Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  From the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, Sherrod had obtained the name of C. W. King, a prosperous Albany Negro who was a supporter of liberal causes. Patriarch of a remarkable family, C. W. King had seven sons, all highly educated, many of whom had studied abroad. The eldest, Clennon, was the professor who had been declared insane in 1958 because he was crazy enough to apply for admission to the University of Mississippi. The youngest, Preston, was an expatriate professor of philosophy at the University of South Wales, in Australia. Of the five middle brothers, two remained in Albany as pillars of the young Negro establishment. Slater King was a builder and real estate broker, like his father. C. B. King was one of only three Negro lawyers in all of Georgia outside Atlanta. (He had secured his brother Clennon’s release from Whitfield Asylum in Mississippi.) He wore a neatly trimmed beard and tailored suits, and he discussed all subjects in a melodious, polysyllabic stream. Yet with all his affectations, C. B. King remained in Albany to press the legal claims of maids, mechanics, and drunkards. Local white lawyers did not quite know what to make of him.

  The eccentric senior King allowed Sherrod and Reagon to occupy an empty room in one of his buildings. The two young SNCC workers seemed a scruffy and unlikely pair of political leaders. Reagon was only eighteen. As a high school student in Nashville, he had so resented James Lawson’s rule barring him from the nonviolence workshops as too young that he had crashed some of the Nashville demonstrations. By his own account the seriousness of the movement had not sunk in until he arrived at Parchman Penitentiary in a truck with the first Freedom Riders and saw the guards there beat, shock, and strip the two prostrate Chicago pacifists. Reagon was fearless, but most of his SNCC elders regarded him as a kid who was a little too eager to keep up.

  Sherrod was the only SNCC veteran who tolerated his company, and to the Albany Kings, Sherrod himself was a young man of mixed qualities. There had always been something about him that was dangerous as well as innocent. When as a teenager he had announced his intention to locate and introduce himself to his white relatives around Petersburg, Virginia, horrified Negro relatives throttled this violation of taboo. When he returned from his first racially mixed discussion group, he expressed amazement at his discovery that there were things white people did not know. In equal extremes, he seemed both shy and touchy, lazy and driven, a man of the cloth and of the street. Sherrod and Reagon spent their first days simply playing basketball on the playgrounds of the Negro high schools, answering questions as they came. Reagon developed quickly as a star attraction among his age peers, many of whom were agog over his tales about the Freedom Rides. After a week of playground bull sessions, more than a dozen of the students responded positively to the idea of attending a church meeting. They accepted the assertion that they could not understand the sit-ins and Freedom Rides without knowing how nonviolent resistance came straight from the Bible.

  Sherrod conducted the first meetings outdoors. He introduced himself as a fellow preacher to the pastors of the churches within walking distance of the high schools, and one of them, Rev. H. C. Boyd of Shiloh Baptist, agreed to let Sherrod use a room in the church. Boyd, attending the first few sessions himself, heard chapter and verse from the Bible on brotherhood and justice. He later came to believe that Sherrod deceived him by emphasizing Christian virtues and a better Albany, while making only passing references to jail or protest, but at the time Boyd soothed himself with the thought that Sherrod was accomplishing what no Albany pastor, including himself, could do—he was attracting a growing number of eager teenagers into church two, three, four times a week.

  The first of Albany’s Negro leaders to react strongly against Sherrod and Reagon was Tom Chatmon, adult supervisor of the local NAACP Youth Council. A Morehouse graduate in his early thirties, Chatmon already had manifested business skills that would win him several fortunes as a distributor of Negro cosmetics, and also a compulsive gambling habit that would devour more than one of those fortunes. Possessed of a gambler’s humor, Chatmon was a popular man in Albany’s Negro establishment. His position within the NAACP corresponded roughly to the presidency of the white Jaycees—a stepping-stone toward senior leadership—and as the adult most closely in touch with Albany’s young people, Chatmon learned early that the two vagabond outsiders were stealing the enthusiasm of his best Youth Council members. Defensively, he concluded that the SNCC pair might be Communists.

