Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Meanwhile, U.S. District Court judge Sidney Mize effectively canceled the integration at McComb by banning further Freedom Rides. Judge Harold Cox upheld and extended the order, ruling that it did not conflict with federal law because the ICC ruling applied to Negroes whereas the injunction applied only to agitators. Burke Marshall was obliged to seek reversal of such blatant sophistry.

  All this racial violence had subdued Negro McComb by the time Moses emerged from jail a few days after the attack on the reporters. John Hardy, one of his registration colleagues, had just survived a shotgun blast into a bedroom of the house where he was lodged in downtown McComb. Neither Hardy nor Moses could persuade people to attend the registration classes. The Masonic Temple was closed to SNCC. Moses, finding that Steptoe and the others wanted to rest for a time, decided that it was pointless to continue work in southwest Mississippi. With Hardy, Curtis Hayes, Hollis Watkins, and several other young people, he decamped for Amzie Moore’s house in the Mississippi Delta. There he found Bevel and Nash, who, like himself, were freshly out of jail on appeal.

  Although the three of them had vastly different personalities, they groped together toward a revised plan. Because the state was even tougher than they had thought, they decided to abandon hopes for alliances with Negro churches or businessmen and with white liberals. They resolved instead to scale down—to depend only on tiny cadres of proven young workers. Bevel’s idea was to run Negro candidates for Congress in two Delta districts. He did not dream that they could win—indeed, part of the idea was that whites would not harass such a ludicrous effort—but he hoped that the campaigns would plant the very idea of voting in the minds of Negro citizens, 90 percent of whom were unregistered. The cadres then could build upon that idea in their registration classes, using live candidates and new dreams. Moses agreed to stay in Jackson as the unofficial campaign manager for Rev. R. L. T. Smith. Bevel went north into the Delta to Greenwood, near his hometown of Itta Bena, to work for Rev. Theodore Trammell. “We can’t lose,” Smith declared when Mississippi whites allowed him, more or less as a novelty, to announce his candidacy on television.

  Starting over in a new area, Moses was as philosophical about his tribulations around McComb as was Martin Luther King about Albany. “We had, to put it mildly, got our feet wet,” Moses wrote. “We now knew something of what it took to run a voter registration campaign in Mississippi.”

  In Atlanta, Wyatt Walker recuperated quickly enough from the tangled passions of Albany to send to the Afro-American Newspapers his personal evaluation of the year gone by. Despite his frequent, vociferous criticisms of those in and around the civil rights struggle, Walker had developed in his first full year at SCLC a professional’s detached eye for the political center. For American of the Year in 1961, Walker nominated the Attorney General. “Moved with decisiveness in Montgomery violence,” Walker wrote of Robert Kennedy. “Petitioned ICC for new ruling with teeth…. has given clear evidence that his department means business.”

  Walker acknowledged few peers in composure, but he did humble himself before King’s phenomenal personal ballast. Even as they returned together from their first ordeal in Albany, King was joking about the intense, conflicting pressures that had bombarded him there. “I had the displeasure of meeting the meanest man in the world,” he said drolly of Sheriff Chappell. Although stung by press criticism, the infighting among his allies, and the disintegration of friends (a fragile, recuperating Dr. Anderson was practically barricaded in his home, which renegade Albany Movement students pelted with tomatoes because of his failure to resume marching), King still was able to look amiably to a future of pain and glory coming at him almost randomly. What stuck in his throat more than Albany was the debacle in Kansas City. Less than forty-eight hours after leaving the Americus jail, King sat down to write a long letter to one of his family mentors in New York. Rev. O. Clay Maxwell was national president of the NBC’s Sunday School Congress, from which King had just been removed as vice president. Having had made his own pained choice to stay with the National Baptist Convention, Maxwell wanted to know whether King intended to fight the banishment edict of the triumphant J. H. Jackson, who was away on a European tour that included a private meeting with Pope John XXIII.

