Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  This first glimpse of him announced that he would go to jail, which hushed the room. “I don’t know what will happen,” he said. “I don’t know where the money will come from. But I have to make a faith act.”

  He turned to Abernathy, who, despite his speeches about going to jail for Easter, still planned to be home at West Hunter for the most important event of the church calendar. He had been grumbling privately that it was easier for King to arrange for Easter services in his absence than it was for him, as Abernathy was alone at West Hunter whereas King had his father as an ever-present stand-in. What kind of preacher would be available to substitute for Abernathy on two days’ notice at Easter? King fell upon these excuses with the weight of an open request. “I know you want to be in your pulpit on Easter Sunday, Ralph,” he said. “But I am asking you to go with me.”

  Abernathy did not reply, leading Daddy King to interpret the impasse as a sign that the decision was not yet final. He spoke up once again to recommend that his son not violate the injunction “at this time.” Exposed and plainly waffling, he covered himself by adding that he supposed King would do what he wanted to do, anyway.

  King replied firmly that he had to march. “If we obey this injunction, we are out of business,” he said.

  Daddy King sagged visibly and shifted in his seat, as though pawing the floor. “Well, you didn’t get this nonviolence from me,” he said. “You must have got it from your Mama.”

  “I have to go,” King repeated softly. “I am going to march if I have to march by myself.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Abernathy, rising to his feet. “Let me see if I can get in touch with my deacons, because I’m gonna spend Easter in the Birmingham jail.”

  Abernathy’s commitment put the gathering to silence. With nothing left to say, they sang “We Shall Overcome” and filed out to a multitude of tasks, leaving Daddy King alone in Room 30.

  For Wyatt Walker, one serendipitous discovery stood out among the strategic disappointments of the campaign: he learned that newspaper estimates of the numbers involved in demonstrations tended to lump together all Negroes near the scene. In effect, the reporters gave the movement credit for bystanders as well as marchers and picketers. This trait of the news business overjoyed Walker, all the more so because it made a virtue of the movement’s customary tardiness. A corollary rule of his media strategy held that the later an event dragged behind schedule, the more onlookers would gather.

  The rule worked to perfection on Good Friday. When King and Abernathy finally stepped off from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church nearly three hours after the announced starting time for the march, they led only about forty jailgoers, as emotion-drenched exhortations had failed to persuade more to join. But midday crowds of Negroes built up along the expected route, talking excitedly about whether it was true that King would face Bull Connor. The long-awaited first sight of King touched off shouts of celebration and encouragement, which grew louder as the marchers pushed their way down the sidewalks for several blocks. By the time the line ran up against the police blockade, reported the next morning’s New York Times, “more than a thousand shouting, singing Negroes had joined in the demonstration.” When King made an unexpected turn, the police scrambled in a wild blur of U-turns by motorcycles and squad cars, with reporters and white pedestrians in hot pursuit. With the police line re-formed across King’s path on Fifth Avenue, the pageantry of confrontation played out abruptly. Giving no warning, a detective seized King by the back of his belt, lifted him to his toes, and shoved him toward a paddy wagon. A motorcycle officer pushed Abernathy in the same direction, grabbing a handful of his shirt. Photographers snapped their shutters in a clicking chorus. Negro bystanders, shouting out in rage or prayer at the sight of the arrests, melted in so closely among the marchers that the officers were not sure which ones to arrest. Stragglers and spontaneous protesters wound up among the fifty-two people who landed in jail behind King and Abernathy. Bull Connor told reporters that King was getting what he wanted.

  Connor had different ideas than Laurie Pritchett about special jail-house treatment for King. There were no newspaper subscriptions or silk pajamas in Birmingham, where the jailers singled him out instead for isolation. After lock-up, they separated him from everyone else and refused his requests to make phone calls or talk with his lawyers. King disappeared into solitary confinement, “the hole,” sealed off from his fellow prisoners and the outside world alike. Silence made the tumult of his arrest fade into memory, and a man accustomed to an intense bombardment of news and emotion passed over into a vacuum where day and night were indistinct. The only clues he had about the continuing crisis of the Birmingham movement were those he imagined filtering in with the stripes of light above the door of his cell.

  Other events of hidden significance occurred elsewhere that day. In Rome, Pope John XXIII interrupted a Good Friday service at St. Peter’s to order that a reference to “perfidious Jews” be stricken from the liturgy. The Pope had issued his visionary encyclical Pacem in Terris only the day before. Of late he had been acting boldly—almost recklessly, some said—battling to put ecumenical reforms through the hidebound Vatican bureaucracy before cancer killed him.

  In Columbus, Georgia, a jury took less than ninety minutes to clear Sheriff L. Warren Johnson of civil liability for having beaten and shot Charlie Ware in 1961, while Ware was a prisoner in the sheriff’s car. The swift acquittal shocked Ware’s lawyer, C. B. King, who believed that the case against Johnson was impregnable, even to an all-white jury. He asked for a poll of the jurors, and when Carl Smith stood up in the jury box to confirm the verdict, he attracted the special attention of several Negroes who had driven up from Albany for the five-day trial. Smith was the proprietor of one of the three white-owned grocery stores in Harlem, the Negro section of Albany, all of which the Albany Movement had been picketing for their refusal to hire Negro clerks and cashiers. Now he declared under oath that Sheriff Johnson had not deprived Charlie Ware of his civil rights or inflicted actionable injury upon him, and at that moment two separate streams of outrage converged.

