Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  A deputy marshal knocked that morning at the home of Dr. Anderson. He was promptly shown to the master bedroom, which was crammed with Albany Movement leaders in the midst of emergency consultations. There he served an order on Dr. Anderson, whom he knew by sight, after which he pulled another order from his sheaf of papers and asked whether Martin Luther King was present. An awkward silence followed. King was sitting on the bed in plain view, but the marshal did not recognize him. King and the others remained frozen in silence, so great was their panic over the consequences of the order. When the marshal withdrew to take up station outside Anderson’s house, King and other named defendants escaped through a window and down a back alley. They soon reconsidered their instinctive flight. Although they shied from the order as a catastrophe for their cause—it put the Justice Department, the FBI, and the authority of the federal judiciary squarely in opposition to their protests against segregation—they decided on reflection that it did them no credit to hide. King drove to the courthouse early that afternoon and volunteered to be served.

  Whether he should obey the order was a different and more difficult question, which was debated all afternoon and into the night. William Kunstler advised King that the restraining order was manifestly illegal. But should he act on that assumption or wait respectfully for a higher court to vacate it? To disregard the order risked a confrontation with federal judges—even those who agreed with King on the merits of desegregation—over the deference due to federal edicts, whereas to obey the order risked a permanent surrender on the critical issue of timing. The latter was a point hammered home by Charles Jones, Charles Sherrod, and James Forman of SNCC. Any federal judge could issue a restraining order, they said, and with a Democratic president now naming judges on the recommendations of segregationist, home-state U.S. senators, white officials would have restraining orders at their bidding. The SNCC leaders argued that it would take time, perhaps weeks or months, to overturn such orders, during which a ripe protest inevitably would decay. If the movement leaders conceded to the white opponents the power to quash protests at moments of disadvantage, they never would find an offsetting weapon. Protest was all they had.

  These arguments were persuasive to King. As the expectant marchers began to trickle into Shiloh that afternoon, he told Robert Kennedy from Anderson’s house that he felt “impelled” to march. Kennedy, who had initiated the call, was shocked to hear that the rumors were true. The Attorney General remained prickly on the subject of civil disobedience. How could King even think of violating this court order, he demanded to know, when governors and school officials across the South were praying for an excuse not to obey federal school desegregation orders?

  King held his ground. While acknowledging the validity of Kennedy’s points, he said that the whole point of the movement was to rise up against blatantly unconstitutional, segregationist laws. Always, King protested, somebody would find a way to make protest unreasonable and segregation reasonable for the moment. “We’re tired, very tired,” he said. “I’m tired. We’re sick of it.” Kennedy kept pounding home the argument that King could not afford to risk the goodwill of the federal courts, where the movement was winning its greatest victories. Contrasting King’s recklessness with the Administration’s steady progress in securing compliance with desegregation orders, Kennedy pressed the point too far for King. “Some of these problems you have created yourself,” King replied, “by appointing these segregationist federal judges.” By implication, King was painting the Administration rather than himself as the trouble-maker. Annoyed, Kennedy had the presence of mind to quell the shouting match by turning the telephone over to Burke Marshall.

  Marshall debated King for nearly two hours that Saturday afternoon, with both sides breaking frequently for consultations with seconds. Marshall’s strength was his patience and command of detail. He pointed out that if King marched in defiance of Elliott’s order, he would go to jail for contempt of court. The segregation issue would be lost. King would put himself in a difficult corner—precisely where the Administration was trying to put Governor Barnett of Mississippi in the James Meredith case. To all this, King responded with some technical points of his own. Barnett’s First Amendment rights were not being violated, he said, whereas the Elliott order plainly stifled his. Barnett faced an order that had been tested through many hearings and appeals, and which was consistent with both justice and Supreme Court law, whereas King faced a contrary order slapped together by one judge. Marshall, while granting many legal weaknesses in Elliott’s order, stressed that the segregationists were watching, and if King were allowed to violate the first federal ruling he didn’t like, “then the whole credibility of our even-handed position—that this is the law—goes out the window.”

  They argued to an exhausted stalemate, by which time runners from Shiloh were bringing King urgent messages that the crowd was growing restive. King closeted himself briefly and then sent Clarence Jones circulating through the Anderson house with his decision: he would obey the order until the lawyers could get it overturned. Then he began to agonize over the fresh question of what he should say to the crowd at Shiloh. He knew from experience that their cheering would raise the roof the moment he showed his face, and it was painful to think of deflating their enthusiasm—so painful in fact that he began to reconsider his concession to Marshall. But no, he must stick to his best judgment, so perhaps he should stay away from the church altogether. Then again, no, he could not bear to have the mass meeting go on without him. With his thoughts lurching about, King took a walk in the night air and then decided to go to Shiloh after all, without knowing exactly how to inform the crowd of the postponement. Surrounded by lawyers, the Albany Movement leaders, and the SNCC students, he made his way into Reverend Boyd’s study.

