Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  For King, the most difficult of the unresolved issues was the fate of some two thousand movement prisoners still jailed in Birmingham. He thought Bull Connor had made a mistake by arresting him, because the public stir strengthened his leverage to demand that all his fellow demonstrators leave jail with him, with the charges dropped as unjust, or, at a minimum, that bail be dropped so that they could gain release on personal recognizance. Robert Kennedy, for his part, was irked by the very idea that King wanted to use himself as a hostage. As stupid as it was for Connor to have engineered King’s incarceration, Kennedy thought it was irresponsible of King to risk an explosion of racial violence in Birmingham over what Kennedy saw as a side issue to the segregation dispute. He told Belafonte to stand by with the money, and secretly pursued alternative methods to free King.

  In Birmingham, the negotiating teams met into the night, the afterglow of President Kennedy’s public endorsement spurring on their eagerness to finish. However, that same national spotlight made the businessmen instinctively wary, and the Negro strategists remained divided in King’s absence. At the mass meeting, only James Bevel addressed the crowd, and, as though to demonstrate that anything could happen once people surrendered to the movement, a procession of nineteen white people entered the church, some of them wearing beards and rabbinical garb. They marched down the aisles of Sixth Avenue Baptist and up to the rostrum, where they embraced the preachers and the choir. “We came to applaud your courage and dignity in your struggle for everyone,” said a rabbi from New Jersey, introducing colleagues from as near as Memphis and as far away as Nova Scotia, saying they had been elected at a rabbinical conference to make a spontaneous pilgrimage in response to publicity about Birmingham. “I have never been moved more deeply in my life,” declared Rabbi Alex Shapiro, who said that as Jews who had seen the Germans overrun Europe, they hoped always to lend succor against oppression anywhere. “We shall do what you ask,” he said. “Our people are your people.” From the pulpit a cantor taught them a simple song of brotherhood in Hebrew, then directed the swaying congregation to embrace one another in the pews. For the ever-present Birmingham police detectives, this joyful hugging was the worst part of the night’s surveillance. “Of course Officer Watkins and myself were sitting between two negroes,” Officer Allison reported to Bull Connor, “and they really gave us the treatment.”

  A number of the Negro negotiators believed that King was wrong to stay in jail. With the active encouragement of Attorney General Kennedy, they prevailed upon A. G. Gaston to show up at the jail with $5,000 cash from his own bank. As in Albany ten months earlier, King and Abernathy found themselves ejected from their cells. This time there was no mystery, and the demands of unity prevented King from complaining publicly about the deception. Still, it was an unhappy King who returned to the Gaston Motel that night. He believed that his own misguided allies had deprived him of an advantage supplied by the cooperative foe, Bull Connor. Fittingly, a day that had begun with an enraged Shuttlesworth escaping from the hospital ended with an angry King trying to barricade himself in jail, and in between, the contending parties had zigzagged through a baffling series of press statements. After dark, farmer Shuttlesworth wound up talking urbanely about holding the course, while citified King wound up wanting to scald the other side of the hog. Late that night, King told reporters that if there was no settlement by eleven o’clock Thursday morning, the movement would mount its largest demonstration yet.

  The deadline slid by without result. It was Thursday, May 9, 1963, one extraordinary week since the gamble of the D-Day children’s march. In Moscow, Pravda ran a story headlined “Monstrous Crimes Among Racists in the United States.” Less vitriolic stories had become staples throughout Europe, and The New York Times reported that Birmingham was competing daily with an insurrection in Haiti for top news billing across non-Communist Asia. A majority of the news outlets, taking the merits of the Negro cause to be obvious, wondered why the Kennedy Administration failed to hasten a solution with a public assertion of authority.

  In Birmingham, with negotiations still deadlocked on the issue of the demonstrators still in jail, the whites pointed out that in return for King’s one-day moratorium they had quietly engineered the release pending trial of the five hundred youngest prisoners. Moreover, they said that after the settlement, and certainly upon the confirmation of the Boutwell administration, they could get the remaining bonds reduced drastically, perhaps even the charges dropped. But they were only businessmen, they insisted, and even if they could make puppets of the city courts and prosecutors, they could not boast of such powers in a public settlement. Surely King could understand that. The best they could do was to include a promise of concerted effort to get the demonstrators released.

