Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  The mention of executive orders only deepened King’s disappointment, because he knew that President Kennedy was implicitly rejecting any Lincolnesque proclamation against segregation laws. The last symbolic chance for that historic step had just passed by, and the Administration was preparing instead for Louis Martin’s White House reception on Lincoln’s Birthday. Martin and his allies sent a thousand invitations to a large cross-section of the Negro elite. President Nabrit of Howard University would be there among the college presidents, and J. H. Jackson atop the preachers. The list included Langston Hughes among the surviving literati of the Harlem Renaissance. In his enthusiasm, Martin was boasting that President Kennedy would host on one evening more Negro guests than had assembled in the cumulative history of the White House.

  At the same time, the White House strictly reserved all press announcements to itself. The gala event was being planned deliberately to maximize the personal flattery of the Negro guests while minimizing the political exposure everywhere else, especially among whites. Most of the guests did not begrudge the public relations. They saw their invitations as both a personal and political boon—an evening in Camelot to mark a confidential alliance with Kennedy. The Negro press throttled its boosterism to downplay the event, and even the chatty Jet magazine scolded nightclub celebrity Dick Gregory for trying to take professional advantage of his invitation: “Baby, you don’t send out advance publicity on meeting President Kennedy when you’re a social guest.”

  Only a half-dozen years earlier, King had connived artfully to get himself invited to the Eisenhower White House, and his subsequent speeches revealed an acute hunger for swirling gowns and royal palaces. Now he was among the very few who harbored doubts about going to the White House at all. Still undecided on February 4, he and Walker drove down to the country wilderness of “Terrible” Terrell County to speak at groundbreaking ceremonies for the reconstruction of one of the churches burned down the previous summer. From south Georgia, King flew to New York to address the American Jewish Congress. This was an important speech for him, because Stanley Levison had helped make the AJC a leading supporter in the Sullivan libel case. The U.S. Supreme Court had just accepted for review the $500,000 state verdict—the first of several punishments administered along with King’s perjury indictment at the dawn of the 1960 sit-ins—and the Court’s pending action brought Sullivan to widespread attention among constitutional scholars for its potential impact on First Amendment law.

  While huddling with Levison before the AJC fund-raiser, King decided to boycott Kennedy’s Lincoln’s Birthday reception. His rejection coincided with a last-minute change that made the affair all but irresistible by Washington standards. Letitia Baldrige, Kennedy’s social secretary, was notifying guests that they were to report not to the East Gate for the reception itself, as their invitations instructed, but to the Southwest Gate so that they first could be “specially presented” to President and Mrs. Kennedy in the intimacy of the upstairs living quarters at the White House. King sent his regrets in a polite but disingenuous telegram. It was true that Coretta was “expecting our fourth child” and that King had a speech to make “out of the country.” But the baby was not due for nearly two months, and King’s important-sounding overseas speech was merely the pretext for his escape. After preaching for Adam Clayton Powell in New York and speaking at several fund-raisers, he flew off for a vacation in Jamaica.

  He became a brooding, pensive man as he contemplated the leap ahead. In speeches before Birmingham, King returned to some of the formative influences on his beliefs, as though seeking reassurance. From Harry Emerson Fosdick, the surviving founder of Rockefeller’s Riverside Church, he cited the distinction between enforceable and unforceable obligations: “Man-made laws assure justice, but a higher law produces love. No code of conduct ever compelled a father to love his children.” He quoted Frederick Douglass and Martin Buber. On the necessity of religious and psychological freedom for the human character, he referred to Tillich: “Man is man because he is free.” On the social and religious imperatives of freedom, he marshaled Kant’s categorical imperative and then added a dictum of his own: “Two segregated souls never meet in God.” He quoted St. Augustine’s warning: “Those that sit at rest while others take pains are tender turtles, and buy their quiet with disgrace.” In handwritten additions to his standard speeches, King begged the churches to abandon their silence during the crisis of freedom, so as to save themselves from “what Reinhold Niebuhr has recently called the ‘sin of triviality.’”

