Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  “No, no,” said King. He told her again to get word of Kennedy’s phone call to Walker so that Walker could issue a statement. Coretta did not agree to do so outright, sensing perhaps that she was in a bind because she had issued her own statement to The New York Times, whereas King wanted Walker to handle the matter. She kept adding details of President Kennedy’s expressed concern, and of two earlier phone calls from Robert Kennedy, while King kept asking her to tell it all to Walker.

  When the news did reach Birmingham, Walker seized hopefully on the White House involvement to proclaim the beginning of phase two in Birmingham—the national phase. Responses outside the mass meeting proved to be far less enthusiastic. News stories pointed out that President Kennedy had not initiated the phone contact, as he had done during the 1960 campaign. Instead, Kennedy had returned Coretta’s urgent phone calls to the White House switchboard. This made Kennedy seem less resolutely sympathetic to King, and therefore made King’s cause seem less worthy. Other, less subtle discrepancies appeared. With the Birmingham police department denying that FBI agents had visited King or that President Kennedy’s influence had produced better treatment for King—and Chief Moore going so far as to declare that it had been his idea for King to call his wife, because he, Moore, was concerned about Coretta’s postnatal condition—most newspapers concentrated their skepticism on the least authoritative party: Coretta. Reports tended to portray her as an anxious new mother who may have confused her White House fantasies with reality. She bore the brunt of condescension even though her version of the episode was closest to the truth. In Washington, the Star dismissed her entire story in a lead editorial entitled “Just a Bit Phony.”

  General press reaction to the Birmingham campaign was no more favorable. Time called it a “poorly timed protest”: “To many Birmingham Negroes, King’s drive inflamed tensions at a time when the city seemed to be making some progress, however small, in race relations.” A Washington Post editorial attacked King’s Birmingham strategy as one of “doubtful utility,” and speculated that it was “prompted more by leadership rivalry than by the real need of the situation.” The New York Times, while playing down President Kennedy’s phone call to Coretta, devoted a great deal of space to a press conference in which Burke Marshall said the federal government had no authority to take action in Birmingham. By contrast, the Times was almost gushingly optimistic about Birmingham’s prospects under its new mayor, Albert Boutwell, who was sworn in on April 15 as Clarence Jones was visiting King in jail. “A warm sun was shining,” the Times reported. The swearing-in ceremony was “like a picnic,” with the “giggles of little girls” making a pleasant change from “the sounds of demonstrations carried on in the last 13 days,” and most Birmingham citizens of both races were looking to Boutwell for “a diminution, if not an end, to racial tensions that have grown alarmingly the last few days.” In an editorial declaring that it did not expect enlightenment to come to Birmingham “overnight,” the Times added that Martin Luther King “ought not to expect it either.”

  For white Birmingham, the tone of Northern news coverage was a refreshing change, hailed that week in local news stories such as “Washington Liberals Ponder Wisdom of Demonstrations” and “Birmingham Image Gets Better Press.” All sides seemed to be converging upon a common ground of forward-looking vagueness, which the Times called “mutual respect and equality of opportunity” and Mayor Boutwell called “mutual respect and understanding.” Such a view rejected King and Bull Connor alike as dangerous, polar extremists.

  King read these press reactions as fast as Clarence Jones could smuggle newspapers into his cell. They caused him the utmost dismay, especially since a diverse assortment of friends and enemies were using the same critical phrases almost interchangeably. King could have addressed his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to almost any of these—to Mayor Bout-well or Burke Marshall or A. G. Gaston, to the Birmingham News or The New York Times. He gave no thought to secular targets, however, after he saw page 2 of the April 13 Birmingham News. There, beneath two photographs of him and Abernathy on their Good Friday march to jail, appeared a story headlined “White Clergymen Urge Local Negroes to Withdraw from Demonstrations.” After attacking the Birmingham demonstrations as “unwise and untimely,” and commending the news media and the police for “the calm manner in which these demonstrations have been handled,” the clergymen invoked their religious authority against civil disobedience. “Just as we formerly pointed out that ‘hatred and violence have no sanction in our religious and political traditions,’” they wrote, “we also point out that such actions as incite hatred and violence, however technically peaceful those actions may be, have not contributed to the resolution of our local problems. We do not believe that these days of new hope are days when extreme measures are justified in Birmingham.”

