Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  In his sermon, King replied that evil was beyond the responsibility of God as well as beyond the reach of man. He ridiculed as hypocrites those who supinely left the cause of righteousness to supernatural beings. These were the “big Negro preachers” in Cadillacs and all the timid souls of false piety who allowed comfort or habit to subvert the demands of conscience. Hammering on his theme, King showed the passion that was driving him into Birmingham, but related passions were just as strong. They could not cast the demon out, he told the congregation, because evil was too deeply rooted in human character. No human faculty, known or unknown, developed or undeveloped, could touch it—not the liberal reason of a dozen Enlightenments, nor all the wildest dreams of scientific progress fulfilled. “The humanist hope is an illusion,” King said.

  Then, to illustrate his point, he did not turn outward to the usual depravities of slavery, the Holocaust, or the atomic bomb. Instead, he invited the congregation to look inward with him at addictions that seemed simple at first but then grew slowly more tenacious until finally, overcoming all goodwill, they emerged almost innocently as invincible evil—alien, yet human as a toothache. “Many of you here know something of what it is to struggle with sin”:

  Year by year you became aware of the terrible sin that was taking possession of your life. It may have been slavery to drink, un-truthfulness, the impurity of selfishness or sexual promiscuity. And as the years unfolded the vice grew bolder and bolder. You knew all along that it was an unnatural intrusion. Never could you adjust to the fact. You knew all along that it was wrong and that it had invaded your life as an unnatural intruder. You said to yourself, “One day I’m going to rise up and drive this evil out. I know it is wrong. It is destroying my character and embarrassing my family.” At last the day came and you made a New Year’s resolution that would get rid of the whole base evil. And then the next year came around and you were doing the same old evil thing. Can you remember the surprise and disappointment that gripped you when you discovered that after all of your sincere effort—you discovered that after all that you had done through your resolutions to get rid of it—the old habit was still there? And out of amazement you found yourself asking, “Why could I not cast it out?” And in this moment of despair you decided to take your problem to God…You discovered that the evil was still with you. God would not cast it out.

  King expressed another passion all too real—an empathy with evil that became relentless self-abasement, a cry for penance. Low and leveling, yielding to no one in keenness of feeling, this raging humility collided with high righteousness to produce a synthetic passion that was uniquely King’s.

  On one level, he resolved the conflict simply for the congregation. Neither God nor human beings would transform human nature alone; human beings must allow God to attack evil through them. “This is the only way to be delivered from the accumulated weight of evil,” he said. “It can only be done when we allow the energy of God to be let loose in our souls. May we go out today big in faith.” From there he began to fashion a closing based on the conventional theology of mankind’s need to invite partnership with the divine. The humblest Ebenezer member could understand it, and the most devout fundamentalist could not object to the conclusion. Still, most members knew that this was no ordinary Baptist sermon. King’s fiery attacks on the Cadillac preachers carried a frightening promise of true controversy; his meditations on evil conveyed authentic despair.

  The examples of hope that King rolled out came not from the struggles of everyday life but from the pantheon of immortals. He spoke of “Simon of Sand” converted into “Peter of Rock,” of “persecuting Saul into an Apostle Paul,” and of “the lust-infested Augustine into a Saint Augustine.” He quoted Tolstoy’s claim of utter transformation: “‘What was good and bad changed places…The things I used to do, I don’t do them now. The places I used to go, I don’t go there now. The thoughts I used to think, I don’t think them now.’” King referred to legendary sinners who had redirected the torment of their inner confessions to produce historical miracles. The evidence of their conversions was a changed world. As King himself contemplated a historical miracle in Birmingham, his sermons revealed a turbulent conflict over the relationship between the public and private person. Perhaps it was possible by extraordinary feats and sacrifices for the public man to redeem the private man. Perhaps it was possible for private demons not only to drive the public man but also to help him—to leaven his hubris, allow him to see opponents instead of enemies. If King felt fury, it was not against Bull Connor or the most virulent of racists, as there were more unfathomable sins than theirs, but against the aloof moderates and blind pietists who refused to see that King was offering them a way out of a maddeningly obvious and relatively easy evil—the sins against brotherhood.

