Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  King’s associates were fanning out to help meet the demand for speeches about Birmingham. Atlantic City wanted King, was promised Abernathy, and finally got Fireball Smith. Wyatt Walker darted off to speeches as far apart as Albany and San Francisco. In the latter city, Bernard Lee came behind Walker to lead an integrated march of some 20,000 people to a rally at the Civic Center, where Police Chief Thomas Cahill donated the first five dollars “to help the people of Birmingham.” Lee also made a speech to the embattled movement in Greenwood, Mississippi. “He whooped,” Annell Ponder wrote thankfully to King, saying Greenwood needed the boost.

  Birmingham had suddenly changed King from a tireless drone on the speaking circuit to the star of a swarming hive. And beyond the rallies of support as far away as Birmingham, England, and Havana, Cuba, a host of spontaneous actions made news. Clergymen in the manicured white suburb of Greenwich, Connecticut, united to fight segregation. Duke University announced the admission of its first Negro students. Demonstrations spread arrests to a new city almost every day in May: 34 arrested in Raleigh, nearly 100 in Albany, 400 in Greensboro, 1,000 in Durham, North Carolina.

  The same winds that lifted King from behind struck the Kennedy Administration in the face. Intelligence reports noted that the Soviet Union broadcast 1,420 anti-U.S. commentaries about the Birmingham crisis during the two weeks following the settlement—seven times more than at the worst of the Ole Miss—Meredith crisis, nine times the peak during the Freedom Rides. When President Kennedy sent a message on May 21 to a summit conference of the independent African nations, stressing the importance of unity in the free world, Prime Minister Milton Obote of Uganda replied with an official protest against the fire hoses and “snarling dogs” of Birmingham. President Kennedy saw that even one of his own soldiers was allowed to march in support of the Birmingham movement at a remote Air Force base in South Dakota, and that such a piddling event made the news. “How the hell did this happen?” he demanded of Lee White.

  On May 20 and 21, President Kennedy privately consulted his government on the repercussions from Birmingham. One problem, the Attorney General told the full cabinet, was that the federal government itself maintained a largely segregated work force. In Birmingham, “there weren’t any Negroes that held any positions where anybody could see them,” and the businessmen had demanded to know, “‘Why should we hire Negroes? You don’t hire Negroes.’” Kennedy introduced Civil Service Commission chairman John Macy for a quick summary of the numbers elsewhere: of 405 U.S. Treasury employees in Nashville, there were four Negroes, all clerks; of 249 Agriculture Department employees in Nashville, two Negro clerks; of 114 employees at Labor and Commerce, no Negroes at all. Rolling out similar statistics for other Southern cities, Macy endorsed the Attorney General’s view that it was better to address them early than “just wait until they flare up.”

  More privately, with Burke Marshall and his closest political advisers, President Kennedy assessed the threat of serial, Birmingham-style eruptions. “There must be a dozen places where we’re having major problems today,” said the Attorney General, adding that the mood of Birmingham was spreading among Northern Negroes too. Only the day before, he reported, Mayor Daley of Chicago had predicted “a lot of trouble,” saying that Negroes in underworld bars suddenly were snickering, not running, when a white police captain walked in. Daley had said, “The Negroes are all mad for no reason at all,” Kennedy reported, “and they want to fight…He says you can’t have a moderate Negro any more.” On this point, Lawrence O’Brien remarked that Adam Clayton Powell had told him candidly that the new militancy of Negro leadership was “very simple”: “He said, ‘I’m not going to watch the parade pass me by. I’m gonna lead it.’” From confidential sessions with Dick Gregory, Marshall and Robert Kennedy reported that competition and ill will among Negro leaders made it impossible for them to be reasonable. “Roy Wilkins hates Martin Luther King,” said the Attorney General. He recalled Gregory’s quip that even his maid was sassing him, and joked that he had advised Gregory to fire her.

