Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  That Thanksgiving weekend, students gathered for SNCC’s Southwide conference in Nashville, where James Lawson’s movement was completing its third year of nonviolent demonstrations. After the conference, students from distant regions joined wave after wave of sit-ins against diehard segregationist establishments. The owner of the Tic-Toc Restaurant sprayed a fire extinguisher into the face of Sam Block, who was visiting from his voter registration project with Bob Moses in Greenwood, Mississippi. Two policemen dragged John Lewis to jail from the same restaurant a week later, as the daily demonstrations continued to draw headlines and huge crowds. Privately, there was gossip about a cultural divide along the picket lines. Lewis worried about a breakdown in nonviolent discipline, as evidenced by the casual dress, cigarette-smoking, and overall lack of reverence on the part of some guest demonstrators. In reply, some of the more sophisticated Northern students snickered at Nashville’s schoolmarmish regimen, calling Lewis a “square.” Still, they all went to jail together.

  The movement gossip about King focused upon his performance in Albany. It was a year since the formation of the Albany Movement, and the anniversary was honored by a week-long series of nightly mass meetings, patterned after a church revival. King, addressing the meeting at Third Kiokee Baptist Church, seemed ill at ease as he announced his intention to organize a boycott of segregated businesses “on the national economic level.” This proposal was no more than embryonic at the time, and destined to be rejected as impractical, but feelings of pride and delicate sentiment urged King to create the impression of something big. After all that had been said and done in Albany, he could not bring himself to tell those people that he was leaving them for another city, such as Birmingham. Nor could he admit that he had abandoned hopes of a breakthrough in Albany. Instead, he retreated behind a cloud of grandiose but vague plans. “I am willing to come back to Albany and go to jail, if necessary,” he assured them.

  To coincide with the Albany Movement anniversary, the Southern Regional Council published a study that Claude Sitton summarized accurately in a New York Times story headlined “President Chided Over Albany, Ga.: Fails to Guard Negro Rights.” While the study criticized nearly every major party to Albany’s year-long crisis—the Justice Department, the local police, the FBI, and the Negro leaders themselves—it laid primary responsibility upon President Kennedy for his Administration’s failure to protect constitutional rights. Sitton quoted the study’s assertion that the federal government “‘has hovered about Albany from the beginning. Incredibly, in this whole time, it has not acted.’” The record, contrasting sharply with President Kennedy’s campaign promises of bold action, showed clearly that “the Government will not move in racial controversies unless there is uncontrolled violence.” Sitton’s story, which played on the front page, lit a fuse of skittering, unbalanced racial perceptions.

  King left Albany to preach at New York’s Riverside Church on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, three days after the Sitton story was published. After the service, a Times reporter approached King while he was removing his clerical robes in the pastor’s chambers and asked for comments on the Southern Regional Council’s Albany study. In the story, which appeared the next day, King was depicted as endorsing the study in all its particulars, including the criticisms of his own strategic shortcomings. But the headline trumpeted a radical change of interpretation: “Dr. King Says F.B.I. in Albany, Ga., Favors Segregationists.” Suddenly the critic was King instead of the Southern Regional Council. More important, the target was the FBI instead of President Kennedy.

  King might as well have hurled lightning bolts into J. Edgar Hoover’s office. Hoover’s top assistants immediately exchanged a flurry of indignant memos, as they did whenever the Bureau was criticized publicly. Assistant Director Alex Rosen interpreted the remarks attributed to King as further evidence that he was under Communist “domination.” Proposals for retaliation rose up through the Bureau’s third-highest and second-highest officials, Alan Belmont and Clyde Tolson, to Hoover himself. Significantly, they chose to let the story stand in the white world, where public challenge risked upsetting segregationist whites as well as the Kennedy Administration. For tactical reasons, the Bureau channeled a vengeful response into the Negro world. As King well knew, the FBI did not lack friendly contacts in the upper reaches of the Negro press. Bureau officials prevailed on representatives of Jet and Ebony, on the publisher of the four Afro-American newspapers, and on John Sengstacke, Robert Abbott’s heir at the Chicago Defender. The prompt result was a series of rejoinders to King in the nation’s largest Negro journals. All the articles focused on one statement the Times attributed to King: “One of the great problems we face with the FBI in the South is that the agents are white Southerners who have been influenced by the mores of the community. To maintain their status, they have to be friendly with the local police and people who are promoting segregation. Every time I saw FBI men in Albany, they were with the local police force.”

