Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Septima Clark, Andrew Young, and Dorothy Cotton told how they took the raw recruits from the “People-to-People” tours and later fed them into the registration projects. They showed a film on Clark’s classes at Dorchester, including a segment showing a group of middle-aged Negroes learning to write their names. After the film, board member Aaron Henry rose to say that the citizenship program already had spawned six small schools in his area of Mississippi, and that it was heartwarming to see people rise so quickly from illiteracy to full-fledged registration work.

  When the floor was opened for general discussion, Rev. Roland Smith shifted attention to King. “Now if you get the best out of a man, you ought to pay him better,” he declared. Smith went on to fashion a tribute into a motion for a salary increase for King. The motion was properly seconded, but during the clamor that followed King rose to oppose it. Smith interrupted him. “Are you killing what we are trying to do?” he asked.

  “No,” replied King. “I am just stating my philosophy.”

  Smith did not back down. “I stand and speak from the vantage point of a man getting old,” he said. “You are now where your Papa used to be—you have the advantage of youth. The public will not love you always. You must keep in mind the law of diminishing returns. Keep your philosophy. Let folks do for you when they want to do. Whenever my church wants to show its appreciation to me, I have nothing to do with it. I know if you were head of a white foundation, they would pay you.”

  King tried to make a joke of it, saying that he already drew a salary from the SCLC: one dollar a year, so that he could qualify for the health plan. But this was no laughing matter for the assembled preachers, and King, sobering quickly, observed that money was one of the “defeating points” of Negro leadership and all other leadership. “All of us have our shortcomings,” he said. “I always ask God to help me. One of my shortcomings, I feel, is not in the realm of money.”

  Daddy King stood somberly to speak. “I agree with my son in part,” he said. He made his points emphatically and with great feeling, although the thrust of them shifted erratically. “He is not going to change. I think some of these things ought to be pointed up. We should put it in writing so that the world will know it. He has a family—three children and a wife…My sons can get anything that I have. I am going down with them no matter what…I know that sometimes you draft folk and override them. So I think this ought to be overridden.”

  There was some tension in the room, as Daddy King had wound around to oppose his son openly. The issue was touchy, not just because the Ebenezer budget could have used some relief from the SCLC, but also because King’s ascetic concept of leadership put his father and all the other SCLC preachers on the defensive. When the board members fell silent, King referred the whole matter to a committee. Then he proposed the election of several “young people” to the SCLC board. They included thirty-six-year-old Hosea Williams of Savannah, who, though three years older than King himself, was considered young because he had no church and was not firmly established in a career. King also nominated John Lewis, who he said was transforming the face of Nashville. Steady and thorough, Lewis had returned to Nashville to lead successful student demonstrations against one segregated establishment after another—churches, department stores, libraries, restaurants, theaters. He was marching through Nashville’s yellow pages.

  Daddy King rose to make sure these people would not embarrass the SCLC by refusing election to the board. A debate over the proper role of young people struck another nerve touching on money and authority, which calmed only when Abernathy moved that the whole matter be studied by a committee. The board meeting ended on that note. King, having negotiated slow passage among the titans, left immediately for the founding luncheon of the Gandhi Society for Human Rights, held in Washington the next day.

  “Non-violence is now woven into the fabric of American life in hundreds of boycotts across the South,” he declared in his speech. “It is marked on the jail walls of thousands of cells of Freedom Riders…Nonviolent protest is no longer a bizarre or alien concept.” Speaking of the Southern representatives in Congress, King argued that segregation was an obsession that penalized the whites of the region economically as well as morally. “Indeed, let us say it bluntly and candidly…” he said. “Many Southern leaders are pathetically trapped by their own devices. They…know that the perpetuation of this archaic, dying order is hindering the rapid growth of the South. Yet they cannot speak this truth—they are imprisoned by their own lies. It is history’s wry paradox that when Negroes win their struggle to be free, those who have held them down will themselves be freed for the first time.”

