Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  On the morning after the Evers murder, Majority Leader Carl Albert called President Kennedy to apologize for the Democratic defectors who unexpectedly rejected a $450 million section of the Administration’s public works bill. “I couldn’t do a damn thing with them, you know,” said Albert, and the President instantly understood. “Civil rights did it,” Kennedy replied. Albert expressed amazement that even committee chairmen, “some of the top men in the House,” had deserted the Administration to support toughening or weakening amendments on racial policy. The issue split the Democrats. “I’m awfully sorry,” Albert said sheepishly, and the President tried to console him. “Just events are making our problems,” Kennedy said wearily. “Christ, you know, it’s like they shoot this guy in Mississippi…I mean, it’s just in everything. I mean, this has become everything.” Albert agreed that the civil rights uproar was “overwhelming the whole program.” He told the President it would be nearly impossible to pass farm bills or mass-transit funding. On every close question from foreign aid to the space budget, civil rights loomed as the margin of defeat.

  Robert Kennedy reached a point of overload the next day, when three thousand anti-segregation pickets showed up outside his office on Pennsylvania Avenue. He tried to win them over with a speech about how demonstrations were unnecessary because the Administration was on their side, as evidenced by the President’s television speech. But this was a brash crowd, and the more vociferous ones shouted questions at Kennedy about the Greenwood shootings and the Winona beatings. What especially annoyed the Attorney General was his inability to refute the placards that accused the Justice Department of racial discrimination in its own hiring. Kennedy knew how hard he had worked on this issue. He had ordered internal surveys and recruitment drives, exploded in tantrums over the slowness of the bureaucracy. However, disclosure of such efforts would lead to painful facts—Burke Marshall had just reported that the Civil Rights Division itself had hired almost a dozen Negro clerks but not a single lawyer or administrator above Civil Service grade 11. Worse, the facts would invite harsh questions about Kennedy’s command of his own department. Inevitably, it seemed, a politician in confession was a politician without power, and the prestige of his office was not served by the Attorney General scrapping with street demonstrators. When he tried to finesse the hiring issue with boasts of percentage gains over the Eisenhower record, a shouting picketer retorted that he saw precious few Negroes coming out the Justice Department’s doors. Kennedy snapped, preferring to scorn than to bend to such critics. “Individuals will be hired according to their ability, not their color,” he said icily, provoking loud jeers from the crowd.

  King was attending the Gandhi Society’s first-anniversary fund-raiser at New York’s Americana Hotel when reports confirmed the death of Medgar Evers. Among the messages that reached him through Clarence Jones was a suggestion relayed from the Jackson movement that the Gandhi Society should name its bail fund for Evers. After all, Evers had given his life in a crusade that had brought nonviolent direct action to the heart of the beast—Mississippi—with six hundred Mississippians arrested in one day. King liked the idea, especially since one of his own Gandhian mentors, Mordecai Johnson, was present at the fund-raiser and pronounced himself pleased to head such a project. Together, they announced the Gandhi Society’s new “Medgar Evers Memorial Bail Fund” after the luncheon that same day.

  To Roy Wilkins, King might as well have stolen Evers’ body. It was bad enough that King had practically killed Evers—sending demonstration fever from Birmingham into Mississippi, forcing Evers to accommodate tactics that led swiftly to violent white retribution, as Wilkins had predicted. It was worse that King tried to make an NAACP man into a symbol of direct action with a bail fund, of all things. And it was worse still that King was rushing in to raise money off his intrusions. Other Evers funds were springing up independently of the NAACP—including one at the Chicago Defender, which solicited on its front page—but it was King’s fund that brought down the wrath of the NAACP hierarchy. Wilkins instructed his aides to contact the widow that first evening after the murder. They secured her written agreement that funds honoring her husband should be controlled by the NAACP rather than by “King’s organization.”*

