Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  “What did he say?” asked President Kennedy, cutting off General Wheeler.

  “Well,” said Marshall, “he says that if there are no other incidents he thinks he can control his people. Of course, he just got there, and he’s…going to try to organize the Negroes to go around into the communities. He said a lot of those people were drunk last night. It being Saturday night.”

  “Yeah,” said the President. “He didn’t say anything about troops, did he?”

  “No, he didn’t,” Marshall replied. “Well, I didn’t raise that, and he didn’t.” Official reticence thus kept the government from learning that King had told reporters explicitly that he was not calling for federal troops. His unstated purpose was to protect the fragile desegregation agreement at all costs by not antagonizing the Birmingham businessmen. On this objective, King and the Kennedy Administration were more firmly allied than they realized. To Marshall, King did stress that the settlement was the ultimate hostage to the violence. “If it causes the businessmen to go back on their agreement,” Marshall reported to President Kennedy, “he said the game is over. And I think that’s absolutely right.” The specter of open racial warfare invaded the Oval Office.

  Recognizing the supreme importance of the settlement, Marshall ducked out again to take a phone call from Sidney Smyer. As the only Senior Citizen to acknowledge his role publicly, Smyer was under relentless attack from local segregationists demanding that the names of the other “traitors” be made known. Mayor Hanes was vilifying other parties “implicated” in the settlement as provocatively as he could—announcing that “the nigger King ought to be investigated” as a “revolutionary,” deriding Chief Moore as fainthearted, and stating of Robert Kennedy that “I hope that every drop of blood that’s spilled he tastes in his throat, and I hope he chokes on it.” In the face of all this, Smyer hazarded a promise to Marshall that the Senior Citizens would hold up. They would lie low for a few more days, he said, because many of them were worried for the safety of themselves and their families, but they would stick by their agreement with King. His steadfastness relieved Marshall. Soon afterward, Smyer called in Birmingham reporters to reveal, behind smokescreen denunciations of Negro rioters, that prominent people in the city were actively promoting racial turbulence “to shove the city into martial law.” Under anybody’s martial law, Wallace’s or Kennedy’s, Smyer warned, “the community is under the heel of the military. No longer can we solve anything ourselves.”

  At the White House, General Wheeler resumed: “Well, Mr. President, I got another Battle Group alerted up in Fort Campbell, Kentucky.” President Kennedy took notes on which Army units would move where, and shortly after Marshall returned he dispatched Wheeler and Vance to get three thousand soldiers moving in Operation Oak Tree. As soon as they were out of earshot, he led a round of chuckling over the military bureaucracy’s precision. “When they say the flying time’s an hour,” quipped the President, “the mistake you always make is that’s what you think—that they’ll be there in an hour.”

  McNamara, Katzenbach, Marshall, and Guthman retired to the Cabinet Room to draft a presidential statement. While justifying the troop movements in the name of public order, it strongly implied that their mission was to protect the desegregation agreement as well. They fed the statement one page at a time to the President’s secretary Evelyn Lincoln for typing, but latecomer Ted Sorensen and President Kennedy objected that it “leaned too much on the side of the Negroes.” Even so, when President Kennedy stepped out at 8:48 P.M. to face hordes of reporters and live broadcast coverage, the version he read cemented his commitment to the landmark settlement. “The Birmingham agreement was and is a fair and just accord,” he declared. “…The federal government will not permit it to be sabotaged by a few extremists on either side.”

  Ralph Abernathy heard President Kennedy’s statement on a car radio as he made his way to the New Pilgrim Baptist Church in Birmingham. The meeting could not be held downtown, because the state troopers had sealed off a twenty-eight-block area around the Gaston Motel, where Wyatt Walker and a score of occupants remained incommunicado. Even out at New Pilgrim, the fear of trigger-happy troopers or nighttime riot was so strong that Negroes who ventured outdoors wore their best clothes and stepped gingerly. It was a long meeting, and through most of it Andrew Young was stuck with the task of squiring the visiting dignitaries, who, having come to celebrate the victory, found themselves instead in a war zone. Among them were Dorothy Height and a delegation from the National Council of Negro Women. Holding themselves primly above the renewed strife, they made speeches about their organization’s mission “to strengthen in every way that we could the moral fiber of our country,” and in praising their founder, Mary McLeod Bethune, they quoted at length “the wonderful words of her last will and testament.”