  To add spice to what was otherwise an occasion for fund-raising, King announced that he had delivered to the White House that morning his draft of a Second Emancipation Proclamation. Bound in fine leather, with its pages carefully wrapped to protect the anticipated historical value, the document carried ambitions far greater than a ceremonial tribute to the memory of Lincoln. Instead, King described a proclamation designed to adapt the boldness of Lincoln’s war measure to conditions a century later. He wanted President Kennedy to break segregation in much the same way Lincoln had abolished slavery: by an electric, symbolic act that reached beyond the authority or control of the White House. “We ask,” said King, “that he proclaim all segregation statutes of all southern states to be contrary to the Constitution, and that the full powers of his office be employed to avoid their enforcement.”

  Such a proclamation would shake American politics and reverberate throughout the world. For King, it was so logical and compelling a short cut to racial justice that he had had his volunteer lawyers—Clarence Jones, Theodore Kheel, Harry Wachtel, and Stanley Levison—spend more than six months drafting the document, and he had long since asked the Secretary of the Interior to reserve the Lincoln Memorial for ceremonies at midnight of the next New Year’s Eve, which would mark the passage of one hundred years since the effective date of Lincoln’s proclamation.

  Unfortunately for King, the Gandhi Society speech attracted almost no publicity. He still lacked the stature to define public issues so clearly that others had to respond to his terms. Those who heard about the speech at all tended to be those who admired King already, and their reactions sometimes struck him from a blind side. His friends at the Christian Century, for instance, saw the Gandhi Society as a sectarian departure from King’s Christian base in America. Their sharp, public criticisms obliged King to write one of his pained, multi-page letters of defense. “You have the impression that the Gandhi Society is made up of Christian leaders who have deserted Christ and the church,” he added. “Nothing could be further from the truth.” Tortuously, King defended his Christianity to his own followers, while simultaneously defending Gandhi as a non-Christian of Christian essence. He realized too late that the Gandhi Society was fatally flawed as a rallying point for public support. Most of its contributors would be labor unions whose leaders knew that the foundation was a vehicle for fighting the Sullivan case with tax-exempt funds.

  President Kennedy was celebrating his forty-fifth birthday with a fund-raiser attended by fifteen thousand people at Madison Square Garden, highlighted by Marilyn Monroe’s surprise solo of “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” The President did not respond to King’s draft proclamation even by private letter, but he did invite him soon afterward to a White House luncheon honoring Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus. King declined, pleading other commitments.

  It had been a trying year for Nelson Rockefeller. The previous November, he had shocked political and social New York with the announcement that he was leaving his wife of thirty-two years, and the front pages had chronicled the juicy divorce story ever since. Rockefeller insisted that the divorce would not harm his chances of gaining the White House. As political reporters doubted such claims in print, legal specialists explored the governor’s prickly dilemma: he could obtain a divorce in New York only on grounds of adultery, which would mean political suicide; h
e could obtain a valid divorce outside New York only if he established residence in another state, which under New York law would require him to relinquish the governorship. Rockefeller eventually solved the problem by persuading his wife to move to Nevada and seek divorce on grounds of “extreme cruelty,” to which she dutifully agreed, though stating that it was very much against her will. Newspaper accounts contrasted her composure with his political manipulations and harshness—noting that he ordered all mention of his ex-wife and their children deleted from his official state biography.

  In the midst of these difficulties, Rockefeller’s son Michael drowned off the coast of New Guinea. The governor was a battered man when he arrived in Atlanta on June 4 to deliver the commencement address at Spelman College. Calamity seemed to follow him South, as he arrived just behind the news of Atlanta’s deadliest single-day disaster since the Civil War. An Air France jetliner crash near Paris killed more than one hundred of Atlanta’s leading citizens as they were ending a chartered tour of European art capitals. The sudden extinction of a generation of art patrons cast a pall over all Atlanta, including its Negro cocoon, where an otherwise grand celebration was proceeding. While Rockefeller addressed Spelman, Eleanor Roosevelt spoke at the sister campus of Atlanta University, and the president of Harvard received an honorary degree from Morehouse. “Demand and get the equal chance that is your birthright as Americans,” Rockefeller told the Spelman graduates. New York reporters noted his criticism of President Kennedy and the Democrats as civil rights charlatans—full of election promises but “found wanting in the courage, the profound and true belief that must back promises with action.”