  Students from the Albany Movement set up another Saturday picket line outside Carl Smith’s store eight days after the verdict. They carried their regular picket signs, urging Smith’s all-Negro clientele not to patronize a store that denied jobs to Negroes, and as usual they lasted only an hour before Laurie Pritchett’s police dispersed their line by making several arrests. Nevertheless, this brief effort was destined to become the most significant single picket line of the entire civil rights movement. It polarized racial politics, spreading far and wide to engage people who never heard of Charlie Ware or Carl Smith. Passions traceable to Smith’s service on the Ware jury nearly wrecked the great March on Washington the following August.

  B. C. Gardner set the white reaction in motion. On Smith’s behalf, he filed a civil suit against the leaders of the Albany Movement, charging that they had driven Smith out of business with an illegal boycott. In a parallel attack, Gardner contacted the local bar association, his FBI acquaintances, the trial judge, and Burke Marshall in Washington, alleging that the Negroes had obstructed justice by punishing Smith for his vote on the Ware v. Johnson jury. Suddenly the pattern was reversed—a white man was presented as the victim of criminal action by the civil rights movement—and law enforcement officials who had been stalling, bickering, or neutralizing each other now found themselves working in concert. Preliminary results landed on Attorney General Kennedy’s desk only ten days after the Saturday picket line. “In Albany, Georgia, we received complaints of an organized Negro boycott against a grocery store owned by a white man who had sat on a jury…” Burke Marshall wrote Kennedy. “It appears that the matter will be presented to a grand jury, that indictments will be returned, and that one of the persons indicted will be Dr. W. G. Anderson, the leader of the Albany Movement.”

  More than thirty FBI agents were detailed to interview scores of Albany Negroes. Law enforcement officials at all leve
ls saw a chance to win, to settle personal or racial grudges, or to demonstrate the evenhandedness of the system. Their targets, however, saw the dragnet as proof that the entire federal system had sunk to the level of Baker County. Against Negroes, justice was a fast waterslide to jail; for Negroes, it was a tarpit of evasions.

  Charles Sherrod did not attend the trial in Columbus. That Good Friday, he took several of his most promising Albany students to Atlanta for SNCC’s fourth general conference. There he declared his determination to keep the Albany Movement going in spite of the letdown from the previous year’s mass demonstrations. To hang on through adversity and national obscurity, Sherrod pledged, “we are willing to pick cotton, scrub floors, wash cars and windows, babysit, etcetera, for food and lodging.”

  In the featured speech of the conference, Bob Moses gently prepared his audience for the decline of the Greenwood movement, remarking that “what you need is not five hundred but five thousand going down.” Then he began meandering into the self-critical abstractions by which he had thought through his own state of depression. They must seek universal suffrage, he said, beginning what became SNCC’s “One man/ one vote” campaign. In pushing for universal suffrage, they must acknowledge that they were

  asking all white people in the Delta to do something which they don’t ask of any white people any place…And that is to allow Negroes to vote in an area where they are educationally inferior but yet outnumber the white people and hence constitute a serious political threat. Because in every other area of the country, the Negro votes are ghettoized—the Negroes elect their leaders, but they don’t elect leaders to preside over what we could call a numerically inferior but educationally superior white elite. I don’t for one minute think that the country is in a position or is willing to push this down the throats of white people in the Delta, and it will have to be pushed down their throats because they are determined not to have it done.

  As Moses relentlessly pursued the difficulties of universal suffrage, the enemy no longer appeared to be ignorant rednecks so much as universal forces of politics, and the purpose of the civil rights movement not so much Christian enlightenment—teaching people to be charitable and fair—as political revolution. While Moses could not see how to achieve universal suffrage, neither could he back down from its necessity. To seek anything less, he said, was to exclude an enormous mass of Southern Negroes and to leave political relations largely intact, which meant that the movement would gain at most symbolic privileges. In a warning to SNCC’s advocates of direct action, and very likely with King’s Birmingham campaign in mind, Moses said, “I think we are in danger of fighting for some things” that would wind up helping only “the black bourgeoisie.”

  Stress and confusion erupted intermittently among the 350 students at the Atlanta conference. In some of the workshops, participants sang freedom songs of sunny optimism, while in others, shared stories of beatings, isolation, and fears built to cries of anguish and rebellion. Some students broke out of their nonviolent serenity by throwing chairs. One put his fist through a window. While many welcomed the idea that SNCC ought to be “challenging the political structure of the country,” as Forman put it, others mourned a loss of essential simplicity. In a confessional organization such as SNCC, students urged each other to dig deeper. What they found was that behind the shared vision of racial brotherhood, they were a diverse lot of saints, hustlers, intellectuals, and runaway farmers, who, cut loose from conventional moorings, had been tiptoeing around the gaping cultural and racial differences between them. Many of the leaders had come into the movement confident that their shining idealism could reorient the outside world, but now their own identities were in flux, too.

