Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Unexpectedly, the next major storm came by way of Jackson, Mississippi, where conflicting pressures were nearly tearing Medgar Evers apart. Only two days after King had announced the settlement victory in Birmingham, Evers spoke for the NAACP in publicly demanding that the city of Jackson appoint a biracial committee to negotiate the same grievances. Mayor Allen Thompson rejected the idea so vehemently that a local television station granted Evers air time for a response, and the novelty of a direct broadcast from a Negro (“In the racial picture things will never be as they once were,” Evers said. “History has reached a turning point, here and over the world”) made him the focal point of tensions between the races. Just then he received a set of shackling, paranoid instructions from his immediate boss in New York, Gloster B. Current. “I suspect that Jackson, Mississippi, will be the next scene of attack by the King forces,” warned the NAACP’s director of branches, “…but whatever target is selected next, it will make it that much harder for the NAACP to carry on its work effectively.” Current instructed his Southern representatives to “hit hard” and quickly, “as soon as the Birmingham crisis is past.” For Evers, these were unenviable orders. He was to reproduce the jail-battered, tentative miracle of Birmingham independently—without mass marches, nonviolent oratory, or other methods that smacked of King.

  At mass meetings through the rest of May, Evers spearheaded a quest for negotiations. When Mayor Thompson easily dodged—once by announcing that he would meet with a biracial committee of his own choosing, specifying Negro members who had praised his stand on segregation—Evers tried to tighten the NAACP boycott against selected local companies that advertised their support of the White Citizens Councils. Finally, on May 28, the Negroes of Jackson erupted joyfully over news that Mayor Thompson has agreed to appoint a legitimate biracial committee and to desegregate public facilities and city jobs, including the police force. It was almost the entire Birmingham package, except for the integration of lunch counters, but Thompson squelched the celebration within a few hours by disowning the agreement as a misunderstanding. Under the sting of this disappointment, pressure for direct action broke loose that same day.

  Four students and a white professor from Tougaloo College staged a sit-in at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Jackson. It lasted for three hours, which gave converging reporters plenty of time to record the details. A mob of young whites took turns slathering the demonstrators with ketchup, mustard, and sugar—a scene graphically depicted in the next issue of Newsweek. After dragging them off the stools only to watch them return, the whites doused them with spray paint and then, growing annoyed, began sporadically to beat them. The tormentors darted forward to pour salt into the professor’s head wound after someone clubbed him to the floor. An ex-policeman named Benny Oliver brazenly kicked demonstrator Memphis Norman’s face bloody until a policeman emerged to arrest them both. A photograph of the kicking appeared on the front page of the next morning’s New York Times.

  In Jackson, the flash of emotion was such that one shoeless, begrimed demonstrator found herself being rushed ahead of waiting customers at a nearby beauty shop, where fluttering attendants washed her hair and stockings and almost sacramentally wiped dried mustard from her legs, just so she would be presentable for the mass meeting. An overflow crowd gave Medgar Evers one standing ovation when he entered the Pearl Street A.M.E. Church that night, then another when he introduced the heroes of Woolworth’s. Finally, a standing ovation that seemed endless—perhaps twenty minutes or more—greeted his announcement that the NAACP was officially launched upon a “massive offensive” against segregation in Jackson. Evers himself remained skewered between inspiration and misgiving. He had not endorsed the sit-in, much less planned it. Aside from his own private doubts about the discipline of the young people, and his worries about suicidal violence in the crucible of Mississippi, he was burdened by the heavy oversight of his superiors. Although he could claim credit for the demonstrators as active members of his NAACP Youth Council, he knew that the critical motivation for their sit-in came from their peers. Some of them had been shuttling to Greenwood on weekends since March. The one who had received the emergency beauty treatment confessed to near worship of Bob Moses, who that week was holding voter registration workshops at Tougaloo College. Such people could not be content with the NAACP boycott of Barq’s soft drinks and Hart’s bread.

