Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Billy Graham’s chief of staff, Walter Smyth, gave Walker and Eskridge more mechanical advice the next morning, dissecting Graham’s historic innovations in evangelical tradecraft. Smyth’s staff had begun preparation for the Chicago Crusade a year in advance, he advised. They had built up a list of some eight thousand preachers within traveling distance of Chicago, and the responses to successive mailings had helped the staff select a Crusade steering committee of ten preacher “captains,” each one supported by five preacher “lieutenants.” A parallel organization of churchwomen canvassed Chicago households to recruit audiences for the Crusade, timing their visits to coincide with Graham’s specially produced radio devotionals. Simultaneously, other Graham workers arranged what amounted to a small municipal bus system to get them all to and from the nightly meetings. Smyth explained that a successful crusade was the result of nearly a million man-hours of unseen preparation. He designated one of his own assistants to begin transmitting to the SCLC the Graham team’s accumulated store of specialized knowledge. None of this explained how to surmount the central obstacle of race, but Walker took a full load of practical guidelines back to King, anyway.

  Fitfully, at times, King still hoped that by emulating Graham’s evangelical methods he could somehow escape the path which had been beckoning since the Montgomery boycott. Just as Wyatt Walker was sitting down with Graham’s representatives in Chicago, King flew to New York and took a cab to 39th Street near Fifth Avenue. The FBI eavesdroppers must have jumped out of their headsets when their transmitters first picked up in Stanley Levison’s office the unmistakable voice of Martin Luther King himself.

  Arriving unannounced, King fell into conversation with Levison as though they worked together every day.* What they talked about was business—fund-raisers, speeches, personnel problems in the SCLC. King told Levison that one staff member was continually at loggerheads with Wyatt Walker. He said that late expenses from the Belafonte concert had reduced the SCLC’s net profit to $9,600, and he asked whether Levison thought $25 per plate was too much to charge for a dinner featuring Count Basie. Levison replied that $25 was “pretty steep,” but that the NAACP pulled in $50 per plate at its annual dinner. Levison said he was pleased that King had accepted his advice not to protest the King’s Inn affront out of respect for Atlanta’s crash victims. King agreed that this had been wise.

  In contrast to the florid praise he customarily heaped on new or potential supporters, King offered Levison only brief comments of assent or criticism. When Levison asked whether he liked his draft of the speech King would give at the National Press Club in July, King said that it was fine. The two of them spoke in shorthand, not mentioning dangers or traumas or motivating beliefs, as these were understood. They spoke frankly of the need for King to achieve greater public recognition. King remarked hopefully that he might get on television, and Levison inquired whether the Newsweek reporter had interviewed him again. They were like two preacher friends in the pastor’s study, except with the businesslike Levison there was no banter or pulpit tales.

  To the FBI, the significance here was the confirmation that King was under the influence of a Communist. The next day, Director Hoover ordered his offices in New York, Georgia, and Alabama to determine whether the SCLC had met all the legal registration requirements for a charitable organization. He also ordered them to find out whether Levison or O’Dell appeared on SCLC stationery, and he instructed the New York office “to advise if the door to the SCLC office has O’Dell’s name printed thereon.” From the beginning, Hoover showed practically no interest in proving the substance of the case against Levison or O’Dell—in documenting their alleged submission to the discipline of Soviet agents, or in gathering legal evidence that they were engaged in treasonous, violent, or clearly malevolent conspiracies against the United States. Also from the beginning, Hoover laid down admonitions of secrecy in language suggesting that, over the decades, his sense of democratic duty had given way to the sly vanity of a monarch. “All investigation conducted in this matter must be handled in a most discreet manner,” Hoover ordered, “to preclude the possibility of disclosing the identities of informants or causing embarrassment to the Bureau.”

  That spring, Levison’s steady subject was Wyatt Walker. The FBI monitors picked up Levison telling Clarence Jones that Walker was “more advanced than Martin,” meaning that Walker was ready for showdown and suffering, and less concerned than King with paralyzing ramifications. Levison paid tribute to Walker’s nerve by recalling to Jones that when Levison and King had decided that Walker needed to go to jail during the Freedom Rides, they had known that Walker would comply without a second thought. For all that, however, Levison kept saying that Walker was a poor executive director for the SCLC, because he was “emotionally immature even though he is brilliant.” Walker was so egocentric, he added, that he was “in conflict with the organization all the time.” Others who talked with Levison agreed: Walker was too mercurial and unstable, while Jack O’Dell was a worker of painstaking miracles.

  Levison suggested to King that Walker be shifted to a job as King’s publicist and traveling assistant—where, King agreed, Walker’s gifts lay—and that O’Dell take on the responsibility of running the Atlanta office. Levison, having just passed through a Senate loyalty hearing himself, said he did not want to see O’Dell in such a visible position in view of his Communist associations, but there was no one else at the SCLC who could do the job. The FBI was dutifully listening in when Levison told O’Dell that King was favorably disposed to the proposal. King took a moral approach to Communist associations and the danger of McCarthy-style attack, Levison added, quoting King’s words that “no matter what a man was, if he could stand up now and say he is not connected, then as far as I am concerned, he is eligible to work for me.”

