Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  A gory photograph of C. B. King appeared on the front page of the Sunday Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Claude Sitton’s account ran on the front page of the Sunday Times. Even the Albany Herald featured a rare indictment of official behavior, albeit under the sporting headline “Sheriff Campbell Whacks C. B. King.” The sporadic violence in Albany was registering ominously in the news media, creating a vibrant atmosphere for Dr. Anderson’s appearance on “Meet the Press.” Spivak bore in relentlessly with questions suggesting that the Negroes lacked support, had achieved nothing, were run by outsiders, were ruining their chances to make friends with Albany’s white people, and were not negotiating in good faith. Other panelists raised the central news angle of national politics: was the Kennedy Administration doing enough? Anderson said no. Although “there has been sufficient indication of violation of constitutional rights,” he declared, the federal government had taken no action in Albany. The President had asked the Attorney General for a report after the last King jailing, but so far nothing had been heard of it. “Moreover,” said Anderson, “I feel as though the President can make a firm statement himself as regards the matter.” The FBI was investigating instances of violence and illegal arrest, he added, but the President had directed no response “as a result of this cumulative material.”

  President Kennedy was on holiday that Sunday, sailing in his sloop Victura off Hyannis Port—not far from Martha’s Vineyard, where King had planned to spend the entire month of August. It was Jacqueline Kennedy’s birthday. With most of his family and in-laws aboard, the President ran aground near port and suffered the indignity of watching his mainsail collapse into Lewis Bay. Family members teased him unmercifully. No response to Friday’s King arrest had yet pushed its way into the President’s schedule, but the issue stalked him.

  On Monday, Wyatt Walker was talking on two telephones at once when someone interrupted him to say that Governor Rockefeller wanted to speak with him on the third phone. “Me?” said Walker. He said, “Hello, Governor. This is Wyatt Walker, executive assistant to Dr. King.” Rockefeller said he was worried about King and wanted to know what he could do to help. “Governor, you called at a propitious moment,” Walker replied. He said there was staggering press demand from the last few days, more marches to run, and the crush of personal needs from the people already in jail, who numbered nearly three hundred. “I’m really up against it for bail money,” said Walker. When Rockefeller asked briskly how much he needed, Walker closed his eyes, tripled his hopes, and said, “Well, twenty-five thousand dollars would do nicely.” Rockefeller said it would be there in the morning, and that he planned in addition to make a like contribution to the general work of the SCLC. Walker hung up in dazed joy. Hints of Rockefeller’s concrete “interest” in the movement found their way to reporters.

  At a Tuesday-morning press conference, devoted mostly to the thalidomide drug scandal and underground testing of nuclear weapons, a reporter asked President Kennedy what he proposed to do about Albany. Kennedy stumbled at first in his response, saying that care was needed because of the confused tangle of local and federal jurisdictions. He paused and then added a thought as though getting it off his chest: “Let me say that I find it wholly inexplicable why the city council of Albany will not sit down with the citizens of Albany, who may be Negroes, and attempt to secure them, in a peaceful way, their rights. The United States Government is involved in sitting down at Geneva with the Soviet Union. I can’t understand why the government of Albany, the city council of Albany, cannot do the same for American citizens.”

  Dr. Anderson instantly seized upon Kennedy’s call for negotiations. “We earnestly desire reconciliation in the Albany community, not victory,” he told Mayor Kelley in another telegram asking for a meeting. Kelley declined to talk with “lawbreakers,” and branded President Kennedy’s statement “incredible.” Because Kennedy spoke in rebuke of the Albany officials, his remarks raised a howl of protest from Southern congressmen. In the Senate, Richard Russell lamented that the President had given the nation’s highest “stamp of approval” to the Negro lawbreakers, saying his statement would “encourage the importation of many other professionals and notoriety seekers and worsen an already bad situation.” Russell speculated that Kennedy’s real motive was to win votes for his brother Edward in the upcoming Massachusetts election. Senator Talmadge denounced King for leading “a violent, calculated campaign to damage the United States in foreign affairs and to set race against race.” Picking up on the fact that the President had called for Albany to negotiate with its local citizens, not with King, he declared that the city’s racial troubles could be solved if “outside agitators” left town.

