Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  “You understand we have had no agreement,” said Barnett.

  “That’s correct,” Kennedy replied.

  “I am just telling you—everybody thinks we’re compromising,” said Barnett.

  Kennedy assured Barnett there would be no appearance of a compromise. “I am just telling you that we are arriving and we are arriving with force,” he said.

  Actually, they both knew that Meredith would be arriving with practically no federal force, and this aspect of the plan began to look less promising as ominous reports reached Kennedy about the size of the mob gathering in Oxford. Mississippi was caught up in a defiant holiday mood. Horns blared in the streets. Confederate flags flew. Radio stations, on emergency programming, filled the time between Ole Miss bulletins with recordings of “Dixie.” The FBI relayed stories of vigilantes converging from distant states with rifles and beer coolers, swearing to defend Mississippi. As Meredith’s small caravan left Memphis, Kennedy feared that the federal escort, though small enough for him and large enough for Barnett, might be too small to handle a riot. He wanted Barnett’s assurance that state authorities would protect Meredith once the marshals left the campus, but by then Barnett preferred to think of the state forces as weak and submissive. “After he gets in,” he told Kennedy, “you certainly don’t expect us to guard him all the time….”

  “Whatever is necessary, Governor,” said Kennedy. “Whatever is necessary to preserve law and order.”

  “But, General,” protested Barnett, “I declare I don’t think I could agree to guarantee the man after he gets in. When he gets in he is just one boy.”

  “I had better call it off, Governor,” Kennedy said sharply, but he let the caravan proceed.

  An hour later, after touring the crowded, gun-laden streets of Oxford, Barnett called Kennedy again. Fear stripped most of the artifice from his voice. “There are several thousand people here in cars, trucks,” he said. “…There is liable to be a hundred people killed here. It would ruin all of us. Please believe me…a lot of people are going to get killed. It would be embarrassing to me.”

  “I don’t know if it would be embarrassing,” Kennedy replied. “That would not be the feeling.” Barnett’s bluntly selfish comment seemed to snap Kennedy out of his scriptwriter’s perspective.

  “It would be bad all over the nation,” Barnett said.

  “I’ll send them back,” said Kennedy. His order flashed from the Justice Department through military channels to a communications plane. From there it was beamed down to Doar in the Meredith caravan, which was hurtling down one of Mississippi’s new interstate highways at nearly a hundred miles per hour. They pulled into a filling station in Batesville, Mississippi, just west of Oxford, so that Doar and McShane could call Robert Kennedy personally to confirm the retreat. To the stoically apprehensive Meredith, sitting in the car, Batesville seemed deserted—stripped of its population, who, from the sound of the radio reports, had motored ahead to join all of Mississippi in defending against him. He was relieved when they turned back toward Memphis.

  Events raced at collision speed. THOUSANDS SAID READY TO FIGHT FOR MISSISSIPPI, announced the Jackson Daily News, which urged readers to learn a resistance song titled “Never, No Never.” Outside Mississippi, the news centered on the challenge to the Kennedy Administration. In the third set of triple-tier headlines that week, The New York Times blared: U.S., TO AVERT VIOLENCE, CALLS OFF NEW EFFORT TO ENROLL MEREDITH; SENDS HUNDREDS MORE MARSHALS. In New Orleans, on Friday, a Fifth Circuit panel tried Governor Barnett in absentia and found him guilty of contempt. Lieutenant Governor Johnson promptly received the same verdict. The three judges sentenced them to indefinite prison terms beginning on Tuesday, unless they purged themselves by securing Meredith’s registration before then. Robert Kennedy, charged with executing this sentence, faced a new political dilemma. Barnett called Kennedy after lunch and secured a promise that no Negro marshals would be used on the next registration attempt.

