Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Like all the other preachers, Shuttlesworth was too distracted to give a normal speech. The church buzzed with rumors. The crowd’s fervor rose with the disintegration of the usual program, as the loss of normalcy itself heralded a spectacular surge of emotion. “I have been inspired and moved today,” declared King. “I have never seen anything like it.” Using figures from Wyatt Walker’s jail registry, he announced that precisely 958 children had signed up for jail that day, and that of these some 600 were in custody. For tactical reasons, he kept to himself the news that a flood of new young people was replenishing the jailed volunteers several times over. “If they think today is the end of this,” he said, “they will be badly mistaken.” He introduced CORE chairman James Farmer, who had flown into Birmingham for the CORE-SNCC Freedom Walk in honor of William Moore. “We are prepared and ready to unite behind you,” Farmer told the Birmingham crowd.

  King revealed that Dick Gregory had just agreed to join the Birmingham movement on Sunday. Cheers went up for the comedian who had drawn national publicity to Greenwood. King also announced that Diane Nash and the other members of the Moore march had been arrested. Finally, he introduced James Bevel, who fairly sprang into the pulpit. “There ain’t gonna be no meeting Monday night,” he shouted, “because every Negro is gonna be in jail by Sunday night.” In wild, boundless bravado, Bevel vowed to finish off segregation in Birmingham fast enough to be “back in Mississippi chopping cotton” by Tuesday. Preaching on the courage of the children, he burst into the freedom songs they had sung on their way into the paddy wagons. Some three hundred people rose spontaneously in anticipation of a march to jail. Unable to wait for the next day, they walked up and down the aisles as the church thundered in song.

  The contest resumed with greater intensity on Friday, May 3. By noon, an audience of anxious parents and curious onlookers jammed Kelly Ingram Park, while more than a thousand young people received marching orders inside the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Across from them, blocking the eastbound cross streets, Birmingham’s uniformed authorities massed in front of school buses, fire equipment, and police cruisers. When the first group of sixty singing students marched out of the church, Captain G. V. Evans confronted them at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Seventeenth Street. This time there was no talk of arrest. With both the city and county jails bulging already, the goal was to keep the demonstrators out of the downtown business section without making arrests. On the orders of Bull Connor, Captain Evans pointed to the fire hoses behind him and told the sixty students to disperse “or you’re going to get wet.”

  The students kept singing, whereupon Captain Evans signaled the firemen to douse them with spray through fogging nozzles. Wetness shocked nearly all the marchers into retreat. Behind them, the bystanders in Ingram Park recoiled instinctively from the threat of being drenched. Through his bullhorn, Evans ordered an evacuation of the area, and the water seemed to enforce his commands effectively, until he and everyone else began to notice the holdout students. About ten of the original sixty stood their ground. Already soaked beyond any worry of lost dignity, they sang one word, “freedom,” to the tune of “Amen.” As the firemen concentrated the hoses upon the singers, the crowd surged back toward the contested borders. Then the firemen advanced toward the holdouts, pounding them with water at close range. The holdouts sat down on the sidewalk to stabilize themselves. It was a moment of baptism for the civil rights movement, and Birmingham’s last effort to wash away the stain of dissent against segregation. For Captain Evans and the firemen, it was a mechanical problem of increasing the water pressure enough to overcome physical resistance on the pavement. Ideally suited for the task were special monitor guns that forced water from two hoses through a single nozzle, mounted on a tripod. The fire department advertised these attachments as miracles of long-range firefighting, capable of knocking bricks loose from mortar or stripping bark from trees at a distance of one hundred feet.

  A. G. Gaston was among the first of millions to be converted by the monitor guns. The city’s leading Negro businessman was talking on the telephone with David Vann, one of the architects of the city charter campaign against Bull Connor. As they often did, the two were singing a hymn of complaint against King’s street demonstrations for undermining their delicate, mostly secret, reform alliance just at its moment of opportunity. If successful, King would force Gaston and other established Negro leaders to endorse his tactics, which would alienate the city’s nervous white moderates. If unsuccessful, King would strengthen segregationists. Either way, the demonstrations were a curse to Vann and Gaston, who had been groping for a way to maneuver King out of town gently, so as not to give comfort to Bull Connor. That Friday afternoon, Gaston suddenly asked Vann to excuse him. Staring down from the window of his office in the Gaston Building, which overlooked Ingram Park, he saw something that yanked out the roots of his millionaire’s bluster.