  In the Albany Herald, James Gray eulogized the “Negro-wooing Government,” and wryly mourned the political demise of his friends the Kennedy brothers as “two ambitious Bostonians, who have been as practically connected with the American Negro in their lifetimes as Eskimos are to the Congo Democrats.” Officials of the Kennedy Administration, for their part, believed that King’s rivals in the civil rights movement were putting on a show of lukewarm support for him. Just before Roy Wilkins led a group into the Attorney General’s office for a summit meeting, Burke Marshall told Robert Kennedy that Wilkins and the others needed to be able to say they were doing something about Albany. Marshall assured Kennedy that they cared very little for the Albany demonstrations, which were “not Roy’s style.” The meeting fulfilled Marshall’s predictions until the NAACP’s Washington lobbyist, Clarence Mitchell, said he was disturbed by posturing within the government. Mitchell called for the Justice Department to take some action in Albany—arrest somebody, file a suit, protect a march, anything. His unexpected bluntness provoked Robert Kennedy. “You know as well as I do, Clarence, that we have done what we can do under existing law,” he said. “We could do a great deal more if our hands weren’t tied.”

  Stanley Levison, just back from his annual vacation in South America, was sending draft statements to King’s cell by mail. The FBI’s wiretap overheard him saying that the Wilkins meeting was a substitute for action on both sides. It was “very possible,” he told a friend, that “the NAACP and the Administration would like to see Martin King kill himself. And the tactic, of course, is to let him languish in jail, and then if it doesn’t arouse a lot of support, then gradually people will get discouraged and they will win, the city officials will win.” King’s job, he added, was to keep the heat on, to make it plain that “this is not the time for the federal government to be weak.” King’s strength also was the antidote for NAACP-flavored criticisms appearing in the skeptical white press. Time was reporting that King “has failed to convince Albany’s Negroes” of the value of nonviolent protest. Suggesting that “too much success has drained him of the captivating fervor that made him famous,” Time quoted one anonymous Negro saying that King “doesn’t even speak for the Baptist ministry, let alone 20 million Negroes,” and another saying that marching to jail was not an intelligent way to desegregate Albany: “Some of us think we can do the job less wastefully.”

  King remained isolated in his cell. Chief Pritchett kept King and Abernathy off work details for security reasons, and allowed them extra food and visiting privileges. Every morning a women’s committee of the Albany Movement brought each of them a clean pair of silk pajamas and plates of food to supplement the wretched jail diet. Abernathy relished a lemon pie. The idea of King in silk pajamas was especially galling to Herald editor James Gray, but, deciding that any protest against the luxury might belittle him among the whites and enlarge King among the Negroes, he held the information in his craw.

  King held devotional services among the prisoners, often reading from the Book of Job. On some days Pritchett’s men took them blinking into the sunlight to attend Judge Elliott’s hearings on the city’s request for an injunction, which had been mandated by Judge Tuttle. Other days King stayed in the cell and tried to work on a new book of sermons, later published as Strength to Love. By the end o
f his first week in jail, Albany’s political and judicial authorities began to accept the unpleasant reality that he was not likely to bail out. As it was unfeasible to expel him again surreptitiously, or delay much longer his trial on the charges of obstructing the sidewalk, time dragged them along inexorably toward a grim choice. They could convict King and sentence him to jail. This course risked renewed mass demonstrations and the embarrassment of possible reversal in appeals court. Worst of all, it kept King not only in town but inside their jail, drawing pressure from distant quarters. Or they could let King go, publicly, and take the chance that this breach might crumble the entire wall of segregation.

  Chief Pritchett was just as happy that such decisions were beyond his province. On Saturday, August 4, another cluster of brave but trembling marchers approached city hall from Shiloh—nine women and four men. They confronted the police at the usual spot, while the regular reporters watched from their assigned press section on the sidewalk. Pritchett, appearing relaxed, allowed the marchers to hold a vigil for nearly half an hour before he dryly advised them that their repertoire was exhausted. They were just about sung out and prayed out, he said, and when they failed to disperse, he led them off to jail like a tour guide. It was dusk. Inside, for the benefit of the newest prisoners, Pritchett called out for the regular prisoners to sing one of the freedom songs they had modified in his honor, “Ain’t Gonna Let Chief Pritchett Turn Me Around.” “I think he really enjoyed hearing it,” King wrote in his diary.