  The Kennedy advisers isolated their dilemma: if the uprising would not die down among the Negro masses, and could not be dampened by Negro leaders, how could they avoid a nightmarish string of Birminghams? President Kennedy toyed briefly with legislating “a reasonable limitation of the right to demonstrate,” but switched quickly to the idea of civil rights legislation. All his aides recognized that legislation on some of the basic Negro demands offered the advantage of “biting the bullet”—of getting past the dilemma with one difficult but sweeping move. However, they were split on what such a bill should include. Sorensen, O’Brien, and Kenneth O’Donnell stressed the political liabilities of an accommodations law that would explicitly integrate public facilities such as lunch counters. They favored instead Title III, the famous provision stricken from the 1957 Civil Rights Act, which would give the Justice Department broad powers to initiate suits for equal protection under the law. But, the very features that made Title III palatable to the political advisers made the Justice Department cringe: it was piecemeal, discretionary, and vague. Pressures would concentrate on the Attorney General, who would be charged with protecting every Negro demonstration and seeking the integration of every swimming pool. Having denied such authority in the Bob Moses lawsuit, Marshall told President Kennedy that he did not want that authority, either. Robert Kennedy agreed. With Title III, he said, Negroes would be “lining up outside…Everybody would have a suit, and we’d be the ones who would be doing it.” He said Title III would be “unhelpful…just awful.”

  When O’Donnell and the others said Title III was vital because it was the established litmus test of civil rights legislation, President Kennedy asked, “How will we get away with not sending any Title III?” On the other hand, he agreed with Marshall that whereas Title III was messy, a public accommodations law would appeal to Negroes because it would have “a personal impact on their daily lives.” He asked pointedly whether such a law would include movie theaters. Told that it would, he said brusquely, “Well, we’ve got to get that one by. I mean, that’s just a basic. We’ve got to have it.” On matters like integrated movie theaters, President Kennedy was inclined to dismiss the pangs of white Southerners. To him, school integration was a tough issue because it touched real fears of class and status, as did jobs and voting. But sitting with Negroes was at worst a requirement of public civility in the modern world. He doubted that Southerners were as “sore” about public accommodations as they claimed. “And I don’t care if they’re sore on that,” he said. “I mean, we can’t go around saying you can’t demonstrate…and they can’t get a solution.”

  By the end of the meeting, President Kennedy leaned toward proposing a civil rights bill. Nearly everything about it was in flux, however, and his own political people were far from reconciled to a public accommodations section. For the immediate future, Robert Kennedy was in a rush to hold a series of off-the-record meetings at the White House with governors, mayors, theater owners, chain-store owners, lawyers, preachers, civil rights leaders, and others—both to lobby for national action and to take soundings on their course. The President agreed, stipulating only that any meeting with Martin Luther King come late in the series. “Otherwise, it will look like he got me to do it,” said the President. “The trouble with King is that everybody thinks he’s our boy, anyway. So everything he does, everybody says we stuck him in there. We ought to have him well surrounded…King is so hot these days that it’s like Marx coming to the White House. I’d like to have some Southern governors, or mayors, or businessmen first. And my program should have gone up to the Hill first.”

  Publicly, the Administration continued to dwell on more comfortable business such as the splashdown of astronaut Gordon Cooper. When pressed for comment about racial demonstrations, officials confined their remarks to calls for sensible progress. The scruffy odyssey of the actual deliberations remained unknown until the disclosure a generation later of a hidden recording system
in the Kennedy White House, and the only contemporary hint of the jittery nerves and psychic dramas was Robert Kennedy’s painful encounter with author James Baldwin, as leaked to The New York Times. Dick Gregory had suggested in his confidential briefings that Robert Kennedy consult Baldwin, and Kennedy, needing shortcuts, introduced himself to Baldwin with a spontaneous request that he assemble a group of deep thinkers to explain both the new anger of the masses and the inability of Negro leaders to dampen it. The next day, May 24, Baldwin produced a haphazard assortment that included his brother, his lawyer, his secretary, his literary agent, a television producer, a white woman who worked for the NAACP, and the director of the Chicago Urban League, who had brought with him a young friend from CORE. Kenneth Clark appeared as the reigning academic, and luminaries from the arts included Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, and playwright Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun. As the guests gathered secretly in Joseph Kennedy’s family apartment near the Plaza Hotel, a mystified Belafonte wondered why, in the political crisis after Birmingham, Robert Kennedy wanted an emergency meeting with such a menagerie rather than with the Negro civil rights leaders themselves.

