No one had voiced these resentments to Walker’s face; he was too intimidating a presence as he jerked and crackled across Shiloh’s floor like a downed power line. No sooner did Walker leave to visit Martin Luther King in Americus, however, than Charles Jones organized a special SNCC press conference. Jones knew many of the reporters personally, from earlier civil rights protests that year, and he promised them a big story. He and other SNCC leaders stood discreetly in the background as Marion Page read a statement drafted mostly by Ella Baker. It denied as “an unfortunate misrepresentation of fact” the news that the SCLC was in command of Albany. “Mr. Walker or no one else is assuming leadership of Albany,” said Page. He renounced nationwide “pilgrimages” and all further demonstrations in Albany, saying that he hoped to renew negotiations with the city’s white leaders. When one of the startled reporters asked whether this meant that the Albany Movement was breaking away from the SCLC, Page replied, “We’ve never been united.”
The fresh public feud ambushed Wyatt Walker as soon as he returned from the Americus jail. Reeling under a barrage of press inquiries, Walker was shrewd enough to recognize tactical advantages even in this stinging rebuke to his authority. Had the press conference not taken place, Walker himself would have been forced to propose concessions in order to get King and Anderson out of jail. Since King had forbidden him to mention Anderson’s condition to anyone—it became a subject of hushed gossip within the Albany Movement’s inner circles—Walker would have been obliged to invent some pretext for retreat. Now he did not have to. Instead, he bit his lip, sent out a flurry of telegrams canceling the SCLC board meeting, and advised the Albanians to seek the best terms their divided ranks could command. For Walker, the SNCC-Page mutiny was a detestable affront that could not have come at a better time.
Far-flung reporters still were checking into Albany that Sunday night when James Gray delivered a television address to southwest Georgia. As Albany’s first citizen, he spoke to local viewers much the way modern Presidents had come to address the nation. Gray owned controlling stock in the only television station in town, from whose studios his image was beamed that night, and he owned the region’s dominant newspaper, the Albany Herald. He had grown up in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, three doors down from Norman Rockwell, and played basketball for Dartmouth College in the 1930s. At a dance after a game he had struck up a friendship with one of the opposing players from Harvard, Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. The two of them roved together enough for Gray to visit the Kennedy vacation home in Palm Beach several times before Joe Jr. was killed in World War II. After that, and after Gray had moved South to marry the daughter of the Herald’s owner, he maintained a friendship with the next Kennedy son, Jack.
Over the next dozen years, Jack had changed from Joe’s kid brother into the dashing senator who wanted to be President, and Gray’s media empire made him into something of a potentate in the small markets of southwest Georgia. In 1958, Gray sent his private plane to fetch Senator and Mrs. Kennedy to Albany for a weekend of barbecue, golf, and country-style politicking, during which Gray himself proved that it was possible for a Yankee to be popular among Southerners. Now that Kennedy was President, a great many prominent citizens of Albany had on their office walls a framed photograph of themselves shaking hands with Kennedy at Gray’s reception, and everybody knew that Gray still called the President “Jack” in private. As chairman of the Georgia Democratic Party, Gray had been scheduled to debate Martin Luther King on television in late 1960, but the President-elect, reacting to the startling evidence that the Negro vote had supplied the margin of his victory, had asked his friend to withdraw in favor of James J. Kilpatrick.
This time Gray decided that he could not duck King and the segregation issue. He told his viewers that a “cell of professional agitators” was mounting a rebellion that “smacks more of Lenin and Stalin than of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln.” He knew enough about the internal splits in the Albany Movement to refer to its weaknesses, but he also subscribed to the white folklore that any Negro rebellion was necessarily the work of the NAACP. As for King, Gray saw nothing but shallow opportunism: “He has learned that martyrdom can be a highly productive practice for the acquisition of a buck.” He closed with a tribute to segregation as “a system that has proved over the years to be peaceful and rewarding,” and a call for an end to disruption. “What we need is tolerance,” said Gray, “not tantrum.”