  Marilyn Monroe died on the night of August 4 in her bedroom across the country. Attorney General Kennedy attended Mass the next morning at the Church of St. Mary in Gilroy, California, outside San Francisco. Already there were reports of mysterious phone calls and gaps in Monroe’s last hours, and subsequent decades lent more credence to the Hollywood gossip. Following later disclosures about President Kennedy’s associations with Frank Sinatra’s friends, as intercepted by J. Edgar Hoover, investigators of various quality unearthed glimpses of Monroe’s star-crossed liaisons with both Kennedys.

  Kennedy left San Francisco after Mass for the World’s Fair in Seattle. At a press conference there, reporters asked him about a scathing think-tank report that accused J. Edgar Hoover of using “sententious poppycock” to exaggerate the threat of the tiny U.S. Communist Party. Although the report accurately expressed Kennedy’s own private views, he parried the question in defense of Hoover. The reason the Communist Party was so small, he replied, was precisely that Hoover had been so skillful in controlling it. “I hope he will serve the country for many, many years to come,” Kennedy added.

  At the White House, a stunned Arthur Schlesinger wrote in his journal of his vivid memories of Monroe from the Kennedy birthday party in May: “I do not think I have seen anyone so beautiful; I was enchanted by her manner and her wit, at once so masked, so ingenuous and so penetrating. But one felt a terrible unreality about her—as if talking to someone under water. Bobby and I engaged in mock competition for her; she was most agreeable to him and pleasant to me—but then she receded into her own glittering mist.” From Atlanta, Dora McDonald sent her thoughts to King at the Albany jail. “Poor Marilyn Monroe,” she wrote. “She needed something to live for. It’s a pity for anyone to feel that life is not worth living at 36.”

  There were no marches in Albany that week, as no one could squeeze new volunteers out of the Shiloh mass meetings. With the reinforcements dried up, King’s presence in jail carried a larger share of the pressure on Albany officials. William Kunstler prepared a habeas corpus motion to force the city to vacate its charges or bring him swiftly to trial, and when the recorder’s court set the trial date for Friday, Anderson and Wyatt Walker fixed that day as the target for a renewed campaign. They would either celebrate King’s victory in court or stage a protest march against his conviction.

  With the showdown set, the triangular negotiations between the Albany Movement, the city, and the Justice Department intensified, and on Wednesday the Justice Department took its first public action in the protracted controversy. Jerry Heilbron, the mild-mannered Arkansan who was supposed to charm the Southerners out of segregation, went into Judge Elliott’s court and filed an amicus brief in support of the Albany Movement, saying that the city of Albany did not come into court “with clean hands.” City officials already were using police power and local ordinances to negate federal court orders, Heilbron argued, and they should not be granted the additional weapon of a federal ban on “demonstrations seeking to introduce constitutional rights into Albany.”

  Robert Kennedy felt strong practical incentives for making such a move. After all, if a federal injunction was granted and upheld, he and not Laurie Pritchett would become responsible for repressing demonstrations against segregation. Kennedy did not want that. Still, for all its care, the amicus brief spoke loudly to the press. “U.S. Intervenes on Negroes’ Side,” announced the Times. King issued a statement hailing the Administration’s “legal and moral support” for the Albany Movement. Volunteers raised their hands at the Shiloh mass meetings, which were full of spirit again. Wyatt Walker planned a Mothers’ March in which the wives of the leaders—Coretta King, Juanita Abernathy, Jean Young, Norma Anderson, Ann Walker, Lotte Kunstler, Marion King, Carol (Mrs. C. B.) King, and even Diane Nash Bevel, with her infant daughter—would effect another dramatic change in the clientele of Laurie Pritchett’s jail. All these fresh enthusiasms weighed on the calculations of the city officials.