  The thirteen short paragraphs transfixed King. He was being rebuked on his own chosen ground. And these were liberal clergymen. Most of them had risked their reputations by criticizing Governor Wallace’s “Segregation Forever!” inauguration speech in January. They were among the minority of white preachers who of late had admitted Andrew Young and other Negroes to specially roped off areas of their Sunday congregations. Yet to King, these preachers never had risked themselves for true morality through all the years when Shuttlesworth was being bombed, stabbed, and arrested, and even now could not make themselves state forthrightly what was just. Instead, they stood behind the injunction and the jailers to dismiss his spirit along with his body. King could not let it go. He sat down and began scribbling around the margins of the newspaper. “Seldom, if ever, do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas,” he began.

  By the time Clarence Jones visited the jail again that Tuesday, King had pushed a wandering skein of ink into every vacant corner. He surprised Jones by pulling the newspaper surreptitiously out of his shirt. “I’m writing this letter,” he said. “I want you to try to get it out, if you can.” To Jones, the “letter” was an indistinct jumble of biblical phrases wrapped around pest control ads and garden club news. He regarded the surprise as a distraction from the stack of urgent business he had brought with him—legal questions about King’s upcoming criminal trials, plus money problems, Belafonte and Kennedy reports, and a host of movement grievances assembled by Walker. Waving these away, King spent most of the visit showing a nonplussed Jones how to follow the arrows and loops from dead ends to new starts. “I’m not finished yet,” King said. He borrowed a number of sheets of note paper from Jones, who left with a concealed newspaper and precious few answers for those awaiting King’s dispositions at the Gaston Motel.

  King wrote several scattered passages in response to the criticism that his demonstrations were “untimely.” He told the white clergymen that “time is neutral,” that waiting never produced inevitable progress, and that “we must use time creatively, and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.” He feared that “the people of ill-will have used time much more effectively than the people of good will,” and pointed out that Negroes already had waited more than three hundred years for justice. “I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, ‘Wait.’” Then, in a sentence of more than three hundred words, he tried to convey to the white preachers a feeling of time built upon a different alignment of emotions:

  But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an air-tight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored ch
ildren, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger” and your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and when you wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at a tip-toe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”; then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

  King assumed a multitude of perspectives, often changing voice from one phrase to the next. He expressed empathy with the lives of millions over eons, and with the life of a particular child at a single moment. He tried to look not only at white preachers through the eyes of Negroes, but also at Negroes through the eyes of white preachers (“The Negro has many pent-up resentments and latent frustrations…So let him march sometime, let him have his prayer pilgrimages”). To the white preachers, he presented himself variously as a “haunted,” suffering Negro (“What else is there to do when you are alone for days in the dull monotony of a narrow jail cell other than write long letters, think strange thoughts, and pray long prayers?”), a pontificator (“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”), a supplicant (“I hope, sirs, you can understand…”), and a fellow bigshot (“If I sought to answer all of the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would be engaged in little else”). He spoke also as a teacher: “How does one determine when a law is just or unjust?…To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law…. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality…Let me give another explanation…” And he spoke as a gracious fellow student, seeking common ground: “You are exactly right in your call for negotiation…I am not unmindful of the fact that each of you has taken some significant stands on this issue.”

  By degrees, King established a kind of universal voice, beyond time, beyond race. As both humble prisoner and mighty prophet, as father, harried traveler, and cornered leader, he projected a character of nearly unassailable breadth. When he reached the heart of his case, he adopted an authentic tone of intimacy toward the very targets of his wrath—toward men who had condemned him without mentioning his name. Almost whispering on the page, he presented his most scathing accusations as a confession:

  I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumblingblock is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice, who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action,” who paternalistically believes that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom…

  Back at the Gaston Motel, deciphering what he called King’s “chicken-scratch handwriting,” Wyatt Walker became visibly excited by these passages. “His cup has really run over with those white preachers!” Walker exclaimed. Long frustrated by what seemed to him King’s excessive forbearance, Walker thrilled to see such stinging wrath let loose. He knew that the history of the early Christian church made jail the appropriate setting for spiritual judgments—that buried within most religious Americans was an inchoate belief in persecuted spirituality as the natural price of their faith. Here was the early church reincarnate, with King rebuking the empire for its hatred, for its fearful defense of worldly attachments. For this, Walker put aside his clipboard. Long into the night, he dictated King’s words to his secretary for typing.

