Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  A number of the shaken business leaders unburdened themselves as freely as the publisher that day, but when they reassembled at the Chamber of Commerce they thought better of his call for intervention by President Kennedy. Inevitably, that would mean federal occupation, force-fed integration, and protracted strife with Governor Wallace. Besides, how could the Army itself dry up the rivers of Negroes they had seen? As the emergency session consumed the afternoon, Burke Marshall kept supplying Robert Kennedy with the names of key executives to be lobbied by cabinet members or by President Kennedy himself. The President made several calls, arguing that there was no way out except settlement. These efforts remained private. While the President worked continuously on Birmingham—meeting at the White House with Ted Sorensen, Nicholas Katzenbach, Lee White, John Doar, Berl Bernhard, and Louis Martin—he instructed his press officers to stress that his powers were not engaged. The President was “closely monitoring events,” they announced, and “continues to hope the situation can be resolved by the people of Birmingham themselves.” The White House received the Hanson telegram as “part of our study of this thing.” “We are not sitting idly by,” said Assistant Press Secretary Andrew Hatcher. “We just can’t say anything.”

  At the Gaston Motel, King experienced the terrible exultation of a commander whose troops had just charged over the hill. Where were they, and what now? As always, the point of breakthrough was the moment of maximum danger. The emblems of the victory, such as the inability of the police to make arrests, shifted the burden of good behavior to the movement just as the dispersed, pell-mell attack severely reduced King’s control. Worse, he knew that half or more of the Negroes now paralyzing the retail district were bystanders who had joined spontaneously upon seeing the demonstrators run wild without getting arrested. Many did not have the slightest training or interest in nonviolent discipline. How long could such a huge, motley crowd celebrate downtown, loosed from the fears of Bull Connor and segregation, without fights breaking out with police or each other—or riots, looting, or vandalism? On the other hand, if King tried to pull them out, only the nonviolent ones might follow his lieutenants, leaving the others more likely to run amok.

  Chaos overran King’s hopes of salvaging a complete, nonviolent triumph. Hundreds of demonstrators made their way back to Ingram Park when they ran out of adrenaline or nerve, and within an hour leaders and followers were chasing each other in all directions. Fred Shuttles-worth burst into King’s room shouting, “Martin, this is it!” One more foray downtown would break the city’s will, Shuttlesworth insisted. Just after he rushed off to lead a “second wave,” Forman burst in shouting that further demonstrations would be foolish and suicidally cruel. King reluctantly supported Shuttlesworth, but plans to retreat from downtown so as to return in better order were too complicated. Orders were modified, lost, delayed, disbelieved, or ignored. Miraculously, there was almost no violence from or upon the remnant who maintained the occupation downtown, but a pitched battle back near the church vindicated the news judgment of the stubbornest reporters, who had ignored the downtown stampede. Somewhere in the middle of the confusion, Wyatt Walker desperately tried to clear a path for the “second wave” by means of underhanded tactics that he had concealed from King. First swearing them to secrecy, Walker dispatched trusted runners to sound false fire alarms in distant corners of the city. Walker himself, in an unsuccessful attempt to drive off the intimidating K-9 corps, sneaked into an alley and blew on high-pitched dog whistles he had imported from the North.

  Among the Negroes, thousands of joyful newcomers were in no mood to resubmit to the amassing phalanx of white firemen and police officers, who in turn were in no mood to suffer the Negro celebration or to allow another breach of their ranks. A duel of rocks and fire hoses escalated by three o’clock to what the reporters agreed was a riot. Firemen worked the hoses with such furious abandon that they accidentally cracked the ribs of a policeman. When Shuttlesworth appeared with his line of singing children, the firemen used a monitor gun to slam him against the wall of Sixteenth Street Baptist, pinning him there until he collapsed. An ambulance took him to the hospital, whereupon Bull Connor declared, “I wish they had carried him away in a hearse.” For another hour, the hoses battered not only rock-throwers in the park but also lines of children who sallied forth from the church under the gleeful urging of James Bevel. Wyatt Walker fumed that Bevel’s madness had turned his climactic demonstration into a “Roman holiday,” but Bevel insisted that the playful submission to punishment represented a sublime and contagious form of nonviolence. “We intend to have the fire department pumping water tomorrow,” he announced from the pulpit that night. “Wear your swimsuit if you want to.”

