Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  These presidential remarks about William Moore spurred press discussion about whether the childlike postman had been crazier or saner than the accepted world. Within the movement, the stunning news of his tragic “Freedom Walk” rekindled the sacrificial energies of two years earlier, when the first Freedom Riders suffered savage beatings at the Birmingham bus station. From the Fisk Chapel, John Lewis led an integrated march of 125 students to the Federal Building in Nashville. They carried signs reading “William Moore. Who Will Be Next?” and “Moore Died for Love. Let’s Live and Act in Love.” Paul Brooks, one of Lewis’ fellow Freedom Riders, announced that he was leaving to take up the walk where Moore had been shot down, saying he could not allow violence to win. In New York, James Farmer convened the CORE steering committee to plan a response to this first slaying of a CORE member.* From Atlanta, SNCC’s James Forman called Moore’s widow in Binghamton to ask whether she thought her husband would have wanted students to take up his march. From Birmingham, Diane Nash reactivated her telephone network. She was with her husband, James Bevel, recalling the picnic of 1961 when they heard about the burning of the Freedom Ride bus outside Anniston.

  Bevel’s afternoon workshops for students had grown so large that they outnumbered the regular mass meetings. That afternoon, following the Kennedy press conference, Bevel and Andrew Young invited the workshop students to stay on into the night. The result was a mass meeting so jammed with people that a fire marshal entered the St. James Baptist Church to try to enforce occupancy regulations. Fred Shuttlesworth bantered merrily with him, and the heightened spirit of the meeting inspired Shuttlesworth to vow that all Negroes attending the next day’s session of the contempt trial would use the “whites only” water fountains at city hall. A tumultuous roar of approval went up. Tributes to William Moore made tears flow, and the movement choir rocked the church with freedom songs. When the call came for the next day’s jail-going volunteers, however, the spirit all but evaporated. It took King more than half an hour to coax a score of volunteers from the huge crowd. Significantly, many of these came from the workshops—students from high schools and even elementary schools. King repeatedly explained that while he deeply appreciated their willingness to suffer, and while he hoped their noble example would inspire their parents, the Birmingham jail was no place for children. In spite of King, some of the third- and fourth-graders refused to sit down.

  Robert Kennedy and Burke Marshall were in Montgomery the next day for a tense special meeting with Governor Wallace. At the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Fred Shuttlesworth told a packed mass meeting he was “glad Bobby came down.” “I wish he would come to Birmingham,” he added, “but he can hear the noise we are making one hundred miles away.” Shuttlesworth preached with gleeful, improvised mirth on the water battle at city hall, reporting that the desperate city fathers had shut off both the white and Negro water fountains. “And all the toilets were locked up,” he said. “So if the judge was ill at ease, he wasn’t no worse off than anybody in the court.” Above peals of laughter, Shuttles-worth told how he had been obliged to walk over to the bus station to relieve himself, and how he had found white policemen in the rest room there too, and how they had suffered together for lack of water. “Segregation is a silly thing!” he cried. “…Here we are—arguing over something that’s free!” To illustrate why they were persisting, he told the story of the little boy who said, “‘Daddy, what makes a lightnin’ bug light?’” Shuttlesworth described how the father had stalled, stammered, and scratched his head until finally, pressed for an answer, he said, “‘Well, I’ll tell you the truth, boy. The stuff is just in him, that’s all.’” To howls of laughter and a chorus of cheers, Shuttlesworth added, “And for the spirit that these Negroes be free, well, the stuff is just in ’em!”

  On Friday, April 26, Judge Jenkins announced that he found King, Shuttlesworth, Walker, Abernathy, and seven Birmingham leaders guilty of criminal contempt. He sentenced each of them to serve the maximum penalty of five days, holding open the threat that further violations of his injunction might lead to more severe penalties under the civil contempt laws, which provided that a judge might jail defendants indefinitely until they “purged” themselves by apology and recantation. To the defendants, the verdict was less daunting than the burden of the movement’s response. Now that the interlude necessitated by the trial was concluded, there could be no more entertainments over the water fountains at city hall. The next move fell to the leaders at a time when there was an acute disparity between the enthusiasm of the mass meetings and the scarcity of jail-going volunteers. The leaders could not predict exactly how an uprising would lead to victory instead of further pain, but they did recognize that they were lost without some decisive move. Accordingly, on the very day of the verdict, Shuttlesworth petitioned the city fathers of Birmingham for permission to stage a mass protest march on the following Thursday, May 2.