  “But lawyer Vann!” Gaston gasped. “They’ve turned the fire hoses on a little black girl. And they’re rolling that girl right down the middle of the street.”

  The monitor guns made limbs jerk weightlessly and tumbled whole bodies like scraps of refuse in a high wind. One look made Gaston sign off the telephone. Outside, brave songs turned to screams, and bystanders threw bricks and rocks at the hoses. When the water drove them back out of range, some of them sneaked into buildings so they could lob their projectiles from above. Eventually, they hit two firemen and Life photographer Charles Moore.

  During the noisy, sporadic duel of rocks and hoses, young marchers continued to spill out of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Walker, Bevel, Andrew Young, and other supervisors directed the lines away from the conflict, avoiding both the hoses and the contaminating association with violence. Their maneuver confronted police commanders with a dilemma: the hoses were pinned down by darting, rock-throwing by-standers while the marchers escaped toward downtown from the other end of Ingram Park. There were not enough hoses to cover both flanks, especially when the monitor guns halved their number. Police detachments did manage to intercept the marchers and load them into jail-bound school buses, but this meant that the authorities were failing in their plan to repulse rather than arrest the demonstrators. Worse, from the commanders’ point of view, the concentrated city forces were being split apart. In consultation with Bull Connor, they decided that they had to drive the Negroes back together. To do that, they needed an intimidating weapon more mobile than the hoses.

  The police commanders deployed eight K-9 units at the corner of Ingram Park farthest from the church. First sight of the dogs brought shouts of fright and rage from the milling crowds. Many fled instantly; some threw rocks at the dogs and their handlers; a few reckless teenagers waved waterlogged shirts like bullfighters. On command, the officers handling the dogs rushed forward to gain close quarters. Where the crowd was too tightly massed to flee cleanly, the growling German shepherds lunged toward stumbling, cowering stragglers. They bit three teenagers severely enough to require hospital treatment. Other targets, screaming with terror and turning in confusion, either disappeared into the Negro section to the west or took refuge in the church. Most of the K-9 units kept up pursuit, but a few veered back to chase away clumps of Negroes who had drifted back into the vacant spaces to gaze on the full panoply of ambulances, billyclubs, paddy wagons, arrest scenes, distant marchers, and the thick ropes of water from the monitor guns.

  On a street corner outside the Jockey Boy restaurant, two dog teams came up behind a group of awed spectators who did not notice them until one of the handlers seized a fifteen-year-old boy and whirled him around into the jaws of a German shepherd. An AP photographer standing nearby caught the sight that came to symbolize Birmingham: a white policeman in dark sunglasses grasping a Negro boy by the front of the shirt as his other hand gave just enough slack in the leash for the dog to spring upward and bury its teeth in the boy’s abdomen. And most compelling was the boy himself, who was tall, thin, and well dressed, leaning into the attack
ing dog with an arm dropped submissively at his side and a straight-ahead look of dead calm on his face. The graphic power of the picture concealed a supreme irony. The victim, young Walter Gadsden, was not steeped in nonviolent discipline, nor had he intended to become part of the demonstration. His handsome cardigan sweater was an emblem of his standing in the prosperous family of C. A. Scott, who so scorned King’s demonstrations that his World papers in both Atlanta and Birmingham still ignored Project C more resolutely even than Birmingham’s white newspapers. Although the image of the savage attack struck like lightning in the American mind, the reaction of Walter Gadsden lay buried in the deeper convolutions of race. True to his family, he later said the German shepherd had shocked him into the realization that he had been “mixing with a bad crowd” of Negroes when he went to observe the demonstration. He resolved to get off the streets and prepare for college.