  King was aiming at a tender spot in political and religious culture. The church had been central to Negro politics since 1441, when Prince Henry the Navigator brought the first recorded slaves out of sub-Sahara Africa and presented all ten of them as a gift to Pope Eugenius IV. Four hundred years later, the two largest Protestant churches in America divided not on some scholastic twist of theology—though there were plenty of these, too—but pointedly over the personal respect due two slaveholding preachers from Georgia. When Northerners raised doubts about their Christian fitness, Southern Baptists and Methodists indignantly marched out to form their own sectional churches. All through the 1840s and 1850s, the eminent Rev. C. C. Jones of Savannah labored to stave off a parallel schism within the Presbyterian Church. Haunted by the personal implications of slavery (“How often do I think of the number of hands employed to furnish me with the conveniences of life,” he had written in the 1820s, “of which they are in consequence deprived—how many intellects, how many souls perhaps, withered and blasted forever for this very purpose!”), he had dedicated his life to the controversial proposition that the first duty of Christians was to extend the benefits of religion to Negroes. Having convinced himself that “the salvation of one soul will more than outweigh all the pain and woe of their capture and transportation, and subsequent residence among us,” Jones expanded a slave mission from the Puritan congregation at Dorchester. He nurtured the Negro church in infancy, only to be blasted himself by some of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ most withering oratory. “Oh, the artful dodger!” cried Douglass. “Well may the thief be glad, the robber sing, and the adulterer clap his hands for joy.” Boring in against Jones’s trademark distinction between the evil system and the conscientious, Christian slaveholder, Douglass insisted that slavery existed only because it was respectable, and that it was respectable because men such as Jones were wrongly accorded the gentlemanly respect due Christians. Jones came to defend his life’s mission with embittered contempt, calling abolitionists “fanatics of the worse sort, setting at defiance all laws human and divine.” When the Southern Presbyterians finally split away during the Civil War, Jones urged the church to adopt the religious instruction of slaves as a high calling.

  A century later, religious respectability remained the crux of the issue that incensed King as he wrote Jones’s great-grandson and namesake, Bishop C. C. Jones Carpenter. As instigator and first signatory, Carpenter had hand-carried the clerical letter attacking the Negro demonstrations to the Birmingham newspapers, exercising great care against interception or editorial changes. Explosive racial tension added gravity to every word, all the more so because of Carpenter’s reputation as the senior Episcopal bishop in the United States. He was a sophisticated critic of segregation and a lifelong correspondent of Reinhold Niebuhr’s best friend, Bishop Will Scarlett, who regularly pleaded with Carpenter to hurl his immense prestige against segregation.* However, Carpenter needed to pick only the slightest difference with King in program or emphasis to stand aside, leaving the weight of his reputation to fall against the movement. King sought a revolution to reverse the burden of inertia. Carpenter chided King on the grounds that protest lacked Christian respectability, unaware of the countervailing storm within King against the Christian respectability of clergymen such as Carpenter himself.

  “I need more paper,” King told Clarence Jones. Sometimes directly, and sometimes with the clandestine help of an old Negro trusty in the jail, he exchanged the new handwritten original for the typed draft. By then the smuggling relay was exasperating Jones, for whom the lette
r was a toothless appeal to white clergymen who did not matter. But he saw the letter-writing as a mental health exercise for King. “I figured he was entitled to it—you know, a man in jail,” Jones later recalled. “But Lord have mercy, I thought he had lost his perspective.” Among the few business decisions Jones managed to wrest from King was an order to evict Hosea Williams from the Gaston Motel. Williams had responded to King’s request for help by driving over from Savannah with a carload of assistants, who were running up a motel bill on the SCLC’s tab. Walker found this not only expensive but unseemly, as the outside staff people far outnumbered the Birmingham volunteers going to jail every day. King agreed.

  The two confessions filled the second half of what turned out to be a twenty-page letter. At first King formally denounced the white preachers for their shortcomings, as though speaking from a pulpit. “I have heard numerous religious leaders of the South call upon their worshippers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law,” he wrote, “but I have longed to hear white ministers say, ‘follow this decree because integration is morally right and the Negro is your brother.’” As he continued with his usual themes on the failures of the church, his wrath turned slowly into a lament:” I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love.” In supreme irony, the prisoner in the hole mourned over the most respectable clergymen in Alabama as lost sheep who were unable to find the most obvious tenets of their faith.

  “Maybe again, I have been too optimistic,” King added, as though it may have been folly to expect better. “…Maybe I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ecclesia and the hope of the world.” Even if the prelates excluded themselves and all their authority from the cause of justice, King said he would not despair, because for him the inner church was a stream of belief intermingled with the religious core of the American creed. If all men were created equal, then all were brothers and sisters, and these fundamental beliefs tilted history toward the affirming conclusion that the universe was on the side of justice. “We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation,” wrote King, “because the goal of America is freedom…If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.”