  Although days earlier Kennedy had branded Barnett a “loony,” citing a report that he had been struck on the head by an airplane propeller, and although he now saw Barnett’s followers as mad, latter-day brownshirts, still he shrank from using force to support Meredith, because to do so would not only reveal an exhaustion of domestic authority but blot America’s reputation in the world. His only alternative was to collaborate privately with Barnett to produce an inspired theatrical effect, worthy of Shakespeare. None but a genius could hope to orchestrate the desired illusion of normalcy and control, especially since Kennedy and Barnett simultaneously sounded public war trumpets that attracted hordes to overrun their stage. The threat of a jailed governor stimulated no new ideas for the script, and by five o’clock the Pentagon was flashing a DEFCON 3 alert to units from Texas to New Jersey: prepare to move within four hours.

  King’s convention was dull by comparison, as the three hundred SCLC delegates passed resolutions at a closing session late that Friday afternoon. One called upon the Justice Department to correct lapses in the protection of constitutional rights around Albany, Georgia. Another commended James Meredith for courage in seeking to enroll at Ole Miss. King, in the lolling drone of closing announcements, was reminding his audience of major SCLC events ahead—such as Mrs. William Kunstler’s gala December fund-raiser in suburban New York, starring Sammy Davis, Jr., and Peter Lawford—when one of the white men in the audience walked to the stage and lashed out with his right fist. The blow made a loud popping sound as it landed on King’s left cheek. He staggered backward and spun half around.

  The entire crowd observed in silent, addled awe. Some people thought King had been introducing the man as one of the white dignitaries so conspicuously welcome at Birmingham’s first fully integrated convention. Others thought the attack might be a staged demonstration from the nonviolence workshops. But now the man was hitting King again, this time on the side of his face from behind, and twice more in the back. Shrieks and gasps went up from the crowd, which, as one delegate wrote, “surged for a moment as one person” toward the stage. People recalled feeling physically jolted by the force of the violence—from both the attack on King and the flash of hatred through the auditorium.

  The assailant slowed rather than quickened the pace of his blows, expecting, as he said later, to be torn to pieces by the crowd. But he struck powerfully. After being knocked backward by one of the last blows, King turned to face him while dropping his hands. It was the look on his face that many would not forget. Septima Clark, who nursed many private complaints about the strutting ways of the SCLC preachers and would not have been shocked to see the unloosed rage of an exalted leader, marveled instead at King’s transcendent calm. King dropped his hands “like a newborn baby,” she said, and from then on she never doubted that his nonviolence was more than the heat of his oratory or the result of his slow calculation. It was the response of his quickest instincts. This impression struck a number of others, including perhaps the assailant himself, who stared at King long enough for Wyatt Walker and some of the others to jump between them.

  “Don’t touch him!” cried King. “Don’t touch him. We have to pray for him.” His words, signaling an end to the immediate crisis, released a flood of noise, some delegates loudly repeating King’s instructions, others shrieking hatred at the attacker. Several preachers moved to enclose the assailant in a protective circle. Walker, Andrew Young, Bernard Lee, and Birmingham’s Rev. Edwin Gardner consulted furtively about what to do. One of them jumped to the microphone to hold back the crowd, saying, “We can handle this on the stage.” Others, seeing that people were bolting outside with the news, gave orders that all the doors should be locked, fearing a lynch mob of Negroes or a second wave of attackers. King kept talking quietly to the white man, saying no one was going to hurt him, and the man said very little except to mumble that he believed in white supremacy and that Sammy Davis, Jr., was married to a white woman. As King and the preachers escorted him slowly offstage to a private office, a hastil
y organized quartet of singers moved to the microphone to hold the crowd, singing “I Want Jesus to Walk with Me” and the somber slave spiritual “Steal Away to Jesus.” James Bevel interrupted to say this was no funeral—Dr. King was all right, and they had weathered a stern test of nonviolence. It was a joyful occasion, he declared, as he started them off in a rendition of “I’m on My Way to Freedom Land,” which gathered volume until the auditorium shook.