  The Gandhi Society surrendered instantly to this demand, but resentments had been unleashed. In an otherwise unctuous letter of capitulation, president Theodore Kheel of the Gandhi Society subtly tweaked Wilkins for carrying on a vendetta through the newspapers. When Stanley Levison first heard the rumbles, he told his friend Frank Montero that “the furor that you are talking about has long and very much deeper roots. The antagonism towards Martin at NAA[CP] has been a disgrace for a long time.” Montero, who was both an old friend of Wilkins and the man who had presented Mordecai Johnson at King’s Gandhi Society luncheon, tried to pass off the dispute as the result of hypercompetition by underlings on both sides. No, Levison insisted, the malice and backbiting were “all on one side, although I admit that this will sound very unusual.” To the startled Montero, Levison poured out a long tale of grievance against Wilkins. “Roy and every single member of his staff except John Morsell…have carried on against Martin,” he said. For years they had conducted a “dirty campaign” of gossip about King—for instance, spreading the “hair-raising” rumor that King moved to Atlanta in 1960 only because the Negro insurance companies paid him $1 million a month to “hold the Negroes back.” Through it all, said Levison, King kept speaking at NAACP functions, opening NAACP branches, and praising the NAACP in speeches. He did not understand how King had been “so patient with the amount of garbage that’s heaped on him.” In fact, Levison said, King’s patience “infuriates me.” This went on to be the longest and most emotional outburst from Levison ever picked up by the FBI wiretaps.

  King himself nearly skipped the Evers funeral in Jackson for fear that his very presence would exacerbate the tensions. In the end, he went but made no speeches or statements. At the public service, he endured eulogies that trivialized his methods as pointedly as funereal dignity allowed. “Lest we forget, and it does appear that some people have forgotten, it was right here in Mississippi back in 1952 that the first statewide nonviolent protest was carried out,” declared T. R. M. Howard. “…We put out some 40,000 fluorescent bumper signs on cars, saying Don’t Buy Gas Where You Can’t Use the Restroom. Our martyred hero, Medgar Evers, was one of the individuals who participated in this first campaign, four years before Dr. King marched at Montgomery.” From the Masonic Temple, King marched through the Jackson heat beside Roy Wilkins in a show of unity, then ducked out to the airport. He was gone before John Doar’s one-man performance at the spontaneous march downtown that Saturday, June 15.

  King’s discretion did him little good, perhaps because the very nature of the Jackson stalemate made him a continuous, galling challenge to the NAACP leaders filling in for Medgar Evers. Having stalled demonstrations until his death, and then postponed them pending his funeral, they were back in the vise. Mayor Thompson was offering no concessions on lunch counter segregation or other issues. The assassination created more movement pressure than ever to secure Birmingham-style results through Birmingham-style mass marches, but the NAACP leaders viewed such tactics as a suicidal obeisance to King—the more so, since they might adopt King’s nonviolence and still fail to budge white Jackson. Their dilemma was so painfully obvious that the ever-independent James Meredith stepped forward to suggest a compromise—a general strike or work stoppage in honor of Medgar Evers. He thought the tactic might add pressure to the NAACP-sanctioned boycott, but his attempted diplomacy earned him only a scathing dismissal from Gloster Current. “We couldn’t comment on any idea a student has…” said Current. “We’re in a titanic struggle here, and it’s not a struggle in which an amateur has to give advice to those who know what it’s all about.” This was empty bravado, as Current was unable to say either that they would or would not resume demonstrations. He and the other national officers left for Washington the
day after the Evers funeral.

  Wilkins was met there by his nephew Roger, a lawyer in the State Department, who was struck by a change in his uncle’s lifelong demeanor. Roy Wilkins had always been a man of formal, laconic reserve, who showed little of himself to anyone and practically nothing to his juniors, but now he could not stop unburdening himself of his troubles, most especially of his torture by King. “Can you imagine it?” he asked his nephew. “Medgar was an NAACP man all the way, and King comes in and tries to take the money.” The younger Wilkins had never seen his uncle so angry or so raw. Grief, pressure, and the ghoulish turf war had worn the polish off the fierce institutional pride of Wilkins’ thirty years with the NAACP. While the Medgar Evers funeral train was chugging toward Washington, he lashed out in a public speech. “The other organizations furnish the noise and get the publicity,” he said, “while the NAACP furnishes the manpower and pays the bills…. They are here today and gone tomorrow. There is only one organization that can handle a long, sustained fight—the NAACP.” Belittling the small memberships of the other groups, Wilkins urged the crowd not to stray. “Don’t go giving them your money when it should be given to us,” he admonished. “Don’t get so excited.”

  While in Washington, Wilkins pressed upon the Kennedy Administration his view that no civil rights crisis was more important than the one in Evers’ hometown, where failure to reach a negotiated settlement on segregation would encourage extremists of both races toward violence or demonstrations. Kennedy officials agreed. With the NAACP leaders, they sought answers to the tactical conundrum of Jackson: how to use federal leverage without attracting attention. Their best answer was to walk a tightrope. Robert Kennedy and then the President received the NAACP preachers from Jackson for White House conferences that raised their stature as successors to Medgar Evers. Simultaneously the Attorney General pressured Mayor Thompson, saying that unless he made concessions to the Negro preachers, he would not long be able to contain the young people who were straining to march. Finally, President Kennedy himself made two phone calls to Mayor Thompson.

