Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  In New York, Stanley Levison worked to place the first newspaper fund-raiser since the 1960 ad that had brought the crippling Sullivan v. New York Times libel suit. In the forty-eight hours since he first saw the Times photograph of the police dog attacking Walter Gadsden, Levison had talked constantly with Jack O’Dell about how to capitalize on the opportunity to make money for the SCLC. O’Dell said that his mass mailings were already showing a fantastic shift in public opinion. Mailing lists were yielding many times the expected return. Ten-dollar contributions suddenly were giving way to big ones. A woman from Queens had sent $3,000. One list had money pouring in from Canada. These early signs put the New York mail room in chaos and O’Dell in awe. With his concurrence, Levison had prepared an ad, but on Monday afternoon—minutes before the first marchers went to jail in Birmingham—the man at the advertising agency called Levison to say that “the bastards at the Times wouldn’t print the ad.”

  Levison brought Clarence Jones in for phone negotiations, and Jones, after talking with some of the Times lawyers he knew from the Sullivan case, reported that “they want to take out references to brutality and all strong references to segregation and discrimination in Birmingham.” Although the deletions included headlines and copy that had been published in the Times’ own news stories, Levison was too pragmatic to waste time fighting. He said the lawyers’ business was to be conservative, and that the Times was fearful of being sued again over a controversial King ad. The important task was to get an ad out, he said—almost any ad that mentioned King, Birmingham, and an address to which to send contributions. Not long after the arrests ended that afternoon, Levison was back on the phone with the Times lawyers, negotiating a compromise ad that referred to Birmingham simply as “one of the largest segregated cities in the Western Hemisphere.” FBI wiretap clerks laboriously transcribed all this, together with his intermittent conversations about stock prices. While the business side of the Times dickered with Levison, the news editors agreed to publish on the next day’s front page another gripping dispatch from Claude Sitton, headlined “Birmingham Jails 1,000 More Negroes.”

  In Birmingham, the Monday mass meeting overflowed from St. James Baptist into Thurgood Church, from there to St. Luke’s, and finally to St. Paul’s. Five to ten thousand people packed the four churches simultaneously, buoyed by songs and testimonials from jail. Birmingham preachers circulated among them with impromptu performances, as did soloists and movement treasurer William Shortridge, whose assistants staggered off under the weight of a record $40,000 offering. Much of the sum came from celebrity Negro preachers who had “lifted” a special Birmingham gift at Sunday services as far away as Pittsburgh and Los Angeles. That evening, Fred Shuttlesworth was attending a second negotiating session with the whites, led by Smyer and Vann, with Burke Marshall hovering in the background. Meanwhile, distraught relatives bombarded the leaders with horror stories about the children penned up outdoors at the fairgrounds. In a rainstorm, James Forman burst in upon King and insisted that he personally inspect the conditions at the camp. King saw crowds of relatives throwing blankets and candy bars over the chain-link fences to the wet young prisoners. He asked police commanders to shelter them, called Burke Marshall to press for federal attention to these “political prisoners,” as he called them, and then broke away to the mass meetings.

  With Abernathy, surrounded by a throng of message-bearers and supplicants, King pushed his way into all four churches. At St. Luke’s, the movement choir’s rendition of “Rock Me, Lord” drove one woman into screeches so unworldly that the preachers on the platform whispered among themselves about whether something should be done. She quieted when Abernathy took the pulpit for King, who was closeted offstage among the telephones. Abernathy, always the salty sidekick, proclaimed that he could tell they were “on the threshold of freedom in Birmingham” by how nervous Burke Marshall was. “Today,” he declared, “I sat in a room with one of the top men in the Justice Department, who paced the floor, couldn’t sit down, changed from chair to chair.” In a voice of pride tinged with merriment, Abernathy assured them that they had the white folks tied in knots. “Day before yesterday we filled up the jail,” he said. “Today, we filled up the jail yard. And tomorrow, when they look up and see that number coming, I don’t know what they’re gonna do!” The congregation clapped and chuckled in the comic expanse of Abernathy’s ego. He told them not to worry about their relatives in jail, because he was going to call Burke Marshall about their safety. “And if he doesn’t do anything about it, I’m gonna call Bobby,” he declared, to peals of laughter, “and if Bobby doesn’t do anything about it, I’m gonna call Jack.” By the time he saw King approaching from the wings, Abernathy had the crowd laughing at all the perils of the movement, including death itself. “The problem with us is that we are too afraid of dying,” he said, “and too afraid of going places that will cause us to die.” Instead of worrying about the Birmingham jail, he advised the fearful, “when you go home tonight you better stand up in the corner and not go to bed, because more folk have died in the bed than any place I know.”

