia, to begin serving prison terms of four to six months. On smuggled paper, Moses wrote that Judge Brumfield, while imposing sentence, had scolded him for leading the Negro children to slaughter: “‘Robert,’ he was addressing me, ‘haven’t some of the people from your school been able to go down and register without violence here in Pike County?’ I thought to myself that Southerners are exposed the most, when they boast.”
The prisoners became objects of curiosity among local whites who had business near the county jail, and some went so far as to make special trips to take a look at them. It was generally accepted that the twelve special ones crammed into one cell were Communists, and few Magnolians had seen a real Communist before. Some asked the guards to point out Moses, whose name was bei
ng circulated as their leader. A businessman remarked soberly that they should keep Moses and the others in jail just as long as the Russians imprisoned Francis Gary Powers, the American U-2 pilot. A young girl was thrilled when Charles McDew, yielding to her pleas to hear them “say something in Communist,” gave her a few words of Yiddish.
These zoolike diversions at the expense of innocently or ignorantly hostile visitors were rare. For the most part, the cramped prisoners had to stave off boredom and despair on their own. They exchanged advanced Nonviolent High lectures among themselves. Moses and McDew played chess with pieces made of matchsticks. “It’s mealtime now,” Moses wrote. “We have rice and gravy in a flat pan, dry bread and a ‘big town cake’; we lack eating and drinking utensils. Water comes from a faucet and goes into a hole.
“This is Mississippi, the middle of the iceberg. Hollis [Watkins] is leading off with his tenor, ‘Michael row the boat ashore, Alleluja; Christian brothers don’t be slow, Alleluja; Mississippi next to go, Alleluja.’ This is a tremor in the middle of the iceberg…”
FOURTEEN
ALMOST CHRISTMAS IN ALBANY
Charles Sherrod and Cordell Reagon made a special bus trip to attend the Moses trial in McComb. They watched their friends being led off to jail, then they returned to their new outpost in Albany, Georgia. Since criminal charges arising from their own McComb arrests had been dropped in mid-October, they had been working to re-create the Mississippi registration project in the cotton, pecan, and peanut region of southwest Georgia around Albany. They had arrived there full of zeal and empty of nearly everything else, sleeping at times in parked cars or on porches. Having spent the summer in Mississippi, they thought of Albany as a slightly larger version of McComb, and of Terrell County as a forsaken plantation of violence, like Amite County.
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