  This was not good enough for King. He recoiled from the thought of the great mass meeting at which he would tell the mothers and fathers that while they had cracked segregation in Birmingham, their children must stay in jail. Those people should not have been arrested in the first place, he insisted. On principle, and personal honor, King refused to settle. If the Senior Citizens could not get the prisoners released outright, then perhaps they could raise $250,000 to get them freed on bond. If they could not or would not do it, then perhaps the federal government could raise the money. After all, Robert Kennedy had raised more than $60 million for the Bay of Pigs prisoners. To Kennedy’s protestations, through Marshall, that the government role here was peacemaker and mediator, not bondsman, King replied that if the federal government had not already been a party to the conflict before President Kennedy’s press conference, and before Robert Kennedy has pressured Gaston to bail him out against his will, then surely it was now, and ought to be more so.

  These were prickly talks, laced with innuendo. To Kennedy’s urgent warnings that the Negroes should settle before Governor Wallace’s troopers crushed their hopes under martial law, King hinted that Governor Rockefeller might help with the bond funds if Kennedy refused. The threat of partisan revolt touched Kennedy where he was vulnerable, not only in presidential politics but even in the Democratic House, where hearings had opened only the previous day on Republican bills to outlaw segregation. Some days later, in a White House presentation before the entire cabinet, Robert Kennedy said he had told King repeatedly that his stubbornness “doesn’t really make a lot of sense.”

  King returned Kennedy’s annoyance. At the Thursday press conference, at which he extended the truce another day, King publicly contradicted the Administration for the first time in Birmingham. “The President said that there were no federal statutes involved in most aspects of this struggle,” he said, “but I feel that there have been blatant violations of basic constitutional principles. I think also that we must recognize that some persons who have been arrested were arrested for going down to register to vote, and the federal government has done nothing about that. And some persons have been arrested in the Federal Building, at the lunch counter there. Nothing has been done.” He went on to assert that several other existing statutes plainly justified federal intervention.

  Perhaps intentionally, King gave no more than this hint that the heat of his negotiations had shifted from the Senior Citizens to the Kennedy Administration, and only a few people, such as Stanley Levison, were privy to the friction. FBI wiretaps picked up Levison’s candid agreement with Robert Kennedy’s position that the prisoners were a “secondary issue.” It was a “pity,” said Levison, that King wanted so much not to look like a privileged leader—he should take the deal and then worry about the prisoners. “Even if the people have to go to jail,” Levison said, “the other things that are won will just make them martyrs and make the victory even clearer. And I’m damn sure that for the kind of victory this represents, people will be delighted to serve a term, because this is the big victory. No question, if this comes, this is the big one.” On the other hand, Levison said he was pleased that King had scolded the Kennedy Administration for its aloofness. Levison figured that the Kennedys w
ere adopting a “new policy” of private maneuver behind a public stance of sympathetic neutrality. “It’s right, and it’s wrong,” he said. While the movement “has to be prepared to do a job without relying on Washington,” it was “impermissible for Washington not to be involved.” In another call, Levison told Clarence Jones that he thought “the Administration made a mistake by not intervening” more forcefully in Birmingham.

  King and Kennedy muttered about each other to their respective aides, who in turn muttered more harshly. But the Birmingham emergency did not allow either side to give in completely to hostility, as political disaster menaced them both. Kennedy, accepting that King would march again rather than leave people in jail, resolved to find the bail money. King, accepting that Kennedy’s help offered the only way out, gave up hopes for immediate bail reduction or release. Together, they resolved to buy their way out of the impasse, and the tacit alliance spawned a frenzy of hidden cooperation. King called Harry Belafonte to say that he needed some $90,000 in cash, and that this time he was working with the Attorney General without reservation. Kennedy’s first call was to Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers, who was soon barking orders from Detroit to his Washington lawyer, Joseph Rauh. “Joe,” he said, “we need to get a hundred and sixty thousand dollars to Birmingham by morning.” Rauh laughed; then he gulped.