Privately, Gray advised Mayor Kelley and Chief Pritchett to make any deal that would get King and the protesters out of jail without surrender. Simultaneously, Gray was telling his friends in Washington that any intervention by the federal government would make it harder rather than easier for the Georgia whites to end the crisis. His argument landed on receptive ears, as Robert Kennedy was wary of jumping into quicksand in Albany. This was the political lesson of his baptism in civil rights earlier that year, when he had been green and impetuous. The Attorney General called in Douglas Kiker and other trusted reporters to announce that he had adopted a “hands off” policy after the spring Freedom Rides. “Real progress” in race relations, he said, required that “local leaders talk it out.”
Before dawn on Monday, December 18, Wyatt Walker sent off a plaintive telegram to the White House in King’s name, requesting that President Kennedy “issue at once by Executive Order a Second Emancipation Proclamation to free all Negroes from second-class citizenship.” That morning, as headlines told New York readers that “Negro Groups Split on Georgia Protest,” Robert Kennedy huddled with Byron White and Burke Marshall at the Justice Department, sending out a stream of messages that he was in close touch with events in Albany, that the issue was “number one” on his agenda, and that he stood ready to give advice if requested by either side.
From Americus, King left by prison transport for trial in Albany along with Anderson, whom reporters described as “haggard.” The courtroom was a mass of confusion, with reporters jostling spectators and officials bustling in and out with whispered messages. Judge Abner Israel recessed the proceedings even before they began. Bailiffs put King and Anderson in a holding cell, where women’s committees from the Albany Movement tried to reach them with gifts of food and cologne. Upstairs, a rumor circulated that negotiations were resuming. Marion Page and his lawyer C. B. King huddled in the mayor’s office along with Donald Hollowell, representing SNCC, while Mayor Kelley and other city officials kept their distance in a separate room. Chief Pritchett shuttled between them with refinements on the truce conditions.
By ten thirty that morning, the whites had dropped their feigned inability to interfere with the operations of the courts and offered to release all local Albany Movement prisoners without any bond at all, provided that King leave town and demonstrations cease. But they held firm on high bail for the Freedom Riders, whom they considered professional agitators, and they refused to commit to writing any agreement with the Negro representatives. C. B. King and Hollowell—the same legal team that was still seeking Charlie Ware’s release so that he could receive medical treatment for the neck wounds he suffered in July—bargained all day for binding statements of City Commission policy, but the most they could get was an unsigned note authorizing Chief Pritchett to speak for the commission on certain matters. Late that afternoon, Mayor Kelley summoned Judge Israel to ratify the new understanding, and the judge then announced from the bench a host of new rulings, including a sixty-day postponement of King’s trial.
King appeared suddenly on the courthouse steps, freed after forty-eight hours of custody. Anderson, still unstable in the midst of his visions, was protectively ushered aside by Walker as King told the assembled reporters that he would leave Albany in spite of his dissatisfaction with the verbal truce. “I would not want to stand in the way of meaningful negotiations,” he said, in his only allusion to his own departure as one of the conditions.
Prisoners began to spill forth from the jails of southwest Georgia. It would take until nearly dawn to empt
y them, by which time contending assessments of their week-long travail were on their way to interested readers across the nation. King himself put the most positive face on the deal, telling a cheering Shiloh crowd that “it wasn’t necessary” for him to stay in jail, as promised. The bus and rail terminals had been “thoroughly integrated,” he said. Bail requirements had been swept away to free hundreds of unjustly arrested protesters, and the City Commission had promised to appoint a biracial commission to address the segregation issue as a whole. Even as King spoke, however, Chief Pritchett was denying that the city had granted a single point. He insisted that Albany had obeyed all laws, including the ICC desegregation ruling. All charges against the demonstrators, including Slater King and the suspended students, remained in place pending trial. As for the biracial commission, Pritchett insisted that the City Commission had agreed only to entertain such a proposal, as it would do for any timely and proper recommendation from local citizens. At the Shiloh mass meeting, Marion Page told his listeners to disregard white victory claims and pay attention to “official” announcements from the Albany Movement.
