Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  These pressures generated Shuttlesworth’s introduction to Sidney Smyer. Never before—in more than six years of sit-ins, boycotts, lawsuits, bombings, and Freedom Rides—had he been granted a meeting with the local “power structure,” or, for that matter, with Birmingham’s leading white clergy. But a few days before the SCLC convention, A. G. Gaston, the city’s top Negro businessman, guided Shuttlesworth to a secret conclave. As they went inside, Shuttlesworth joked that even Gaston with all his money never before had been permitted inside a white hotel in Birmingham. When they arrived, Smyer shook Shuttlesworth’s hand, calling him “Doctor.” Alluding to the precarious reform movement in Birmingham, Smyer first asked Shuttlesworth to persuade King to stay away, and when Shuttlesworth turned that notion aside, he asked for assurances that there would be no trouble. Shuttlesworth could not help making a speech about how long and how much he had suffered to attract the honor of such a request, but then he denied that the honor itself was worth a truce. He said he had to show the city’s Negroes deeds instead of words. So how much segregation would the downtown stores give up to avoid demonstrations? When Smyer parried this question by saying that he couldn’t speak for the downtown merchants, Shuttlesworth headed for the door and said, “You all called me to the wrong meeting.”

  Smyer reconvened them the very next morning, this time in the presence of grim-faced representatives from the major stores: Sears, Loveman’s, Newberry’s, Greene’s, Woolworth’s, Pitzitz. It began with an awkward silence, which was broken when Shuttlesworth said he was there to hear what they had to say. After another silence, the man from Loveman’s said, “I don’t mind desegregating my water [fountains].”

  “Oh, no, gentlemen,” Shuttlesworth replied. “We’re past water now. We have to have toilets. Women have to be able to refresh themselves in your stores.”

  After pained silences, separated by terse outbursts on both sides, A. G. Gaston attempted to break the stalemate. “You know, your daddy and I got started in business about the same time,” he told Loveman. “And you know you got your start among the Negroes like I did. We got our money together. And most of our customers are Negroes. And it looks like you could do something. We don’t want demonstrations either, but I don’t have the power. I can’t stop it. But this man here can stop it.” He said Shuttlesworth had the marbles.

  Shuttlesworth stood up after another silence, saying they should all go pray that the best would come out of this. As he was leaving, he turned to Louis Pitzitz, owner of Birmingham’s largest department store. “Mr. Pitzitz,” he said, “the last time, they arrested two students in your store. This time it’s gonna be different. Martin Luther King and I are gonna sit on your stool, and we aren’t gonna walk out. They’re gonna have to drag us out. And the press will be there. And you’ll be out of business all over Alabama. That’s just the way it is.”

  As Shuttlesworth and Pitzitz glowered at each other, Loveman rose hastily to his feet. “Wait a minute,” he said. “I can just call the maintenance man and just paint over that sign in the restroom.” He was referring to the “Whites Only” sign.

  This was the beginning of a breakthrough. In exchange for integrated water fountains and restrooms, Shuttlesworth agreed to hold a convention without demonstrations. There was much backsliding and quibbling over seemingly trivial details. For example, the “Whites Only” signs must be painted over rather than removed, so that the store owners might more easily disclaim responsibility if Bull Connor thundered down upon them for violating the local segregation laws. In the end, a fragile bargain was struck. Each side worried that the other would renege.

  Pressure was also building inside the FBI. Bureau officials, clearly alarmed by the repeated phenomenon of mass arrests in Albany, took note of a report from the Savannah office that the Negroes from the summer jailings “were all trained” at Septima Clark’s Dorchester retreat. The report was grossly exaggerated, in that only a tiny fraction of the Albany demonstrators had been to Dorchester, and also misleading, in that Clark’s classes focused on literacy and voter registration, not protest. Nevertheless, Bureau officials were inclined to credit the report, in the belief that such unprecedented upheavals must be fomented by cadres. This was the view of people far away, steeped in conspiratorial intelligence work, who never had gone near a mass meeting. It stripped the demonstrators of appreciable human motivation, leaving them more like robots and yet somehow more fanatical. In short, they became more like Communists to the Bureau, and it was seen as no small confirmation on that score that the man in charge of Dorchester was Jack O’Dell.