  King had been considering lawsuits against Jackson and protest marches inside the convention hall, because he believed that “Dr. Jackson will continue his un-Christian, unethical and dictatorial tactics as long as no-one openly oposes [sic] him.” But, on reflection, he had decided that he would spare both Maxwell and himself the ordeal of further rebellion. “I do not feel that I am of the temperament to put up a struggle at this point,” he wrote. “I think it may give the impression that I am fighting to maintain an office…. It would make me look little rather than big, and my involvement in the struggle for the rights of my people must always keep me above the level of littleness.”

  FIFTEEN

  HOOVER’S TRIANGLE AND KING’S MACHINE

  Then came the last year of postwar innocence. “What can you say,” John Glenn exclaimed after orbiting the globe, “about a day when you have seen four beautiful sunsets?” Mickey Mantle won the Most Valuable Player award; John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Intellectuals and Hollywood directors still showcased cigarette smoke as a positive image, paying little attention to obscure health warnings from Britain’s Royal College of Physicians. The first of the baby-boom children turned sixteen, snatched up their driver’s licenses, and created a new stage of life within Detroit’s shiny creations. The Ford Motor Company designed tiny cars to compete with the German Volks-wagen, but Henry Ford publicly dropped the idea as un-American.

  America was king, though some of its newly powerful citizens ached for the settled refinements of Europe. Cardinal Spellman announced that he had arranged to bring Michelangelo’s Pietà to New York for exhibition, whereupon potentates in Washington, not to be outdone, borrowed Leonardo’s Mona Lisa for the National Gallery. On television, a new show called “The Beverly Hillbillies” unexpectedly broke the hegemony of the Westerns atop the ratings charts, replacing frontier adventure with social satire that blended the extremes of gushing wealth and heartwarming naïveté. Through John and Jacqueline Kennedy, declared a story in The New York Times, “the average American has a much clearer idea of what it must be like to have everything.” Future writers chose 1962 as the year of nostalgia, the perfect setting for surf comedies and carefree romances. Still, forebodings of ideological dislocation ran beneath popular enthusiasms for achievement, new dance steps, gadgets, and peaceful change.

  On October 1, 1961, W. E. B. Du Bois applied for membership in the Communist Party of the U.S.A. “I have been long and slow in coming to this conclusion,” Du Bois wrote in a public statement, “but at last my mind is settled.” He was ninety-three. Born a year before Mohandas Gandhi, during the Andrew Johnson impeachment trial of 1868, he was a year younger than the historic First Baptist Church (Colored) of Montgomery. More than sixty years after breaking the color line on Harvard doctorates, fifty after founding the NAACP, thirty after surrendering his beloved Crisis magazine to a “sportswriter” named Roy Wilkins, and ten after being hauled manacled into federal court for advocating peace talks in Korea, the old man decided that “capitalism cannot reform itself; it is doomed to self-destruction. No universal selfishness can bring social good to all.” Still haughty in manner and freethinking in scholarship, Du Bois was an unlikely candidate for the discipline of a working-class party. In his membership application, he reviewed for party chairman Gus Hall his lifelong disagreements with the Communists.

  His statement found its way into King’s files as well as J. Edgar Hoover’s. King cited the defection by “one of the most brilliant Negro scholars in America” in one of his warnings about the limits of Negro patience: “There can be no doubt that if the problem of racial discrimination is not solved in the not too distant future, some Negroes, out of frustration, discontent, and despair, will turn to some other ideology.”
He did not speak publicly of Du Bois again for six years.

  Hoover might have hailed the Du Bois statement as a vindication of the FBI’s long-standing diagnosis of subversive tendencies, but he took no public notice of it. This supreme rebuke to Du Bois—that his last insult to American values failed to draw even recognition in mainstream politics—starkly illustrated his insignificance in the white culture. Although Hoover was waging a major battle over the security threat posed by the American Communist Party, the Du Bois defection was peripheral to him because he needed examples that would register with Attorney General Kennedy and with the public at large. Du Bois did not.