  Such tolerance for communism was anathema to Hoover, who promptly sent an account of the intercepted conversation to Attorney General Kennedy. Omitting all Levison’s personal assessments of O’Dell and Walker, Hoover implied that Levison was maneuvering O’Dell into King’s confidence solely to further Communist influence. On its face, Hoover’s memo was nothing more than good intelligence work, but it closed with a warning that carried extra dimensions. “Levison also said,” Hoover wrote, “that if O’Dell and King should reach an agreement, it would be possible for King to see you and say ‘lay off this guy’ [O’Dell].” This last line made the Attorney General both the beneficiary and the subject of FBI intelligence about Communist intentions. If Kennedy did indeed “lay off” O’Dell upon request, he would become, like King, at least a partially witting dupe in Levison’s manipulations. In the spy’s world, as opposed to the courtroom, Levison could corrupt Kennedy without knowing it, and Kennedy could become vulnerable to charges of conspiring with, or coddling, a man he had never met. Hoover classified his memo “Top Secret.”

  Early in July, Roy Wilkins brought the NAACP convention to Atlanta for the first time since 1951, the year King graduated from Crozer. More than a thousand delegates from forty-two states came to town a month after Harry Belafonte. There was some picketing—delegates picketed “Johnny Reb’s” restaurant, and orderly groups carried signs reading “12 Southern Cities Have ‘Open’ Hotels. Why Not Atlanta? NAACP”—but Wilkins set the tone for what Crisis would nickname the “Hard-Working Convention.” “I would like to emphasize that what we came to Atlanta to do was conduct a convention, with a full agenda of business…” he told reporters, “and while a sit-in in a restaurant may be psychologically important…this is not the main business of this convention.”

  James Meredith was presented to the convention as a young man who might become the first Negro to enter the University of Mississippi. James Nabrit, president of Howard University, delivered the main address at a Fourth of July barbecue. King appeared as one of the off-night speakers. As always, his photograph was conspicuously absent from C. A. Scott’s Daily World, which published dozens of convention shots, and he would be the only major speaker
not shown in the Crisis issue devoted to the week’s events. These were among the signs—subtle to some, blatant to others—that King remained a thorn to his elders in leadership. But there were limits to such discouragements. King was a phenomenon who had to be accorded at least a platform, and a platform was all he needed. Comedian Dick Gregory introduced him as America’s “only celebrity who gives out more fingerprints than he does autographs.”

  “True peace is not merely the absence of tension, but it is the presence of justice,” King told the audience. “And I think this is what Jesus meant when he looked at his disciples one day and said, ‘I come not to bring peace but a sword.’ Now certainly he didn’t mean he came to bring a physical sword. Certainly he didn’t mean that he did not come to bring true peace. But Jesus was saying this in substance: that…whenever I come, a conflict is precipitated between the old and the new. Whenever I come, tension sets in between justice and injustice…The tension which we see in the South today is the necessary tension that comes when the oppressed rise up and start to move forward toward a permanent, positive peace.”

  Moments later, King shifted to the theme of internal tension, saying that “the time has come” for public discussion of the bickering within the civil rights movement. Almost plaintively, he recalled for the delegates that he had “addressed NAACP chapters in more than twenty states.” Many of his SCLC officers also were NAACP officials, he said. Marchers and boycotters “should not minimize work through the courts. But…legislation and court orders can only declare rights. They can never thoroughly deliver them. Only when the people themselves begin to act are rights on paper given life blood.”

  Then King tried to burn up all the divisions among them in the heat of his own personal belief. He portrayed nonviolence as the way out. It was the transcendent key, the bridger of gaps. “This is the beauty of nonviolence,” he said. “It says you can struggle without hating. You can fight war without violence. This is where we find the essence of love, standing at the center of this movement.” His method was open. It was democratic because it respected the democratic faith that all persons were created with equal standing. “I submit to you that any individual who decides to break a law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty for it is at that moment expressing the very highest respect for law. There is nothing new about this. Go back with me if you will to the Old Testament. See Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego as they stand before King Nebuchadnezzar. They made it clear: ‘We cannot bow.’ Come if you will to Plato’s Dialogues. Open the Credo or the Apology. See Socrates practicing civil disobedience. Academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. Come to the early Christians. See them practicing civil disobedience to the point that they were willing to be thrown to the lions to stand up for what they believed. Listen to Peter as he says, ‘We must obey God rather than man.’ Come up to the modern world. Never forget that everything that Hitler did in Germany was legal. It was illegal to aid and comfort a Jew in the day of Hitler’s Germany. And I believe that if I had lived there with my present attitude I would have disobeyed that law, and I would have encouraged people to aid and comfort our Jewish brothers. If I lived in South Africa today, I would join Chief Luthuli as he says to his people, ‘Break this law. Don’t take this unjust pass system where you must have passes. Take them and tear them up and throw them away.’”