  Bureau officials took word to Attorney General Kennedy that O’Dell, linked to Levison by the wiretaps, was a threat to Birmingham, and Kennedy undertook to handle the problem privately, through his aide John Seigenthaler. As former editor of the Nashville Tennessean, Seigenthaler had come to know Rev. Kelly Miller Smith, from whose church James Lawson, Diane Nash, and John Lewis had organized the first of the Nashville sit-ins. Smith sat on King’s SCLC board. Before he left for the Birmingham convention, Smith received an official but confidential contact from Seigenthaler, who told him the government was gravely concerned about King’s alliance with a man of known Communist associations. King should sever all contact with O’Dell, and in no case should he allow him in Birmingham.

  Smith promptly relayed the message to King, who treated the matter as an intriguing nuisance. In context, King decided, the indirect warning meant that the Kennedy Administration was accommodating its own internal McCarthyite forces while hinting to King that there was a relatively painless way out: O’Dell should not go to Birmingham. He called O’Dell in to inform him personally. O’Dell chafed at the news. He was scheduled to lead several workshops at the Birmingham convention—indeed, he was at the center of the SCLC’s voter registration drive, as well as its collaborative efforts with COFO and other groups, which were by far the biggest hidden successes of the past year. O’Dell grumbled that it was a ridiculous compromise to admit that he might be a threat to the nation’s security and then respond by grounding him for a conference. King said he had seen much sillier things in politics.

  O’Dell remained behind in Atlanta when the SCLC convention opened that Monday, September 24. Birmingham’s downtown merchants delayed painting over their “Whites Only” signs until the last moment, but they did it, causing amazement among the Negroes. Adhering to the agreement, neither side trumpeted the change to the press, for fear of provoking Bull Connor. Still, the victory put Shuttlesworth into higher spirits than usual. At the Monday-night mass meeting in St. John’s Church, he gave such a rousing introduction to Wyatt Walker as King’s advance guard that Walker seized the pulpit and cried, “I have come to Birmingham to ride the Bull!” Jackie Robinson, recently elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, also arrived for the convention that night, but the Birmingham police refused to allow him a motorcade to the church. Shuttlesworth told the packed crowd to obey the police. “No one knows what’s going to happen the next few days,” he said.

  Publicly, the SCLC convention in Birmingham caused about as much stir as a Rotary luncheon. There were no demonstrations. The news was drenched that week with events in Mississippi, as J. H. Meredith’s quest to enter Ole Miss reached its climactic stages. Already Governor Ross Barnett once had blocked Meredith in a dramatic physical confrontation. (The Mississippi legislature had made Barnett himself the emergency university registrar, in a ruse to circumvent the court order binding the regular registrar.) Promptly after that, the full Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals hauled the registrar and the university trustees into a hearing, threatened them with contempt, and secured a promise that they would register Meredith.

  On Tuesday, September 25, as King was arriving in Birmingham, Chief U.S. Marshal James McShane and John Doar picked Meredith up at Dillard University in New Orleans. Doar was a volunteer courier for a sheaf of the Fifth Circuit’s latest orders against evasion and obstruction. Meredith said good-bye to his wife and to Medgar Evers, who ha
d been counseling him for his lonely walk into the maw of Ole Miss. At the New Orleans airport, Doar and McShane waited awkwardly while Meredith went downstairs to the colored snack bar and restroom. Then the three of them flew to Jackson, Mississippi, in a Cessna 220 owned by the U.S. Border Patrol. Mississippi Highway Patrol aircraft flew alongside them the whole way. In Washington, Al Rosen fed Burke Marshall a stream of FBI reports on the intentions of Barnett, the trustees, and a few local sheriffs who were threatening to arrest Meredith on any convenient charge.