  Bursting into the church, Abernathy obliterated this contrived decorum. He announced President Kennedy’s support for the settlement. But, he shouted above prolonged cheers, he was resting his hopes on even greater powers than the U.S. Army or the White House. He was looking to the Almighty God who had listened to Paul and Silas in the Philippi jail, to Daniel in the lions’ den, to the three devout Jews in Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace. Between rhythmic shouts from the congregation, Abernathy cried out that he was looking to the God who had sought out Moses in the land of Midan and Martin Luther King “in the sophisticated, well-endowed Ebenezer Baptist Church of Atlanta, Georgia…He is the leader! He is the Moses!…We are going to listen now to our leader.”

  King’s Sunday speech was recorded by the indefatigable pilgrims from Radio Riverside, who had filled nearly five reels of tape since the previous night’s Klan rally. On Monday, they followed him on a tour of Negro taverns and billiard rooms, during which a drubbing from a riffraff pool shark left King fretting once again that his skills had atrophied since Crozer. As the Riverside reporters walked the tense streets outside, they recorded a frustrated diatribe from Bull Connor himself. “Well, the son of a bitch,” Connor sneered. “He’s the only one that’s caused any violence. You can quote me as saying that if you put ‘son of a bitch’ in front of it…The biggest racketeer that ever hit America. Shakedown artist…He’s down there in the pool room now, preaching nonviolence.”

  That Monday night, the Riverside reporters followed King again to the mass meeting. The relief of two days’ shaky peace, plus the presence of celebrities, packed the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church. Former heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson, who was preparing for a July rematch with the awesome new champion, Sonny Liston, told them with expressive humility how the televised news footage of Birmingham had moved him. “And I’ve got my training camp,” he said, “and I felt very guilty…that here I was sitting in camp watching you people, my people, go through this…And I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart.” When Patterson sat down, a bandaged but dapper Wyatt Walker came forward. “It does not take long to introduce Jackie Robinson,” he said snappily. “You can do it as quick as you can say Jackie Robinson.” And the gray-haired baseball immortal drew a river of sighs and cheers that eclipsed even King’s.

  “I don’t think you realize down here in Birmingham what you mean to us up there in New York,” said Robinson. “And I don’t think white Americans understand what Birmingham means to all of us throughout the country.” Normally a facile public speaker, Robinson said haltingly that he could not express himself, could not explain it, that the only thing he could think to tell them was that when he left New York his three children had wanted to come with him to go to jail too, because they had seen Birmingham children going to jail for what they believed in. “I can’t help getting emotional about this thing,” he said. “…And I wish that this same kind of enthusiasm that has shown right here in this church tonight could be shown to Negroes through America.”

  “I am convinced that the agreements that have been made will be met,” King told the congregation. With the Alabama troopers and the Army soldiers locked in a stalemat
e, the movement’s followers could hope again, but the long trail of ordeal had honed King’s optimism down to a fierce determination. “We must have faith in our movement,” he declared with all his passion. “And another thing we must realize—this is not a racial conflict basically. I want you to understand me here. We are not going to allow this conflict in Birmingham to deteriorate into a struggle between black people and white people. The tension in Birmingham is between justice and injustice.” Their goal was to enlist “consciences,” not skin colors, he said, as their cause was as broad as religion and democracy. He insisted that some white people in Birmingham were with them secretly, or in spirit. One had even called with an offer to rebuild A. D. King’s parsonage. “I do not know,” King intoned. “They may try to bomb a little more.” He drew gasps by announcing that a Negro pedestrian named Prince Green, of Coosa Street, was in the hospital after being shot from a passing car that evening. They would keep going through bombings and shootings. “I’m sorry,” King cried out, “but I will never teach any of you to hate white people.”

