Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  The Winona mystery deepened when Lawrence Guyot, one of the SNCC students who had been jailed with Bob Moses in Greenwood, drove to the jail and disappeared himself, arrested and beaten when he asked the sheriff what had happened to his friends. While no outsider yet knew that Winona was a flytrap of violence, panic began to spread among movement insiders who knew that silence was an ominous sign. Wiley Branton tried desperately from Atlanta to find out what had happened, but he was told that he could get no information unless he had a client, and he could obtain no clients without coming to the jail. The FBI promised to investigate, but the Bureau maintained no field office in the state and its stringer agents were busy in Jackson. No agents reached Winona all of Monday, and John Doar, the federal official most likely to have responded personally to the crisis, had left Mississippi for Alabama, where on Tuesday Governor Wallace fulfilled his pledge to block integration by “standing in the schoolhouse door.”

  For weeks, Wallace and the Kennedy Administration had attracted national publicity as they maneuvered for the showdown. Kennedy had the leverage of the Army troops already mobilized in Alabama to support the Birmingham settlement, plus the benefit of his experience the previous fall at Ole Miss. Wallace, for his part, ensconced himself in a makeshift office on campus, near the designated registration spot, and there, behind a host of troopers and the hum of newly installed air-conditioners, he concealed his plans. In the end, Nicholas Katzenbach proceeded alone to meet Wallace, who stood at a lectern behind a line that his media advisers had painted on the ground as the symbolic threshold of segregation. Katzenbach announced that he had a proclamation from President Kennedy ordering Wallace to cease his illegal resistance to the federal court order on integration, and Wallace responded by reading a defiant proclamation of his own. “There can be no submission to the theory that the central government is anything but a servant of the people,” he declared. “We are God-fearing people, not government-fearing people. We practice today the free heritage bequested to us by the Founding Fathers.” When he finished, Katzenbach made Wallace physically bar the door by bumping ceremoniously toward him four times, and then Katzenbach retreated. Meanwhile, away from the cameras, the two Negro students proceeded quietly to their dormitory rooms, and Wallace did not oppose the National Guard units that later moved onto campus to defend them.

  The tacit bargain between Wallace and the Administration contained hidden elements of some consequence. By holding the two Negro students back from the public confrontation—sending Katzenbach alone rather than in the usual escort role—Robert Kennedy ensured that Wallace did not actually block the two students he had been ordered to let through, which spared Kennedy the vexing “Mississippi” problem of prosecuting a sitting governor for contempt of court. The price was that Wallace was allowed to make his contemptuous nationwide address while looking upward at a representative of the federal government rather than downward upon the two Negroes whose rights were at issue. This difference helped elevate Wallace from the marginal stature of a Ross Barnett into a presidential contender. His stand against Washington and do-gooder bureaucrats planted a conservative standard which, further rinsed of overtly racial content, came to dominate American politics for more than a generation.

  A lesser consequence was that President Kennedy felt pressure to deliver some compensatory showmanship. Just the night before, at American University, he had given a major address on the need to take risks toward a reduction in worldwide nuclear armaments. He announced a temporary suspension of nuclear tests in the atmosphere, a renewed effort to secure a test-ban treaty with the Soviet Union, and a conviction that “no government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue.” Now on Tuesday the speech was an instant success, hailed as a step away from the Cold War and as a gesture of peace in the spirit of the late Pope John’s Pacem in Terris. Yet the same front pages also told of the newest racial collisions—of twenty-five arrests outside the courthouse in Cambridge, Maryland, and of attacks worse than Bull Connor’s in Danville, Virginia, where fire hoses and nightsticks sent to the hospital forty-eight of sixty-five Negroes protesting downtown segregation. (“We will hose down the demonstrators and fill every available stockade,” proclaimed Mayor Julian Stinson of Danville.)

  As President Kennedy and the Attorney General had anxiously awaited the outcome of the showdown with Governor Wallace, a telegram came in from Martin Luther King on the “beastly conduct of law enforcement officers at Danville.” Asserting once again that “the Negro’s endurance may be at the breaking point,” King implored the Administration to seek a “just and moral” solution. “I ask you in the name of decency and Christian brotherhood to creatively grapple with Danville’s and the nation’s most grievous problem.” There was a rougher, public message from King on the front page of The New York Times. Warning that the historic new legislation would be wasted if President Kennedy merely introduced it and then left for Europe, as he was planning to do, King said that supporters of the bill were prepared to stage a march on Washington. The Times highlighted King’s assessment that its passage would require the “total weight of the President and his prestige,” and quoted his plea that, above all, President Kennedy must begin speaking of race as a moral issue, in terms “we seldom if ever hear” from the White House.