  The trio proceeded by car to the Federal Building in downtown Jackson, where Registrar Robert Ellis had agreed to perform his loathsome duty of admitting Meredith. They found no state officials present, however. When Doar reported this newest wrinkle to Washington, Marshall tracked them down by telephone at the Woolfolk State Office Building, some blocks away. The president of the trustees told him they were trying to comply with the order but were restrained—being practically in the custody of Barnett and the legislature, which had summoned them to testify about the university crisis. Another trustee told Marshall that the Fifth Circuit order no longer applied, because Meredith had been late reaching the Federal Building. Marshall short-circuited the dispute with phone calls to Judge Tuttle in New Orleans, by which he obtained a phone-relayed extension of the deadline. The trustees eventually relented on the time but held fast on the place, insisting that the extension did not apply to the part of the order that specified the Federal Building. By then it was almost dark. Robert Kennedy decided to give in and send Meredith to the Woolfolk Building.

  “Can you clear the crowds so we don’t make a big circus?” Kennedy asked Governor Barnett.

  “You would have a big space,” Barnett replied. “They’re not going to bother him.”

  Soon the long wait was over. Doar, McShane, and Meredith pushed their way through a jeering crowd of two thousand outside the Woolfolk Building, then up the elevator to the tenth floor and through another crowd in the corridor. Barnett, bathed in television lights, blocked the threshold of Room 1007. Legislators inside climbed atop chairs and tables to obtain a better view. As Doar moved forward to explain the Fifth Circuit’s orders to Barnett, television and radio stations transmitted the confrontation to Mississippians across the state. Barnett “interposed” Mississippi’s sovereignty, as embodied in his own person, between Meredith and the university officials, who maintained an outward willingness to obey the orders.

  “Which one is Meredith?” Barnett inquired, sparking titters of laughter, as the familiar and well-known Meredith, standing in front of Barnett, was the only Negro in sight. Barnett read to Meredith his second proclamation of interposition, ending that he did “hereby finally deny you admission to the University of Mississippi.” A Rebel yell went up from the crowds gathered around transistor radios ten floors below. When Barnett refused Doar’s request to enter, some legislators chanted, “Get going! Get going!” One cried, “Three cheers for the governor!” They hooted the Meredith trio along its path of retreat, then filed back to their chambers in triumph. One state senator hailed Barnett’s stand as “the most brilliant piece of statesmanship ever displayed in Mississippi.” Another vowed to persevere “regardless of the cost in time, effort, money, and in human lives.”

  An angry Robert Kennedy called a cheerful Barnett as Meredith was heading for Memphis that evening. “He is going to show up for classes tomorrow,” said Kennedy.

  “At Ole Miss?” replied the startled governor. “How can you do that without registering?”

  “…I think they arranged it,” said Kennedy. “…It is all understood.”

  “I don’t see how they can,” said Barnett. “They’re going to give him special treatment? They can’t do that, General.”

  Ten minutes later, Kennedy called Barnett again, after Marshall and the other Justice officials in his office convinced him that he must give Barnett precise notice of Meredith’s arrival on the Ole Miss campus. Otherwise, Barnett could disclaim responsibility for any violence against him. Kennedy relayed the notice along with a stern lecture on the supremacy of federal law. He pointed out that all the judges of the Fifth Circuit were Southerners. “But anyway, Governor,” he added, “they will be down there at ten o’clock.”

  “Ten o’clock will be all right,” Barnett said politely. Later that night, three judges of the Fifth Circuit signed an order commanding Barnett to appear before them on Friday in New Orleans for a hearing on whether Barnett should be held in contempt of court. The impending collision of races, and perhaps even armed forces, dominated the next day’s news. The New York Times published three Meredith stories on its front page beneath a banner headline: U.S. IS PREPARED TO SEND TROOPS AS MISSISSIPPI GOVERNOR DEFIES COURT AND BARS NEGRO STUDENT.

  Doar, McShane, and Meredith flew back to Mississippi the next morning in the same Cessna, this time to Oxford. They arrived without troops or any other support force, as Robert Kennedy wished to avoid any appearance that the federal government required abnormal measures to obtain compliance with the law. When an escort of Mississippi highway patrolmen unexpectedly abandoned them near the campus gates, the three of them stepped forward alone to confront Lieutenant Governor Paul Johnson, who was backed by formidable rows of state troopers and sheriffs. This third standoff ended much like the others, except that Chief Marshal McShane, having heard through the telephone maze that the Mississippians might yield to a face-saving show of force, tried to push his way by. “Governor,” he told Johnson, “I think it’s my duty to try to go through and get Mr. Meredith in there.”