  King spoke of the jail marches with joyous respect, of mass meetings packed inside and out so that “you can’t get near the church,” of experiences that day beyond any he had known. “There are those who write history,” he said. “There are those who make history. There are those who experience history. I don’t know how many historians we have in Birmingham tonight. I don’t know how many of you would be able to write a history book. But you are certainly making history, and you are experiencing history. And you will make it possible for the historians of the future to write a marvelous chapter. Never in the history of this nation have so many people been arrested for the cause of freedom and human dignity!” When the cheers died down, he said, almost in disbelief, “You know, there are approximately twenty-five hundred people in jail right now.”

  Earnestly, almost gingerly, he wound to the subject of love. “Now we say in this nonviolent movement that you’ve got to love this white man,” he told them. Above a cry of “Yes!” he said, “And God knows, he needs our love…. And let me say to you that I’m not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love.” Begging their indulgence, he recited again the distinctions among the three Greek words for “love.” This time he added a small new twist by stating that there was something mundane, even debased, about eros and filia. “Romantic love is inevitably a little selfish,” he declared. “You move your lover because there is something about your lover that moves you.” Titters punctuated his coy description until he moved on to agape. “And when you rise to love on this level,” he declared, “you love those who don’t move you. You love those that you don’t like. You love those whose ways are distasteful to you. You love every man because God loves him!”

  A few seconds later, as King left hurriedly for the last mass meeting, the choir sprinted into a runaway version of “Ninety-nine and a Half Won’t Do.” To round off the moment, and to cover King’s exit, Abernathy took the pulpit again to tease King for presuming to teach native Alabamans such as himself about love. “I had been telling him that we know the meaning of that word he calls ‘eros,’” said Abernathy, pronouncing the Greek with pompous exaggeration. “He says that ‘eros’ is that type of love that moves ya.” Abernathy spoke the words so seductively that skitters of laughter replaced the gospel fervor in the audience. “And he went on to say what it might be,” he impishly reminded them. “It might be the way your lover walks. And it might be the way your lover talks. I was glad that he didn’t tell you what it really is!” Then, with the crowd convulsed in laughter, Abernathy gave a deadpan shrug. “But that’s the way people talk from Georgia. In Alabama, we’ll take the ‘might be’ out, and let you know just plainly what it is.” He hastened off after King, leaving the crowd bubbling with satisfaction that the movement had everything: religion, music, drama, tender fellowship, Greek lessons, cataclysms of history, and a full range of entertainment that included sexy humor
from preachers.