  Chatmon’s worries unsettled even the boldest and most restless of Albany’s Negro leaders. Some members of the prestigious Criterion Club suggested that they be run out of town, or, as C. B. King put it to Sherrod, “have opined that the community might be well advised to divest itself of your presence.” A prominent Albany Negro placed “an urgent and distressing call” to NAACP regional headquarters in Atlanta, warning that the two young SNCC activists were about to seduce the local youth into suicidal demonstrations. Three NAACP officials rushed down to Albany to try to restore discipline against such a possibility.

  As November 1 approached, Chatmon found it increasingly difficult to resist his Youth Council members who wanted to test the white waiting room of the Trailways bus station on the effective date of the new ICC desegregation rule. Chatmon did not deny that it had cost the Freedom Riders much more pain to obtain this rule than it would cost Albany’s youth to test it, and he heartily agreed that both justice and federal law supported any Negro’s right to fair treatment at the station. Still, he belabored himself with limits. If he sought approval within the NAACP, he was likely to be refused and almost certain to be accused of bending to the SNCC line. If he went ahead without approval, he invited censure within the hierarchical NAACP. If he did nothing, his Youth Council charges would follow Sherrod to the bus station and discredit Chatmon as the figurehead leader of a timid, inert NAACP. Chatmon reluctantly began negotiations with Sherrod toward a “test” at the bus station on November 1. High school students from the Youth Council would carry it out, but they would not act in the name of the NAACP and they would avoid arrest. A tentative, secret agreement was reached before Sherrod left for the Moses trial in Mississippi.

  Word of it seeped back across race lines to the city authorities, prompting Mayor Asa Kelley to call a special meeting of the Albany City Commission on October 30. In closed session, Police Chief Laurie Pritchett reported that “certain demonstrations were expected to occur.” Pritchett was a studious, farsighted police officer, notwithstanding his hulking ex-football player’s frame and his ever-present cigar. In anticipation of such a crisis, he had studied the performance of Alabama authorities during the Freedom Rides. Concluding that their chief error had been to permit violence, which drew publicity and forced federal intervention, he had lectured his officers on how to enforce the race laws without nightsticks or guns. To the City Commission, Pritchett announced that he had instructed his men to make no arrests under the segregation laws themselves, which were vulnerable to legal attack, but to defend segregation under laws protecting the public order. He said he had put the entire Albany police force on alert status “during the period of expected tension.” All vacation time was canceled. The commissioners thanked him for his sophisticated preparations.

  When Cordell Reagon and Charles Sherrod approached Albany in a Trailways bus on the morning of November 1, they were about to make Albany one of scores of cities across the South to be tested that day as a follow-up to the Freedom Rides. Gordon Carey of CORE had sent instructions to more than seven hundred volunteers in seven states. The plan for Albany was a kind of pincers maneuver: Sherrod and Reagon were to test the Trailways facilities as passengers, while a group of Chatmon’s Youth Council students was to meet them, testing the bus station facilities from the outside. When Sherrod and Reagon walked into the white waiting room, however, no students were in sight. Their greeting party was composed instead of a half-dozen or so grim-faced Albany policemen. Chilled with disappointment, the two SNCC workers left the station quickly to find that paranoia was loose among the Negroes, who had war
ned of beatings and even massacres at the station. It took all day for them to rally the spirits of the Youth Council members enough for nine of them to venture to the Trailways station that same afternoon. Sherrod and Reagon waited outside as the students entered the white waiting room. When police ordered them to leave, they retreated in compliance.

  Although this was the tamest of demonstrations by Freedom Ride standards, Sherrod reported that “from that moment on, segregation was dead.” Word flashed through Negro Albany that “the children” had dared to confront Laurie Pritchett’s men at the bus station. All but the most conservative of the local NAACP leaders came quickly to agree that someone would have to get arrested at the station, if only to establish grounds for a test case on police violations of the new ICC order. Sherrod preached Lawson’s theme that Supreme Court edicts piled high as the clouds were irrelevant so long as Albany’s Negroes enforced segregation upon themselves by cowering before the police. High school students flocked to his meetings in greater numbers, bringing with them older relatives. College students turned up, as did a few preachers and even a schoolteacher or two. Sherrod and Reagon were also holding voter registration workshops every Saturday, but the town was consumed with interest in what would happen next at the bus station.