  Here was direction for King, but not comfort or clarity. It was never comfortable for a man who spoke all his life of consuming guilt to be held up as a public saint. And his course made a paradox of King’s fundamental conception of evil. In the manner of the nineteenth-century dialecticians, King seemed to be turning Reinhold Niebuhr on his head: the evil within individual people was more intractable than the injustices of society, not less. If a sinner like King could produce a miracle of public morality in Birmingham, what became of Moral Man and Immoral Society? What then became of Niebuhr’s theology? Worshippers at Ebenezer often saw through such muddles. When King seemed depressed and out of sorts, they came out of his sermons shaking their heads over his powerful rumblings, remarking that he was a “God-troubled” man, surely on the verge of shaking up the white man’s world.

  After his sermon on evil, King hurried to preach that same day in Birmingham for Shuttlesworth’s chief assistant in the ACMHR, Rev. Nelson “Fireball” Smith. Birmingham’s special election fell on Tuesday of that week. By Wyatt Walker’s original plans for Project C, the demonstrations were to have commenced the following day, March 6, but complaints from Birmingham Negroes already had forced a postponement until March 14. The idea was that they needed at least a week or two after the election to prepare for the campaign, and also to find out whether the election produced a more favorable political climate in Birmingham. The compromise target of March 14 left exactly one month in what Walker called the “prime shopping season” before Easter, during which the combination of an economic boycott and escalating demonstrations would have the maximum chance to break segregation in the city.

  No clear winner emerged from the March 5 election, however, and a runoff between Bull Connor and Albert Boutwell was scheduled for April 2. With the limbo in Birmingham politics thus extended for another four weeks, the arguments for delay resurfaced within the King-Shuttles-worth alliance. All Birmingham was alive to the fateful choice on whether or not to end the Bull Connor era. Connor, by making himself the chief obstacle to the Chamber of Commerce as well as the civil rights movement, had united the downtrodden with the elite. Inside the unlikely, unspoken coalition against him—Negroes, labor unions, white newspapers, reformers, and image-conscious businessmen such as Sidney Smyer—everyone was compulsively on his best behavior. By their reckoning, the spring of 1963 suddenly became the worst possible time to launch racial demonstrations in Birmingham. A. G. Gaston strenuously opposed the campaign. Rev. J. L. Ware, president of the Baptist Ministers’ Alliance, almost broke public silence on King’s plans with near passage of a resolution that warned King to stay out of the city. Private opinion among Negro leaders ran so strongly that even Shuttlesworth—who normally belittled the difference between the runoff candidates, calling Bout-well merely a “dignified Connor”—hesitated to leap in against the tide. After all, he was in exile from Birmingham, living in Cincinnati.

  James Lawson was prominent among the few who argued against postponement. Since the January retreat at Dorchester, he had been making periodic forays into Birmingham from his church in Memphis, conducting workshops in nonviolent methods for members of Shuttlesworth’s ACMHR. Lawson’s job was to train the foot so
ldiers for Project C, as he had trained those for the prolonged campaigns against segregation in Nashville and other cities. Meeting in church basements and private homes, often introduced by Wyatt Walker, Lawson had been recruiting, teaching, proselytizing for nonviolence. His goal was to find as many volunteers as possible who were willing to endure ten days in the Birmingham jail. If their initial inspiration survived the practice tests staged in the workshops, they signed the nonviolence pledge cards Lawson had designed. By March, Walker had some two hundred cards in his “jail file,” and Lawson opposed postponement on the grounds that these two hundred people—not the whims of Birmingham politics—should guide decisions. Their readiness and their morale were what mattered.