  King’s strategy talks lasted the balance of the night at the Gaston Motel. From the negotiating front, Shuttlesworth and his colleagues reported modest progress at best. On the demonstration front, however, they were encouraged by a huge and nearly flawless day’s march to jail, and beyond that, some of them had noticed a critical sign: the downtown business district had been practically a ghost town, empty not only of Negro shoppers but also of white ones. They were not sure what had caused this phenomenon—whether it was the sight of the two hundred young pickets or merely the cumulative awareness of the daily “Negro trouble” downtown—but in any case the white women were staying home. To King’s strategists, this was economic leverage beyond their fondest hopes. It was also serendipity, as even Wyatt Walker admitted that Project C never contemplated a boycott by whites as well as Negroes. Seizing the new possibility of a complete, biracial shutdown of Birmingham’s retail trade, they decided it was less important to march people to jail or to picket certain stores than to flood the business district with masses of protesting Negroes. To do that, they needed to get around the fire hoses and paddy wagons. The planners hatched schemes all night, and at 6:00 A.M. on Tuesday, May 7—just as Shortridge and his assistants finished sorting the record offering in a neighboring motel room, which they had rented especially for that pleasant labor—the youth leaders began to fan out to homes and schools, rousting their most trusted recruits.

  Across town, the white negotiators met early. They knew that the Negroes would mount another onslaught that afternoon, that Bull Connor had no room to imprison more demonstrators, and that nationwide sensitivity to the racial conflict in Birmingham soon would force either President Kennedy or Governor Wallace to send troops into the city. They were not sure which would be the greater calamity, but they foresaw that all paths led within a matter of hours to economic and social catastrophe, which Sidney Smyer referred to as a humiliating “black eye” for Birmingham. Recognizing that they lacked the power among themselves to avert disaster, they resolved to sound an alarm to the entire white business establishment—to all the “big mules” of the semi-secret Senior Citizens Committee, which had pushed through the reform against Bull Connor. The negotiators rushed to the telephone to summon all members to an emergency session that very morning at the Chamber of Commerce.

  At ten o’clock, King held a news conference at the Gaston Motel. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he told the huge assembly of reporters, “I would like to say briefly that the activities which have taken place in Birmingham over the last few days to my mind mark the nonviolent movement’s coming of age. This is the first time in the history of our struggle that we have been able literally to fill the jails.” Even as he spoke, young demonstrators made their way unobtrusively toward a dozen rendezvous points scattered around the business district. Volunteers stowed picket signs inside car trunks. Dorothy Cotton, Isaac Reynolds, and others delivered final instructions to vanguard groups of fifty or less, while Bevel, Walker, and the better-known leaders made a show of gathering as usual at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

  At the Chamber of Commerce, seventy of the “big mules” assembled before noon in a banquet room. On call from Chairman Smyer, Sheriff Bailey delivered a grim briefing on the state of law enforcement: stuffed jailhouses with rebellious staffs and budgets already overspent for the year; street officers on the point of cracking from relentless stress, helpless to make further arrests but caught between taunting demonstrators, omnipresent news cameras, and the conflicting orders of an unstable and divided high command that included Bull Connor. An old ex-governor, chairman of a Chamber of Commerce committee to attract new industry to Birmingham, stood up to announce gravely that if it was that bad, they should call up Governor Wallace right then, tell him to declare martial law to “suppress this whole business,” and be done with it. A wave of seconding speeches rolled forth in support of his opinion, during which the noise of sirens began to penetrate the walls.

  Shortly after noon, a group of fourteen Negro children, some carrying schoolbooks and lunch bags, marched out of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church toward downtown. Sight of them surprised the police commanders, as the demonstrations never had started before one o’clock. Many police units were still at lunch, others not due to report until twelve thirty, but the available officers managed to carry out their orders. They blocked the line of students, confiscated their picket signs, and directed them back toward the Negro section, saying they could march there all they wanted. From across the street, movement leaders studied this police response as they sent forth more “decoy” lines and waited for pandemonium to erupt. Blocks away, vanguard groups of the best-trained nonviolent students already were in motion, running double-time along the sidewalks from all four points of the compass. Within minutes, they retrieved their signs from movement cars at corners near their designated sites and threw up lines totaling six hundred pickets in the heart of the business district.