  Given his recent sensitivity to King’s opinions, these urgings may have influenced President Kennedy’s extraordinary decision to make what amounted to an extemporaneous civil rights address on national television. The causes were uncertain because the notion of a speech came so suddenly from the President himself, without a trace of the usual gestation within the government. When he startled his advisers on Tuesday with the thought that he might announce his civil rights legislation on television that night, no one liked the idea. Political advisers Kenneth O’Donnell and Lawrence O’Brien objected that the civil rights bill itself would carry more than enough political danger; they said the President should not magnify his risk with a personal commitment. To speech-writer Ted Sorensen, what made these drawbacks more compelling was Kennedy’s precipitate haste. There was no speech draft. There had been no consultations with Congress or anyone else on what the President planned to say. To make a naked dash that very night on so sensitive an issue seemed like the worst sort of presidential whim, but Kennedy refused to let it go. Burke Marshall later remembered that Robert Kennedy alone had encouraged the speech idea, but the Attorney General himself remembered that his brother “just decided that day…He called me up on the phone and said that he was going to go on that night.” Toward six o’clock that evening, President Kennedy ordered fifteen minutes of network time at eight. He gave Sorensen some general ideas and some scraps he liked from Louis Martin, then sent him off to write a speech within two hours.

  Minutes before eight, Sorensen came into the Cabinet Room with a draft that President Kennedy found workable but stiff. He began tinkering to add paragraphs of fervor and rhetoric, dictating to Evelyn Lincoln while Sorensen cross-dictated to Gloria Liftman. They retyped pages and fragments, inserting them here or there in the stack as opinions changed in the mad fit of purpose. Everyone else in the room was aghast with the realization that there would be no finished text—that the leader of the free world was about to ad-lib on national television—but as the seconds ticked away the President was at his best, wired both hot and cool. “Come on now, Burke,” he prompted. “You must have some ideas.”

  The President’s first peroration before the cameras was a bit awkward, on the refrain “it ought to be possible,” but then he broke through with a sketch from Louis Martin contrasting the life chances of two newborn American babies, one white and one Negro. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” he declared. “It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.” />
  These words brushed along a religious course that was starkly out of character for the worldly President. Their flow transformed even his approach to the global struggle:

  We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it. And we cherish our freedom here at home. But are we to say to the world—and much more importantly, to each other—that this is the land of the free, except for Negroes, that we have no second-class citizens, except Negroes, that we have no class or caste system, no ghettos, no master race, except with respect to Negroes?

  Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise. The events in Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased the cries for equality that no city or state or legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them…. We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and a people…A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all.

  Kennedy wandered on and off his text, outlining his forthcoming legislation. He kept inserting parenthetical phrases signaling that race was no longer an issue of external charity or deflection: “We owe them, and we owe ourselves, a better country.” When he ran out of text, he coasted unevenly to the end. By then, it didn’t matter.

  In Atlanta, King drafted an instant response, with errors characteristic of his own uncertain typing and spelling. “I have just listened to your speech to the nation,” he wrote. “It was one of the most eloquent[,] profound and unequiv[oc]al pleas for Justice and the Freedom of all men ever made by any President. You spoke passionately to the moral issues involved in the integration struggle.” An equally excited Stanley Levison called King that night to say that President Kennedy had done “what you have been asking him to do.” To Levison, the historic speech underscored the importance of their decision to make Congress, not President Kennedy, the focus of the Washington demonstration.

  In Jackson, all three Evers children, including toddler Van Dyke, tumbled in their parents’ bed, arguing over which television program to watch. Their mother had allowed them to stay up past midnight to find out what their father thought of the President’s wonderful speech, and they all rushed for the door when they heard his car. Medgar Evers was returning from a glum strategy session. All but nine of the seven hundred Jackson demonstrators were out of jail. Local white officials were claiming victory untainted by concession. Both the white and Negro press portrayed the Jackson movement as shrunken, listless, riddled by dissension. Privately, Evers had asked for permission to invite Martin Luther King to join forces, but his NAACP bosses ignored the heretical idea. Finally home, Evers stepped out of his Oldsmobile carrying a stack of NAACP sweatshirts stenciled “Jim Crow Must Go,” which had made poor sales items in Mississippi’s sweltering June. His own white dress shirt made a perfect target for the killer waiting in a fragrant stand of honeysuckle across the street. One loud crack sent a bullet from a .30-’06 deer rifle exploding through his back, out the front of his chest, and on through his living room window to spend itself against the kitchen refrigerator. True to their rigorous training in civil rights preparedness, the four people inside dived to the floor like soldiers in a foxhole, but when no more shots came, they all ran outside to find him lying facedown near the door. “Please, Daddy, please get up!” cried the children, and then everything fell away to bloodsmeared, primal hysteria. The victim said nothing until neighbors and police hoisted the mess of him onto a mattress and into a station wagon. “Sit me up!” he ordered sharply, then, “Turn me loose!” These were the last words of Medgar Evers, who was pronounced dead an hour later.