  At three o’clock, a police inspector ventured inside the church to negotiate. From a military tactician’s point of view, the engagement thus far was confined to a relatively mild skirmish in which the K-9 units had rotated on the controlling vector of the fire hoses, sweeping Negroes out of Ingram Park or across it into the church. Only half the Negro groups had stepped off on their jail marches, of whom some 250 were being arrested. The dogs and police units had reconcentrated outside, bottling up scores of wet, angry bystanders amid the five hundred demonstrators who were still trying to form their lines. In that precarious situation, King was only too happy to accept a truce for the day, as he knew that the political tremors had been set loose already. Seizing a moment in the chaos, he called Clarence Jones in New York with a long list of people who should be told personally of the day’s events. At 3:57 P.M. by the FBI wiretapper’s log, Jones gave Stanley Levison a breathless summary and an emergency request from King that Levison draft telegrams for President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy “within the hour.” Levison, whose qualms about the decision to use child marchers had put him on edge already, became so rattled that he wrote an awkward, overly erudite telegram that King could not use, ending, “Will you permit this recrudescence of violence in Birmingham to threaten our lives and deny us our rights?”

  Birmingham’s white leaders scrambled to head off a swell of public sympathy for King by denouncing his use of children. Mayor Boutwell told the city that “irresponsible and unthinking agitators” had made “tools” of children to threaten lives and property. “The respectable people of Birmingham, white or colored, did not create this danger,” he declared. “We are not contributing to it. We are innocent victims…I cannot condone, and you cannot condone, the use of children to these ends.” Judge Talbot Ellis, whose juvenile court was inundated with young Negro defendants, said that those who “misled these kids” into demonstrations “ought to be put under the jail.” In Washington, Robert Kennedy issued a statement of more balanced tone. “Continued refusal to grant equal rights and opportunities to Negroes makes increasing turmoil inevitable,” he announced. “However, the timing of the present demonstrations is open to question. School children participating in street demonstrations is a dangerous business. An injured, maimed or dead child is a price that none of us can afford to pay.” Kennedy stressed that the injustices of Birmingham were a local rather than a federal responsibility, to be resolved “in good faith negotiations, and not in the streets.” These attacks came too late to faze King. In caustic remarks, he and his fellow preachers noted that this tender solicitude for Negro children had never produced much concern over their consignment to miserable schools or other injuries of segregation.

  Burke Marshall, who had called that morning to request that the demonstrations be suspended, called again more urgently, arguing on behalf of the Kennedy Administration that King must call a halt now because the rock-throwing by Negroes had contributed to the violence. King refused. Although he resented Marshall’s attitude, he also sensed more pain in Marshall’s voice than conviction. King interpreted this pain as the forerunner of enormous political pressure in Washington, which confirmed that the Birmingham movement was taking off. The burden of inertia was shifting. Marshall, having caught an earful from A. G. Gaston about the little girl being squirted down the street, was not far behind in perceiving that dissent against King was evaporating in Negro Birmingham. Hard upon this surge of internal strength radiated the national news that a thousand Negro children had marched to jail in two days, and before the far-flung American public could begin to absorb such a troubling novelty, violence, the universal messenger, was racing toward their living rooms with pictures of water hoses and dogs loosed on children. Marshall’s pain, like the stridency of Birmingham’s white leaders, revealed an underlying defensiveness, and their appeals to the welfare of Negro children drew them toward King’s ground. To anticipate and experience these complex shifts of emotion was the essence of historic movement; to have caused them raised the sweet thrill of legend.

  King knew that the people who cared most about the children were the mothers and fathers streaming all afternoon into the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to join hundreds of marchers and onlookers who simply stayed on for the mass meeting. The big church was packed long before evening. Passing the collection plates took a full hour, and the spirit of the congregation ran so high that Andrew Young came out to make a cautionary speech. “We have a nonviolent movement,” he said, “but it’s not nonviolent enough.” He warned that no amount of provocation justified rock-throwing. “We must not boo the police when they bring up the dogs,” he added. “…We must praise them. The police don’t know how to handle the situation governed by love, and the power of God. During these demonstrations we must tell the crowd to behave.”