  Now he rushed feverishly to a closing, four-word slogan: “All. Here. And now.” Rhythmic applause allowed him to speak only one sentence between bursts of mass emotion. “We want all of our rights,” he shouted. “…We want our freedom here in America, here in the black belt of Mississippi, here behind the cotton curtain of Alabama, here on the red clay of Georgia…We have lived with gradualism, and we know that it is nothing but do-nothingism and escapism which ends up in standstillism!” This pseudo-pedantic Negroism added laughter to the shouting. “No, we are not willing to wait any longer,” King cried. “We want freedom now!” This set off a pandemonium that King stilled only with a solemn reprise on the likelihood of persecution and death, and he closed with a flourish of inspiration from the prophets. He had done it again—come into the NAACP’s own house and stolen a crowd. Although his summons was objectionable to NAACP leaders in spirit and direction, it contained too much power and too little specific heresy to be challenged.

  His NAACP speech did not register in the white world. As with many sensational scenes from his life, it remained a matter of journalistic whimsy whether interest crossed the racial line, and the only kind of event almost guaranteed to command an audience on both sides was the drama of white force seizing personally on King’s body. Even followers of civil rights had hazy memories about whether King had been involved in the Freedom Rides, as he had never been arrested then, but plain citizens and every cub reporter knew about King’s manacled trip to Reidsville. It was news when he went to jail.

  It could have happened at Shreveport or at any stop on the “People-to-People” registration tours, but King expected the pinch in Albany. Among the court dates circled on his calendar was the July 10 sentencing from his arrest on Albany’s streets the previous December. For such a minor misdemeanor by a gainfully employed person, Judge Durden might ordinarily have dismissed the case or suspended sentence—if not for mercy, then to spare Albany the publicity of having King in its jail. This did not seem likely, however, in light of the harsh mood that had descended upon Albany’s politics in the past seven months. Not long before King’s sentencing, Georgia Democratic Party chairman James Gray wrote a special front-page editorial in his Albany Herald, in which he denounced Albany Negroes’ complaints as “the Hitlerian tactic of the ‘Big Lie’…The Negroes are lying. The Department of Justice knows they are lying…. This sordid effort will fail, as all of the craft and cunning the Negro agitators have employed in their plottings for months have failed…. It will fail because its motivation is essentially evil.”

  King had little reason to hope for enlightened leniency in such a city. Before he and Walker and Abernathy drove down for the hearing—back to the dirt side streets and the a capella hymns at Shiloh—King told his secretary, Dora McDonald, that most likely he would have to cancel his engagement at Washington’s National Press Club. Judge Durden proved him correct by sentencing King and Abernathy to pay a $178 fine or serve forty-five days in jail. Both said they would serve the time rather than cooperate with injustice, and by the time they had been searched and processed into their green jail fatigues, Dora McDonald in Atlanta was composing her daily report on the phone calls that had swamped King’s office since the first news bulletins. One Washington reporter, she wrote, was “shocked beyond words” to hear that King was in jail, while an official of the National Press Club only wanted to know why King had not waited until after his speech there on July 19. McDonald advised King that she had already arranged for him to receive the Atlanta Constitution at the jail, and for Abernathy to get The New York Times. “Rev. Abernathy and you would be very proud of me today,” she wrote. “I have not cried—not even a little bit.”

  SIXTEEN

  THE FIREMAN’S LAST REPRIEVE

  King and Abernathy went to jail on the historic day when live television pictures first leaped across an ocean, via Telstar satellite. All three television networks broke into their evening programs with a picture that appeared simultaneously on French and American screens: Vice President Lyndon Johnson was shown huddling with excited scientists, all watching themselves on television in the act of watching themselves, in the infinite regression of the media age. For the return transmission, French authorities selected a simple head shot of actor Yves Montand singing “The Little Song.” The content of the beams was trivial in comparison with the feat itself, which the Times hailed as “rivaling in significance the first telegraphed transmission by Samuel F. B. Morse more than a century ago.”

  Such frontier technology did not yet reach to Albany, Georgia. There, television reporters still had to break
off by early afternoon so that they could fly with their exposed film by charter airplane to Atlanta, where facilities existed for “feeding” news footage to New York in time for possible use on the evening news. Only extraordinary events justified such expensive effort, which meant that developments in remote areas had to reach high levels of visual drama. The King jailing was not a television news story.

  But it did set off tremors along more traditional lines. The news played on the front page of the Albany Herald, under the sarcastic headline “King Languishes in Bastille,” and it also played just under the Telstar story in papers across the country. The account in The New York Times reminded readers that a previous jailing of King had proved critical to the outcome of the 1960 presidential election. Both the Herald and the Times noted significantly that Governor Nelson Rockefeller, a presidential aspirant, had released a telegram urging Attorney General Kennedy “to assure the physical safety of Dr. King and his companions,” and to “investigate whether constitutional rights of peaceable assembly have been violated.” Early the next morning, Harvey Shapiro of The New York Times Magazine became the first of several newspaper editors calling the SCLC in the hope of publishing a “letter from prison” by King. Dora McDonald immediately relayed Shapiro’s proposal to Chauncey Eskridge, and by noon Eskridge was analyzing it with Billy Graham’s public relations specialist. His advice—“Nothing should be published while you are in prison…hold everything until released”—postponed a notion that would reappear within a year as King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”