  C. B. King was working on a criminal case that touched the rawest passions of race. Violence had erupted in the county of the notorious Screws case—“Bad” Baker County, one of the plantation areas that ringed Albany. High finance in Baker County was dominated by an illiterate multimillionaire cattle breeder, who wrote checks on scraps of grocery bags and signed them with an “X,” and by Coca-Cola chairman Robert Woodruff, who owned a 30,000-acre resort plantation called Ichuaway.

  Every Fourth of July, Woodruff’s plantation overseer presided at a giant free barbecue for Negroes only. Three thousand had attended that year’s festivities, during which a Negro field hand named Charlie Ware made the mistake of flirting with the white overseer’s Negro mistress. The overseer complained to the sheriff, L. Warren Johnson, who fawned upon the powerful overseer almost as deferentially as the county’s Negroes fawned upon the sheriff. Both Ware and Sheriff Johnson had a fifth-grade education and a fondness for drink. “Gator” Johnson also had a reputation for meanness, as he was alleged to have killed four or more Negroes under his custody. As successor to the infamous Sheriff Claude Screws, he was from the “old school.” On the night of the 1961 barbecue, Johnson drove to Charlie Ware’s house and proceeded to beat his wife intermittently until Ware came home. Then Johnson beat Ware on the head, arrested and searched him, and drove to Newton, a town so tiny it could not support a restaurant. Parked outside the Baker County jail, with Ware handcuffed beside him on the front seat, Johnson picked up his radio transmitter and said, “This nigger’s coming on me with a knife! I’m gonna have to shoot him.” He fired two .32-caliber bullets into Ware’s neck. “He’s still coming on! I’m gonna have to shoot him again,” said Johnson, and fired a third time.

  This, at any rate, was the account of the FBI agent who investigated the shooting after doctors later brought Ware miraculously back to life, with no permanent injuries except those caused by vertebra fragments that seeped into his spinal fluid. The FBI agent supported Charlie Ware’s version almost completely, but his conclusions counted for very little in Baker County. A grand jury promptly indicted Ware for felonious assault upon Sheriff Johnson. Later in July, officers transported Ware from the hospital to the jail. He was still there in November, when C. B. King appealed to a judge to free him on the grounds that Ware was not a risk to flee and that he suffered both mental and physical aftereffects of the shooting, with blood still dripping from his ears. The judge refused to lower the bail bond, forcing the impoverished Ware to remain in jail more than a year until trial, but in the meantime C. B. King filed a civil suit against Sheriff Johnson in federal court, arguing that Johnson’s story was preposterous on its face. The sheriff was a full head taller than Ware, outweighed him by more than a hundred pounds, and possessed all the psychological advantages of a white sheriff in a Black Belt county where the air of feudalism still mingled with the heat. King alleged that the sheriff had committed a monstrous violation of Ware’s civil rights.

  What was new for southwest Georgia was Charlie Ware’s refusal to plead guilty to whatever charge pleased Sheriff Johnson. By all previous standards, he and C. B. King were leaping into deep caves with only a single match. But the news of their crusade fanned the incipient rebellion in Albany. A week after C. B. King filed his bail motion for Charlie Ware in Baker County, more than twenty people crowded into Slater King’s home for a tense Friday-night summit conference. Representatives of seven Negro organizations in Albany, plus SNCC, gathered in an atmosphere of charged anticipation, undercut by rivalry and suspicion. Anxieties caused them to stress their points of agreement. All the representatives, from the Federated Women’s Clubs to the Ministerial Alliance, subscribed to the NAACP’s official goal of ending all segregation in Albany. They also agreed that it was preferable to achieve these goals by negotiation rather than demonstrations, which they called by the euphemism “positive actions,” but they split over the crucial question of who should decide when positive actions were required. No organization welcomed such responsibility, especially in the pregnant knowledge that Sherrod’s youth cadres were burning to go ahead, but none trusted the others, either. Almost inevitably, by a process reminiscent of the bus boycott’s first days in Montgomery, they decided to create a new organization called the Albany Movement.