  At a three-church mass meeting, the day’s fury at last subsided into the gentler passions of speeches and organ music. “This is a great movement,” said King. “We are not going to stop this movement until we have moved segregation from this city.” He preached nonviolence, as always, and pledged not to flinch even though “the Governor—bless his heart” was moving Alabama state troopers into Birmingham that very hour. Still, there was a hint of melancholy in his voice. Weary, King discarded his morning excitement about the ripe powers of the movement and spoke instead of a need for earthly help. “The hour has come for the Federal Government to take a forthright stand on segregation in the United States,” he said. “I am not criticizing the President, but we are going to have to help him.” Almost plaintively, King recalled his long, futile campaign to persuade President Kennedy to issue a Lincolnesque proclamation. He told the congregation of his encounter with the Kennedys in the Lincoln Room of the White House, and said that once he thought Kennedy “wanted to sign.” Although the sentimental opportunity of the Emancipation Day centennial was long past, King drifted back to his yearning for a simpler way. “We need to call on the President to sign a paper saying that segregation is unconstitutional,” he said.

  Robert Kennedy joined his brother for dinner that night in the White House, where they anxiously awaited word on the “big mules” debate. When the call finally came through at eight o’clock, an aide considered the moment important enough to make notes on Burke Marshall’s first, exhausted words to President Kennedy: “The meeting worked. The meeting of all the businessmen worked. Now if [it] holds w/ Negroes, we’re over the hump. They’ve had a hell of a day—& we’ve got to make it stick.” With only a handful of dissenting votes, Marshall added, the Senior Citizens had empowered a committee to negotiate a settlement with the Negroes in their name.

  The white committee, led by the board chairman of Royal Crown Cola, pitched immediately into negotiations with the Negroes, led by Arthur Shores, A. G. Gaston, and President L. H. Pitts of Miles College. At midnight, abandoning the fiction that they could perfect a compromise without the informed consent of King, they retired under cloak of secrecy to seek him out at the Drews’ house. Mayor Boutwell’s chief assistant, Billy Hamilton, was among the whites who dropped out at this critical stage; Boutwell simply could not risk public disclosure that his man had gone into a Negro neighborhood at night to barter away segregation face to face with the arch-villain himself. For the others, the midnight meeting was a personal and political watershed, such that the gruffly irreverent Sidney Smyer, who regularly boasted that he had been “called a son of a bitch plenty of times,” led the group in a prayer for divine guidance. Then they grappled with the details of segregation’s demise. Generally, the whites wanted vagueness and delay in order to minimize the danger of reprisal, while the Negroes wanted precision and immediacy in order to minimize the likelihood of dispute or betrayal. As the night dragged on, both sides tended to credit the mild, unflappable Andrew Young with ideas that achieved overall balance by proceeding in mixed stages. For the Negroes, there would be immediate desegregation of downtown dressing rooms, which was relatively easy for the whites because there were few left. For the whites, the linchpin segregation of the lunch counters would be surrendered at the end of sixty d
ays or upon the integration of the public schools, whichever came first. By 4:00 A.M., King, Smyer, Marshall, and all the others agreed that they had at least a blueprint for a settlement, and could do no more without sleep.

  At almost exactly that pre-dawn hour, two firebombs crashed into Hartman Turnbow’s farmhouse outside Mileston, Mississippi, between Jackson and Greenwood. Turnbow jumped from bed and tried to put out the fires, until his wife and daughter shouted to him that they could not escape because there were armed white men outside. Turnbow grabbed one of his rifles and drove away the intruders in a spirited gunfight.

  Bob Moses arrived shortly after daybreak. The attack endangered his rural registration projects because Turnbow, only a few days earlier, had become the first Negro in the twentieth century known to have tried to register in Holmes County. Turnbow was a yeoman farmer like E. W. Steptoe, stout as an oak and owner of seventy acres “free and clear.” In return for his courageous, colorful folk wisdom, SNCC workers cheerfully overlooked the arsenal of firearms that he had concealed in at least a dozen places on his property and person. (“This nonviolent stuff ain’t no good,” Turnbow later told “Martin Lufus King,” as he called him. “It’ll getcha killed.”)