  Evers straddled the divide. In his speeches, he mixed the NAACP’s tactics (“Don’t shop for anything on Capitol Street!”) with the spirit of the students (“We’ll be demonstrating here until freedom comes”). Privately, he used the standard NAACP arguments to discourage the students from further demonstrations: they had not realistically defined their goals, and they could not expect others to pick up the cost of their defense. But when a group of students returned downtown the next day in spite of his counsel, and nineteen were thrown in jail off picket lines, Evers rose in the mass meeting to praise their courage. He did not object when David Dennis of CORE and other youth leaders told the young Negroes of Jackson to “bring your toothbrushes” to the next day’s demonstration, nor did he resist the advice of a high school junior who took the pulpit: “To our parents we say we wish you’d come along with us, but if you won’t, at least don’t try to stop us.” At the march on May 31, Evers watched policemen take some six hundred schoolchildren to a makeshift jail at the state fairgrounds, hauling many of them in garbage trucks.

  Few students begrudged his role. Evers was likable, less abrupt than most adult leaders, and he had been there without flinching since the cold days of Emmett Till. He was the acknowledged leader—the one who stood up personally to Mayor Thompson, who negotiated their bail, who received nearly all the death threats. Moreover, the students could see his identification with their cause etched deeply in his face, as Evers was a man of guile but not hypocrisy or cowardice. He was in revolt against his artificial role as spokesman aloof from strategy. Because the Jackson movement had exploded so obviously as a clone of Birmingham, he consulted Martin Luther King covertly about what to do. And he called Roy Wilkins. With more than six hundred Negroes in jail, and all Jackson aroused because of them, they could no longer pretend that direct action was incidental to the struggle. Wilkins recognized that the student sit-ins, not the boycott, had made Jackson into front-page news for four straight days. He made it five on June 1, by flying to Jackson to be arrested with Evers off a picket line outside Woolworth’s.

  On May 30, King sent telegrams to President Kennedy and the Attorney General requesting a personal audience with them “to avert an unnecessary national calamity.” What King hoped was that now, with the worldwide protest over Birmingham, he could finally persuade President Kennedy to issue the executive order against segregation. Stanley Levison endorsed King’s strategy with the observation that no Administration had ever been so worried about the Negro problem as the Kennedys were now. FBI wiretaps on Stanley Levison’s home phone enabled J. Edgar Hoover to dispatch his couriers with advance warning of King’s telegrams—of King’s expressed hope “to put so much pressure on the President that he will have to sign an Executive Order”—and to note that King was formulating such plans with a “secret member of the Communist Party.” King, of course, did not know of the wiretap, nor of Kennedy’s earlier resolve not to receive him while he was so “hot.” All he knew was that Lee White declined his request on the grounds that President Kennedy was too busy.

  It was almost midnight on June 1 when King placed a conference call to Levison and Clarence Jones to discuss his response. He opened with a bit of news for the New Yorkers, telling them that Roy Wilkins was in jail in Jackson, Mississippi. Medgar Evers had called again, he said, but had disclosed none of his plans because he believed the Jackson police were tapping his phone. For King, Wilkins’ first arrest in nearly thirty years was a sober but hopeful development. “We’ve baptized brother Wilkins,” he said. Levison said they could expect new things like that to spread through the Southern cities, and he sug
gested a special SCLC meeting to discuss how to respond. Jones talked of mobilization discussions he had attended with New York church groups.

  King cut them off. “We are on a breakthrough,” he said gravely. “We need a mass protest.” They must take advantage of the fever he felt sweeping ahead of them. What he had in mind was a “mass march” on Washington “and also a unified demonstration all over America.” He said Paul Newman and Marlon Brando, both “Kennedy men,” had offered to help, and so had trade unions across the country. Levison caught the rush of King’s thought and chimed in that Phil Randolph would join too. To influence President Kennedy to “really push” civil rights legislation, they agreed that a march of “possibly a hundred thousand people” on Washington was needed, and that such a monstrosity could not be organized before August.