  This gave the leaders five days to prepare. From the beginning, it was no secret that their model was the 1960 march at the climax of James Lawson’s sit-ins in Nashville. This three-year-old event had become a new inspiration in Birmingham, since Bevel had been showing his film copy of an NBC special report on Nashville, narrated by Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. “Four thousand Negroes marched on the City Hall in Nashville, Tennessee,” Andrew Young announced at the mass meeting. “We would like to have that many here in Birmingham.” In their private strategy sessions, however, the leaders recognized that they faced crippling disadvantages. Nashville had jailed none of its marchers, whereas Birmingham had a consistent record of jailing them all. There had been no injunction against demonstrations in Nashville, nor any Bull Connor. Most critically, the Nashville march line had been formed mostly of students, whereas the Birmingham movement had been a grim war waged by Negro adults.

  Bevel wanted to change that. Young people were the ones watching the Nashville film at the workshops every day. In Birmingham, where a scarcity of adult volunteers forced King’s colleagues to devise alibis and side projects, the only hope for a march rested on a mass infusion of students. As in Mississippi, Bevel and Diane Nash had begun by recruiting the elite students—basketball stars, Miss Parker High School—and within two weeks the workshops had become a contagion. An entire new echelon of student leaders had distinguished themselves by their ability to slip in and out of schools. Every day younger and younger students popped up in the workshops, full of bravado, ready to march to jail, and every night King presided over debates about which ones they should permit to go. John and Deenie Drew, A. G. Gaston, and Rev. John Porter stoutly opposed allowing students younger than college age, as did nearly every Birmingham leader consulted. School records and lifetime hopes could be ruined, young lives scarred by exposure to rapes, beatings, and the unmentionable ugliness of the jailhouse. Far from allowing their own children to march, the Drews sent their eleven-year-old son off to a distant prep school, to protect him from dangers created by their houseguest, “Mike” King. No self-respecting adult could use their children for battle fodder, they said, as even the early Christians had not encouraged their children to face the lions at the Colosseum.

  Birmingham’s white leadership grew more confident that its united, noninflammatory toughness was subduing the Negro protest. The News published an instructive article entitled “Greenwood Rolled with Punch—And Won.” Meanwhile, the two city governments of Birmingham maintained a remarkable truce as they waited for the Alabama courts to decide which of them was legitimate. The rivals shared everything from memo pads to parking spaces, and every Tuesday they acted out a ceremony of parallel sovereignty. When Bull Connor and his fellow commissioners filed out of city hall, Mayor Boutwell and the new city council filed in to take up the same business anew. At the third set of dual meetings, on April 30, both bodies denied Shuttlesworth’s request for a parade permit that Thursday.

  At the Gaston Motel, King and his aides faced the implications of the denial. It meant that anyone who marched would be su
bject to arrest, and that the leaders could be reimprisoned for violating Judge Jenkins’ injunction. Furthermore, anyone who urged children to make the march would be subject to prosecution for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and King believed that the circumstances gave Birmingham a good chance to make criminal convictions stick on appeal. Nervously, he kidded Bevel about the possibility that the great gamble would only make them all long-term inmates. “Well, Bevel, you already got about eighty counts of contributing to the delinquency of minors pending in Jackson,” he said.

  “Well, that’s the problem,” Bevel replied. “I didn’t get enough. If I had had eight thousand, they wouldn’t have bothered me.”