  A tumultuous cheer went up when King made his entrance. He too preached nonviolence, but at first his address was unusually informal and frisky. He told preacher jokes about the futility of trying to defeat Negro Baptists with water hoses, predicting that even Bull Connor would come to admit that “not only did they stand up in the water, they went UNDER the water!” “And dogs?” he asked. “Well, I’ll tell you. When I was growing up, I was dog bitten”—he paused, as a horrified cry rose up—“for NOTHING! So I don’t mind being bitten by a dog for standing up for freedom!”

  He told them that not all whites were hostile, and that their movement was reaching people far away. “No, we are not alone in this,” he assured them. “Don’t let anybody make you feel we are alone.” Birmingham had made the Huntley-Brinkley news show on NBC, he said. Help was on the way; they were moving. Then, in a single sentence, he swept aside the pressures for a moratorium on the demonstrations: “Now yesterday was D-Day, and tomorrow will be Double-D Day!”

  The announcement that the jail marches would continue over the weekend drew deafening applause. Then King moved on almost quietly, dispensing with oratorical surges. He repeated his willingness to negotiate over the movement’s four basic demands, which he reviewed at length. Only at the end did he mention the little catalysts who had ignited the city. “Now, finally, your children,” he said, “your daughters and sons are in jail, many of them, and I’m sure many of the parents are here tonight.” Then he said simply, “Don’t worry about them.” That alone smothered some of the desperate fears and skittering rumors—tales true and false about rats, beatings, concrete beds, overflowing latrines, jailhouse assaults, and crude examinations for venereal disease. “They are suffering for what they believe,” he said, “and they are suffering to make this nation a better nation.” The crowd seemed soothed not just by his words but by his calmness. Having committed everything, holding nothing back, he touched the faith at his core. In fact, his great gamble looked so promising that he slipped almost into a reverie, assuring the parents that the Birmingham jail was not only bearable for their children but a “spiritual experience” to be welcomed, even longed for. “Jail helps you to rise above the miasma of everyday life,” he said. A thought distracted him. “If they want some books, we will get them,” he promised. “I catch up on my
reading every time I go to jail.”

  King and his advisers stayed up long past midnight plotting strategy for Saturday’s march. Blessed with an abundance of volunteers, they devised schemes to divide or circumvent Bull Connor’s blockading forces. Their goal was to put at least another five hundred young people in jail. All that night, the attention of the outside world gathered forcefully upon them. Irate Birmingham citizens strung up an effigy of King in the courtyard of a Catholic church, and news presses across the country mass-produced photographs of Friday’s violence. The morning New York Times featured three of them stacked two columns wide on the front page: on the bottom, state troopers dragging the CORE-SNCC “freedom walkers” to jail in Fort Payne, Alabama; in the middle, Birmingham firemen straining to aim a monitor gun at demonstrators; on top, the police dog sinking its teeth into Walter Gadsden’s midriff. The visual power of the Gadsden photograph was so profound that President Kennedy, like millions of readers, could see nothing else. The picture made him “sick,” he told a morning audience of ADA liberals at the White House. Although he lacked legal authority to do anything about Birmingham, Kennedy added, he was dispatching Burke Marshall and Joe Dolan as mediators that very day. This presidential mission, plus the established threat of violence, conferred a status on the Birmingham confrontations that greatly stimulated the influx of reporters. Claude Sitton of the Times abandoned the William Moore march in favor of Birmingham, as did Pat Watters of the Atlanta Journal. For Sitton, who had been in Greenwood, this marked the second time in a month that the Birmingham campaign had deflated an ongoing story. Watters came to Birmingham reluctantly; his fresh sympathy for the lonely students on the William Moore death trek, along with his glimpses of movement rivalries, convinced him that the children’s marches were another attempt by a cynical or capricious King to undercut CORE and SNCC.