Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Then a quickening pace of oratory consumed the distance between King and the crowd. When he spoke of going to jail “without hating the white folks,” they answered with a clap of applause. “Say to the white man, ‘We will win you with the power of our capacity to endure,’” he urged. “How long will we have to suffer injustices?” he cried. A deep bass voice shouted back “God Almighty!” and reporter Watters quickly looked up and saw that it belonged to an old man with a very black face. The old man’s cries kept punctuating King’s rising “How long…Not long” litany, and Watters lost ground in his desperate efforts to jot down each spoken word. King was soaring now, as he spoke of redemptive suffering, the possibility of martyrdom. “But we shall overcome,” he cried, and both churches shouted back, “Shall overcome!”

  The song of that title sprouted softly here and there beneath his oratorical descent. “Don’t stop now,” King admonished them. “Keep moving. Walk together, children. Don’t ya get weary. There’s a great camp meeting coming…” Suddenly, without the usual cries of jubilation from a hymn or a prophet, his voice trailed off. King stepped away from the pulpit, as though even he had been overwhelmed by the powers he elicited from the congregations. They sang “We Shall Overcome,” swaying gently back and forth in the pews as they waved aloft their white handkerchiefs, whose flutter made the church look like a cotton field in cross-cutting breezes. After a number of verses, a clearly transported Dr. Anderson raised his arms for silence. He thanked King profusely for his appearance and pledged that the Albany Movement indeed would keep moving. And then, crowning the moment, he invited King himself to walk together with them against the bastions of segregation.

  As the crowd rocked in approval of the suggestion, the leaders huddled on the platform to discuss this departure from the schedule. Unable to hear one another, they retired to Reverend Boyd’s study for a brief conference. Anderson argued that King’s continued presence alone might produce a settlement, which would make another march unnecessary. King agreed to stay, notwithstanding other commitments, including an obligation to preach for Daddy King on Sunday. That being decided, someone expressed reservations about advertising Dr. King’s whereabouts in advance, given the rumors that redneck whites or stoolie Negroes might try to kill him. Hastily, the leaders devised an announcement designed to encourage the congregations while minimizing the security risk. Then they stepped back out into the music. First sight of Anderson’s beaming face told the crowd that King had agreed to stay. When he gained enough silence, he announced in a winking, joyful code, “Be here at seven o’clock in the morning. Eat a good breakfast. Wear your warm clothes and wear your walking shoes.”

  Shiloh and Mount Zion remained open all night for prayer. After midnight, with King safely ensconced in his home, Anderson sent a telegram to Mayor Kelley: “We waited the night of the 15th of December for an acceptable response, but it was not forthcoming. We shall prayerfully await an acceptable response by 10 A.M. this morning at Shiloh Baptist Church.”

  The telegram backfired. Kelley and the other commissioners, not being accustomed to city business early on a Saturday morning, opened it only shortly before the deadline. They took offense, especially when Chief Pritchett delivered intelligence reports on the King and Anderson speeches of the previous evening, indicating that the Negroes intended to march again if rebuffed. Mayor Kelley addressed a terse letter of rejection to Marion Page instead of Anderson, perhaps to underscore the commission’s disapproval of Anderson’s recent conduct. He summoned reporters to announce that Albany was breaking off negotiations.

  A forlorn Anderson returned to the Shiloh pulpit after a last desperate trip to city hall. “We found no common ground for discussion,” he reported gravely. “We will kneel and pray until God comes and helps to show us and the world the way to take a step toward freedom.” Wyatt Walker stepped forward to say that it was time to get down to business. When he asked for a show of hands of those prepared to march to city hall behind Dr. King, about 150 people responded. “That is not enough,” Walker said sharply. Quick speeches of exhortation produced few additional volunteers, as the most dedicated people were in jail already. The hand count stalled far below the number of the two big marches earlier that week, made without King.