  Walker heard people quoting his earlier exhortations on the vital importance of the Easter shopping season. But, since they now had to wait until after the April 2 runoff, they said, and since there wouldn’t be enough time after that to build a good campaign before Easter, and since Birmingham’s Negroes then would have spent all their money and therefore would not be able to boycott effectively until the Christmas shopping season, perhaps they should postpone until the end of 1963. The drift of such comments drove home Lawson’s point that all these professed practicalities were nothing more than an outward sign of the fears that inhibited any mass protest. There was always good reason to postpone. But the stark realities of Birmingham so concentrated these inhibitions that they threatened to strip away the support of local Negro leaders, and this was a loss that King could not ignore. While he granted Lawson’s point that it would be twice as difficult to re-recruit jailgoers after a long postponement, he also saw that recriminations were bubbling up with the arguments for postponement. Preachers were letting loose their resentments against Shuttlesworth, calling him an absentee autocrat. Even John Porter, King’s protégé and former assistant pastor at Dexter Avenue, whom King had just installed personally in a Birmingham pulpit, was holding back from Project C. He said Shuttlesworth was an unstable dictator.

  They teetered back and forth between the urge to go ahead and the pressure to postpone. On Saturday, March 9, the FBI monitors picked up an extremely guarded phone conversation between Jack O’Dell and Stanley Levison, in which Levison asked whether the campaign “in the unnamed city” was still scheduled as planned. O’Dell replied that it was. The next day, however, King himself told Levison that he had decided to “postpone that thing until the day after the election, because Bull Connor is in the runoff, and we feel that if we make a move before that time, he could use that to his advantage.” Another factor holding him back, King confessed to Levison, was his assumption that Birmingham whites would “do everything they can to destroy the image of the SCLC.” He mentioned specifically the Birmingham News and its published accusations that King employed Communist subversives such as O’Dell.

  This intercepted conversation was the FBI’s first notice that King was contemplating a new campaign, and the Bureau circulated an internal appeal for information on “King’s purpose in going to Birmingham.” Meanwhile, at Ebenezer that Sunday, King preached his own version of Vernon Johns’s “Segregation After Death” sermon on the parable of Lazarus and Dives. He did not go to Birmingham the next day for the regular mass meeting, but Shuttlesworth flew in from Cincinnati. Despite the runoff and despite King’s wishes, the idea of an immediate launch was still alive in his mind. That night’s meeting revealed a mixture of anticipation and coyness. “There will be no nigger any more,” one speaker promised. “It will be mister nigger.” Shuttlesworth, without disclosing any details to Connor’s detectives in the audience, told the crowd that Attorney General Kennedy would protect them in the dangers ahead. The next day, Wyatt Walker and the Birmingham leaders continued to debate the wisdom of postponement, and not until that Friday did Shuttlesworth finally concur in the delay, which ran against his entire persona—his promises, famed bravado, and grand assurances of control over Birmingham’s Negro preachers. His letter to King and Walker masked concessions to nerves or adversity behind a thick screen of vagueness.

  The extent of King’s commitment was sinking in: he must change Birmingham, for otherwise Birmingham’s past would be his future, in which case he was finished. To meet this challenge, he now seemed to have less than minimal support, plus a run of bad luck and more internal problems than usual. Various factions of lawyers were squabbling over the anticipated legal cases for Project C, and one disgruntled former staff member, who quit upon being chastised for unauthorized use of SCLC travel expenses, was making nasty public charges that King had “sold out to Governor Rockefeller” for personal gain. In short, nothing was falling easily into place, and all these deficiencies put King so much on edge that he spent the last two weeks of March exploring a backup amendment to the plan: if all else failed in Birmingham and the movement’s momentum collapsed, he would appeal to outsiders to pour into Birmingham to help fill the jails. King felt the need for such a contingency force so strongly that he went as far away as Washington, D.C., asking trusted friends to recruit secret cadres of volunteers. Walter Fauntroy, Walker’s old seminary friend, accepted the assignment. His reports on a growing list of reserves in the capital soon established him in King’s mind as a figure of comfort.