  By the time Sheriff Andrew P. Smith arrived at the farmhouse that afternoon, Moses was taking photographs of the fire damage for his report, having taken his own statements from the witnesses. (“They come by here and shot all in my kitchen,” Mrs. Turnbow declared.) An FBI agent, dispatched by John Doar at Moses’ urgent request, was pulling slugs from the clapboard walls. This sort of meticulous investigation put Sheriff Smith into a nearly insoluble political dilemma. If he accepted the Turnbow account and went after the white firebombers, he would be doomed as sheriff in Holmes County. If he stalled, or pronounced himself unable to solve the case, he would have to turn the investigation over to the FBI. These choices being unacceptable, Sheriff Smith accused Turnbow of firebombing his own house and shooting it full of holes to build sympathy for the Moses registration campaign.

  Turnbow defended himself with a squirrel hunter’s knowledge of ballistics. “Why, I ain’t never owned a forty-five in my life,” he protested, pointing to the holes in his house. “Them’s forty-five bullets and forty-five holes, and I never owned nary’un.”

  Nevertheless, Sheriff Smith, his conspiracy theory reinforced by intense feelings of scorn and frustration, arrested Turnbow, Moses, and three SNCC workers for arson and related crimes. A jury promptly found them guilty. Moses was fined $50 on a separate charge of impeding Smith’s investigation by taking pictures. The overall predicament, which was at once logical and patently absurd, obliged Doar to launch a protracted effort to void the state prosecutions. All this took place in the quiet obscurity of the Mississippi countryside, markedly in contrast with the tumult that had left Greenwood only a month earlier and passed on to Birmingham.

  Fred Shuttlesworth exploded in dissent as soon as King sent word on Wednesday morning of a proposed one-day moratorium on demonstrations. From his hospital bed, though groggy from “three hypos” of sedation, as he said, Shuttlesworth reared up to tell his loyal preachers of Birmingham that the softhearted King was giving away their chance to finish off Bull Connor. “Ain’t no use scalding the hog on one side!” he thundered. “While the water is hot, scald him on both sides and get him clean. If the water gets cold, you ain’t never gonna clean off that hog!” Aside from this policy disagreement, Shuttlesworth made it clear that he was affronted as King’s co-equal prince of the church. King should have visited him in the hospital. On something as important as this first break in their avalanche of street pressure, King should have convened the Negro hierarchy around Shuttlesworth’s bed to make the decision.

  By the time he burst into Drew’s house, still wearing hospital tags, Shuttlesworth was a cauldron of steam. He peppered King’s explanations of the truce with mordant comments: “Say that again…. Did I hear you right?…Well, Martin, who decided?…You’re in a hell of a fix, young man.” As King tried vainly to calm him, an aide pointed out that the matter was moot because King already had scheduled a press conference. This only inflamed Shuttlesworth’s sarcasm. “Oh, you’ve got a press conference?” he asked in mock wonder. “I thought we were going to make joint statements.” Daring King to announce a truce, he promised to nullify it by leading the kids right back into the streets.

  Of the mortified bystanders in the Drew living room, Shuttlesworth’s threat most sorely alarmed Burke Marshall, who had been assuring Washington almost minute by minute that President Kennedy could announce a Birmingham truce to the nation at his televised press conference that day. Only such a dire emergency forced Marshall to interject his professorial voice into the raging distemper among the Negro preachers. He warned Shuttlesworth that a historic agreement was at stake, that promises had been given and commitments made. “What promises?” shouted Shuttlesworth. The reference to unknown understandings backfired, as did Abernathy’s soothing suggestion that perhaps Shuttlesworth was sick after all and should go back to the hospital. He was leaving all right, Shuttlesworth stormed, but they had better understand that neither King nor President Kennedy himself could call off the afternoon march.

  “Wait a minute, Fred,” King said softly. Over his shoulder to Marshall, he stressed the obvious vulnerabilities facing leaders of a small national minority. “We’ve got to have unity, Burke,” he said. “We’ve just got to have unity.”