  Walker retired gloomily to the pastor’s study, where King had been socializing with the pastors of the twin churches on Whitney Avenue. Like King, Boyd and Grant were Morehouse men, the former a college contemporary of King’s brother A.D. and the latter a schoolmate of Daddy King’s, back in the late 1920s. King teased them both for supporting J. H. Jackson at Kansas City. Socially, their congregations in Albany were paired much like Dexter and First Baptist in Montgomery, or like Ebenezer and Abernathy’s new West Hunter Street Baptist in Atlanta. Abernathy relished pointing out that in Atlanta he and King had reversed their social positions from Montgomery, with Abernathy now holding the more prestigious West Side congregation, “out-doctoring” and “out-professoring” his friend King. When Walker delivered his gloomy news about the scarce volunteers, the preachers turned painfully to business, and decided to go with one last appeal.

  Claude Sitton of The New York Times noted that it was 4:16 P.M. when King and Anderson came out of the church arm in arm, with Abernathy and Mrs. Anderson the first of 265 others marching two by two behind them. There were a hundred youths below the age of seventeen, including some thirty on bail from previous arrests that week, and a few older people who had trouble keeping up. There was a lone white person, a student from the University of Georgia. (Reporters, pawing for any explanation of his singular presence, seized upon his statement that he had recently visited Ohio.) Now the white student was a conspicuous fleck in the long column moving through Harlem, Albany’s Negro business district. They walked past the joints and pool halls, which were gearing up for Saturday night, past gas stations and food stores. Everyone stared at the procession—grizzled drinkers and young children alike. A few of the marchers tried to recruit reinforcements from the spectators, but for the most part they were silent.

  It was a chilly December day for Albany, and threatening to rain, so that when the marchers turned toward city hall on Jackson Street the slickered troopers heading toward them appeared to be a mass of yellow in the distance. A number of the Negroes clutched tightly at Bibles under their arms, and among those uttering prayers, the tall, handsome Dr. Anderson drew attention because he spoke with a furtive chipperness that clashed with his normal executive composure. “God bless you,” he kept saying to no one in particular. “God bless each of you. Strike me first. God bless you.”

  The opposing lines converged on either side of Oglethorpe Street, which divided downtown from the Negro section. Two motorcycle policemen pulled up to the curb to block the path across the border. They did not move when King led the Negro column around to their rear, but Chief Pritchett then stepped forward with his amplified megaphone to meet them in no-man’s-land. “Do you have a written permit to parade or demonstrate?” he asked, his voice crackling through the drizzle.

  “We are simply going to pray at the City Hall,” King replied, adding that he did not believe a parade permit was necessary for that purpose. Pritchett disagreed, ordered the marchers to disperse, and then announced that they were all under arrest. His men—a composite force of policemen, sheriff’s deputies, and state troopers—marched across the intersection to herd the procession into the street. Motorcycle officers stopped traffic in all directions; others already had sealed off the area around the city jail. The march resumed in a new formation, down the middle of Jackson Street into downtown, with yellow-slickered lawmen scattered along both flanks. Photographers walked backward to snap shots of King, who was singing “We Shall Overcome” with the others. The entire panorama puzzled, angered, or entertained bystanders according to their perceptions. Its meaning was not obvious to all strangers, including the young white couples who came blinking out of the movie theater’s matinee performance of Come September, starring Rock Hudson a
nd Gina Lollobrigida. The procession seemed to be combustible and yet orderly, almost rehearsed, with both the Negroes and the officers looking solemn but not grim. At first glance, it could have been anything from a Mardi Gras parade to a mass execution.

  After the officers steered the column into the sealed-off alley behind the jail, the true character of the event revealed itself. Moans and prayers went up when King and the other leaders disappeared among the first batch into the jail. One marcher shouted out above the others: “The blessed Son of God was born about this time of the year two thousand years ago to bring peace to this world. And here we stand two thousand years later.” Suddenly, somewhere in the midst of the huddled marchers, the sounds intensified into hysteria as about a dozen men pushed their way out of the alley. They were carrying a young woman who was gasping and writhing, with a spoon jammed between her teeth. Police guards responded to desperate cries for water merely by parting to let the men rush frantically down the street with their stricken cargo. Gawking bystanders parted too, until, some distance down the street, the young woman’s seizure abated. When her bearers had assured themselves that she was fully recovered, they dutifully retraced their steps to the alley to await admission to jail. Groups being herded inside for booking passed those coming out for transport to prisons in the outlying counties. Pat Watters was struck by the sound of their song, “We Are Not Afraid,” and how it seemed steadfast even when muffled behind the doors of a departing paddy wagon. He included this detail in a vivid dose of surrealism that landed on page 10 of the next day’s Atlanta Journal, between Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson’s wedding photograph and a plane crash story from Iowa.