  King told them to contact Philip Randolph and signed off, leaving Jones and Levison to soar away in appreciation of his sudden audacity. For days they treasured this one phone call among thousands. In an uncharacteristic gush, Levison told Jones’s wife Ann that “you tingled” when King talked that way about historical opportunity, and he confessed that his own ideas were “a step behind Martin.” Jones kept saying he was “thrilled by the conversation.” “We both know that Martin is a very cautious and thoughtful person,” declared Jones, “and he is saying the hour is now.” The FBI’s wiretap stenographer summarized their glowing reprise: “They agree that all sorts of very exciting things are happening.”

  When Wilkins flew back to New York from the Jackson jail, he left behind negotiating demands identical to King’s in Birmingham, but a modified strategy. While Evers and other NAACP spokesmen announced a “second phase” of smaller demonstrations, a battery of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s best lawyers filed lawsuits in support of the demands. To keep up spirits at the nightly mass meetings, Wilkins recruited celebrities such as Lena Horne, who had volunteered her services after the traumatic challenge of the James Baldwin-Robert Kennedy meeting. Mayor Thompson kept them off balance by extending and withdrawing concessions. One day Evers announced that Thompson had promised to hire the first twelve Negro policemen within thirty days. Then the promise vanished, and Thompson announced instead that he had secured a court order banning further demonstrations. While opposing lawyers quarreled over its legality, students went defiantly to jail in wildcat demonstrations. The strain so eroded Medgar Evers’ nerves that one night, hearing a noise, he stalked through his house with his rifle, only to come upon his nine-year-old son in the bathroom.

  The stalemate dropped Jackson out of the headlines during the first week of June, when Pope John XXIII died in Rome and President Kennedy made a political trip to Honolulu. Political commentators speculated intensely about the Administration’s internal debate over what kind of civil rights legislation to propose. Tear gas and 257 arrests made news of continuing demonstrations against segregated movie theaters in Tallahassee, Florida. In North Carolina alone, major demonstrations continued in half a dozen cities, including Lexington and Greensboro, where on June 6 police arrested 278 students led by Jesse Jackson, student-body president at North Carolina A&T.* Fresh racial dramas diverted attention as far away as Newfoundland, where forty Negro soldiers protested their exclusion from Charlie’s Snack Bar, near their Strategic Air Command flight station. Still, events were drawing a wide variety of movement characters back to Mississippi, as though to assemble them all for the assassination of Medgar Evers.

  John Doar was already there. Since leaving his wife and newborn son at a hospital delivery room on May 14, he had not been back to Washington and scarcely had time to call home. His emergency cases included the attempted expulsion of the Birmingham schoolchildren and the charges that Hartman Turnbow and Bob Moses had conspired to bomb Turnbow’s home, plus a host of legal/military preparations for anticipated battles over university integration. The latter issue kept him shuttling between Alabama and Mississippi. On June 5, Doar successfully escorted the first Negro student into the law school at Ole Miss.

  By then Bob Moses, free on another bail bond, was returning from a trip North. During the eruptions in Jackson, he testified with Charles Sherrod and Timothy Jenkins before a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee. In a New York speech on June 3, Moses remarked that if the Justice Department had not dropped its protective lawsuit in Greenwood, “Negroes would still be marching downtown to the courthouse today.” He qualified himself almost in the next sentence, however, not wishing to make self-serving or exaggerated claims. “The Negro community at that time—before Birmingham—was not ready to demonstrate en masse,” he conceded. “The thinking was that adults should be going down, and not children. And so we didn’t have sustained marches of people.” Nearly two years before King would launch huge marches at Selma, Moses envisioned applying the pressures of mass direct action to voter registration. “Now, after Birmingham, it may be possible to launch this kind of thing,” he told his tiny audience. “I’m not sure. Of course, Birmingham is directly responsible for what’s going on in Jackson now.” Moses made his way back to Mississippi in time for a week-long training workshop on Monday, June 10. Its leaders were to be Bernice Robinson of Highlander and Annell Ponder of the SCLC, but Ponder disappeared that Sunday morning.

