Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  On Saturday afternoon, as tense police lines awaited the first sally from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Wyatt Walker engineered a surprise five blocks away. On a signal, several groups of ordinary-looking young pedestrians merged just outside city hall, and only then did a girl display a banner reading “Love God and Thy Neighbor.” Bull Connor emerged personally to investigate and, incensed by the trickery, ordered all twenty-five Negroes hauled off to jail. Almost immediately, a woman and a small girl without banners knelt on the steps of city hall to pray. They went off to jail too, whereupon Connor ordered his men to arrest or disperse all groups of “strolling Negroes” near city hall, with or without picket signs. In so doing he not only failed to keep Negroes from swamping his jails but also created a racial dragnet that went far beyond the limits of Judge Jenkins’ court order.

  King’s strategists had achieved a tactical advantage by switching to guerrilla concealment, but Connor swiftly retaliated. When his men discovered that young demonstrators were slipping out of two different churches in twos and threes, he sent his men to seal off both churches. When, after some 150 arrests, the lock-in dried up the supply of volunteers headed toward city hall, the confrontation shifted across the street from Sixteenth Street Baptist to Kelly Ingram Park. There the adult Negro spectators watched policemen guard the exits to trap the young demonstrators inside, and rage spread among them as the monitor guns swept away the few young marchers who escaped. A cascade of rocks soon rained down on the uniformed officers.

  Now the advantage shifted against the movement, whose leaders realized that their young marchers, schooled in nonviolence, were locked up inside the churches while adults armed with rocks, knives, and guns moved freely on the perimeter. James Bevel, alarmed that a riot would undo all their efforts to arouse public opinion against segregation, managed to talk a police lieutenant into lending him his bullhorn. “Everybody get off this corner!” he shouted. “If you’re not going to demonstrate in a nonviolent way, then leave!” Bevel darted about like a sheepdog, effectively dispersing the troublemakers, some of whom recognized him as the madcap young preacher who had mobilized the youth demonstrations. When the anger subsided, he grandly announced that he was suspending all marches for the following day too, so that the movement could purify itself for a giant push on Monday. Later that day, hot words passed privately between Bevel and Wyatt Walker, who considered Bevel an insubordinate grandstander. It fell to King to arrange a truce between his two hot-tempered aides. While supporting Walker on procedure, he approved Bevel’s one-day moratorium as a wise emergency move. Then King escaped the tension by flying home to preach at Ebenezer.

  Birmingham swelled over the weekend. Along with Burke Marshall and scores of reporters, activists of all kinds arrived in the wake of the stunning children’s marches. Ella Baker flew in from New York, as did pacifist Dave Dellinger. SNCC’s James Forman, arrested on the William Moore march, bailed out and headed straight for Birmingham, as he had done a month earlier upon leaving jail in Greenwood. Dick Gregory made his way down from Chicago, and among the miscellaneous newcomers that Sunday were two folk singers, Guy Carawan and Joan Baez. Carawan came expressly to record a mass meeting for Folkways Records, Baez to give a concert, and they happened upon each other in the Gaston Motel. Baez was burning with curiosity about the civil rights movement, which was why she had booked a concert tour of Negro colleges in the South, but she was more than a little apprehensive about crossing the race barrier in a city poised for war. Even though Sunday was the truce day, helmeted police units patrolled the streets in force and hovered around the Negro test groups who sought to worship in white churches.

  Baez was only too happy to accept Carawan’s escort into the morning worship service and the afternoon mass meeting at New Pilgrim Church. There, as one of a handful of whites among two thousand Negroes, Baez first encountered soul music. The Birmingham movement’s choir was a polished group in comparison with the spontaneous, a capella singers of Albany. It had a director, Carlton Reese, an organist, and established stars such as Mamie Brown and Cleo Kennedy. But its freedom music still astonished a folk purist such as Baez. There were sweet spirituals, arrhythmic blues solos, and thundering gospel numbers—all intensified by the imminent surrender to jail—and the power of it melted Baez’s alien separateness so that she shouted and cried, and looked close enough to a happy seizure that she came briefly to the attention of the roving ushers. When a driver whisked her away to the haven of all-Negro Miles College, Baez was astonished again to discover that her concert audience maintained a steadfast disinterest in the cauldron of protest across town. The Birmingham World, which was not covering the demonstrations, sent its own reporter to this first concert by a white celebrity on the Miles campus, and the reviewer praised the performance, though noting tartly that the singer felt free to remove her shoes on stage.