  The running battle between Kennedy and Hoover took place on different ground. Kennedy wanted to shift the Bureau’s priorities drastically from domestic intelligence to organized crime. Citing the FBI’s own private figures that the American Communist Party had shriveled further since its collapse in 1956—until some fifteen hundred FBI informants within the party supplied a hefty part of its budget and membership—he insisted that the Bureau’s vast domestic security network was a wasteful bureaucratic appendix from the McCarthy era. Kennedy was appalled to learn that there were only a dozen FBI agents targeted against organized crime, as opposed to more than a thousand in political security work. He would have preferred something close to a reversal, and it annoyed him almost beyond endurance that the FBI still denied the very existence of organized crime.

  By the end of Robert Kennedy’s first year as Hoover’s nominal boss, worn edges were beginning to show. In December, Kennedy told a British journalist that the U.S. Communist Party “couldn’t be more feeble and less of a threat, and besides its membership consists largely of FBI agents.” In sharp but indirect rebuttal, Hoover told a House committee the next month that the U.S. Communist Party was “a Trojan Horse of rigidly disciplined fanatics unalterably committed to bring this free nation under the yoke of international communism.” Hoover substantiated this ringing alarm by disclosing confidentially to the congressmen, and to selected senators as well, that a New York lawyer named Stanley Levison was both a secret member of the Communist Party, subject to orders from the Kremlin, and a guiding adviser to Martin Luther King. The message was clear: that the troublesome Negro revolution was Moscow’s skirmish line, and that only the omniscient Hoover knew the full details. “The threat from without should not blind us to the threat from within,” he wrote. More pointedly, in a January 8 classified memo to Robert Kennedy, Hoover extended the reach of suspicion. Not only did the Communists have influence upon King through Levison, he warned, but through King, in turn, Levison and the Communists had “access” to the Attorney General himself and to the White House. Because King had met personally with both Kennedy brothers—even taken a meal recently with the President—there was a specter of Communist influence at the highest levels.

  Kennedy made no recorded response, perhaps because he dismissed the notion that he was personally vulnerable to Communist manipulation. Not everyone in the Justice Department felt secure from the threat, however, as became evident as soon as Kennedy left on February 1 for a month-long goodwill trip around the world. The next day, Acting Attorney General Byron White called in the FBI liaison officer specifically to discuss Hoover’s January 8 warning about Levison. “It is White’s feeling that definitely some action should be taken,” the liaison officer reported afterward to the Bureau. White wanted to review Levison’s FBI file for ammunition that might awaken the Kennedy Administration to the danger.

  For the Bureau’s purposes, White’s enthusiastic initiative was too much of a good thing. His request for the Levison file raised thorny problems. For one thing, nearly all the intelligence information about Levison’s Communist allegiance was at least five years old, and it came from two brothers, Jack and Morris Childs, who had infiltrated the party as FBI informants after having been purged in the factional turmoil of the late 1940s. Worse, the Levison record would show that the FBI itself twice had attempted to recruit Levison since then, which would make it difficult to explain why the Bureau now considered him so sinister. Finally, while the Bureau could show that Levison and King were close friends in the civil rights movement, there was no evidence as yet to show that either one of them followed the orders or even the wishes of the American Communist Party, let alone the Kremlin. In short, the January 8 memo had exaggerated the subversive linkages in order to get a message through to Kennedy, and Byron White’s sudden embrace of the alarm now called for the Bureau to show its hand. This potential embarrassment rose instantly to J. Edgar Hoover for decision. “King is no good any way,” he scrawled on the memo outlining the problem. “Under no circumstances should our informant be endangered.”

  By this, his first written assessment of King, Hoover marked him for FBI hostility in advance of any investigation. The terse comment, while crudely put, effectively guided FBI subordinates in their dealings with White. The important signal to get across was that King was tainted by his association with Levison. As to White’s request for evidence, Hoover transformed weakness into strength: the information could not be revealed, he ordered, because it was too important. The Levison file must remain secret in all its details.