  Ponder got as far as Winona by Trailways bus. With five recent graduates of her literacy school, she had made another run to Septima Clark’s school. They had gone through a week’s teacher-training classes—complete with a menu offering “Freedom Fighting Hot Rolls,” “Full Citizenship Barbecued Chicken,” “Literacy Potato Salad,” and “Brotherhood Punch”—and then made the long journey back across Georgia and Alabama to the last rest stop before Greenwood, less than thirty miles away. The sight of Ponder walking into the whites’ waiting room of the Winona bus station caused the waitress behind the counter to wad up her check pad and fling it at the wall in disgust, crying out, “I can’t take no more.” Police officers and a highway patrolman promptly came over and threw the Negroes out, notwithstanding Ponder’s reminders of the pertinent ICC ruling of 1961. Standing outside on the pavement, humiliated in front of people she had just packed full of freedom songs and leadership lessons, Ponder decided to take down the license numbers of the police cruisers in order to file a complaint. This was too much for the senior officer, who ordered Ponder and her students arrested.

  The assorted officers interrogated the prisoners one by one in the station-house booking room. First they asked June Johnson, a sixteen-year-old from Greenwood, whether she was a member of the NAACP, and when she admitted it, one officer started slapping her around. They asked who paid her and what kind of trouble her bosses were planning for Winona, and in the rising heat of the cuffings another officer hit her on the back of the head with a blackjack. They took the wailing Johnson back to a cell and brought out Annell Ponder—tall, schoolmarmish, and fatefully dignified. She said she and her friends did not hate them, she steadfastly refused their demands to say “sir” to them so long as they called her “nigger” and “bitch,” and she admitted straightforwardly to the highway patrolman that she had been writing down his license number for a complaint to the federal government. All these answers enraged men who already had stepped over the line of violence. Cursing the name Bobby Kennedy, they kept beating Ponder to the floor and pulling her to her feet until her head was swollen and bloody, a tooth chipped, and one eye seemed knocked off line. Ponder held unsteadily to the corridor walls as they pushed her back toward the cells. She made a terrifying sight to her students, including Fannie Lou Hamer, who was next. By then vengeance had consumed her captors. They dragged Hamer into an empty cell, threw her face-down on a cot, and ordered a young Negro prisoner to beat her with a blackjack. When she screamed, they answered with taunts about whether she had seen Martin Luther King that day. They brought a second prisoner to sit on her legs, then to switch places with the first one when he got tired. Hamer was beaten until the fingers protecting her head were blue and the skin on her back swelled up hard
as a bone. Then the officers shut not only the cells but the station-house doors, and began figuring out how to protect themselves against inquiries that were sure to come.

  At midnight, some twelve hours after the first blows in the Winona station house, Wyatt Walker convened a conference call for King and his closest advisers, who were scattered around the country. King solicited advice about the proposed march on Washington. Was it feasible? Would Philip Randolph agree to merge his October march for jobs with an August march for freedom? He introduced the questions in a way that left no doubt about his own inclinations, saying “something dramatic must be done” to support the civil rights bill that President Kennedy was expected to introduce any day. “I don’t think it will pass otherwise,” said King. “It will get him off the hook—he can use this thing politically by saying he tried to get it, knowing all the time it can’t pass.”

  For King, the primary question was whether to “center” the march on President Kennedy or Congress. “I’ve had mixed emotions about the President,” he said. “I’m just not sure.” A lengthy debate produced two agreements.* First, they would aim the march against the clear and certain opposition of a Southern filibuster in the Senate. On this point only Clarence Jones dissented, saying it would be impossible to match the complex logistics of a huge march with the unpredictable timetable of Congress. Second, they decided not to seek an advance alliance with Roy Wilkins, for fear that Wilkins would stall or even preempt them with public announcement of a conflicting NAACP conference, as he had done to Randolph’s plan for a June march against Negro unemployment. Instead, they would secure a private agreement with Randolph and then announce the march publicly to force Wilkins to go along. Stanley Levison urged King to make at least a preliminary announcement that week in New York. As they were signing off, Andrew Young interjected the news that Annell Ponder may have been arrested. “I got it second-hand twenty minutes ago,” he said. “I’m trying to get the FBI to investigate.”