  Chief Pritchett closed all liquor stores and cocktail lounges that night, and doubled police patrols. Military sound trucks roamed the streets blaring the announcement that all soldiers on leave should return to the Marine Corps Supply Depot or Turner Air Force Base. City hall was emptied except for a few straggling bystanders and the main body of reporters, who waited to find out what was happening to King. Along with Anderson and Abernathy, he first was hauled from the crowded holding cell to Pritchett’s office. Later, these three ranking prisoners emerged dramatically in the midst of an armed police escort. One plainclothes officer carried a Thompson submachine gun. They all piled into the chief’s shiny new Buick Roadmaster. Then they were gone—headed north, Pritchett disclosed, for the Sumter County jail in Americus. Then and later, white citizens complained bitterly about the Roadmaster and all the special protection for King, saying that he was receiving privileges far beyond the due of a white prisoner, let alone a Negro. Pritchett defended his measures as enlightened segregation. If King were to be killed in Albany, he said, “the fires would never cease.”

  Fred Chappell was a tough, independent sheriff, who said “nigger” to and about any person of color, famous or not. He did so with a half-smile of defiant assurance, as though to emphasize his disregard for polite convention. With his deputies, Chappell slammed a cell door on King’s first full day in the Albany Movement. King became one of some 750 demonstrators arrested there in the past week, one of more than 400 still in jail. Nothing approaching such magnitude had ever occurred in the civil rights movement. Albany now combined the dimensions and the tactical advances of all its recent predecessors, from Montgomery through the Freedom Rides, including—now that King was in jail—nationwide headlines.

  Anderson had been shaky even before the march. His mumbling had been a sign of slippage. Now, having been taken to the jail in his own hometown of Americus, where his father had first achieved prominence as a traveling salesman for one of the pioneer Negro insurance companies, the experience was so intense for him that it had to be salvation itself, or the abyss. “Thank you, Jesus,” he told King. He prowled the dingy cell until claustrophobia and the malice of Sheriff Chappell rubbed a thin spot in his psyche, and then he greeted King again. “You are Jesus,” he said, as though it should have been obvious all along. Anderson knew his Bible—the descent of the spirit upon the anointed one at Shiloh, which everyone could feel, the march into Jerusalem, the dungeons and revilement. “And we are the saints,” he cried, looking not just at his fellow prisoners but out upon a great assembly of their comrades that appeared only to him. “The hosts which no man can number.”

  For King, this behavior at first may have seemed no more than another instance of the messianic adulation showered upon him for years, and for Anderson it may have begun as a lapse into a common, ecstatic church persona. In confinement, however, fervid eccentricity could intensify into mania. King tried to calm Anderson, as did Abernathy and Bernard Lee from the next cell. Anderson’s passions were almost incandescent with energy, however. He kept jumping up to proclaim the thrill of fresh visions. Even late into the night, nervous exhaustion allowed him only a light, fitful sleep, which was interrupted frequently by Abernathy’s extraordinary snoring. On this, Abernathy’s first night in jail with King, the piercing volume of his nasal trumpet created a lasting legend. The humor was lost that night to apprehension about Anderson’s condition. Each time Abernathy startled him back into full consciousness, it turned out that supernatural realities still were more vivid to him than his jail bunk, dashing the hopes of his fellow prisoners that sleep might restore him to normal.