  Back at the mass meeting, a distraught Andrew Young interrupted to announce that the Birmingham police had just arrested Guy Carawan and his wife Candie on the steps of the church. “They are the ones who taught us many of the songs that we sing in the movement,” Young lamented, adding that the police were getting nervous, nasty, and unpredictable. Perhaps Bull Connor, interpreting the truce as a sign of weakness in the movement, was trying to intimidate the Negroes into submission. As the police hauled the Carawans off to jail, an angry-looking James Bevel strode swiftly to the pulpit with Bernard Lee. “We’re tired of this mess!” he shouted. “Let’s all get up!” Waving his arms, he directed the packed congregation to march around inside the church and then down to the city jail a few blocks away. They would encourage the movement prisoners inside, while showing the police that they were not afraid. Almost cackling, Bevel suggested that this spontaneous demonstration would not violate the conditions of his self-imposed truce. “Let’s not march,” he called out. “Let’s just walk.”

  The music soared as the congregation rose without noticeable dissent. Off in the wings, the preachers huddled to argue. Wyatt Walker fumed against this latest maverick surprise from Bevel, who had called off that day’s demonstration and was now calling it back on. Walker saw every circumstance as unfavorable: King was out of town; the congregation was mostly adults, in their Sunday clothes, unprepared for jail; and rough treatment by Connor’s police might puncture morale before the climactic jail marches the next day. Worst of all from a personal point of view, Bevel had swept along Bernard Lee into his renegade spontaneity, and since Lee had been practically Walker’s ward for the past two years, this reflected poorly on Walker’s discipline. Bevel kept saying they must not allow the police to plant fear in a nonviolent movement, and all the while the surrounding preachers urged them to set aside the dispute for the pressing reality that the congregation was about to exit leaderless through the church doors. Walker salvaged some authority by decreeing that Bevel could not lead the column—he could not risk being jailed before Monday’s youth march. From the volunteer preachers he selected Charles Billups, a Shuttlesworth colleague of many years, and Billups ran ahead to catch up.

  They spilled out of New Pilgrim past the startled police officers, who retreated before them up Sixth Avenue, waiting for orders. Sirens sounded. Curious porch-sitters watched the solemn marchers go by for five long blocks through a Negro section of town. Paddy wagons and fire equipment converged ahead, just short of the city jail. Firemen rushed to hook up, while some police units stopped traffic and others roughly cleared the area of all bystanders, including indignant reporters. Before the head of the Negro column reached the barricade, Bull Connor himself walked out into the tangle of fire hoses to confront them.

  Drawing close, Billups knelt on the pavement, and many of the two thousand behind followed his lead, like a line of falling dominoes stretching all the way back to New Pilgrim. After a brief prayer, Billups stood up and shouted loudly enough for the distant reporters to hear: “Turn on your water! Turn loose your dogs! We will stand here ’til we die!” Many of the Negroes within range trembl
ed, and a woman keeled over in a faint, but after a few seconds some noticed that the fireman remained paralyzed at his tripod, unable to blast the preacher at point-blank range. To save face, Connor repeated his order to fire in a hushed, angry growl. Some heard him say “Dammit! Turn on the hoses” before the silence swallowed him up too. After a few more seconds, Wyatt Walker gingerly approached the two police captains standing near Connor and whispered that the Negroes need not march into white Birmingham nor even to the city jail. He suggested that they be allowed to gather for a prayer service just across the street in a Negro-only public park.