  Shuttlesworth bridled at hearing the call of unity imposed for once upon him. “I’ll be damned if you’ll have it like this!” he roared at King. “You’re Mister Big, but you’re going to be Mister S-H-I-T!”

  No one knew exactly what King told Shuttlesworth when they retired to a back room. Most likely he stressed that the boycott was still on, that the white negotiators had given in on many points, that a day off from the previous day’s nearly tragic explosions might be healthy. And perhaps he just passed time to let him settle down, believing as he did that it was difficult for Shuttlesworth to find himself ignored by the hordes of reporters—178 of them, by Wyatt Walker’s latest count, from as far away as Japan and the Soviet Union—who came into town knowing little of Shuttlesworth’s history in Birmingham. Whatever King said, it appeared to work, as the two leaders emerged in a sunny, performing mood. At the press conference shortly thereafter, Shuttlesworth took the lead in announcing the truce he had denounced so violently in private. “We do believe that honest efforts to negotiate in good faith are under way,” he told reporters.

  Burke Marshall, who had warned Washington of a snag, now passed along the Justice Department’s equivalent of a huge sigh, and President Kennedy stepped before the cameras half an hour later. “Good afternoon,” he said. “I’m gratified to note the progress in the efforts by white and Negro citizens to end an ugly situation in Birmingham, Alabama.” He praised Marshall for his tireless mediation effort to “halt a spectacle which was seriously damaging the reputation of both Birmingham and the country.” Noting that the Negro leaders had stopped the demonstrations, and that the incoming Boutwell administration had “committed itself wholeheartedly to continuing progress in this area,” the President said he hoped for a final settlement within a day.

  President Kennedy had scarcely completed his masterly performance at the press conference—his first to be dominated by the subject of race—when a new snag imperiled the truce from the opposite direction. This time it was Governor Wallace, who announced that he certainly did not know of any negotiations to compromise segregation, nor did he think that Arthur Hanes and Bull Connor could approve of such. Hanes promptly challenged the “other” mayor, Boutwell, to admit that he was somehow involved in negotiations with Negroes. Governor Wallace’s state troopers began military drills in Kelly Ingram Park, and Bull Connor sent his men to padlock the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. The most decisive blow of the hard-line segregationists fell upon King and Abernathy: at a hearing on their unlawful-parade convictions from the Good Friday march, a lo
cal judge unexpectedly set their appeal bonds at the new legal maximum of $2,500 apiece. Before a shocked courtroom audience, the defendants pronounced themselves both unwilling and unable to pay, whereupon guards hauled them off to the Birmingham jail, shortly after President Kennedy’s optimistic press conference.

  Now a furious A. D. King jumped before the Birmingham press corps to declare that this betrayal voided the truce. He predicted huge demonstrations by the end of the day, the padlocked church notwithstanding, and Wyatt Walker said much of the same. Only the personal intercession of Attorney General Kennedy deflected Shuttlesworth from leading Bevel’s reserves on a march downtown. Kennedy’s theory was that Bull Connor was trying to provoke a riot as a pretext for martial law under his political ally, Governor Wallace, which would scuttle prospects for a settlement. Kennedy did not have to say that such an immediate and violent rebuttal of the President’s position would be a disaster for the Administration. He felt obliged to defend the settlement, and he knew that King’s imprisonment would stiffen the Negro terms just when the President was trying to soften both sides. Moreover, as Marshall had seen in the vivid confrontation with Shuttlesworth, the arrest removed the one presence that was indispensable for sustained Negro unity behind any settlement.

  Once again, more urgently than ever, Robert Kennedy needed to get King out of jail. He called Harry Belafonte in New York with an emergency request: could Belafonte protect the movement, the country, and Dr. King all at once by raising $5,000 bond money—in cash, that same day, as every hour was precious? Belafonte agreed to try. The New York banks were closed, but he mobilized wealthy friends to pluck up loose cash in the city. By evening, Belafonte called Kennedy to say that the money soon would be on its way to the airport. In a telling aside, however, Belafonte added that he was still waiting to get confirmation from Wyatt Walker that Dr. King actually wanted to come out of jail. This was a clinker for Robert Kennedy. Of all the surprise twists of the day, the most vexing were the signals reaching Marshall that King wanted to stay locked up.