Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  O’Dell had first met King as a colleague rather than a celebrity when Levison took him to present a report on the net receipts from the Carnegie Hall event. Financial success made it a festive occasion, and Levison pressed King to establish a more permanent fund-raising structure. He recommended O’Dell, with his experience in business management, as the ideal supervisor for an experimental program of fund-raising by mass mailings. King approved Levison’s plan, and the mail solicitation proved successful beyond all expectation. O’Dell soon was working full time as director of the SCLC mail room in Harlem, drawing a small salary from the proceeds. He saw so much potential in the newfangled techniques that he took advanced marketing classes at the NYU Business School. By August 1961, Levison and O’Dell reported proudly to King that their little operation had raised $80,000 for the SCLC in the past year—more than half the SCLC budget—above expenses of less than $10,000. In the parlance of direct mail, they reported to King that they were adding every day to a “master list” of 12,000 “proven contributors.”

  The New York SCLC office was a beehive of efficiency. Experience there as a typist and envelope stuffer had led Bob Moses to expect something similar at SCLC’s Atlanta headquarters, where he found instead the languid atmosphere of a church social. The discrepancy discouraged Levison as well as Moses, and finally King himself concluded that the organization of the Atlanta office was critically flawed. In January 1962, anticipating large voter registration grants on the establishment of the VEP, King asked O’Dell to begin commuting between New York and Atlanta. His new assignment was to apply the lessons of his fund-raising project to voter registration. Wearing two hats, O’Dell became in effect the SCLC’s first quartermaster. He was keeper of lists, statistician of votes, designer of systems.

  Just before O’Dell started commuting, Andrew Young went South as the Field Foundation’s new supervisor for Septima Clark’s citizenship schools. Young was charged with the vital task of connecting New York philanthropy to the civil rights movement by steering tax-exempt money into voter registration. For the better part of a year, Young had vacillated over a career decision: should he leave the expense-account comforts of his job as associate director of the Department of Youth Work in the National Council of Churches for the risks and hardships of civil rights work in the segregated South? “Now I am forced to make a choice,” he had written in a letter to King, seeking advice. Never having met Young, King had asked Levison to meet and evaluate Young in New York. Levison found him competent but unfocused. Gardner Taylor gave King a more personal report, as Taylor had known the Youngs as one of the most distinguished Negro families in New Orleans. They were wealthy Congregationalists, from the highest and “lightest” of the churches, and a number of Young cousins were so light-skinned and respectable that they had passed over into the white world. Andrew Young, three years King’s junior, had first thought he might join the idealism of the Southern movement by tutoring the unlettered preachers of the SCLC. “The Southern Christian Leadership Conference is made up largely of Baptist Churches and lower class Negroes,” he wrote a New York friend. “These clergy do not have the respect of the educated Negro, and there is almost no way for them to get together. They need each other desperately, though. This would be one of my objectives.”

  Months of adjustment had followed, running parallel to the creation of the Voter Education Project. From Highlander, Myles Horton apologized to Young for the delays. Young apologized to philanthropists for the conceptual fuzziness of the voter education scheme, and confessed to Wyatt Walker that “we get more chicken about moving back to the center of the struggle.” The final arrangements between Young, the SCLC, the foundations, and the National Council of Churches amounted to an elaborate exchange of titles and obligations, comprehensible only to foundation experts. Young went on the Field Foundation payroll, but the SCLC paid his travel expenses and other budget items. Myles Horton helped weave a third institution into the patchwork by securing through the National Council of Churches an abandoned Congregationalist missionary school as a site for citizenship classes.