  They could hear seven hundred people singing freedom songs and spirituals in the church. Whenever the singing died down, a speaker gave them a dose of rhetoric and something to pass for an update on the delays. Because most of the regular leadership was huddled around King, the speaking task fell most often to Rev. Samuel B. “Benny” Wells, a stocky, coal-black man of little education. He had immensely broad shoulders, which he used in his regular job as a freight loader at the U.S. Marine depot. On weekends, he pastored a tiny country church called Blue Spring Baptist out in Worth County, some twenty-five miles from Albany. Wells felt out of place in the councils of the city preachers. His strengths were a coarse eloquence and an earthy, forceful presence, plus a lack of inhibiting career goals.

  “Take us up!” someone shouted from the congregation, and Wells did his best to oblige. Never had he faced such a crowd. He preached them to an emotional peak, hoping that the bedlam would entice King to make his entrance, but when nothing happened he was obliged to preach them back down again toward a prayer and a new song. Then Wells hastened to the wings for consultations. Once he made his way inside the study and said, “Dr. King, the world is waiting for a message. They are looking and listening for a message tonight.” King nodded. His aides told Wells to hold the crowd because they were not yet certain of the next move. Obliging, Wells stalled until the crowd grew restless, and then he preached them to another peak, and down again. After three or four times through the cycle, Wells could stand it no longer. “I’ve heard about an injunction, but I haven’t seen one! I heard a few names, but my name hasn’t been called!” he cried. “But I do know where my name is being called. My name is being called on the road to freedom. I can hear the blood of Emmett Till as it calls from the ground!” At this the church erupted in throaty courage that refused to die down until Wells proposed to march out with them. “We will go down to the City Hall,” he said, “and we will protest peacefully the evils that have been grinding the life out of our spirits for ninety-nine years.”

  Nearly two hundred people, mostly teenagers, followed Wells out of the church and down the familiar route to the border of the white business district. When Chief Pritchett and a police squadron blocked them at the bus sta
tion, Wells fell to his knees in the street. Sweaty, overwrought, and plainly frightened, he prayed aloud for courage until Pritchett could take it no longer. Standing directly over Wells, the police chief said sourly, “All right, Rev, come on and get up, goddamn it. Let’s go to jail.” One hundred thirteen people followed Wells into the cell blocks. Others retreated, but a burst of fervor soon moved another fifty to file across Oglethorpe Avenue to join them.

  Inside Dr. Anderson’s station wagon, King observed from a distance. Although he tried to avoid the note-taking FBI agents, lest they charge that he had violated Judge Elliott’s injunction by encouraging the demonstration, he was overjoyed that the ordinary folk of the Albany Movement had marched on their own. “They can stop the leaders,” King said happily, “but they can’t stop the people.” Albany’s white officials, on the other hand, figured that the enjoined leaders must have connived in the march somehow, in violation of the injunction. They asked the FBI to investigate. Director Hoover shrewdly insisted upon direct orders from the Justice Department. Then FBI headquarters instructed agents to tell each Negro being questioned—including King—that a criminal contempt investigation was being conducted specifically for the Attorney General.

  From the perspective of national politics, the main story was that King and the other named defendants had not defied the order. A legal crisis was averted. King was not in jail, and the Wells march was a minor event that the Administration could overlook because it raised no legal challenge or public clamor. “The Negroes finally decided to obey this injunction,” Burke Marshall reported simply to the Attorney General. Similarly, a New York Times editorial focused exclusively on King’s confrontation with Judge Elliott. “We are glad he [King] is not…leading the Negroes of Albany, Ga., in defiance of a Federal court injunction,” the Times declared. “Whatever the shortcomings of local justice in the Deep South, certainly no one knows better than Dr. King that the Federal judiciary is a pillar of the constitutional safeguards his followers have so often been denied.”

  On Sunday, with the new prisoners farmed out to jails in the surrounding counties, King and Anderson held a press conference. Describing Judge Elliott’s injunction as “unjust and unconstitutional,” they told reporters that their lawyers were working to have it vacated by the federal appeals court, headed by Judge Elbert Tuttle, an Eisenhower appointee. It was an uncomfortable session for King. He could denounce the injunction all he wanted, but he felt constrained to say he respected it. He could not advocate any demonstrations or urge his followers to do anything but wait, lest he be found in contempt of Judge Elliott’s court. White reporters from Albany pressed him to explain why he had not done more to stop the Wells march.

  King began a far more harrowing ordeal late that afternoon when he agreed to sit for a private gripe session with the SNCC leaders in Albany—Sherrod, Jones, Reagon, and Forman, plus Yale Law School student Tim Jenkins, who had flown in for the crisis. It began politely enough in Slater King’s backyard, with the students restating their reasons why King had erred in submitting to Judge Elliott’s injunction. This was familiar ground for King, as he half agreed with them, but the criticism escalated rapidly into a general attack on King’s character and methods.