  King’s irritation with the established church had been percolating for months. At a historic Chicago conference on religion and race, just after the Dorchester strategy session, he informed eight hundred distinguished clergymen that “noble pronouncements filter down too slowly.” He called for preachers willing to sacrifice, saying, “We are gravely mistaken if we think that religion protects us from the pain and agony of mortal existence.” This was his message to the entire clergy, high and low, black and white. He preached it to the liberal white clergy in Chicago, and he preached it with blunt anger to his congregation back home at Ebenezer. “I’m sick and tired of seeing Negro preachers riding around in big cars and living in big houses and not concerned about the problems of the people who made it possible for them to get these things,” he said from his pulpit. “It seems that I can hear the almighty God say, ‘Stop preaching your loud sermons and whooping your irrelevant mess in my face, for your hands are full of tar. For the people that I sent you to serve are in need, and you are doing nothing but being concerned about yourself.’ Seems that I can hear God saying that it’s time to rise up now and make it clear that the evils of the universe must be removed. And that God isn’t going to do all of it by himself. The church that overlooks this is a dangerously irrelevant church.”

  These internal tempests went with King to Jamaica, where Wyatt Walker had taught him to play golf only a couple of years earlier. After the Freedom Rides, King began to criticize golf as too bourgeois, too frivolous, and Walker, who cultivated the banker’s habit of saying that Wednesday afternoon was his “golf day,” kept up a running argument about whether King was letting the movement interfere too much with his private life. Increasingly preoccupied, King welcomed the escape to Jamaica, but urgent distractions followed him across the water. Dooto Records of Los Angeles, whose recordings of Redd Foxx and other comedians had made it the first nationwide, Negro-owned recording company, was selling a pirated album of King’s speeches. King feared that filing a lawsuit would make him look greedy and also poison his chances of gaining a contract with Dooto, but Walker convinced him that he had no choice if he wanted to protect his capacity to earn money for the movement. King decided to sue for $200,000, pledging any proceeds to the SCLC. Then from Fifth Avenue in New York came an elegant letter from Stephen Currier, telling King that his Taconic Foundation was “reviewing our major commitments,” such as its grants to the VEP and the citizenship school at Dorchester. Currier invited King to join the Taconic trustees and other selected philanthropists for a round-table “evaluation of Negro gains up to the present…together with an equally well-informed and sophisticated discussion of what can be anticipated in the foreseeable future.” King did not enjoy the role of supplicant, but he had to endure the vagaries of money managers—whether they played as loosely as Dooto or as stiffly as the Taconic trustees.

  On February 8, while King was in Jamaica, J. Walter Yeagley, Robert Kennedy’s assistant in charge of the Internal Security Division, startled J. Edgar Hoover with a memorandum stating that Internal Security wished to consider criminal prosecution of Stanley Levison as a member of a subversive organization. This was an extraordinary suggestion, as the Justice Department long since had severely restricted “membership” prosecutions on constitutional grounds. Smith Act cases, which had made Herbert (“I Led Three Lives”) Philbrick nationally famous as an FBI informant in the Communist show trials of the late 1940s, had been nearly extinct since 1956, when At
torney General Herbert Brownell ruled that the department would decline to seek indictment without evidence that the target was acting upon “an actual plan for a violent revolution.” Under the McCarran Act of 1950, the department generally authorized prosecution only of those who failed to register as national officers of the Communist Party. Although Levison met neither of these standards, even by the FBI’s description of him, Yeagley was declaring in effect that if he was as dangerous a Communist operative as Hoover kept saying in his classified bulletins, then the Justice Department was prepared to waive the restrictions. It would be worth the political heat to put Levison out of business, if not in prison, by indictment and trial. In his memorandum, Yeagley asked Hoover for a “current prosecutive summary report.”