  Rockefeller went off to a college presidents’ luncheon, where he sat next to King, and then attended a political dinner honoring Edward Smith, the Republican candidate for governor of Georgia. He urged Smith to persevere in the quest for two-party democracy in Georgia, but Smith promptly died in a car crash on the way home. Georgia Republicans despaired of finding another sacrificial candidate, as their party remained something of a political joke in many Southern states. The chairman of the Republican Party in North Carolina was disgraced that summer upon the revelation that, under a fictitious identity, he maintained a second family in Virginia.

  Harry Belafonte arrived in Atlanta as Rockefeller departed, and the singer attracted by far the greater news attention. Rockefeller was only a rich governor who slipped in and out of the city’s obscure circles (Republicans, Negroes, and Negro Republicans), but Belafonte was an international star who had not toured the South since the year of the Brown decision. Vice Mayor Sam Massell presented him with the keys to the city. Belafonte and his racially mixed troupe of entertainers went from a press conference to the Atlanta Cabana Motel, the finest of the city’s new downtown inns, where they registered without incident. This extremely public breach of hotel segregation fulfilled one of the many goals set by King and Belafonte.

  Just before the Belafonte concert, King privately asked the new mayor, Ivan Allen, to help remove the restriction against racially mixed audiences at the Municipal Auditorium. Allen did, and down went another barrier. Since ordering the removal of “Colored” and “White” signs from city hall drinking fountains on his first day in office, Allen had gone on to throw out the first ball at the first integrated baseball game at Ponce de Leon ball park. In Birmingham, by contrast, the color signs were still up, the parks were all closed, and the Birmingham Barons had dissolved that spring rather than comply with integration in baseball’s Southern Association. King hoped to send a message that through enlightenment Atlanta got baseball, Belafonte, and prosperity, whereas Birmingham was forfeiting all three.

  The Atlanta FBI office anticipated trouble, however: managers of the Atlanta Cabana’s plush restaurant, the King’s Inn, intended to refuse service to any Negroes who tried to eat there, celebrities or not. Warning cables flashed to headquarters and from there to Burke Marshall in the Justice Department, and Marshall, unbeknown to King and Belafonte, called the restaurant owner to urge him not to bar them. Failing at that, Marshall launched a private lobbying campaign to prevent the arrest of such visible leaders and the inevitable publicity that would follow. “It was arranged that the police would not make any arrests unless it became absolutely unavoidable,” Marshall reported to Attorney General Kennedy. “Dr. King and Belafonte left the restaurant after a fairly short time, so that no police action was necessary.”

  The confrontation at the King’s Inn came as a stinging surprise to King and Belafonte, who had arrived for a festive pre-concert luncheon in full confidence that all was arranged. At a hastily organized press conference, King announced that ordinarily he would have called for sit-ins against the King’s Inn, but that in view of Atlanta’s grief over the Air France disaster he was postponing demonstrations “until a more propitious moment.” This diplomatic gesture allowed him to minimize the damage to the positive spirit of the Belafonte concert. The embarrassed hotel manager also tried to make the best of the insult, by inviting the Kings, the Abernathys, and all the members of the Belafonte troupe to crowd into his office for a free lunch. “I cannot get too excited or upset,” remarked singer Miriam Makeba. “I’m from South Africa, which makes Atlanta look like the cradle of democracy.”