  “You are not going in,” Lieutenant Governor Johnson replied.

  “I’m sorry, Governor, that I have to do this, but I’m going in,” said McShane. After a few physical rebuffs, he had to conclude that the rumors of capitulation were false. He and Doar sounded Meredith’s third retreat, which pushed euphoria still higher in Mississippi.

  King addressed the SCLC convention that night, defending the Albany Movement as a political success even though friend and foe alike were branding it a failure. Behind a merciful curtain of media disinterest, he spent most of his time planning a coordinated assault that would avoid the errors of Albany. With Shuttlesworth, he assembled special caucuses of the Alabama leaders. They scheduled a People-to-People recruitment tour early in the new year, plus a voter registration drive with VEP funds. The plan was to build toward a Christmas shopping boycott as the first stage of a planned confrontation “somewhere in Alabama.” King remained coy about the target city, knowing that the meetings were infiltrated. Also, he worried about attacking Birmingham as long as negotiations finally were producing results. On this point Shuttlesworth had no such doubts. “They took those signs down because you were coming to town,” he told King, “and they’ll put ’em up again just as soon as you leave.”

  With Governor Barnett vowing to scorn the Fifth Circuit’s orders and the federal government threatening openly to back Meredith with soldiers, commentators compared the confrontation to the events preceding Little Rock or even Fort Sumter. Robert Kennedy took advantage of the pressure to bear down on Barnett in nearly continuous telephone negotiations. By their voices, two Americans scarcely could have sounded more foreign to each other. Kennedy spoke a high-pitched, nasal Bostonian, brimming with energy but often garbled by pauses and staccato asides. Barnett, in a low Mississippi drawl, fashioned sentences of cleaner syntax, masking his nerves behind homespun amiability. What united them was the fraternal belief that politicians weathered crises best by accommodating the interests of other politicians—by skirting public controversies to take care of each other. Accordingly, Kennedy never pressured Barnett with the prospect of jail or overwhelming military force. He did not vow to “convert the state of Mississippi into a frog pond,” as the Chicago Tribune threatened to do in 1865 when the legislature tried to impose onerous Black Codes on the newly freed slaves. Nor did Barnett swear to block the schoolhouse door or die the fire-breathing death of a Rebel martyr. Instead, Barnett fo
cused on Kennedy’s need to get Meredith into Ole Miss with the least possible public display of federal power, while Kennedy addressed Barnett’s need to defend segregation as vigorously as any Mississippi rival might claim to have done.

  Drifting inexorably into public relations, they fashioned an agreement to stage a fake showdown at the gates of the campus. Two dozen armed U.S. marshals would support Meredith, and Barnett, yielding reluctantly to superior force, would retire to the new task of getting Meredith out of Ole Miss. Ironically, this solution faltered when Kennedy’s desire to appear accommodating did not quite satisfy Barnett’s desire to look as though he was being pushed around.

  “Hello, General,” said Barnett that afternoon. “I was under the impression that they were all going to pull their guns. This could be very embarrassing. We got a big crowd here, and if one pulls his gun and we all turn, it would be very embarrassing. Isn’t it possible to have them all pull their guns?”

  “I hate to have them all draw their guns,” Kennedy replied, “as I think it could create harsh feelings. Isn’t it sufficient if I have one man draw his gun and the others keep their hands on their holsters?”

  “They must all draw their guns,” Barnett insisted. “Then they should point their guns at us and then we could step aside.”

  By late afternoon, as Doar and McShane were preparing to escort Meredith into Mississippi on his fourth attempt to register—traveling this time by car from Memphis—Barnett and Kennedy were still fashioning the scene. Barnett was afraid that Kennedy might let on that there was a deal, which would finish Barnett in Mississippi politics. Kennedy, having reduced Meredith’s military support to a level that made Barnett uncomfortable, was assuring Barnett that he would portray their pretend showdown as a real one.