  From Washington, King flew home to Atlanta on March 27, just in time to take Coretta to the hospital for the birth of their fourth child, Bernice Albertine—the one conceived in Albany. He paused long enough to pose with the mother and infant for a photographer from Jet, then slipped back into Birmingham on March 29. From there he flew to New York City on the thirty-first. The secret meeting was partly Harry Belafonte’s idea and partly Levison’s. Noting King’s habit of running to his Northern supporters in the midst of a crisis, they suggested that it might be wiser for King to take these supporters into his confidence by giving them advance notice of Project C. That way King would look more organized, and the supporters, feeling more a part of the drama, might respond more readily to appeals for help. Wyatt Walker, who stayed behind in Birmingham, belittled the plan as a “stroking session” for the celebrities, “a little razzmatazz,” but King was sparing no courtesy. With Shuttlesworth, Abernathy, Levison, and Clarence Jones, he pushed his way into Belafonte’s jammed apartment past actors Anthony Quinn and Fredric March, past William and Lotte Kunstler, Governor Rockefeller’s press man Hugh Morrow, James Wechsler of the New York Post and some seventy other reporters, dignitaries, friends, and strangers—all sworn to secrecy. King functioned well for his own speech that evening, but during Shuttlesworth’s emotional description of the dangers before them in Birmingham his head jerked ever so slightly. Belafonte thought it was a nervous tic brought on by tension. He had not seen such physical signs of stress in King before.

  It was not until almost morning, when everyone except Abernathy had gone home, that King began to relax. Julie Belafonte brought out his personal bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream. Ever since she had introduced him to the sherry, King had kept up a running joke about how much he savored the nightcap of the most elegant New Yorkers. Whenever he came to the Belafonte home, he made a great show of inspecting the bottle to make sure that the sherry had not fallen below the line he had marked carefully on the label at the end of his last visit. That night, sipping his Harvey’s, he conquered Birmingham by teasing his comrade. “Let me be sure to get arrested with people who don’t snore,” he intoned, eyeing Abernathy.

  Abernathy protested vehemently that he did no such thing.

  King’s eyes went wide with delight. “You are torture,” he declared. “White folks ain’t invented anything that can get to me like you do. Anything they want me to admit to, I will, if they’ll just get you and your snoring out of my cell.”

  He and Abernathy guffawed and pantomimed until sleep came, as they had done back in Montgomery. Then they flew back to Atlanta, where waiting for King was a notice that all tickets for the newly integrated Metropolitan Opera tour in Atlanta were sold out. He brought Coretta and the baby home from th
e hospital on Tuesday, April 2, and left that same afternoon for Birmingham. Slipping into a city whose attention was riveted on the ballot-counting from that day’s runoff election, King went unnoticed to the Gaston Motel to find Wyatt Walker waiting with his clipboard and all his lists—the jail list, the phone volunteer list, the transportation committee list, the food list, the mail-room list, plus his layout charts of the targeted downtown lunch counters and his street maps of the best routes to get there. To the second, Walker knew precisely how much longer it would take the average old person to walk to McCrory’s for a sit-in than the average teenager, but all his mountain of lists and calculations seemed pitifully small next to the core identity of an American city. In the end, Project C was no social science formula, approximation of political risks, or rational exercise of any kind, not even one touched by genius. It was a cold plunge.

  NINETEEN

  GREENWOOD AND BIRMINGHAM JAIL

  A transit strike made Birmingham quieter than usual on Wednesday, April 3, or “B-Day,” as Walker mobilized his telephone list to call his jail list—350 by his count, 250 by King’s later memory—and of these, some sixty-five showed up to fulfill their pledge. In the basement of A. D. King’s church, Walker briefed them like an air commander before a bombing mission, with the logistics sketched out on a blackboard. King and James Lawson followed with a final reprise on the philosophy of nonviolence. Then they set off to meet Shuttlesworth at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which sat just across Kelly Ingram Park from King’s headquarters at the Gaston Motel. Shuttlesworth already had dispatched two of his sturdiest ACMHR officers to ask for a demonstration permit, face to face with Bull Connor himself, and they reported that Connor had thrown them out of his office, roaring, “I will picket you over to the City Jail!” Shuttlesworth himself distributed copies of his “Birmingham Manifesto” to reporters. “The patience of an oppressed people cannot endure forever,” it began. “…The absence of justice and progress in Birmingham demands that we make a moral witness to give our community a chance to survive.”