  Police guards escorted King and Abernathy from jail to the local recorder’s court on Friday morning, August 10. It was the first day of the third week of their latest stretch in jail, and exactly one month since they had stepped into the same courtroom for sentencing on their original Albany arrests of the past December. The trial before Judge Durden did not last long. C. B. King, his head still wrapped in bandages, raised the defense that his clients had not been disorderly, and that the charges were a subterfuge for the city’s actual purpose: to enforce segregation. He was encouraged by the city attorney’s announcement that Albany no longer enforced any segregation laws against contrary federal rulings, but Judge Durden soon delivered a verdict that straddled the entrenched lines of the political siege. Finding King, Abernathy, Anderson, and Slater King guilty as charged, he imposed upon each of them a $200 fine and sixty days in jail. Then he suspended the sentences on condition that the defendants violate no laws.

  Elated but wary, C. B. King spoke up to ask whether this condition meant that the defendants must obey the city’s segregation ordinances. No, replied Judge Durden, because the Supreme Court had expressly overruled those ordinances. After this, the defendants filed out to celebrate. Two pillars of Albany politics had just renounced segregation. King announced that he would go home to preach at Ebenezer that Sunday, and Mayor Kelley all but acknowledged that his departure was part of a compromise package, offsetting the concessions. “I think the Attorney General’s intervention…has given Dr. King plenty of reason to leave,” he told reporters. “He’s accomplished his purpose.”

  That afternoon, the FBI wiretap on Stanley Levison’s office phone picked up a call to Levison at his home. His secretary, sounding uncomfortable, told her boss that she did not want to ruin his weekend, but a court summons had just arrived in connection with a financial dispute at one of his rental properties. Levison replied that nothing could spoil his weekend, “because they suspended sentence on Martin.” This was a “real victory,” he said, and not just in Albany, because King’s stature now cast its shadow across the South. King’s opponents only recently had thought he had overreached himself, Levison added, and that nobody would raise much of a fuss if they let him rot in jail. Now even Albany had admitted that it could not contain the “tornado” of locking King away in defense of segregation. Levison told his secretary not to fret over money or the summons. His analysis of the Albany verdict was one piece of Levison intelligence that Director Hoover did not see fit to pass on to the Attorney General.

  Levison’
s long-range optimism about King’s personal influence did not guarantee the success of the Albany Movement itself, which immediately began to sputter. When teams fanned out through the city on Saturday to test the city’s sworn cancellation of the segregation laws, Laurie Pritchett and his police units scrambled after them. True to their promise, the city officials made no arrests under the segregation laws, but neither did they permit the slightest breach of the custom. They closed the city library to prevent the first Negro from checking out a book. They closed the white parks when integrated groups attempted to play tennis. When a doubles match retreated to the all-Negro George Washington Carver Park, city employees raced up to cut the nets just before the first integrated point could be played. Thwarted, William Kunstler angrily smashed a tennis ball high into the air. The racial dispute came to approximate a kindergarten standoff. “King or No King,” declared the Herald, “City Avows No Compromise.”

  King was back in Atlanta, preaching at Ebenezer. The morning crowd spilled out of the church down into the basement auditorium. Daddy King presided happily. His good mood bubbled up repeatedly during his son’s sermon, as he rapped his cane on the floor in agreement and shouted out a gruff command, “You hear that, deacons!” The younger King announced that he must return to Albany in light of the latest reversal.

  He appeared the next night at Shiloh, while James Bevel preached to the spillover mass meeting across the street at Mount Zion. They delayed renewed demonstrations for two days, because the City Commission had granted them a major concession: the commission would receive its first delegation of local Negroes that Wednesday night for the presentation of grievances. Expectations of the historic occasion were justifiably low. At the appointed hour, with thick clusters of Albany Movement people waiting outside city hall in a rainstorm, Mayor Kelley recognized Marion Page. “I am M. S. Page, a law-abiding citizen of Albany,” Page began, emphasizing the fact that he had refrained from joining the protest marches. He read a petition urging the commission to consider the Albany Movement’s original demands. When he finished, the mayor politely but firmly announced that such racial matters remained in litigation before Judge Elliott. Therefore, Kelley said, the commission deemed it improper to discuss or comment upon them. Page was excused.