  Slater King recommended as president a doctor named William G. Anderson, who had come to Albany from his hometown of Americus, Georgia, only four years earlier. In the elite Criterion Club, Anderson had distinguished himself for persistence and diplomacy. He was handsome, well-spoken, ambitious, and unscarred. The founding members of the Albany Movement elected him president that night. Slater King became vice president. Before adjourning, the members adopted a cautious declaration of method. In language that bore signs of C. B. King’s draftsmanship, the document concluded: “It has been our vicarious experience, that when positive actions in matters of this kind have become necessary in order to implement the achievement of these constitutionally guaranteed rights, it has been detrimental to the best interests of the communities involved, economically, socially, and morally. In view of the threat of such detriment, it is our hope that such positive actions will not be necessary in the city of Albany.” A copy soon found its way into the hands of Mayor Kelley and Police Chief Pritchett.

  Sherrod and Reagon had reason to be pleased. After about two months’ work, they were being incorporated into a leadership organization much broader than anything ever created in McComb. Expected SNCC demonstrations were the unspoken cause of unity, and the qualms of the local leaders were so feeble against the tide of student sentiment that the first of the “positive actions” took place on November 22, only five days after the founding of the Albany Movement. Three high school students from Chatmon’s Youth Council walked into the white sections of the bus station to confront the officers stationed there during the continuous “alert.” After they refused orders to move on, even in the commanding presence of Chief Pritchett himself, they were hauled off to jail under the fixed gaze of several dozen bystanders. Tom Chatmon bailed them out within an hour, but Albany had its first arrests on the day before Thanksgiving.

  Late that same afternoon, Albany State College dismissed its students for the holiday weekend. Hundreds of Negro students walked or rode across the Flint River bridge to the Trailways station in downtown Albany, bound for their hometowns. Because of the earlier arrests and the persistent rumors of race trouble, the dean of students went ahead of them. He took up a post outside the station, from which he directed the herd of students toward the colored waiting room. All obeyed him except two, Blanton Hall and Bertha Gober. They broke away to “go clean-sided,” which was the local Negro slang for entering the white waiting room. The distraught dean, for
bidden to pursue them there, peeked in from the outside along with gaggles of awestruck students. A policeman quickly approached Hall and Gober in the line at the white ticket window and said, “You’ll never get your ticket there.” The two students asked why, nervously and politely standing their ground. A detective laid the groundwork for arrest by advising them that their presence was “tending to create a disturbance,” and when they still did not move from the line, Laurie Pritchett ordered them to jail. Word had flashed through Negro Albany by suppertime: two groups to jail in a single day. By morning, nearly everyone knew that two Albany State students were spending their Thanksgiving away from home, behind bars. Although they were almost completely unknown, being from out of town, their plight drew sympathy eclipsing that for the three Youth Council members. Strangers took plates of turkey down to the jail.

  The two students stayed in jail through Thanksgiving night, receiving more food and visitors. Frequent bulletins about their condition pulsed outward by telephone and word of mouth. As in McComb, the sentiments of parents and other adults fell heavily to their support, so that the leaders of the new Albany Movement determined on Friday to call their first mass meeting for Saturday night. With a campus crisis, a high school crisis, and a growing fear of violence over segregation, they had a compelling opportunity to introduce their organization to the general public. Anderson and Slater King obtained permission from Rev. E. James Grant to use Mount Zion Baptist Church. This was a breakthrough in itself, as Mount Zion was the church of the Baptist elite.

  On Saturday morning, Blanton Hall and Bertha Gober each received in jail an official notice from Albany State, that “as a result of your being apprehended and arrested…you are hereby suspended indefinitely as a student.” If the mass meeting was not already a guaranteed success, it became one as soon as the leafleters and runners spread word that President Dennis had decided to stand with the white segregationists. Rumors flew—that the students were in tears, that Reverend Grant had resisted pressure to withdraw his permission to use Mount Zion, that Dennis would not dare show his face at his own church.