  Police radios crackled with strange sightings of trotting Negroes at unusual places. At the church, where reporters were massed and police units still converging, it was some time before it was fully accepted that these rampaging bands had anything to do with Martin Luther King’s mannerly troops, who were still coming out of the church. Even then, with headquarters angrily squawking that a dastardly surprise attack had concentrated behind their rear lines, the commanders were reluctant to believe that the main contest could be elsewhere, but finally they sent units peeling off downtown under siren.

  From his observation post in the Smith Building, Wyatt Walker watched the police blockade thin out until there were far too few officers to arrest or disperse his marchers, and then he called by walkie-talkie for a general charge. Suddenly, all the doors of Sixteenth Street Baptist flew open to disgorge a dozen lines of young Negroes who bolted into full sprint past the decoys, across the street, and around the police. Ignoring crosswalks and traffic signals, endless streams of them pushed past gaping white pedestrians and blocked what little traffic had not been halted already by the police. Bevel called it their “freedom dash.” The next day’s Birmingham News gave the bedlam a lyrical cast: SIRENS WAIL, HORNS BLOW, NEGROES SING.

  Inside the Chamber of Commerce, talk of martial law had chilling real-life accompaniment from outside. Smyer gravely called upon President Kennedy’s representative to speak. His many talks in Birmingham had convinced him, Burke Marshall said, that martial law under Governor Wallace’s troops offered at best a dangerous truce. He thought the Negroes would keep marching, then or later, because the “central problem” and the “root of the demonstrations” was a denial of basic constitutional rights. Marshall spoke softly, and the more softly he spoke the louder were the intruding sounds of chaos. It seemed to him that a pressing responsibility fell to the Senior Citizens themselves, he said, as they had the power to bring about a lasting solution. All they had to do was to stand behind the retail merchants in their efforts to reach a negotiated settlement with the Negroes. Marshall sat down after the brief but courageous speech, which, at the very least, checked the stampede of the Alabamans toward martial law. Some voices still spoke up for that option, a few for Marshall, and with the issue thus joined, Smyer thought it prudent to recess for lunch.

  No executive repast was ever like this one. As the big mules descended toward their favorite downtown restaurants, choruses of “We Shall Overcome” first blasted their ears, and then they were swallowed up by what amounted to Birmingham’s nonviolent Bastille Day. Not only had the young Negroes broken into the downtown enclave, they had jammed the sidewalks and streets in a wild celebration of triumph and possession, paying little attention to the august businessmen who were obliged to go around them or, coming upon a patch of sidewalk literally carpeted with sit-ins, to step over them. Turning the first corner, the Senior Citizens beheld what King proudly called “square blocks of Negroes, a veritable sea of black faces.” Newspaper estimates of their number would run upward from three thousand. Jo
yous, weaving processions burst out of segregated stores, then back in again. Here and there a policeman lamely tore up a picket sign or two. Wincing commanders explained to the business leaders that they were making no arrests because the jails would hold no more, and they could not otherwise clear the area without teargassing or shooting up the downtown sanctum itself, including the Chamber of Commerce.

  All these sensations struck the mules with revolutionary force. One of them, publisher Clarence B. Hanson of the Birmingham News, rushed back to his office to compose a telegram to President Kennedy. Although he clung even then to the amazing local cabal of journalistic restraint—burying on inside pages a host of news stories, such as “Negro Mobs Break Through Police: Swarm Over Downtown Area”—Hanson splashed the crisis telegram across the top of that afternoon’s final edition. His extraordinary appeal to Kennedy, which broke the five-week embargo against front-page mention of King, revealed that even powerful American whites conceived of themselves as helpless victims of race: “Mr. President, if these were white marches…we believe your Administration would have taken vigorous action to discourage them.” Hanson objected to Burke Marshall’s call for self-responsibility on the grounds that it conveniently exempted President Kennedy himself. Having encouraged the aspirations of King and other Negroes, said Hanson, Kennedy was obliged to stop their demonstrations: “If there is to be order, and respect for law…you, sir, must be the one to bring it.”