  “Let us proceed,” intoned Billups, who walked forward as though in a trance. Watching from afar, the puzzled reporters felt the tension evaporate, and then they saw Bull Connor walking toward them. He explained breezily that he had granted a routine request to let the marchers pray in a segregated park, but to the marchers themselves it was nothing short of a miracle. Billups led the column past the water pumpers and the dreaded monitor guns, stepping over the hoses. As disbelief turned to joy behind him, shouts of “Hallelujah!” raced back along the line. Nonviolence had touched the fireman’s heart, they said, and had tamed Bull Connor’s hatred as surely as Moses had parted the Red Sea.

  Across two hectic and furtive days, Burke Marshall had taken soundings across the racial divide. Fred Shuttlesworth, while glorying in the attention from Washington, objected that Marshall’s practice of shuttling back and forth between whites and Negroes helped the whites maintain segregated negotiations. On the other side of town, Marshall found the city’s leading whites boiling with internal conflict. They were desperate to remove the stigma of racial ignorance and violence, to restore the city’s prosperity and reputation on their own initiative. This was the white power structure’s “whole desire,” Marshall told President Kennedy. “They want Birmingham to look like Atlanta.” However, another side of their pride made them deeply resent the Negro demonstrators as the proximate cause of their troubles. The idea of negotiating under the pressure of street demonstrations was offensive to all the city’s leading merchants and politicians. Conservatives refused to talk with any Negroes at all, Marshall found, and liberals refused to sit down with “outsiders,” most especially King.

  The best Marshall could do that Sunday night was to patch together scouting groups of moderate whites and conservative Negroes. Reform leaders Sidney Smyer and David Vann, plus several white merchants, met downtown with Negroes led by Arthur Shores and A. G. Gaston. Both sides lamented the dangers of demonstrations, but the Negroes stood by King’s original four-point program as a necessary condition of stopping them. In the end, the whites rejected all four points. But at least it was a beginning, and Burke Marshall followed up on all sides with his most telling and persistent argument: they should keep talking, he said, because only then could they sort out King’s confused, irrational demands. He said King did not know what he wanted. In the aftershock of the D-Day publicity, this perspective served Marshall’s tactical need to promote consideration of King’s aims, and balanced his criticisms of segregation with a parallel attack on King. Politically, it supplied a dignified role for the Kennedy Administration. By casting Birmingham as a failure of articulation on King’s part, Marshall projected the sovereign understanding of a problem solver without risking any government authority.

  Partly because the characterization so sharply patronized King, it appealed to those who recoiled from the protests as nearly unfathomable outbursts of Negro passion. It was particularly welcome in Washington, as the leaders of the Free World did not enjoy professing helplessness on a stark issue of freedom that was commanding attention around the world. Even privately, Marshall and his colleagues clung to a portrayal of themselves as facilitators cutting through the fog of King’s unhappiness. Some days later at the White House, Robert Kennedy emphasized the brain-power gap to the full cabinet, saying that “the Negro leadership didn’t know what they were demonstrating about. They didn’t know whether they were demonstrating to get rid of Bull Connor or whether they were demonstrating about the stores…I think some of the people who were demonstrating certainly didn’t know what they were demonstrating about, and none of the white community knew what they were demonstrating about.” A year later, in a joint oral history with Kennedy, Marshall said that when he went to Birmingham, “I talked to King and I asked him what he was after. He really didn’t know.” Twenty years later, Marshall recalled that it was “hard to negotiate with King because he had no specifics. What he wanted was something.”