“In appreciation for the accurate coverage of Albany’s difficulties,” as they announced it, Albany leaders treated white members of “the national and international press corps” to a steak dinner Monday night at the Radium Springs club where James Gray had played golf with John Kennedy. Mayor Kelley announced that Attorney General Kennedy had called within an hour of that afternoon’s truce to congratulate the city for preventing an outbreak of violence. Perhaps the city’s shrewd hospitality helped set the tone for news reports that described Albany’s crisis as having been safely navigated by wise restraint, and that criticized King’s protest methods for stirring up a dangerous but ineffectual discontent. Journalists had spiteful reason to fault King for nondelivery. Many of them had just traveled to Albany at considerable expense on King’s promise of a protracted, newsworthy confrontation, only to have the story fizzle almost upon their arrival. Elsewhere, too, there was lingering disgruntlement over King: Page, Charles Jones, and other leaders of the Albany Movement privately blamed him for the meager settlement.
The New York Herald Tribune called the Albany truce “a devastating loss of face” for King, “one of the most stunning defeats” of his career. Most reporters took a sportswriter’s approach and billed the week’s events essentially as Segregation 1, King 0. More thorough press reflections focused on the discovery in Albany of bureaucratic divisions within the Negro movement. NAACP officials supplied much of the confidential information, but they were careful not to reveal the parochial motivation that dominated their own internal communications. Privately admitting that the Albany branch of the NAACP was “almost defunct,” and had been so for nearly a decade, they had maneuvered singlemindedly to disparage any competing organization. They offered to make William Anderson president of the local branch if he would dissolve the Albany Movement as unnecessary. They made similar overtures to Slater King. They tried to stop demonstrations and fumed over the popularity of the movement songs. This starkly self-interested perspective extended to Mississippi, where field secretary Medgar Evers boasted to his superiors that strong NAACP chapters had prevented student registration projects from making any headway. Evers assured headquarters that King had raised very little money for the Freedom Riders in Mississippi, and he strongly implied that Moses, John Hardy, and other registration workers had brought persecution on themselves when they “became involved with some hoodlums, law enforcement officers, and voter registrars.”
To some degree, Evers and other NAACP employees tailored their reports to the expectations of their superiors, but the antagonisms were real. NAACP sources openly derided student activists and then subtly confirmed those same activists in their criticisms of King. The outlines of such quarrels escaped to the white press. Claude Sitton’s reprise on Albany in the next Sunday’s New York Times, headed “Rivalries Beset Integration Campaign,” traced the quarrels to the sit-ins of 1960. In a more sensational article entitled “Confused Crusade,” Time quoted Roy Wilkins in scathing appraisal of SNCC: “They don’t take orders from anybody; they don’t consult anybody. They operate in a kind of vacuum: parade, protest, sit-in…When the headlines are gone, the issues still have to be settled in court.” King’s gingerly reply—“I think it would be a mistake to try, as some civil rights leaders want to, to throw the students out of the movement. The little conflicts are inevitable”—was barely heard amid cross-firing attacks from anonymous SNCC leaders, who criticized King for status-seeking, for whirlwind speech-making, and for “meekly” shirking his jail time in Albany. Such attacks in Time brought SNCC a public identity more than all its previous campaigns. James Forman, who resented King’s bourgeois habits and his quest for media recognition, was featured as one of the four established national leaders. He posed for the Time photographer in a starched white shirt and tie, with a pipe.
All this bilious contention was too much for Stanley Levison, who promptly wrote a letter protesting the lack of “ordinary fairness” in Time’s presentation. “Status seekers do not generally go to jail, even for limited periods,” he wrote. “…Ironically, there are those who have argued that Dr. King is so extraordinarily self-sacrificing that he must be seeking martyrdom, while now a new voice charges that he avoids sacrifice. He is indeed damned if he does and damned if he does not.” Time did not publish Levison’s letter.