  Ralph Abernathy coaxed from the congregation a “love offering” of $600 for Fred Shuttlesworth, who was still in bed since Friday’s collapse at the victory press conference. Shuttlesworth did not reappear until after King left town, but on Wednesday he made an entrance leaning on the arms of two retainers, and spoke with his old vigor. “I have just about de-bulled ol’ Bull!” he roared. “I didn’t know it would take me seven years.” By then King was in Cleveland. It was May 15—“some six or seven weeks,” as he put it, since the birth of his daughter at the commencement of Project C, and nearly two weeks since the first children’s march of May 2. Only after he emerged from Birmingham’s long dark tunnel did he begin to see how drastically everything, including his own life, had changed.

  TWENTY-ONE

  FIRESTORM

  Mobbed at the airport, King motorcaded like an astronaut through the streets of Cleveland to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church for what amounted to the first white mass meeting of the civil rights movement. His separate constituencies suddenly blended into jumbled hordes. In a whirlwind twelve hours, he gave six speeches and a television interview. After posing with the Episcopal bishop of Ohio, he complied with Negro photographers who insisted that Wyatt Walker lift his shirt so that King could point solemnly to his rib bruises. At his second stop in Cleveland, traffic was jammed for twenty blocks around Cory Methodist Church, a converted Jewish synagogue, where churchwomen with picnic baskets had been encamped for as long as nine hours. Finding it impossible to squeeze King through the crush of bodies, the sponsors diverted the overflow to three Negro churches nearby, and squadrons of Cleveland police shuttled King among the congregations while Abernathy and Walker held off the crowds. An enterprising man ran extension cords out of one church and sold hookups to those who wanted to record King’s address. The evening’s live audience exceeded ten thousand, and the SCLC netted $15,000 from the offerings. “I’ve never seen a more aroused response,” King exclaimed from one pulpit.

  It was as though the Birmingham movement had been transplanted magically to Cleveland. Scarcely pausing, King spent a day holding the truce in Birmingham and then a night in New York with Harry Belafonte, who told him that Hollywood and Los Angeles were mobilizing to top Cleveland’s welcome. From Chicago, Mahalia Jackson said people were so worked up over Birmingham that she could turn out the entire city to hear King. She vowed to do just that within a week.

  That Sunday, the New York Post discovered King’s month-old “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Much to Stanley Levison’s regret, the two-page scoop killed interest in the “Letter” at the Times, where the editors had just told King and Levison that they had it “cut down and ready to be put in type” for the Sunday Magazine. Although the Times quickly yanked the excerpt from the publishing schedule, lesser journals were not so put off by the competitive staleness, and the “Letter” sprouted on the covers of Liberation, Christian Century, The Witness, Friends, and The Mennonite, among others. Within days, Levison sold reprint rights to the Atlantic Monthly for $600, and Clarence Jones soon mounted a campaign to stop wildcat circulation in order to protect King’s copyright for book negotiations. William Kunstler took the initiative for a book to be written jointly by King and himself, but Stanley Levison maneuvered Kunstler aside as an “opportunist.” The feverish excitement over Birmingham penetrated even the New York literary establishment, where a publisher suggested to Levison the eventual title of King’s third book, Why We Can’t Wait.

  In Birmingham, King helped foil a churlish attempt by the Connor forces to expel two thousand child marchers from school, then flew off the next weekend to a rally of nearly fifty thousand in Los Angeles. The audience, clutching programs that bore pictures of snarling Birmingham police dogs, filled the seats and aisles of the old Wrigley Field and then spilled across the field and out into the parking lot. The largest civil rights rally to date was also the first integrated mass meeting, and self-consciousness hung beneath the excitement. Whites and Negroes were shy or excessively polite to each other, like strangers at a freshman dance. With awkward sincerity, Paul Newman read a list of actors and California politicians “who have evinced concern and interest.” A soprano drew nervous coughs when she trilled heroic r’s through “Right On, King Jesus.” Wyatt Walker quickly sat down after his early pronouncements—“I am America’s new black Joe”—fell flat. SNCC’s Sam Block tried to make a short speech about Greenwood, but stage fright reduced him to cardboard words about “trying to make the world safe for democracy.”