  The Evers murder came at the midpoint of a ten-week period after the Birmingham settlement when statisticians counted 758 racial demonstrations and 14,733 arrests in 186 American cities. Two men demanding integration chained themselves to the gallery of the Ohio legislature. An Alabama mob stoned the home of a white preacher who suggested that Negroes be allowed to worship in his church. Ironically, one of the few places that was quiet for a time was Greenwood, Mississippi, where Bob Moses and Bernice Robinson held their training workshops “in spite of the chaos all around us,” which included the four-day disappearance of their friends, who finally were sprung from the Winona jail on the day Evers was shot. “They were a horrible sight,” Robinson reported to Myles Horton. “Annell Ponder’s eyes were swollen and bloodshot from the beatings, and one hip was swollen twice the size of the other. Mrs. Hamer had bruises all over her head, and her hips were bruised.” They closed the week’s session a little early so that everyone could go down to the Evers funeral in Jackson, but these intimidations caused no one to drop out, and twelve more people around Greenwood came forward to become registration teachers. By the time Robinson’s report reached Highlander, Horton had abundant troubles of his own: a posse of ten sheriff’s deputies had staged a blitzkrieg raid on his relocated camp near Knoxville and arrested all twenty-seven members of the weekly workshop for unchaperoned interracial conduct. The local sheriff announced that he had authorized the raid to forestall vigilante action by angry, fearful constituents, including one who had threatened to “take shotguns and there will be Negro blood running down the mountain.” The sheriff padlocked the Highlander camp, which arsonists burned to the ground four days later.

  In Winona alone, John Doar worked on no fewer than three federal suits: one to order local officials not to interfere with integration at the bus station, another to overturn the criminal convictions of the Negroes, and a third, futile one to punish the officers who had administered the jailhouse beatings. Doar snatched a private moment to attend the funeral in Jackson—he had considered Medgar Evers a friend and ally since his clandestine scouting trip two years earlier—but emergency duties followed him even there. At the end of a silent memorial march through town, the dignitaries disappeared inside the Collins Funeral Home for a small private service, leaving most of the huge crowd of five thousand marchers outside to disperse. Of these, some one hundred young people defied the court order that made public silence a condition of their gathering. They sang “Oh Freedom” as a dirge, and then, when someone broke into an up-tempo version of “This Little Light of Mine,” a hand-clapping mass edged back into the street. “Now they’re making their way downtown,” an apprehensive radio announcer told his listeners in San Francisco, “and my guess is that a demonstration is under way.”

  The noise of sirens and screams broke out over the singing, as the Negroes marched to a halt, nose to nose with a gathering phalanx of fire trucks and policemen armed with shotguns. The temperature was 103 degrees. Some of the Negroes shouted, “We want the killer! We want freedom!” These were the young movement people who had been forbidden to march for two weeks now, since the children’s march of June 1. Even on Flag Day, June 14, pairs of them had been arrested off the streets for carrying little American flags, as Jackson’s white officials allowed Negroes no public display of any kind. The police regarded the spontaneous demonstration as the bitter but predictable result of the city’s decision to allow the Negroes to memorialize Medgar Evers. They brought up pumper trucks and dogs, and they charged when some of the young marchers began to throw rocks at them. They had clubbed several and arrested nearly thirty when, suddenly, the man who talked like Gary Cooper appeared in a showdown scene from one of his movies.

  An astonished Claude Sitton wrote in The New York Times that Doar walked into the flashpoint of a riot, hands raised above his head “with bottles and bricks crashing around him.” Shouting his name, he told them this was not the way, and the very sight of him stilled the crowd so that he could be heard. An angry young woman came up to him. “We get our rumps shot up!” she yelled in his face, and then, stammering with disgust, “And what are they gonna do…and what are we, are we gonna wait for the Justice Department?” “Aw, give us a break,” pleaded Doar. One of the Jackson officers, looking to the uncertain Negroes behind, shouted that Doar should make sure they all knew who he was. “My name is John Doar!” he yelled. “D-O-A-R. I’m in the Justi
ce Department in Washington. And anybody around here knows that I stand for what’s right!” He walked forward, calling out the names of Dave Dennis and other movement leaders he knew and how many times they had been arrested, saying they too wanted the crowd to disperse. Miraculously, they did. Doar scarcely paused after his famous “stroll” that day. His month-old son back in Washington was still nameless, and remained so for another two weeks until Doar’s colleagues made him take time literally to pull a name from a hat.

  In Jackson, the unburied corpse of Medgar Evers already was a shrine to the altered state of American race relations. His murder was eerie and providential, so flushed with history as to seem perversely proper—shot in the back on the very night President Kennedy embraced racial democracy as a moral cause. This was a mythical event of race, the first national one since Emmett Till’s death trip into the Tallahatchie River. In a subtle but important turn of perception, people referred to the killing as a political assassination instead of a lynching, adding both personal and historical connotations. White people who had never heard of Medgar Evers spoke his name over and over, as though the words themselves had the ring of legend. It seemed fitting that the casket was placed on a slow train through the South, bound for Washington so that the body could lie in state. In death, Evers inspired reappraisals, conversions, and heroics on a grand scale, but the extraordinary emotions also produced raw adjustments among the leaders. Some of them were at each other’s throats before the funeral train left Jackson.