  Robert Kennedy arrived with Burke Marshall and his press aide Ed Guthman, straight from a secret meeting with Harry Wachtel’s nervous cabal of Northern chain-store owners. The Baldwin session began innocently enough with a review by the Attorney General of the Administration’s unprecedented commitment to civil rights, and with mild challenges from guests who said that Kennedy must do more. The Attorney General replied that impatience in the Negro community seemed to be rising independently of his efforts—that while every conceivable measure was being considered, and more action was in the works, Negroes were listening to dangerous extremists such as the Black Muslims, which could cause real trouble. Then the young CORE man shattered the parlor mood like an eggshell. “You don’t have no idea what trouble is,” he told Kennedy. “Because I’m close to the moment where I’m ready to take up a gun.”

  This was Jerome Smith, who with Doris Castle had answered James Farmer’s desperate call for CORE volunteers on the first Freedom Ride from Montgomery into Mississippi. Upon release from Parchman Penitentiary, he had endured a series of beatings for attempting to integrate bus facilities in McComb, Mississippi, after even Bob Moses abandoned the region as too violent, and since then he had worked as a sometimes-paid CORE worker across the South, most recently in North Carolina. The particulars of Smith’s work were not well known to most of the Negroes in the room, let alone to Kennedy. Smith had a speech impediment that thickened when he was upset, and now, stammering with emotion, he told the Attorney General that the Black Muslims were no threat to anyone, because they risked nothing. In Birmingham, Jeremiah X had stood on the side and watched while children faced the dogs and fire hoses. The Negro masses knew who was on the line, said Smith, and the real trouble would come if those who had been willing to die became disgusted with nonviolence. “When I pull the trigger,” he said, “kiss it goodbye.”

  The meeting never recovered. When Kennedy tried to skip past Smith’s rawness as a hobo’s intrusion, Baldwin asked Smith whether he could imagine fighting for the United States. “Never! Never!” cried Smith. Baldwin hoped that this exchange would demonstrate to Kennedy the seriousness of Smith’s pacifism and the depth of his anguish, but the Attorney General reacted instead to a lack of patriotism. “How can you say that?” he demanded. Smith and Kennedy talked past each other, with Smith ranting about prisons and beatings while Kennedy tried to put him straight about the seriousness of military obligations. Finally, Smith said that sitting there with Kennedy made him want to vomit. Baldwin saw this as a poetic statement of Smith’s despair over the necessity of being there at all, of having to dramatize for the Attorney General the portent of such injustice; Kennedy saw it as an insult to himself and his office, and turned away to dismiss him. This brought Lorraine Hansberry to her feet to say that being there made her sick too. “You’ve got a great many very, very accomplished people in this room, Mr. Attorney General,” she said archly, “but the only man who should be listened to is that man over there.”

  Belafonte, who had arrived worrying that Kennedy would take advantage of the entertainers in some scheme to undercut Negro protest or win the 1964 election, suddenly worried that the diatribes would make a permanent enemy of Kennedy. He tried to dispel the poison by recalling out loud the many hours he had spent around the pool at the Attorney General’s home on Hickory Hill, discussing these same explosive issues without rancor. Clarence Jones, who was there as Baldwin’s lawyer, picked up on Belafonte’s lead by raising some suggestions he knew were dear to Martin Luther King, such as presidential “fireside chats” on race and an executive order on segregation. But it was too late. Kennedy scoffed at them all as impractical or silly. He laughed out loud when Jones mentioned King’s idea that President Kennedy should fight segregation with the kind of dramatic gesture that Gandhi had employed against untouchability in India—with a new Emancipation Proclamation or by personally escorting the first Negro students past Governor Wallace’s avowed blockade at the schoolhouse door. Burke Marshall laughed too. The Negroes, for their part, laughed when Kennedy defended Harold Cox and other segregationist appointees as upright jurists, and again when Marshall spoke of the “special men” from the Justice Department who helped the FBI protect civil rights workers. Kennedy considered the Negroes hopelessly naïve about big-time politics; they considered him just as naïve about race. The two sides jerked apart, past frustration and disbelief to drained hysteria, laughing at each other. Hansberry ended it by leading a walk-out from what Kenneth Clark called “the most dramatic experience I have ever had.”