  This was not the first time that young veterans of the Freedom Rides had pressed King to jump off the cliff, but none of them had been quite like Bevel. He had returned from Mississippi wearing a yarmulke atop his shaven head, which he explained sometimes as a token of his affection for the Hebrew prophets and other times as a protective device to keep himself out of jail, saying Mississippi sheriffs were so mystified by the sight of a Negro preacher in a “Jewish beenie” that they preferred to let him alone. Bevel possessed the unique charm of a spellbinding eccentric, a junior Vernon Johns. For King, who was far surer of his judgment than of his innate creativity, Bevel had the appeal of a free spirit, a madcap Aristotelian. He even respected the “voices” Bevel claimed to hear. In moments of stress, Bevel served as a reminder that there was an essential element of craziness to the movement, as did the murder of William Moore. When deciding whether to send children into Bull Connor’s jails, King could not get away with the rational repose of Solomon.

  With King’s permission, Bevel addressed the mass meeting a few hours after the parade permit was denied on Tuesday. To the crowd, and to the police detectives conspicuously among them, he announced that there would be a mass march on Thursday with or without a permit. It would be a special march of high school students on what Bevel and Walker called D-Day. Almost as an aside, Bevel added that his wife Diane was leaving that night to take up the Freedom Walk of the slain William Moore.

  Two separate Moore marches stepped off on Wednesday morning, the first of May. Not surprisingly, both groups drew heavy press coverage. Walking in the footsteps of a dead man, having been threatened by Klansmen as well as Alabama officials, and having been denied protection by the Justice Department, the small bands of walkers were a guaranteed suspense story. Claude Sitton of The New York Times left Birmingham to cover one group of ten volunteers who, after protracted negotiations between CORE and SNCC, had been selected to make the walk along Moore’s entire route from Chattanooga to Jackson. This group included Bob Zellner and Bill Hansen of SNCC, Jesse Harris of the Greenwood movement, and Sam Shirah, the white Birmingham Southern student who had caused such a stir at a Birmingham mass meeting. James Forman went along as an observer. Simultaneously, Foster Hailey of the Times left Birmingham to cover the smaller group of Diane Nash Bevel, Paul Brooks, and six others, who began walking toward Birmingham from the spot where Moore’s body had fallen. Alabama state troopers soon arrested all eighteen in both groups, plus Forman.

  In Birmingham, the partial evacuation of reporters handed King a verbal shield for the internal politics of the D-Day march. To John Porter and others who were upset by the decision to use high school children, King said he had to do something dramatic in Birmingham because the press was losing interest. These words seemed shocking and cynical to Porter, who with each step into the movement had been swept toward dilemmas more unsettling to his temperament. For King’s purposes, however, the press argument obscured the central debate over sending children to jail, where the drift of King’s inclinations would have driven Porter and others to near apoplexy. In private talks with Walker, Shuttlesworth, Bevel, and others closest to him, King was allowing the minimum age of jail volunteers to drift steadily downward.

  From his workshops, where hundreds of Birmingham’s children were pressing themselves forward for the D-Day march, Bevel brought to King a simple formula: any child old enough to belong to a church should be eligible to march to jail. Nearly all the young volunteers were Baptists, like King and himself, and Baptist doctrine required only a conscious acceptance of the Christian faith as a condition of both church membership and personal salvation. By common practice, churches allowed the youngest school-age children to become members. That settled it right there, Bevel insisted. How could he and King tell six-year-old church members that they were old enough to decide their eternal destiny but too young to march against segregation? How could they keep church members out of a nonviolent movement that embodied Christian teachings?

  King knew that Bevel was overwrought for good reason, as his wife was at that moment out on William Moore’s route down Highway 11. He also knew that it was absurd to form a jail march based on church teachings as addressed to the afterlife. Still, he felt the truth of what Bevel was saying, as well as its hope of transformation. The church had paved the way for the movement by swallowing up not only the fear of death but also distinctions of race and age and all the compromises of everyday sanity. Bevel made it plain: if they could, they should send volunteers to jail over the objections of their parents. “Against your Mama,” he told King, “you have a right to make this witness.”

  By then the Birmingham police department had received an FBI intelligence report that leaflets were circulating in the Negro high schools urging all students to leave school at noon on Thursday. This threat of mass truancy was only a hint of the rumblings in Negro Birmingham. “Meatball” and other Bevel recruits were sounding the call in the elementary schools too. “Tall Paul,” a rock ‘n’ roll disc jockey, was broadcasting a jived-up announcement about the “big party” Thursday at Kelly Ingram Park, and nearly every Negro kid in Birmingham knew what he meant. The night was filled with anguish and excitement, as some young people wrestled with plans to sneak in or out of the march, while others confided bravely to relatives that Martin Luther King wanted them to march to jail.