  Courtney Evans, the FBI liaison, took Hoover’s answer to White a few days later. White replied that he fully appreciated the reasons why he could not see the Levison dossier. Still, to restrain White, Evans went so far as to tone down Hoover’s January 8 memo. It was not Levison himself who was talking to the Attorney General and the White House, Evans reminded White, but King. The Communist access was indirect rather than direct. Such assurance drew out White’s sarcasm. “White said from the character of some of the people over at the White House he would not have been surprised if it were reported that Levison actually did have such a contact,” Evans wrote, transmitting to FBI headquarters a barb doubtless aimed at Harris Wofford.

  From the FBI’s point of view, Evans achieved an ideal understanding with Byron White, in that the Acting Attorney General seemed to embrace the Bureau’s suspicions of King and Levison on Hoover’s word alone. Moreover, the incident helped Hoover reestablish direct communications with the White House. Robert Kennedy had been able to cut the Director’s cherished access to the President’s office by insisting that FBI messages be cleared through channels at the Justice Department. On February 14, Hoover sent Byron White a file summary on King’s miscellaneous contacts with supporters of left-wing causes. Simultaneously, he sent a similar report to Kenneth O’Donnell at the White House, delivered by hand in an important-looking FBI pouch. “My dear Mr. O’Donnell,” he began. “I thought you would be interested in the following concerning the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., prominent southern Negro leader…”

  Meanwhile, Robert Kennedy circled the globe on his extraordinary tour, speaking confidently for the Administration on foreign policy and other subjects far afield from the Justice Department, traveling with legions of reporters who speculated that such trips foretold a Kennedy dynasty in which Robert would follow his brother into the White House. In poorer countries, Kennedy was bedeviled by persistent questions about the American stand on colonialism. Indonesians in particular refused to accept his neutral comments about their negotiations for the independence of New Guinea from the Netherlands. Kennedy, trying not to offend a NATO ally, took essentially the same position he maintained during the conflict in Albany, Georgia: that it was a matter for the local parties to decide for themselves. This earned him a barrage of criticism for his implied recognition of merit in the Dutch colonial claims. With his shy humor and dogged grit, Kennedy gamely faced hecklers in more than one country. Later he reflected that no amount of East-West debate on the claims of democracy against communism would dispel the global preoccupation with race and economics. “There wasn’t one area of the world that I visited,” he said later, “…that I wasn’t asked about the question of civil rights.”

  J. Edgar Hoover welcomed the Attorney General home on February 27 with a dose of scandal so f
antastic in those days that even the most credulous readers of supermarket tabloids would have dismissed it as lurid fantasy. Hoover’s memo was the result of an investigation that had begun sometime earlier, when FBI agents in Las Vegas arrested private parties for placing illegal wiretaps on the home of singer Phyllis McGuire. Preliminary development of the wiretap prosecution had shown that the wiretappers were in the employ of Robert Maheu, a former FBI agent working for Howard Hughes, and Sam “Momo” Giancana, Al Capone’s mobster heir in Chicago. That much was good news to the entire Justice Department—Hoover loathed Maheu as a Bureau renegade, and Kennedy had sought the conviction of Giancana almost as diligently as that of Jimmy Hoffa. The first of the bad news was that Maheu and Giancana claimed immunity from prosecution on the grounds that their wiretap was sanctioned by the CIA. Officials from the CIA, in turn, had confirmed through gritted teeth that Maheu and Giancana indeed had been working for them in a series of top-secret attempts to assassinate Cuban premier Fidel Castro by means of Giancana’s gangster connections. Giancana, while plotting these missions, had asked Maheu and the CIA to make sure that his mistress, Phyllis McGuire, was not two-timing him while he was away, and the agency officials had decided that they were in no position to refuse.