  In the FBI, notwithstanding that Hoover and DeLoach had all but formally declared war on King in January, Yeagley’s resolve was far from welcome. It meant that the Bureau would have to corroborate its allegations against Levison. Alternatively, admitting that the allegations came only from the Childs brothers, Hoover would have to make his prized informants available for cross-examination in court. Neither prospect was attractive, as Hoover much preferred the license of political intelligence to the rigors and risks of law enforcement. Hoping to find another way, he ordered agents from the New York office to seek other Communist informants who might testify against Levison. Scrambling, the agents interviewed their best fourteen informants, only to find that not a single one recognized Levison’s name or photograph. They told Hoover it was useless. As a last hope, Hoover directed Rhode Island agents to interview Louis Budenz, a contemporary with Morris Childs at the Daily Worker in the 1940s, who, along with Philbrick, had been a star witness in the most prominent Smith Act trial. Budenz did not know Levison either.

  Once again Hoover used the spy’s escape hatch: the reason for the absence of corroborating evidence was precisely that Levison’s work was secret even among Communist functionaries. On February 12, the day of President Kennedy’s Lincoln’s Birthday reception, Hoover wrote Yeagley that the FBI could furnish no “prosecutive summary” on Levison, because the information came from “a highly sensitive source who is not available for interview or testimony.” This was the last, naked bluff. Yeagley’s choice was to blink or protest bluntly that the emperor wore no clothes, and, faced with the authority of J. Edgar Hoover himself, he blinked. The Levison-King investigation remained in the confines of political intelligence, where Hoover wanted it. Shortly thereafter, the Bureau’s internal report on the unsuccessful effort at corroboration was filed away, marked DO NOT DISSEMINATE.

  At the White House, the Kennedys’ party was going well until the President spotted Sammy Davis, Jr., among the guests milling around the upstairs living quarters. Kennedy was aghast—“absolutely feathered,” as his aide Lee White put it a year later. He had nothing against Davis personally, and in fact had socialized with him in the company of Frank Sinatra and Peter Lawford. But that was in California. What galvanized the President now was the fact that Davis, as half of the most famous interracial couple in the United States, was sure to draw the concentrated attention of the press corps photographers waiting downstairs. Kennedy feared that shots of him with the Davises would make deadly smear material in a close campaign. Moreover, as a gifted observer of the press, he sensed that White House photos of Sammy Davis would draw enough press interest to break through Pierre Salinger’s carefully planned media snooze on the reception.

  Kennedy snatched his aides into various side rooms and closets, demanding to know how Sammy Davis got through the gates. None of the aides, including Louis Martin, owned up to the knowledge that Martin himself had tenaciously reinserted Davis’ name on the clearance list every time it disappeared. Everyone shrugged dumbly over the mysteries of bureaucracy, until the President calmed down to address the practical question of how to keep Davis out of the photographs without provoking his anger or the press’s interest. They debated the problem furtively while Kennedy continued to greet the guests. One strategy called for Mrs. Kennedy to draw Davis aside for some private discussion just as the photographers were admitted. Shortly after Mrs. Kennedy was given instructions, however, panicky word spread that the plan offended her as an insult to White House manners, or to Davis, or to Mrs. Davis—the aides were not sure which. In any case, the First Lady was refusing to come downstairs for the reception. President Kennedy himself had to patch that up before the operation could proceed.

  For Lee White, Louis Martin, and other Kennedy assistants, the President’s anger over the Davis presence produced an unforgettable jolt, but the evening went off smoothly on the surface. Sammy Davis’ face went unrecorded. At Lincoln’s Birthday celebrations all around the country, Republicans had to do without the best-known Negro speakers—a collateral, partisan benefit of the White House evening that did not go unappreciated. Salinger’s press office managed to cast the reception as a minor event in President Kennedy’s day, subsidiary to his receiving a Lincoln centennial report from the Civil Rights Commission. Salinger led the reporters to focus on the less threatening aspects of the report, such as the overcrowding of Negro students in urban schools. The New York Times account, headed “Civil Rights Fight Shifting to North,” noted the reception in passing as a gathering of “civil rights leaders and Government officials,” and of the guests mentioned only Vice President Johnson by name. To Louis Martin, such dissembling was the price of crashing the White House social barrier against Negroes. Hints of recognition escaped the privacy of Negro society—Newsweek called the casual acceptance of the reception a “milestone” in itself—but even as a secret, Martin prized the historic accomplishment of securing admission for an entire generation of leadership. He went off to recuperate in Miami about the time King returned from Jamaica.