  Robert Kennedy went to dinner that night at the White House, where the President pried out of his guest, Newsweek bureau chief Ben Bradlee, a tip that the subject of the next cover story would be Senator Barry Goldwater’s chances to become the Republican presidential nominee in 1964. “I can’t believe we’ll be that lucky,” said Kennedy, who hoped to run against Goldwater. “I can’t believe Barry will be that lucky, either.” The Attorney General missed nearly all the dinner gossip, being closeted with the telephone. From ALF-CIO president George Meany, he secured a promise for half the $160,000 out of two of Meany’s departmental accounts. He obtained a quarter-share of $40,000 directly from David McDonald of the Steelworkers, and, with Walter Reuther’s promise to send the final share out of Auto Workers funds, Kennedy turned to the feat of instant delivery. It was a matter of slush funds and satchels, of the sort that Kennedy himself had publicized in his war against unsavory union practices. No less than a national security crisis legitimized the transactions, and Kennedy discussed the logistics with Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg.

  The Attorney General was counting minutes, waiting for confirmations of cash in hand. Fretfully, he called Harry Belafonte to make sure that the settlement was not falling through on King’s end. While he was pressing for reassurance, Belafonte’s doorbell rang, and when Belafonte said it might be a delivery right then, Kennedy anxiously insisted that Belafonte find out while he waited on the line. Obliging, Belafonte put the phone down and opened his door to behold a uniformed Negro deliveryman, who handed him a small black satchel containing $50,000 in cash from his boss, Michael Quill of the New York transportation workers’ union. For King, this favor was in part a return on a speech he had delivered before Quill’s workers several years earlier. For Belafonte, the quick circuit between Robert Kennedy’s voice and the deliveryman’s face remained a salient memory of his political life.

  Racing home to New York, Jones followed King’s instructions to report to Harry Belafonte, and then followed Belafonte’s instructions to meet Governor Rockefeller’s assistant Hugh Morrow at Rockefeller Plaza. By then the New York banks had closed for the weekend, but Jones soon found himself standing with Morrow and a punctilious vice president inside a cavernous vault of Chase Manhattan, the Rockefeller bank. Governor Rockefeller himself was in Venezuela, having just married Happy Murphy so swiftly on the heels of their respective divorces that the minister who performed the ceremony was subjected to ecclesiastical reprimand by Presbyterian superiors. In the Gallup poll on Republican presidential contenders, Rockefeller dropped thirteen points within a week of his marriage, instantly boosting the prospects of his rival, Barry Goldwater. These circumstances contributed to the atmosphere of secrecy inside the bank vault. Rockefeller wanted to avoid public charges that he had tried to “buy” the Negro vote, and King wanted to avoid publicity about Rockefeller’s contribution to protect his relations with the Kennedys. For the bank itself, customs of confidentiality dignified the irregular transaction. In return for a promissory note by which Jones numbly promised to repay the full sum instantly upon demand, the vice president handed over a briefcase full of cash. Jones, feeling like a character in a spy novel, walked out of the vault to Belafonte’s apartment, before heading back to Birmingham. On his return, he found in the mail a “blind” receipt notifying him that his loan had been repaid in full.

  At the Gaston Motel, where the army of reporters had been promised a major announcement by noon, King stalled well into Friday afternoon. He was waiting first for confirmation that Joe Rauh had wired the union money from the UAW bank in Washington, then for the whites in Birmingham to fulfill their pledge to pay the money to city bond clerks, thereby setting free a steady stream of demonstrators. He was also waiting for word from Belafonte that Jones was heading South with more than enough money to free the last prisoners. With Burke Marshall and the white negotiators, King was exchanging last-minute modifications on how the various parties would behave when the great moment came—what they would sign, what they would say publicly, what they would truly mean. All the while, King was composing and rehearsing the performance on the Negro side. When finally the reporters threatened mutiny, King, Abernathy, and Shuttlesworth marched solemnly before the cameras. For reasons of internal diplomacy, King made sure who spoke the first words. Shuttlesworth said, “The City of Birmingham has reached an accord with its conscience.”