  In the aftermath, Clarence Jones tried to apply a professional glaze to the abrasions by introducing himself to Kennedy with the easy warmth of an opposing lawyer on lunch break. Shaking Kennedy’s hand, Jones said he knew Marshall from Birmingham, where as King’s lawyer he was aware of some of the Justice Department’s labors. “I wish you had spoken up and said something about that,” Kennedy replied. These parting words hardened fatefully. When he heard from Marshall that the Attorney General considered him a weak hypocrite for failing to defend the Administration, Jones complained to Stanley Levison of Kennedy’s arrogance in assuming that the Administration’s secret role in Birmingham had been wholly positive, and that Jones could have offset the statements from Kennedy’s own mouth. “Each time he said something, it merely underlined the deep gulf,” Jones told Levison, who replied that Kennedy and Marshall were under the “mad illusion that they and not the Negroes won the Birmingham battle.”

  To Kennedy, on the other hand, Clarence Jones made a first impression of cowardly defection. When James Baldwin leaked word of the disastrous meeting to The New York Times—“Robert Kennedy Fails to Sway Negroes at Secret Talks Here”—the Attorney General countered by featuring Jones in leaks to the Times’s James Reston and others about how Negro “moderates” were bailing out under pressure, leaving the Kennedy Administration alone between the extremists of both races. When Jones defended himself in a letter to the Times, Kennedy scratched a caustic note to Burke Marshall across his copy: “He is a nice fellow & you have swell friends.” From reports on the Baldwin guests supplied swiftly by the FBI, Kennedy seized upon the fact that Jones was among three Negroes married to whites,* and he grumbled that they must be suffering from psychological “complexes” about living so comfortably apart from their race. Almost certainly, Kennedy’s personal enmity contributed to his decision some weeks later to authorize FBI wiretaps on Jones’s home. By quirk of timing, this wiretap first opened to J. Edgar Hoover the details of Martin Luther King’s private life.

  In other respects, Robert Kennedy’s reaction to the Baldwin meeting was more fluid. Only days after leaving in a cold fury, he told Guthman that perhaps he would feel that strongly against his country if he had grown up a Negro. His anger had at first frightened Arthur Schlesinger, but the historian saw him change
quickly. Perhaps Kennedy’s most characteristic and telling response was an intermediate one: he channeled the rage toward others. Within days, he began to erupt at sleepy interagency meetings on Negro hiring. His tongue-lashings on the lack of action were so startling and personal that they humiliated the targets, most frequently Lyndon Johnson. The Vice President chaired the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, carrying out a task which, like most of his assignments, did not engage the President. Johnson’s exclusion from the Administration’s inner core was so complete that he had not been consulted even about how to get emergency civil rights legislation past his fellow Southerners in the Senate, and Lawrence O’Brien reported to President Kennedy that Johnson was alarmingly meek in legislative meetings. Later, when asked directly for an opinion by President Kennedy, the Vice President almost whispered that inasmuch as he had seen none of the drafts of the bill and knew only about the general race problem “from what I’ve read in the press…I’m not competent to counsel you.” For the once-mighty Johnson, the semipublic scoldings added to a store of grievances against the younger Kennedy.

  As an authentic disaster, the Baldwin meeting made Robert Kennedy a pioneer in the raw, interracial encounters of the 1960s. Hard upon Birmingham and his previous ordeals in civil rights, the experience knocked the Attorney General off balance. What was intensely personal no longer seemed so distinct from policy, nor public from private. The drive to hire Negroes in the federal government became an obsession to him, but it could not be publicly mentioned without drawing attention to embarrassing realities. For Kennedy, it required a new gyroscope to learn what was appropriate for what audiences at what times, when to “feel” like a Negro and when not. Ironically, these anxieties gave Kennedy a dose of Du Bois’s “twoness” and King’s “tip-toe stance” just as King himself was having a taste of Camelot.