  Those who joined King in boycotting President Kennedy’s party were few but highly significant. A. Philip Randolph and Clarence Mitchell refused to come, and each was more explicit than King in letting it be known that he did so in protest of Kennedy’s timidity. Randolph’s impatience was such that for months he had been talking with Bayard Rustin about reviving his 1942 plans for a march on Washington, with which he had bluffed President Roosevelt into integrating the nation’s war industries. Mitchell, the NAACP’s chief lobbyist in Washington, stayed home because Kennedy had given him nothing to lobby for in Congress. He regarded the New Frontier much less favorably than did his old colleague Roy Wilkins—so much so that there were rumors of a feud between them. For months, Mitchell had been dropping veiled warnings that the NAACP might do well to defect to the Republicans. He argued that the Republicans in Congress already had introduced bills to attack segregation, job discrimination, and voter intimidation—acting on all the promises made by both political parties in 1960.

  Late in February, President Kennedy reacted to the warnings of revolt by introducing a voting rights bill. His decision came so unexpectedly that Lee White and others stayed up all night drafting the legislation. The bill, hustled up to Congress with a written message, attracted modest applause at best. Liberal Republicans said their legislation was much better. Disappointed civil rights leaders suggested that it was a narrow and limited afterthought, albeit a worthy one. Even those who had basked in the glow of the Lincoln’s Birthday reception could not bring themselves to praise the initiative with much enthusiasm. President Kennedy, bound by his own inclinations and by the Southerners of his party, had worked himself into a corner where on all sides he received less criticism for doing nothing substantive in civil rights than for doing a little bit.

  Governor Rockefeller seized the moment to attack Kennedy’s civil rights record. At an NAACP rally in upstate New York, he proclaimed what Clarence Mitchell had been saying in private. Trenchantly, Rockefeller attacked Kennedy’s much-publicized plan to make racial progress through presidential appointments, charging that the President’s most critical appointments had been four Southern judges of well-known segregationist views. This pointed attack by a leadin
g presidential rival for 1964 stimulated the only civil rights question at Kennedy’s next press conference. The President replied by commending his four judges for “a remarkable job in fulfilling their oaths of office.” He compared them favorably with Eisenhower’s appointments in the South, then moved on to a question about the Cuban missile crisis.

  The next day, Kennedy called Nicholas Katzenbach at the Justice Department. “Is it real bad?” he asked, putting Katzenbach in an awkward spot. On one hand, Katzenbach knew full well that Rockefeller’s attack actually had understated the Republican case against the Kennedy judges. The best civil rights judges in the South, and indeed the department’s only hopes for racial justice through the courts, were Eisenhower appointees; the most egregious segregationists were Kennedy’s, and they were more than four in number. On the other hand, Katzenbach was a subordinate officer whose boss, the President of the United States—who was probably staring at the front page of the morning New York Times, where his “remarkable job” quotation was splashed alongside unsavory descriptions of the judges—wanted reassurance that the dangerous Nelson Rockefeller had not made a fool of him. Katzenbach waffled, saying that one Kennedy appointment “hasn’t been impossible.” Bravely he forced out some of the worst news—that Judge Cox of Mississippi “has not been good”—but when the President almost plaintively remarked that “our other appointments have, uh, uh, have done pretty well,” and then waited for a comment, Katzenbach turned bitter truth to sweetness. “I don’t think we have anything to be embarrassed about on that,” he said.

  This controversy over the Kennedy judges flared up in the beginning of March 1963. King preached at Ebenezer those first two Sundays. There was always a private, cocoon-like quality to his sermons before the home congregation. Now, having disappeared from public sight to purify himself for Birmingham, his tone was even more self-absorbed than usual. He preached on his lifelong preoccupation with the nature of evil in the world, using as his standard text the story from Matthew 17 about the disciples who were shaken because they could not exorcise the evil spirit from a madman. “Why could we not cast him out?” they asked.