  Of all the speakers, only King was at home. He personified Birmingham to nearly everyone there, and he did not have to change his delivery much to suit an integrated audience. Having always aimed his speeches at the common spine, he opened quietly with the trigger line from his first speech of the Montgomery bus boycott: “There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.” The crowd rose with him through three perorations. Near the end, one ecstatic woman could be heard shrieking in the tones of a wolf whistle. “Now the Governor of Alabama has said that he will stand in the door to try to prevent a Negro from entering the University on June the tenth,” King declared. “And I think that if the Governor of Alabama will present his body by standing in the door to preserve an evil system, then President Kennedy ought to go to Tuscaloosa and personally escort the student into the university with his body! And I think that would be a magnificent witness for what this nation stands for.” He kept the crowd near a roar through his final run from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

  After the rally, Burt and Norma Lancaster hosted a reception in Beverly Hills, for which California governor Edmund G. Brown had sent out the invitations. A brassy Hollywood lawyer got down to business by announcing that it took $1,000 in hard cash to run the SCLC movement each day. Paul Newman wrote the first $1,000 check, singer Polly Bergen the second, actor Tony Franciosa the third. Actors John Forsythe and Lloyd Bridges contributed, as did the wife of basketball star Elgin Baylor. Marlon Brando mumbled a warning against “what-we-have-doneism” and bought a week of the movement for $5,000. Sammy Davis, Jr., matched the reception’s total receipts with his own pledge of $20,000. Together with Wrigley Field contributions of $35,000, the evening brought the SCLC $75,000. Awed by the glitter and money, a Jet reporter wrote that “We Shall Overcome” rang out from the Lancaster home “like Wings Over Jordan in Beverly Hills.”

  Then King flew to a different kind of awe in the heartland: riding in an open car amid a fleet of limousines, rushing through the streets of Chicago behind the roar of police motorcycles and the wail of sirens to city hall for an official welcome by Mayor Daley. The mayor, looking only slightly uncomfortable, joined the motorcade to the city-owned McCormick Place on the shore of Lake Michigan, where for nearly an hour he stood backstage with King as Mahalia Jackson fussed over them, straightening their ties and thundering at the stagehands and musicians who were delaying her big n
ight. Then, finally, Mayor Daley welcomed the heroes of Birmingham. In his own speech King was hard-pressed to match the dueling headliners—Mahalia Jackson, queen of gospel, appearing for once with her archrival Dinah Washington, queen of the blues. The three of them held the overflow crowd until two o’clock in the morning, when young Aretha Franklin topped them all with her closing hymn. Only twenty-one, already a battered wife and the mother of two children aged six and four, she had seen the underside of church glamour as the daughter of big-time singing preacher C. L. Franklin (“The Man with the Million-Dollar Voice”). Aretha Franklin still remained four years away from crossover stardom as Lady Soul, but she gave the whites in her audience a glimpse of the future. She wrung them all inside out with the Thomas Dorsey classic “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” and by the time she finished few doubted that for one night they had held the most favored spot on earth. Franklin herself was so moved by the privilege of singing at King’s rally that she slipped four $100 bills into Mahalia Jackson’s hand on stage.

  Wyatt Walker stayed behind in Chicago to help count the evening’s receipts, which netted the SCLC $40,000. King himself went ahead to Kentucky, where the mayor of Louisville led an escort to the Civic Auditorium, then on to St. Louis for yet another giant rally, always calling upon President Kennedy to issue a Second Emancipation Proclamation against segregation. A single week’s events had brought some $150,000 to the SCLC, which went a long way toward repaying the portion of the Birmingham bond money that had been advanced as loans. Financially, the movement was reaping a bonanza. Stanley Levison pronounced himself “flabbergasted” that the one, neutered ad in The New York Times had generated ten times its cost in revenue, with responses still coming in weeks after publication.