  For King, too, the moment brimmed with tension. Eight years after the bus boycott, he was on the brink of holding nothing back. Eight long months after the SCLC convention in Birmingham, he was contemplating an action of more drastic, lasting impact than jumping off the roof of city hall or assassinating Bull Connor. Having submitted his prestige and his body to jail, and having hurled his innermost passions against the aloof respectability of white American clergymen, all without noticeable effect, King committed his cause to the witness of schoolchildren.

  TWENTY

  THE CHILDREN’S MIRACLE

  Birmingham police squads, anticipating a “D-Day” youth march on Thursday, May 2, reinforced their daily roadblocks along the routes downtown from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The usual crowds of Negro bystanders gathered directly across from the church in Kelly Ingram Park, watching the police officers. Both groups listened to freedom songs wafting outward through the brick walls and stained glass windows. When the front doors opened shortly after one o’clock, fifty teenagers emerged two abreast. Their high-spirited singing and clapping transformed “We Shall Overcome” from a wistful dirge into a ragtime march.

  Jumping wearily to duty, the officers halted the line, gave notice of the court injunction against demonstrations, warned of arrest, and started directing the teenagers into the paddy wagons. Except for the absence of adults in the line, it seemed to be another day in the month-long siege until a second double line of marchers spilled out through the church’s front doors. Shortly after them came another group, followed by another and another. Wyatt Walker, speaking to assistants by walkie-talkie, sent some groups veering off by different routes. Police radios crackled with requests for more paddy wagons. The dispatchers, swallowing the department’s pride, called on Sheriff Bailey to send in county deputies. Still the marchers kept spilling forth, outnumbering and enveloping the officers so that one group of twenty teenagers was able to slip around the clogged arrest lines tow
ard city hall. They had almost disappeared into the down-town business district before a police detachment took off in pursuit.

  From the swirling mass of Negro children, blue uniforms, and picket signs, an anxious policeman spotted a familiar figure across the Sixteenth Street truce line. “Hey, Fred,” he called. “How many more have you got?”

  “At least a thousand!” shouted Shuttlesworth.

  “God Almighty,” said the policeman.

  Reporters saw things they had never seen before. George Wall, a tough-looking police captain, confronted a group of thirty-eight elementary-school children and did his best to cajole or intimidate them into leaving the lines, but they all said they knew what they were doing. Asked her age as she climbed into a paddy wagon, a tiny girl called out that she was six. When city firemen came up to help contain the demonstration, one group of marchers dissolved in panic at the sight of high-pressure hoses being spread across Fourth Avenue; then they managed to re-form. An elderly woman broke away from the cheering observers in Ingram Park and ran along the arrest lines, ecstatically shouting “Sing, children, sing!” Four blocks away, police overtook the twenty students who had circumvented the blockade. They carried signs that read “Segregation Is a Sin” and “No Eat, No Dollars.” The very sight of them was a blow to the city’s goal of confining the unsettling disturbances to the Negro sections of town.

  On running out of paddy wagons and sheriff’s patrol cars, police commanders called in school buses to take load after load of hookey-playing students away. It was all over by four o’clock. With the streets cleared, the energy that had created the extraordinary sights disappeared into the jails, where as many as seventy-five students were crammed into cells built for eight. And almost as soon as the lines stopped coming out of Sixteenth Street Baptist, early birds began filing into the mass meeting at Fred Shuttlesworth’s old church some blocks distant. Rev. Edwin Gardner, the warm-up preacher, directed their overflow emotions into songs, prayers, and an offering. “If you are dead broke, see me after the meeting,” he said. There were a thousand people in the church by the time surveillance detectives took their seats at six, and nearly twice that number when Shuttlesworth and King arrived. “The whole world is watching Birmingham tonight,” said Shuttlesworth.