  Although Shuttlesworth announced the terms of the settlement, the reporters would not be satisfied until they heard it from King himself, as most of their readers knew nothing of Shuttlesworth. King stepped forward to speak. Through his cautionary remarks—“there is still a strenuous task before us, and some of it is yet uncharted”—shone his first euphoric predictions of a national contagion. While he was speaking, Shuttlesworth collapsed in a dead faint. Shrieks went up about his exhaustion and his fire-hose bruises. Even so, the medical crisis diverted attention only briefly to Shuttlesworth, and the press conference resumed as soon as ambulance attendants bore him off to Holy Family Hospital.

  At St. John’s Church, a crowd of some two thousand people broke off a rollicking version of “Oh Freedom” when the preachers made their entrance to the first mass meeting that Friday night. Triumph inspired Abernathy to a rhapsody on leadership. “Amen!” he shouted. “Give me a big hand! Tonight is victory night, and you ought to stand up for me!” He said that if he were dying, he wanted King to be holding one hand and Shuttlesworth the other while his wife cradled his head. “All these preachers are great men,” Abernathy proclaimed, “but there isn’t but one Martin Luther King! God sent him to lead us to freedom. Are you going to follow him? Is he our leader?” To great rhythmic shouts of “Yes!” Abernathy cried, “Then say ‘King’!” This served as the introduction for King, who took the pulpit amid a deafening chant of his name.

  He quelled the adulation by reading the formal statement he had made at the press conference. Then, to establish a tone of intimacy, he gave the crowd an exclusive tidbit of the written agreement, details of which were being withheld so as not to alert the Klan. “The sitting rooms will be integrated by Monday,” King announced. He went on through the timetable of the phases: a biracial committee in fifteen days, integrated rest rooms and water fountains in thirty days, lunch counters and upgraded Negro clerks in sixty. All movement prisoners were “either out of jail or on the way out of jail,” he promised, and he told them “off the record” that the white businessmen planned to move faster than the timetable specified.

  He warned them that the world would try to minimize, negate, and forget their achievement. Indeed, Mayor Boutwell already was announcing that he would not be bound
by the settlement. Mayor Hanes was calling it a “capitulation by certain weak-kneed white people under threats of violence by the rabble-rousing Negro, King.” The Birmingham News was publishing a slanted farewell story, “Negroes End Desegregation Campaign: Not Able to Get Charges Dropped,” and, almost pathetically, the editors placed alongside it a graphic summary of spring rampages at Princeton, Brown, Brandeis, and Yale, strongly implying that the local upheaval was of no greater moment than panty raids up North. “Now don’t let anybody fool you…” King told the crowd. “Do not underestimate the power of this movement! These things would not have been granted without your presenting your bodies and your very lives before the dogs and the tanks and the water hoses of this city!…”

  “Then another thing,” he said, his voice now quivering with emotion. “The United States is concerned about its image. When things started happening down here, Mr. Kennedy got disturbed. For Mr. Kennedy…is battling for the minds and the hearts of men in Asia and Africa—some one billion men in the neutralist sector of the world—and they aren’t gonna respect the United States of America if she deprives men and women of the basic rights of life because of the color of their skin. Mr. Kennedy knows that.” The President’s worries gave the movement leverage to change the reality of a segregated bastion like Birmingham, King said, and now they had touched a nerve connecting conscience with power. He told them he had been flooded with phone calls offering support—not just from the rabbis and the most powerful Negro preachers, but planeloads from Denver and Los Angeles and Pittsburgh, and the head of the American Baptists, and Jackie Robinson and Floyd Patterson. And Harry Belafonte had called that morning to say that three thousand New Yorkers were ready to picket the White House if necessary to gain an agreement. “Now this is an amazing thing!” King cried. “And it should make all of us feel happy.”