  Charles Sherrod walked out onto the grounds of the Gammon Theological Seminary and grabbed hold of a tree. Suddenly he hated the dark color of his arms. His kinky hair repulsed him, as did everything else about him, including the way words came out of his mouth. Shame ate him alive. Ashamed of his mother, he became again the waif who peeked into a white world of perfection and longed for his white ancestors. This very shame shamed him again, and then yet again when he thought of all the years he had been teaching young Negroes differently, mouthing the movement’s phrases about accepting yourself. Having sent trusting young Negroes to jail on convictions that now seemed to rest on fantasy and hypocrisy, Sherrod felt utterly unclean. When he recovered, he could only liken the ordeal to one of the graphic Old Testament conversions. He felt stronger for it, but never again did he talk so glibly about slipping into a new racial attitude.

  Summoned by King, James Bevel arrived from Greenwood just in time to preach at the Birmingham mass meeting on Friday night, April 12, a few hours after King went to jail. He said he had heard about Birmingham and Bull Connor all his life. Birmingham was sick, he said. Its white people were sick with blind hatred, and its Negroes were sick because they would not take the step to freedom. Bevel looked out over three hundred people, who seemed lost in the cavernous Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, and pronounced it a pitifully small crowd for so momentous a day. He pointed an accusing finger at the two white police detectives who were sitting in the audience with their tape-recording equipment. “The police can come to our meeting, bring their guns and their badges and little microphones to church,” Bevel declared, “but if you want to be free, there is nothing they can do about it.”

  The crowd stirred as Bevel began to preach with his usual abandon. Both races must stop worrying about their conveniences, he cried (“If God can feed the cockroach, he can feed the Negro”), and open their eyes to spiritual healing. It was easy to be whole, he declared. Freedom was there for the taking. Quoting the words of Jesus to the lame man at the pool of Bethesda (“Rise, take up thy bed, and walk!”), Bevel began a cascade of oratory. To heal themselves with freedom, he cried, all they had to do was walk—walk to the mass meetings, walk to the courthouse, walk to jail. On this theme he “worked himself and the congregation into such a frenzie [sic] that we were unable to understand what he was saying,” the police detectives later confessed to Bull Connor. The crowd understood. Bevel was a spiritual kamikaze, shaking them loose. “The Negro has been sitting here dead for three hundred years,” he declared. “It is time he got up and walked.”

  On Monday afternoon, King was overjoyed to see the handsome face of Clarence Jones at his cell door. Jones, hoping to ward off hostile treatment from the Birmingham jailers, was decked out in his finest New York lawyer clothes. He greeted King with the words he most wanted to hear: “Harry has been able to raise fifty thousand dollars for bail bonds.” And Belafonte had said he was good for more, for “whatever else you need.” King wrote later that these few words from Jones “lifted a thousand pounds from my heart.” They meant that those who wanted out of jail could get out, and that King could not now be second-guessed for going to jail instead of raising money.

  Jones also told King that Belafonte and Walker were organizing a phone and telegram campaign to pressure the Kennedy Administration to seek decent treatment for King in the jail. So far King remained isolated in his cell, allowed no phone calls. He had no mattress or linen, and was sleeping on metal slats. Hearing of these conditions from Wyatt Walker, Belafonte had called Robert Kennedy. As King knew, the Attorney General strongly opposed the entire Birmingham campaign, let alone King’s going to jail, and Kennedy had further reason to feel put upon because he knew that King could relieve his suffering at any time by posting bond and walking out of jail. Under these circumstances, Jones reported, Kennedy’s response to Belafonte had been testy, but leavened with humor. “Tell Reverend King we’re doing all we can,” Kennedy had told Belafonte, “but I’m not sure we can get into prison reform at this moment.”

  After Jones departed, the jailers led King out of his cell to the prisoners’ pay phone, saying it was time for him to call his wife. King, who had enough jail experience to know that guards normally do not nurture an inmate’s family communications, suspected correctly that the sudde
n kindness was really for the convenience of the police department’s wire-tap stenographers. When Coretta promptly informed him that the President had just called her, King did not reply. Stalling—caught between his hunger for her news and his reluctance to let Bull Connor know what President Kennedy was doing—King made small talk with his two older children. His evasive manner alerted Coretta.

  “Are you being guarded?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “Did they give you a time limit?”

  “Not exactly, but hear everything, you know,” King said pointedly. “Who did you say called you?”

  “Kennedy,” said Coretta. “The President.”

  “Did he call you direct?”

  “Yes. And he told me you were going to call in a few minutes. It was about thirty minutes ago.”

  This was significant news, potentially a replay of President Kennedy’s famous phone call before the 1960 election. “Let Wyatt know,” King instructed. “…Do that right now.”

  Coretta recounted her conversation with President Kennedy, saying, “He told me the FBI talked with you last night. Is that right?”