  At Dorchester, the missionary school, not far from Savannah, Georgia, Young merged the old citizenship education program with voter registration, accepting Septima Clark as the undisputed schoolmistress of both. She took in adult students by the busload, a week at a time, and used the practical methods she had been developing for more than forty years. In math class, she taught her pupils how to figure out seed and fertilizer allotments. In literacy classes, she worked upward from street signs and newspapers to the portions of the state constitutions required for voter registration. Although her pedagogy commanded the attention of professionals like Young, her gift lay in recognizing natural leaders among the poorly educated yeomanry—midwives, old farmers and draymen, grandmothers who had pushed children and grandchildren through school—and imparting to them her unshakable confidence and respect. There was an invisible edge to her. Still touchy about being the daughter of a slave, she was quick to notice what she called pridefulness among her own people—taking it personally, for instance, that Mother King never invited her into the “drawing room” of the King home in Atlanta, and noting that powerful preachers of the movement were given to vainglory and often oblivious to the contributions of women.

  At first, Clark treated her new boss almost as a pupil—all the more so since Andrew Young had accomplished nearly all his grant-knitting wizardry before she had even met him. Once, when a new busload arrived at Dorchester, Young flew in by chartered airplane for the opening ceremonies, and Clark intercepted him on the way to the pantry. He should not eat unless he shared the food with all the new arrivals, she said patiently, because they had been on a bus all night and were hungry. Young blinked. There was no money for a communal breakfast in the budget, he said, and besides, no one had complained about what was due him as the director. Clark said he must bear in mind that these were people who put sand in Coke bottles just to prove to the folks back home that they had seen the ocean. They would never dream of attending church at Ebenezer, let alone Young’s elite congregation, because the worshippers there dressed up too much and were too refined for them, and if the recruits could not feel comfortable doing such simple things, how could they feel worthy to vote against the wishes of the white man? Clark said that the recruits noticed everything. Young’s budget priorities and his lack of eagerness to mingle with his recruits spoke as eloquently as his speeches. “If you can pay all that money that the Marshall Field Foundation has sent us to rent a plane, why can’t you give them two or three dollars to buy breakfast?” she asked. Failing that, he could share their discomfort.

  “Septima, you are a saint,” said Young.

  “No, I’m not a saint,” she replied. “I don’t consider myself a saint. But I do know that what you are doing is not wise.”

  “There are saints in hell, you know,” said Young, who was agile in theological debate.

  “Well, then, I might be one of them,” said Clark. She already had ruined Young’s appetite, and eventually the foundation director from New York found himself loosening his tie and eating bag lunches with citizenship students.

  Such working adjustments were well under way by February—not only for Clark and Young but also for Jack O’Dell and Wiley Branton, the incoming director of the Voter Education Project. On February 2, 1962, all these people gathered at a meeting of SCLC affiliates in Atlanta. King made a speech. Septima Clark and Dorothy Cotton were introduced as the new citizenship teachers. James Lawson conducted workshops in nonviolence. Andrew Young attended as the representative of the Field Foundation. And Jack O’Dell, as director of SCLC voter registration, conducted the business sessions. O’Dell described a new flow chart for registration. First, King would speak on tour, using the power of his name and his message to solicit new volunteers. Then O’Dell and Young would send selected volunteers to Dorchester for citizenship training with Septima Clark. The most gifted trainees would take her methods back to their home
areas as teachers. Finally, O’Dell would submit the records of trained, functioning workers to Wiley Branton for VEP funding as ongoing SCLC registration projects.

  King left immediately on what he called variously a “People-to-People” tour, a “Southwide” tour, and a “Freedom Corps” drive. Beginning with a traditional rally in the First Baptist Church of Clarksdale, Mississippi, he spent three days whirling through the Delta’s Third Congressional District, where James Bevel was working. To drive home the point that he was after more than big audiences and heavy collection plates, King held meetings at country stores as well as churches, and stopped at the smallest hamlets as well as the ones with paved roads. While James Lawson held nonviolence workshops at Tougaloo College, King preached registration politics to awed farmers in Jonestown. In tiny Sherard, he gave a pep talk to an audience of exactly one old man, who proudly claimed to have walked thirteen miles to meet King. With Wyatt Walker and Dorothy Cotton, King recruited in three days some 150 people willing to make the long journey to Septima Clark’s citizenship school in Georgia.