  The SNCC leaders were in a bind. They wanted a “people’s movement,” like SNCC itself, and yet without King, the Wells march had had little impact on the outside world, and without such impact it was nearly impossible to inspire more of Albany’s ordinary people to take up the crusade. What they needed was the use of King’s influence without his suffocating glory, and it was all the more galling that they were obliged to ask King to reform himself accordingly. To these political differences, each of the SNCC leaders added an acute, private complaint against King. For Charles Sherrod, it was King’s pragmatism, his habit of second-guessing the great mystical tide of the movement. For Tim Jenkins, it was King’s aura of religion and suffering, which Jenkins thought stigmatized Negroes as an emotional people unequipped for the rigors of politics. For James Forman, it was being older than King and yet dwarfed like a child by his heavily credentialed fame.

  The students said King was too dreamy to have the cunning that the movement required, but they also said he was too attached to his worldly status to lose himself in zealous commitment. They told him they resented his control of the press—how much they hated it when reporters in Albany would phone King in Chicago or New York for an interpretation of events in Albany. Forman attacked his caution in the face of the Elliott injunction, saying that King only wanted to protect his “fund-raising base” among the white people who read The New York Times. They recounted their grievances over the division of movement funds, arguing that the money should be controlled by the Albany Movement instead of the SCLC. They denounced Wyatt Walker as Iago or a martinet, and King for hiring him. Above all, they said King was too middle-class. Using a favorite term of opprobrium among aristocrats and proletarians alike, they called him “bourgeois.”

  It went on hour after hour, into the night. King flinched defensively but never flashed in anger. When indignant staff aides jumped in to defend him, King waved them aside. Marion King, Slater King’s wife, kept bringing trays of food to sustain them through the argument, and each time she came outside from the kitchen she winced and nearly cried out against the scathing names she heard being heaped upon King. She held back, however, as did her husband and the other observers. King and the students had created their own charged space. Ironically, the confrontation gradually took on a kind of intimacy. As tempers and political labels gave way to introspection, King talked increasingly to Charles Jones, the student most like himself. Jones moved so near King’s chair in the yard that he spoke nearly in a whisper.

  “Martin, you are the symbol of spiritual integrity,” Jones said. “If you say this injunction is a tactical move to co-opt the movement, then everybody will listen and follow you to jail. And you then change the rules. You have done this before, and now we are at a point where you have to provide the leadership even for the Kennedys, as well as the movement. So let’s go to jail, bro’. I’m gonna be going. We’ll be there together.”

  King smiled. “Chuck, do I have to?” he asked. He joked about how difficult it was even to shave in jail—he used an acrid powder to soften his tough beard—and how as a pastor he was accustomed to having his things laid out for him. He and Jones chatted about their experiences in jail, but they seemed to be speaking also of a symbolic level of surrender. Jones had just decided to give up the pulpit. Paradoxically, as only a young Brahmin preacher could do, he kept saying King had to choose his cross over his career.

  “Even you have got to grow a little bit more,” Jones told King. “Please listen to me. I love you. You know that. Whenever you’ve called, I’ve been there. But now I’m saying this is ahead of you. You’ve got to accept it.” In the end, exhausted, Jones and King smiled silently at each other. Tim Jenkins later snapped Jones from a kind of trance by complaining that his pitch had been too religious.

  King retired late Sunday night to the counsel of his lawyers at the Anderson house, across the street, where Coretta had come for a visit. Battered by criticism and stalemated by the injunction, he was tired. In later years, he jokingly gave thanks for the stamina that allowed him to accomplish something positive in Albany that weekend, when his fourth child, Bernice, was conceived.

  On the following afternoon, Marion King drove through the country outside Albany to the Mitchell County jail in Camilla, where the daughter of her maid was among those incarcerated from Saturday’s Wells march. Arriving at the hulking, whitewashed jail with plates of freshly baked food, she stood outside the chain-link fence in a throng of other Negroes from Albany, waiting for visitors’ hour. They all sang freedom songs and scanned the jailhouse windows for familiar faces. Nothing about the crowd pleased the Mitchell County sheriff and his deputies, who were accustomed to a grimmer atmosphere. (Among their regular prisoners they counted the miserable Charlie Ware, still awaiting t
rial on attempted murder charges more than a year after the Baker County sheriff shot him three times in the neck.) The mass singing outside foretold another unbearable visitors’ period in which the officers would be lost in a sea of Negroes fretting over mail privileges and lost pocket-books. Irritably, to cut down on the noise and bother, the deputies shooed the waiting visitors away from the fence. All skittered backward except for a woman with two small children, who backed up slowly and silently, seemingly unaware of the commotion.

  Marion King did not move fast enough. Something about her prompted the sheriff and one uniformed deputy to walk briskly outside. “I mean you!” one shouted. King retreated steadily. She had seen Ella Mae in the jail window and did not want to set an example of cowering in fear. A split second later, the sheriff slapped her sharply across the face. Three-year-old Abena went sprawling from her arms to the pavement. One-year-old DuBois shrieked. As the sheriff slapped her again, the deputy kicked her in the shins, knocking her feet from beneath her, and then kicked her several times more on the ground. She lost an instant to blackout or shock, as the next thing she knew was the sharp pain in her knees, which had struck the pavement. The officers were going back through the gate, and the crowd behind was gasping in horror.