  It was a groggy King who announced his plans through the bars the next morning. “I will not accept bond,” he told visiting reporters. “If convicted, I will refuse to pay the fine. I expect to spend Christmas in jail. I hope thousands will join me.” A Negro reporter quoted him as pledging to remain in jail “as long as necessary” to force change in Albany’s segregation. The strain of incarceration emerged in King’s lofty but plaintive comments about the Sumter County jailers. They had pushed his dignity into its final refuge: the pulpit. “I wish some people could be a little more courteous,” he said. “The guards in this jail call me ‘boy.’ I might note that I am the pastor of a church with four thousand members.”

  Abernathy was gone—bailed out early to make Sunday services in Atlanta and to “rally the nation” from outside. Hopes that daylight would improve Anderson’s condition were sadly unfounded. He began to hallucinate about extraterrestrial events, so deep in his own world that King and Bernard Lee discussed their worries in front of him. They were haunted by the memory of a Negro Episcopal priest who had come unhinged during the big Sunday march on the capitol in Montgomery during the early sit-ins of 1960. Firemen had pointed a hose at the priest to move him back, and although they did not turn on the water, something in the sight made the priest snap. His mind went away somewhere and never came back. Abernathy had seen it happen that day, along with Lee and Ella Baker, and King had arrived later to encounter the husk of an old friend. Now it frightened him and Lee to think that Anderson might be having a similar breakdown. They approached him about bailing out ahead of them, but the proposal horrified Anderson as a betrayal of King. He would not be like Simon Peter.

  Wyatt Walker swept into the Americus jail late that day, almost quivering with adrenaline. Substituting for King as the main speaker at the previous night’s mass meeting, Walker had preached and exhorted, prayed and ducked out to take scores of phone calls. “The SCLC has thrown its full resources behind the Albany Movement,” he had announced. His telegrams were summoning Daddy King, James Lawson, and the other SCLC board members to an extraordinary meeting in Albany on Monday night. He had barely slept before stepping up the pace that Sunday—dictating a nationwide fund-raising appeal to be sent over King’s signature, giving press statements, making travel arrangements for the board members, allocating some of the SCLC’s limited treasury to prisoners making the most desperate pleas for bail, while telling other supplicants that their relatives had to hang on in their cells. Now was the time to strike, he told them, because King was drawing the pressure of world opinion to Albany. They should be thinking about putting more people into jail, not taking any out.

  All these matters were compressed into the briefing Walker
had prepared for King. Inside the Sumter County jail, King punctured Walker’s kinetic strategems. “Wyatt, you’ve got to get us out of here,” he said. “Andy’s not going to make it.”

  These words spun Walker’s mind backward, toward visions of disaster. Early release would break the will of the movement, waste all Walker’s labors at coordinating support, touch off howls from people demanding to follow King out of jail, and severely damage the credibility of King, who had just promised to stay in jail until Christmas. King thought Anderson could make it through one more night, perhaps.

  Walker headed back to Albany with all his grand plans collapsed into one imperative: bluff toward a quick settlement. A second shock greeted him before he adjusted to the first. This time it was a rebellion. Walker’s imperious manner had alienated some Albany Movement leaders even before he had assumed command of the last mass meeting. Then, at Shiloh that day, just as C. B. King and some of the locals had been frowning at the news that Walker’s solicitation letter called for contributions to be sent to the SCLC in Atlanta, rather than to the Albany Movement, someone rushed in to tell them that Ralph Abernathy was appearing on television from Atlanta. They all rushed in to hear Abernathy tell the viewers of his night in the Sumter County jail and how the SCLC was calling for a nationwide “pilgrimage” to Albany. The conjunction of these two events had soured a number of the Albanians. Having naïvely measured King’s treasury by his image, they had expected him to come to town with ample funds to bail out their emergency cases. It was a blow to discover that the money had to be raised first, compounded by the news that it would be siphoned through Atlanta. As for Abernathy, they had thought he was in jail in Americus, only to see with their own eyes that he had vanished to Atlanta already, and was taking charge of Albany from there. Suddenly they saw Abernathy and Walker as movement “pros” in a less exalted sense—as those who trafficked in the ordeals of innocents. They felt like hayseeds.