  He went on to new tours through South Carolina and Georgia. By February 22, when Wiley Branton announced that at long last the Voter Education Project was “open for business,” the SCLC hit the ground running for the newly available funds. More than a thousand people quickly signed up for the Freedom Corps. Hundreds of them passed through Septima Clark’s training program at Dorchester. The Voter Education Project secured three initial grants totaling $162,000 from the Taconic, Field, and Stern foundations, with the promise of much more to come, and the SCLC almost instantly received an advance of $11,000 against its first-year request of $60,000. Jet magazine, the largest Negro weekly, published a story entitled “Dr. King Uniting Greatest Force Since Reconstruction,” observing that King was touring the South “in a manner more familiar to an office-seeker than a man of the cloth…in the best traditions of a political machine.”

  Other civil rights groups did not fail to notice the SCLC’s head start, and King tried to repair relations with SNCC as well as the NAACP. In March, he agreed to speak at a private SNCC fund-raiser in New York, hosted by Harry Belafonte. SNCC’s financial distress was such that Bob Moses made one of his rare trips out of Mississippi for the event. Jones and Sherrod came up from Albany. Tim Jenkins came down from Yale Law School. SNCC chairman Charles McDew arrived at the last minute from Louisiana, where, on a visit to a jailed SNCC colleague, he had been imprisoned for a month himself on a manifestly contrived charge of vagrancy. Before King arrived, Belafonte had a long session in his living room with the SNCC delegation, trying to convince them that their criticisms of King’s leadership were misguided. The students complained generally that King was too far above the battle, too cautious, too distracted by his fame. Moses said very little, but his immersion into Mississippi stood as the prime counterexample to King. Among themselves, the SNCC leaders grumbled that Belafonte’s allegiance to King was grounded in an entertainer’s rule that every show must have a star. To Belafonte’s arguments that the real King was much less bourgeois than he might seem, they snickered about Coretta’s pearls and pillbox hats, Daddy King’s self-centered bluster, King’s vacations and silk pajamas. “If it looks like it, acts like it, tastes like it, smells like it, and feels like it, you know, at some point you’ve got to say it is,” one joked.

  They spoke with the conviction of those who had purged themselves of status attachments, but they did not press their sarcasm too openly upon Belafonte. They respected him as one of SNCC’s prime benefactors, and they conceded his point that no other leader would tolerate their effrontery. At that night’s cocktail party, King mingled briefly with the crowd, then stood next to Belafonte to make a glowing speech about what he himself had learned from the sacrifices of SNCC students. He introduced each of them for a statement about the nature of SNCC’s ongoing work, urged the guests to support them, and departed without mentioning his own organization.

  King plunged into another “People-to-People” tour on March 24. “Let’s pull it, doctor!” Wyatt Walker shouted to his wife as their alarm clock sounded before dawn, and they pushed King’s schedule up a notch to the frantic pace of a political campaign. By midmorning, Walker, King, Abernathy, Dorothy Cotton, and Bernard Lee had flown from Atlanta to Richmond, held a press conference, greeted a host of Negro dignitaries, and raced by motorcade to Petersburg for a luncheon speech. They canvassed door-to-door that afternoon, then drove a hundred miles west to a mass meeting of nearly three thousand people. The tour went on through Virginia, dragging behind schedule despite the prodding of Walker and his clipboard, so that some audiences were left waiting two and three hours. Walker dispatched preachers ahead to hold the crowds.

  News of the VEP and the new registration drives did not escape into the white press at all. VEP officials actively discouraged publicity for fear of inciting a political storm against their tax arrangements. Whitney Young of the Urban League refused to join in a public announcement because he was dissatisfied with the anticipated allotment of funds. For diplomatic reasons, King urged that Roy Wilkins be the focus of any VEP announcements, but Wilkins declined to participate. These inhibiting factors kept the early successes of the registration drive a secret even from activists in the civil rights movement. Stanley Levison was shocked to hear Wyatt Walker report that Dorchester trainees already had founded 61 small citizenship schools across the South. This was fantastic, cried Levison, but where was the news? Press clips were vital to his fund-raising letters, which generated money to build the entire program. By the time King agreed to issue a low-key press release on the SCLC drive, the number of schools had grown to 95 and the Dorchester trainees to 930. The release attracted little attention among reporters, who had grown skeptical of drum rolls for Negro registration.