  At John Drew’s house on Monday morning, May 6, Marshall spent two and a half hours trying to convince King that the afternoon demonstrations would hinder rather than help the negotiations now under way. It was true, Marshall conceded, that the white merchants could grant some of King’s demands on their own authority, but it was also true that the city could prosecute the merchants under the segregation ordinances if they did. Therefore, on this and every other matter at stake, the merchants were justifiably reluctant, not knowing which of the pretender governments would be recognized as legitimate. Until the courts decided between Boutwell and Connor, which would be only a few days now, all parties, including the federal government, would be partially blind, and demonstrations in the interim could only raise tempers at substantial risk of violence. To all this, King replied that he believed Birmingham’s merchants had the power to prevail upon any city government, including Connor’s. One of his mistakes in Albany had been to aim his marches at politicians, who didn’t need Negro votes, instead of merchants, who did need Negro trade. Now that the demonstrations were better focused, he would negotiate at any time, but he would not shut down the Birmingham movement on the mere promise of later negotiations. Every time Marshall cited the logic driving the merchants’ position, King replied that pressure, even fear, had been improving their reason. When Marshall left Drew’s house about noon, reporters pried out comments that the meeting had been instructive but essentially fruitless.

  The red pumper trucks and the monitor guns were in position when King pulled up at Sixteenth Street Baptist, but the police deployments otherwise revealed that Bull Connor had changed his tactics. To reduce the chance of conflict with riotous, non-movement Negroes, he had ordered his men to seal off the war zone of Kelly Ingram Park, which was now an empty square block of trampled grass surrounded by helmeted police. Almost politely, by way of compensation, Connor had permitted a crowd of some two thousand Negro spectators to gather on the sidewalks near the church. Though the rows of stand-by school buses indicated that Connor was going to try the Laurie Pritchett, welcome-to-jail strategy, no one knew what would happen. With King preaching nonviolence to the forming lines inside the church, James Bevel stepped outside for a final parley. Extending his hand to shake on the bargain, Bevel publicly asked a police captain to confirm that he would not use the hoses on the marchers if they kept good order. The captain, who by this time had built up a cross-trench acquaintance with Bevel, smiled tightly as he contemplated the dark outstretched hand. He replied that the police would not use excessive force, but no, he could not go so far as to shake on it.

  On signal, Dick Gregory led the first nineteen children out of the church. The captain called for the paddy wagon after the standard warning of arrest, whereupon the young people behind Gregory broke into a song of spirited relief. To the tune of “The Old Grey Mare,” they sang “I ain’t scared of your jail / ’cause I want my freedom / want my freedom / want my freedom…” Some of them snake-danced into the wagon as the next group spilled from the church. After that they came so continuously, and sang so loudly, that the police commanders merely waved them toward the paddy wagons and buses, dispensing with the dialogue.

  Older people joined in significant numbers for the first time since D-Day, comprising more than half the demonstrators. Some parents went to jail with their children. Others were so overcome by fear or disapproval that they snatched their children from the lines by force. At first, isolated ou
tbursts of grief or anger were among the few indications that the procession between rows of nightsticks was no parade, but the festivity gradually wore off among the spectators. Watching friends and relatives walk to jail at the rate of ten per minute for nearly two hours, a number of them grew sullen and angry, perhaps compounded by guilt that they were not willing to submit to the jailers themselves. A few bottles and rocks landed on the pavement near officers who, laboring in the heat under orders of restraint, lost snappish tempers more than once. In front of news photographers, five of them threw an overwrought Negro woman to the pavement and subdued her with knees to the throat and limbs.

  King’s aides, fearing that a riot soon would tarnish the largest single day of nonviolent arrests in American history, raced outside at 2:40 P.M. to call a halt. “That’s it for today!” one shouted, urging both Negroes and policemen to go home. Nearly eight hundred people had marched to jail from the church; more than two hundred reached the same destination from surprise picket lines in the downtown business district. With the next day’s headlines secured by midafternoon—BIGGEST MARCH STUNS BIRMINGHAM! the Chicago Defender would say—King’s aides began to harvest the newcomers who surged forward to replace the jailed ones many times over. Bevel said they would have six thousand ready for the next day. He and the other leaders directed the crowds into the mass meeting at St. James Baptist Church, which was swamped long before nightfall. The movement was becoming a tempest. A foretide of one event churned into the backwash of others, and mass communications spread the ripples far and wide.