  King hushed them when he returned, holding an ice-filled handkerchief to his face. Rosa Parks, mother of the bus boycott, stopped him briefly to administer her favorite remedy for headache: two aspirin and a Coca-Cola. King then announced that he and the assailant had been able to talk calmly in the office, and that the man had presented himself as a soldier on a mission for the American Nazi Party. His refusal to press charges infuriated the Birmingham police officers who arrived at the auditorium, as it put their boss, Bull Connor, into a perverse predicament. Having breached his fundamental political rule—which he had enforced against First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt herself, among many others—to allow an integrated SCLC convention in Birmingham at all, Connor did not hesitate to point out that a white man could not have attacked King at a lawfully segregated meeting of Negroes. Under duress, Connor had permitted the integration, just as he had permitted the signs to come down in the stores, in the hope of holding business support against the new city constitution. For all his strained tolerance, he reaped only a crazed “Nazi” and the prospect of unwelcome publicity. With King refusing to press charges, Connor had no choice but to have the department bring them itself. The Birmingham police persuaded Roy James to plead guilty and hustled him off to serve thirty days.

  Wyatt Walker, trying to get the news out, was stymied temporarily because the few major reporters who had come to Birmingham long since had departed to cover Ole Miss. Finally he tracked down a young New York Times reporter who was sympathetic and trusting enough to write a story datelined Birmingham, as though he had been there. The reporter, being at risk himself for the deception, could do no more than identify the attacker as a “self-styled Nazi.” No firmer description reached the news world, but FBI agents advised headquarters within hours that James was a member of the American Nazi Party, and that his home address was a Nazi “dormitory” outside Washington, D.C. His FBI rap sheet showed previous arrests for violence in New Orleans and his native New York. Almost immediately, police intercepted a letter from Nazi Party commander George Lincoln Rockwell, who wrote “Lieutenant” James that “your heroic deed has put new heart into hundreds of people who…have protested the outrage of sending a white American to jail for punching a communist-nigger agitator.” Adding, “I know how much you hate jails, Roy,” Rockwell promised to secure James’s prompt release and closed with “Heil Hitler!” His letter, along with other reports of organized violence against King, lay buried in the files.

  When the SCLC convention left town, a Birmingham judge ordered a November referendum on the new city constitution. Bull Connor, having tarnished his segregationist credentials for no political reward, lost patience with the blandishments of reform politics. He promptly sent his men to notify the downtown store owners that they were in violation of city ordinances, and the “Whites Only” signs reappeared one by one.

  From his home in Atlanta, with a swollen jaw and a bruised back, King watched the conclusion of the Ole Miss saga on television. On September 29, the day after the James attack in Birmingham, the screen showed the arrival in Oxford of former Major General Edwin Walker, who, disciplined for insubordination, had resigned from the U.S. Army in flaming public protest against what he called the Kennedy Administration’s “collaboration and collusion with the international Communist conspiracy.” Walker already had gone on the radio to rally volunteers, confessing that he had been “on the wrong side” when he carried out Eisenhower’s orders to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School five years earlier. “Barnett yes, Castro no!” he declared. “Bring your flags, your tents and your skillets! It is time! Now or never!” Other cameras showed trucks and cars already cruising the streets of Oxford. Intelligence reports picked up Klan Klaverns mobilizing from as far away as Florida. Barnett’s desk was stacked with telegrams offering services to the defense of Mississippi.

  That Saturday afternoon, Robert Kennedy concluded that the situation was grave enough for him to bring the President himself into the confidential talks with Barnett. In the Oval Office, historian Arthur Schlesinger joined Kennedy, Burke Marshall, and Kenneth O’Donnell, all seated expectantly around the President as the call to Barnett went through. “Go get him, Johnny boy,” the Attorney General told his brother with a tight smile, as though spurring on a champion boxer. The President responded with a breezier levity, rehearsing a fake greeting that went, “Governor, this is the President of the United States—not Bobby, not Teddy, not Princess Radziwill.” Then Barnett came on the line and President Kennedy, turning serious, was promptly deflected. Barnett asked whether he had talked with the Attorney General that morning about the Attorney General’s latest talk with one of Barnett’s aides, Tom Watkins, and the President, despite frequent asides with his brother, could not catch up with the third-hand conversation. This gave Barnett an opening to suggest that Kennedy wait for the Barnett aide—“really an A-1 lawyer,” said the governor—to bring his unspecified idea personally to Washington. Kennedy agreed to have the Attorney General receive him, but asked what Barnett intended to do about the Tuesday deadline.