  From this complaint the FBI-inspired stories plucked the issue of birth: they pointed out that four of the five regular FBI agents in Albany were Northerners. Then, having refuted King on an issue of fact, the stories denied that the FBI had erred in the slightest. Jet declared accurately that the Justice Department, not the FBI, was holding up prosecution of Sheriff Campbell for beating C. B. King. The editors warned King against making the FBI a “scapegoat,” and advised him to “take the matter up with the President and the Attorney General, bub.” More stridently, the Chicago Defender story quoted Deke DeLoach’s charge that the “statements by Dr. King reveal a total ignorance, not only of the true character of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, but also of the FBI record in protecting civil rights.”

  The Bureau was correct that four of the five Albany agents were Northerners, but it was also true that Marion Cheek, the only Southerner, took personal charge of civil rights complaints. This proved very little in itself, as Cheek was proud of his record in cases of violent excesses by segregationists. As a key witness in the upcoming Charlie Ware lawsuit, he would tick off facts supporting his conclusion that Sheriff Johnson had shot Ware in cold blood, and would scoff at the respectable Albany segregationists who proclaimed Gator Johnson’s innocence. At worst Cheek was a modified segregationist, who had gotten along fairly well with King. Now King’s remarks embittered him, not just for the aspersions against his professional integrity but also for the affront to the Director. Cheek nearly worshipped Hoover, telling everyone how the old man had once granted him a station transfer when his wife was sick.

  King made a mistake about the birthplaces of the agents. It was a less trivial mistake to be drawn into a dispute about whether Hoover or the Kennedy Administration was more to blame in Albany. On instructions from Hoover, DeLoach called King’s office to seek an immediate appointment so that he and William Sullivan, head of the intelligence division, could set King straight on the facts. When Dora McDonald put him off, saying that King was secluded at work on a book of sermons, DeLoach asked the Atlanta SAC to set up the appointment for him. The SAC reported the next day that he had had no better luck—King was busy traveling. Although the request was presented as an informal one, not connected to any official FBI investigation, DeLoach huffily resented King’s failure to schedule the interview. He never called King again. He did not write King a letter setting forth the Bureau’s objections to the Times article. DeLoach did not attempt to verify the accuracy or balance of the story, nor consider that King had any but the basest motives for his comments. Instead, two months later, he closed the matter so suddenly and with such scalding prose as to suggest that he was content to preserve the purest grievance against King. “It would appear obvious that Rev. King does not desire to be told the true facts,” DeLoach wrote to his superiors. “He obviously uses deceit, lies and treachery as propaganda to further his own causes.” In the two remaining paragraphs of his memo, DeLoach used variants of the word “lie” five times in reference to King.

  All this
took place within the bowels of the government, precipitated by one newspaper article and two unreturned phone calls. This secret fury, in turn, was partially the result of the Southern Regional Council’s hidden role in brokering the Voter Education Project. During that long process, Leslie Dunbar and other SRC officials had passed along to civil rights leaders the Kennedy Administration’s assurances that voter registration would be a haven of federal protection. Now Dunbar, though a Kennedy supporter and a cautious man by nature, felt personally responsible for the unanswered violence coming down on the Moses project in Mississippi and the SNCC registration projects around Albany. His own frustrations with the Administration helped drive the Albany study to public light, but Dunbar could not refer explicitly to the broken promises without compromising the shaky tax arrangements on which VEP rested. Here again the public face of racial politics was fatefully disingenuous: everything seemed as obvious as black and white—tediously so—and yet the central dramas remained invisible.