  Evaluations of the Belafonte visit rested heavily upon perspective—as to whether it was a success or a failure, whether or not it was noticed, whether the treatment of Negro stars by fancy white restaurants was a weighty or trivial matter. King considered the rejection at the King’s Inn to be of enormous symbolic importance, affecting the willingness of masses of Negroes to risk similar humiliation. For King, the incident was both a point of defeat and of mobilization, worthy of press conferences and public statements. In sharp contrast, he made no public statement at all when he received direct threats from the Ku Klux Klan that the “nigger King” would be assassinated in Shreveport, Louisiana, his next stop after the Belafonte concert. Death threats were too inflammatory for public discussion. By the peculiar logic of racial politics, King raised a cry about restaurant courtesies while accepting death threats quietly as a hazard of his work.

  Wyatt Walker did call Burke Marshall about the Shreveport death threats, and Marshall responded immediately by making phone calls to the Shreveport police commissioner and the parish sheriff. Their blunt responses put Marshall in the awkward position of knowing in advance that local law enforcement officers intended to ignore a serious threat to a civil rights leader. Diligently, Marshall canvassed judges in the Shreveport area until he found two who agreed to intercede. The judges eventually assured Marshall that the police officers did promise to do their duty, though they could not bring themselves to say so directly to a Washington official. Meanwhile, King and Walker flew to Shreveport against the wishes of the SCLC’s Shreveport leaders, who urged King to cancel the appearance.

  Local Negroes packed the Little Union Baptist Church, turning out to show support for their voter registration project in the face of the bombings that had driven C. O. Simpkins out of town. Wyatt Walker found a police squadron surrounding the church, for which he gave thanks to Burke Marshall. As the hymns gave way to the serial introductions of King, Walker went outside to talk with Police Commissioner Earl Downs, with whom Marshall had conducted an unpleasant discussion that afternoon. Downs ordered Walker back inside. “All right, Commissioner,” Walker replied, “but I’d like to establish that the rear of the church is going to be covered.” Walker’s executive manner, and possibly the detail-laden clipboard he carried, so incensed Downs that he ordered his men to arrest him for loitering on the church steps. The meeting inside continued as Walker disappeared. Held incommunicado all that night and most of the next day, he received macabre notification that he would be allowed outside contact only with Dr. Stuart DeLee, the parish coroner. DeLee appeared twice to interrogate the prisoner with the announced purpose of assessing his sanity. He asked Walker exactly how long he had believed in integration and whether he thought people were ou
t to get him.

  Upon his release, Walker had no time for protest or reflection. He flew to Chicago for two days of exploratory talks with representatives of Billy Graham. These private negotiations no doubt would have surprised most experts in politics or religion, as the famous white evangelist and the Negro movement occupied separate regions of the public mind. During the clamor over segregation since the Brown decision, Graham had preserved his attendance records and a relatively undisturbed ministry, adapting in religion much the way Vice President Nixon adapted in politics. Indeed, Graham and Nixon became more closely identified with each other in the late 1950s, appearing on each other’s platforms in the kind of symbiotic cooperation that King once hoped to achieve with each of them, especially Graham. But Graham had not broken with King as completely as Nixon. He regarded King’s gospel as his own, and King respected Graham’s course professionally if not in doctrine. Although the two of them did not work together in public, they cooperated privately through their lieutenants.

  King sent Walker and Chauncey Eskridge to pose some difficult questions: how did Graham maintain such a favorable public image outside the church world, and how did he keep his huge operation solvent while making relatively few public appearances? At the Civic Opera Building, which was headquarters for an upcoming Chicago Crusade, Graham’s media adviser Walter Bennett told them candidly that King’s entire approach was faulty. Whereas Graham reduced his annual exposure to a few crusades that were so enormous as to command news attention outside the religious press, King dissipated his strength in countless speeches before relatively small audiences. Therefore, said Bennett, King’s favorable publicity depended almost entirely upon sympathetic reporters who were quick enough to catch him as he dashed through town. This was too small a publicity base for any preacher, especially a Negro. By Bennett’s diagnosis, King’s constant pursuit of the next convert and the next small budget transfusion was shortsighted, because it kept King from breaking through a media threshold. Bennett offered the professional opinion that his current pace would kill King within five years by heart attack or exhaustion. Walker and Eskridge highlighted this dire prediction in their report to King.