  “I want to think it over a few days,” Barnett replied.

  “Well, of course,” said Kennedy. “The problem is, Governor, that I got my responsibility just like you have yours.”

  “I realize that,” said Barnett. “And I appreciate that so much.” He spoke the last two words with a long earnest drawl, stopping the conversation. Reemphasizing his hope that Watkins could find a way out, Barnett started to sign off. Then abruptly, and sincerely, he said, “I appreciate your interest in our poultry program and all those things.”

  President Kennedy stifled a laugh until the phone connection was broken, then chuckled in wonder that Barnett could mention livestock in the midst of the constitutional crisis. “You’ve been fighting a sofa pillow all week,” he told the Attorney General. By this he seemed to mean that Barnett’s warm, simple manner made him an easy mark, but by the objective results the governor was no pushover for anyone. The President’s personal authority—carefully reserved until now—had just come to bear in the emergency with no effect except to ratify a postponement. Segregationists were streaming into Oxford more rapidly than Justice Department officials could reassemble their Freedom Ride-style civilian force of prison guards, Border Patrol agents, and deputy marshals. That force was gathering at the naval air base outside Memphis, having stripped three prisons and the Mexican border of federal manpower, but it numbered only five hundred at maximum strength.

  The White House conferees decided that something stronger than words was required to force a change in Barnett. They resolved to nationalize the Mississippi National Guard, though there was some doubt as to whether its units would fight other Mississippians in behalf of James Meredith and the Kennedy White House. The Attorney General immediately set lawyers to work on the necessary presidential proclamations, and the President himself called his chief speechwriter, Ted Sorensen, in the hospital, where he was recovering from a case of White House ulcers. Kennedy asked Sorensen to rouse himself to write a speech for him to deliver on television. Sorensen agreed, saying he would craft some ideas in light of the fact that “the Republicans are taking the straight Ross Barnett line.”

  “Except Eisenhower,” laughed Kennedy. He appreciated the irony of looking more favorably now upon the Little Rock precedent. “Eisenhower’s taking a little away from ’em,” he said.

  “No, I mean the Republicans in Alabama,” said Sorensen, making the point that Kennedy would be safe from partisan attack at least in the Deep South: both parties would attack him.

&n
bsp; A second call to Barnett went out from the Oval Office an hour after the first. This time Robert Kennedy prepared the way by telling Barnett that they need not wait for Watkins to come all the way to Washington, as Watkins “would be wasting his time…. He doesn’t have any suggestions,” said Kennedy. “He just told me, Mr. Governor.”

  “I thought he did have,” said Barnett, sounding puzzled.

  “Well, he didn’t,” said Kennedy. “I mean he said something about sending the, Meredith, uh, sneaking him into Jackson and getting him registered while all of you were up at…”

  “Yeah?” said Barnett.

  “…at Oxford. But that doesn’t make much sense, does it?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” drawled Barnett. “Why? Why doesn’t it? That’s where they ordered him to go at first, you know.” The idea was that Barnett would continue to lead the charge of segregationists up to the Ole Miss campus at Oxford for the scheduled confrontation; meanwhile the Kennedys would sneak Meredith into deserted Jackson and register him there in accordance with the court order from one of the earlier registration attempts. By this devious plan, Barnett could swear to the people of Mississippi that he had not given an inch on segregation, and that Meredith had been registered only by the conniving tricks of the Kennedys.

  Not surprisingly, Barnett had stalled until he heard this idea come out of Kennedy’s mouth rather than his own, but then he embraced it as a mighty fine suggestion. His enthusiasm led Kennedy to reconsider the scheme. Its obvious drawback was that while Meredith might leap the great hurdle of registration, he would wind up an hour’s drive from the Oxford campus, and in the meantime the federal government would have allowed Barnett to gather Mississippi’s army of resistance to prevent him from setting foot there. Perhaps registration was only fool’s gold. In this light, Kennedy pushed Barnett to guarantee that state forces would maintain order in Oxford. The President came back on the line to press the same question.