  From different worlds, King, Hoover, and the Kennedys took the measure of one another as they spun toward the new year. Each of them saw things that were concealed from the others, and ignored things that were plain. King alone knew they were heading for Birmingham; he could choose his ground so as to draw attention to freedom as he defined it. In December, he sent Wyatt Walker and Andrew Young there to recruit, plan, and prepare. King himself preached in Birmingham on Sunday, December 9, before flying to New York for a highly successful Sammy Davis fund-raiser—which came off without picket lines against Jack O’Dell—and then a board meeting of the Gandhi Society. On Friday, a bomb detonated outside Birmingham’s Bethel Baptist, rattling the church so that the stained glass and all other breakables shattered and jagged fault lines ran up the walls. The concussion tore the roof off the parsonage next door, destroyed the pastor’s car, knocked out power and telephone lines, and ripped holes in three other houses, sending two infants to the hospital with severe glass cuts. Bull Connor, now gearing up to run for mayor, arrived with firemen, detectives, and police dogs to take charge of the investigation, which accomplished nothing. “Dammit, they ought to be hung when they’re caught,” Connor told reporters. The Birmingham News noted that Bethel Baptist was renowned as Shuttles-worth’s church, the place of refuge for the battered Freedom Riders in May of 1961. It had been bombed twice before, but both the newspaper and Connor puzzled over why anyone would want to bomb it nearly a year after Shuttlesworth had departed for Cincinnati. The new pastor, dazed and shaken, was puzzled too, as he had permitted no civil rights meetings to be held there. “Once more we have been shocked by the bombing of Bethel Baptist Church,” King wired President Kennedy. He appealed for help in Birmingham, which he described as “by far the worst big city in race relations in the United States. Much of what has gone on has had the tacit consent of high public officials.”

  Three nights later, on December 17, King and several other leaders conferred with President Kennedy about Africa. The Negro leaders requested a “Marshall Plan” of economic aid for the impoverished, newly independent nations there. They also pressed for American sanctions against South Africa’s apartheid system and for greater diplomatic pressure to free the remaining colonies on the continent. Particularly at issue was a recent United Nations proposal to curtail armed suppression by Portugal of independence movements in its colonies of Mozambique, Angola, and Portuguese Guinea. The United States had cast one of only seven votes against the resolution, joining South Africa and five European nations.

  President Kennedy put his guests at ease by sharing their sensibilities. NATO obligations made impossible a simple cutoff of arms shipments to Portugal, the President explained, but he was skeptical of Portugal’s promises not to divert NATO arms shipments to suppress anti-colonial movements in Africa. In fact, Kennedy assured the Negro leaders that he did not trust Portugal’s word on this point any more than they did. The task of effective government was to design safeguards that would support NATO without allowing Portugal to prop up its colonies by force. These were complexities that absorbed the President in every detail. Although his private conference with the Negro leaders was scheduled to last only half an hour, he slipped out briefly to light the White House Christmas tree and returned for another half-hour—then two more hours. For once, presidential aides found themselves juggling the schedule to benefit civil rights leaders, lopping off or abbreviating appointments with other dignitaries. The Negro press hailed the event as “the longest conference ever held by Negroes with a U.S. President in the White House.”

  That night, President Kennedy taped a freewheeling interview with correspondents from the three major networks. He was at his best—candid, articulate, and witty. Repeatedly, and with obvious relish, he discussed turning points of the Cuban missile crisis. He stressed the vagaries of decision-making at the pinnacle of government, ticking off the historical “misjudgments” that had brought on each of the twentieth century’s major wars. Only once did he bring up the race issue, in complaining that the Ole Miss crisis made it more difficult to pass an education bill.

  The President was acutely conscious that his nation had dominated world politics since the war against the Axis. “I think it’s a fantastic story,” he said. “We have one million Americans today serving outside the United States. There’s no other country in history that’s carried this kind of a burden…since the beginning of the world. Greece, Rome, Napoleon and all the rest always had conquest. We have a million men outside, and we’re trying to defend these countries.” The American empire was coming of age as measured against its most awesome predecessors, and like those predecessors it conceived of its power as a benevolent force. Twice the United States had served as “the great means of defending the world,” he said—first against the Nazis, then against the Soviets. “Now I think that’s a pretty good record for a country with six percent of the world’s population, which is very reluctant to take on these burdens. I think we ought to be rather pleased with ourselves this Christmas.”