In Albany, Charles Jones and Cordell Reagon were more abrasive than Sherrod in their judgment of King. They called him “De Lawd,” a SNCC nickname mocking both King’s pomposity and the submissiveness of ordinary church folk. They also intimated that they had orchestrated the Albany negotiations toward precisely the result that followed: King’s removal from Albany, bearing the onus of a weak settlement. This remained their secret almost as much as Anderson’s mental crisis remained King’s. They privately endorsed a weak settlement in order to promote a strong movement, privately sought King’s release from jail and then criticized him for not staying there. They justified competitive maneuvers on the theory that their goals could not be advanced or protected without influence to offset King’s. This was SNCC’s classical revolutionary dilemma. To oppose their ally, they became more like what they said they opposed, beginning a cycle of imitation and rejection.
In later years, Wyatt Walker conceded that his manner toward the SNCC students was perhaps too “flint-faced,” but at the time he blamed their jealous insubordination for damaging the Albany Movement. He did not bother to address their grievances against him until Charles Jones made some headway in convincing Harry Belafonte that Walker’s autocratic style was dividing the movement. This seized Walker’s attention because he knew that Belafonte commanded King’s attention, but even then he complained that Jones had “brainwashed” Belafonte with false tales about Albany. Belafonte, for his part, took the dispute privately to King and found him to be almost blithely philosophical. Walker and the students were not as different as they might appear, King replied.
To mitigate Walker’s abrasiveness toward the SNCC students, King had hoped to use Bernard Lee, but it was now clear that Lee identified too closely with King to be effective in that role. Lee already had come to dress like King, walk like King, and even to imitate King’s long, measured phrases. After talking with Belafonte, King called James Bevel and asked him to mediate between the SCLC and SNCC.
Bevel was in Mississippi, living on his small stipend from the SCLC. Still struggling to turn Jackson into Nashville, he was the foremost preacher among the SNCC students, and among the most unpredictable of their free spirits. A case in point was his recent marriage to Diane Nash. This union of SNCC leaders matched social opposites. Nash had been runner-up in Chicago’s “Miss America” trials. Poised and proper, so light-skinned that she could pass for white, she had been raised in a middle-class Catholic family. Now she confronted a wild man from Itta Bena, Mississippi, a self-described example of the legendary “chicken-eating, liquor-drink
ing, woman-chasing Baptist preacher.” Their tempestuous romance, held together by the passion of the movement, had elements of Shakespearean richness to it, rearranged along lines of Negro American culture: she as an upper-class Kate and he as a vagabond Prince Hal.
Bob Moses found the newlyweds at Amzie Moore’s house in Cleveland, north of Jackson. He had obtained release from the Pike County jail on a $1,000 appeal bond on December 6, having served thirty-seven days for disturbing the peace during the McComb student prayer march back in October. Moses emerged to find that time and fear had made him a relative stranger. Jerome Smith, one of the New Orleans students who had responded to James Farmer’s plea to take up the first Freedom Ride, had been so inspired by reports of the outpost in McComb that he organized a Freedom Ride to the McComb Greyhound station in November, shortly after finishing his sentence at Parchman.* After a white mob beat them severely at the station, a bloodied Smith vowed to send another team of riders, and the next attempt, on December 1, attracted forty FBI agents, a squadron of police, a score of reporters, and a white mob of five hundred. The cordon of officers allowed the Negro riders to achieve the first-known peaceful integration of a bus-station waiting room in Mississippi history—it lasted three minutes, while their bags were being unloaded—but the mob took out some of its anger on the white reporters observing in the background. Simmons Fentress, Time’s Atlanta bureau chief, was thrown into a plate-glass window, and several others were bruised or cut. The attack on the reporters prompted an outraged editorial in The New York Times, whose correspondent, Claude Sitton, believed he escaped a beating because the mob had mistaken him for an FBI agent. Sitton had moved on to cover King in Albany.
Parting the Waters Page 79