  Levison was preoccupied with the SCLC’s running battle against extinction. On March 9, he traveled to Atlanta for an emergency meeting about the Sullivan case. Prospects were grim. The Supreme Court, by rejecting a request that the case be transferred to federal court, had just killed the desperate hope of the four SCLC defendants to postpone the confiscation of their assets. As a result, the automobiles of Shuttlesworth, Abernathy, and Joseph Lowery had been sold at a state-ordered auction. Some of S. S. Seay’s real estate was attached for quick sale. Sullivan had placed a lien on the land Abernathy had inherited from his father, and lawyers were moving to discover other property that could be seized. Fred Shuttlesworth, still growling about the incompetence of his lawyers in his Birmingham sit-in case, walked into the emergency meeting almost directly from the Birmingham jail. As King’s appointed secretary for the occasion, he noted drily in the minutes that the discussion “centered on lawyers and their efficiency.”

  There was subdued panic among the four SCLC defendants, for whom ruin was no longer merely a theoretical possibility. Mayor James of Montgomery had another $500,000 judgment in the appeals courts behind Sullivan; Governor Patterson had a bigger one after that. It was fine for them to portray themselves in fund-raising appeals as four lowly Negro preachers being crushed by state repression, but at stake were the family treasures of relatively prosperous men. Lowery disclosed to his colleagues that he stood to lose between $150,000 and $200,000. This was real money, the new birthright of preachers who had succeeded despite the millstone of a segregated economy. Together with jail and violence, such financial persecution was driving the SCLC’s leadership from the toughest parts of the South. Shuttlesworth had moved to Cincinnati. Phifer, his cellmate, was taking a church in New York, and the recent bombing of his home had convinced C. O. Simpkins to move from Shreveport to Chicago. Adapting to harsh realities, King handled the delicate diplomacy of bringing in Northern white lawyers to supersede Southern Negro ones. Stanley Levison, sharp-eyed and practical as always, strongly supported the move on the grounds that the Southern lawyers were overpaid and ineffective, which made it more difficult for Levison to raise money. The crisis sent him back to New York with a renewed mandat
e.

  From the beginning, Levison had seen the Sullivan case as both a threat and an opportunity. Because the lawsuit gravely jeopardized newspaper advertising as a fund-raising mechanism, Levison had helped pioneer the direct-mail method. Because the issues in the lawsuit threatened labor organizers in the South as well as Negroes, he and King slowly had built union support. The labor interest in turn helped King enlist labor lawyers and constitutional experts, and this, like the AFL-CIO speech, attracted the attention of professional politicians. When Theodore Kheel hosted a New York lawyers’ luncheon in February, Nelson Rockefeller heard about it and sent King a friendly note “to assure you of my personal support.”

  After the Kheel luncheon, King found himself alone in a hotel room with a Wall Street lawyer who had a large cigar in his mouth but remorse on his face. At forty-four, Harry Wachtel had made a name for himself as the legal architect for an Israeli immigrant named Meshulam Riklis, one of the inventors of the modern conglomerate. By perfecting a technique called the leveraged buy-out, through which he essentially bought companies with their own assets, Riklis had built a $500 million empire from what seemed to be an irrational combination of firms, ranging from the Playtex brassiere company to the Schenley distillery. Wachtel’s reputation as a business predator made him an unlikely sympathizer for King, but he disgorged a capsule life history in a confessional tone. He was a Jewish shopkeeper’s son, he said, and as a college radical in the late 1930s had vowed to use his law degree for the downtrodden. But things had not turned out that way, and he had worked, as he put it, “not on the side of the angels.” The cruelest irony for him was that his conglomerate, Rapid-American, owned several of the chains whose segregated lunch counters still were the targets of sit-ins in the South—Greene’s, McCrory’s, McClellan’s. Wachtel’s daughter had pummeled his conscience relentlessly, wanting to know what good was all his money and power if he was helpless to create elementary justice in the Riklis company.