  Early in December, The Nation had published an excerpt of the Southern Regional Council’s Albany report in an article entitled “Kennedy: The Reluctant Emancipator.” This was a small public hint of the linkage between Kennedy and Lincoln that had been on King’s mind throughout the disappointing year. On New Year’s Eve, the descendants of slavery were to celebrate one hundred years of freedom. By proclaiming the slaves within the Confederacy “forever free,” Lincoln had made the Civil War a war of emancipation. Now more than ever, King wanted Kennedy to say something similar about segregation. It would give the movement a moral club to take to Birmingham.

  He lobbied privately all month for a Second Emancipation Proclamation, together with organizations such as the African-American Heritage Association. Early prospects looked bleak, as the Civil War Centennial Commission declined to schedule any ceremonies honoring Emancipation Day. For “practical considerations,” which almost certainly centered upon the threat of protest by the Southern State Centennial Commissions, the Administration’s Bureau of the Budget concluded that it would be “undesirable to use the Civil War Centennial Commission as a vehicle for the observance.” This omission—perhaps the most glaring of the government’s withdrawals from the four-year centennial—left King without an occasion that beckoned for a presidential appearance. White House interest in his proposal seemed so puny that William Kunstler advised him to march to the White House on New Year’s Day, to deliver his Second Emancipation Proclamation to President Kennedy a second time, through the gates if necessary. Kunstler thought he might persuade Lincoln historian Carl Sandburg to go along, but King had no taste for emancipation as a protest event.* After his Africa meeting at the White House on December 17, he bubbled with renewed optimism, because he found the President sympathetic, obviously well briefed, and “so well informed.” King and his aides talked almost daily with Louis Martin, Lee White, Arthur Schlesinger, and Berl Bernhard of the Civil Rights Commission.

  As usual, the
decision bounced around inside the White House until the last minute. The Administration was preoccupied with Robert Kennedy’s frantic efforts to raise Fidel Castro’s ransom price of $62 million for the return of the Bay of Pigs prisoners from Cuba. In another marathon of wild renaissance government, Kennedy was sending his assistants scurrying in all directions at all hours, bending the tax laws, commandeering airplanes, amassing pharmaceuticals and medical supplies to Castro’s satisfaction. An emergency call from the Attorney General to Boston’s Cardinal Richard Cushing secured a last million dollars when the banks were closed for the weekend, and the 1,100 prisoners left Cuban jails in time to spend Christmas in Miami. Lee White submitted the draft proclamation to Pierre Salinger the next day, for final decision by the President in Palm Beach. King’s frontal assault on segregation was gone, as were his suggested flourishes and frills, but the kernel of a new presidential commitment was preserved in the heart of the short document:

  WHEREAS Negro citizens are still being denied rights guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States, and the securing of these rights is one of the great unfinished tasks of our democracy:

  NOW, THEREFORE, I, JOHN F. KENNEDY, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim that the Emancipation Proclamation expresses our Nation’s policy, founded on justice and morality, and that it is therefore fitting and proper to commemorate the centennial of the historic Emancipation Proclamation throughout the year 1963.

  White advised Salinger of staff opinion that “not to issue some statement would be regarded as a minor disaster.”

  In Washington, the civil rights cabal gathered in Berl Bernhard’s office to discuss the reservations filtering back from Palm Beach. Those closer to the President were saying that something so historic as a Second Emancipation Proclamation was impossible to do halfway. Far better to do nothing at all, they said, especially since public expectations of Civil War commemoratives were practically nonexistent. Facing this reasoning, the advisers in Bernhard’s office groped for an idea that would salvage something from their year’s efforts, knowing that O’Donnell and the others with the President felt some residual sense of obligation. They trotted out and discarded many ideas before Louis Martin began musing that the key was to think of something that made President Kennedy feel that he was taking advantage of his personal strengths. In Martin’s view, these were social more than political. Shackled to the Southern Democrats, President Kennedy shrank from the political implications of the draft proclamation. On the other hand, he and Mrs. Kennedy felt completely relaxed at social gatherings of Negroes. Here the contrast between Kennedy and his predecessor, Eisenhower, was stark. In no other aspect relating to race did he compare more favorably, Martin argued. They should think of something like a White House reception for Negro dignitaries.