  Thompson was a garrulous and optimistic sort who kept telling the President he was wonderful and not to “get your feelings hurt” by the nasty things Thompson might have to say on political occasions, such as the rally he was attending with Governor Wallace that day, “because I think the world of you.” Kennedy laughed and gave Thompson “full permission to denounce me in public as long as you don’t in private.” As to the negotiations, Thompson managed to pass off his refusal to seek desegregation of the downtown stores as a positive achievement: “I told the merchants…it’s entirely up to them—if they want to sell to whites, sell to Negroes, or fish, or anything in the world, it’s up to them, and I’m going to protect them with every force that’s in my command.” He told Kennedy he had “answered every other thing” on the Negro preachers’ list “except the biracial committee, and I just can’t do that right now.” When the President asked about one of the items on the list—hiring the city’s first Negro policemen—Thompson nearly purred over the wire. “Oh, I’ve got that!” he exclaimed. He was planning to take that step and several other big ones, he assured the President, but stressed that “we have to do it our way.”

  Thompson asked President Kennedy to help things along by trying to persuade the Negroes to “go through the courts, and not have marches and intimidation.” He said Jackson was in an “explosive situation” because of the young Negroes “being used as shields, and they have just gone wild. They have got it in their system, and the people can’t control them or anything.” On this point, President Kennedy asked for Mayor Thompson’s evaluation of the Jackson preachers who had come to the White House—which one should he talk to, who had most control, was Rev. R. L. T. Smith “the stud duck down there?” Thompson replied that “the power” was not Smith but a Rev. G. R. Haughton, who “is the one that causes problems, and he’s real smart and they look to him a lot.”

  The next night, Reverend Haughton rose to present the final result of the negotiations to a mass meeting in his own Pearl Street A.M.E. Church. Groans and hoots rose up from the crowd even before he finished reading the four-point package: (1) six Negro policemen “to be used in the Negro areas,” (2) eight Negro school-crossing guards at Negro schools, (3) eight Negro promotions in the city sanitation department, and (4) “the city will continue to hear Negro grievances.” Why was there no biracial committee? someone asked. Why were the Negro policemen to be segregated? Why was there no mention of segregation in the downtown stores? Against the onslaught, Haughton defended the settlement as a starting place. He preached, invoked the approval of Attorney General Kennedy, and finally offered up his pastoral honor. “I’m not getting one penny,” he cried. “My hair’s getting whiter every day. I’m missing my meals. My family is worried about me, here and elsewhere. Some of us want to make a big noise and that’s all, but we’re here for business!”

  Large numbers of supporters cheered Haughton. Another preacher pressed his advantage by challenging anyone to say that the steering committee would betray the movement. Then Arthur Jones rose as the authorized NAACP spokesman to say that the settlement honored Medgar Evers, who was just then being buried in Washington. He reminded the crowd that Evers had said from the beginning that he did not want another Birmingham in Jackson, and “if we want freedom for Medgar’s sake, we still don’t want a Birmingham.”

  The patchy settlement held against all discontents. On Thursday, the Negro preachers and the city fathers applauded each other at a ceremony in which Mayor Thompson swore in Jackson’s first Negro policeman, stressing as assets his 250-pound weight and his trustworthy record. This was a mawkishly empty victory to most of the young activists who had gone to jail, but they bowed to it, retreating to their workshops and registration projects in the Mississippi countryside. CORE’s David Dennis told a gathering why they had not challenged the settlement with demonstrations: “I think everyone can see that a split between the organizations at this particular point could do us no good,” he said. Tim Jenkins, down from Yale Law School, declared in a speech that organizational rivalries were no more fatal in civil rights than in the Pentagon or the peace movement. Jerome Smith, less than a month after his parlor confrontation with Robert Kennedy in New York, brought his battering intensity back to his CORE project in Canton, one of Mississippi’s toughest towns. “Our religion must not just become empty prayers,” he told a mass meeting, “but our religion must become a living vote, you see, because if the church was right, and if the church would not conform to the whims of a sick society…we would not be here and Medgar would not be there.”

  In Washington, integrated troops fired a last salute and buried Medgar Evers with full military honors on June 19, eight days after the assassination. Twenty-five thousand people had viewed the body in a two-day processional, and the burial service at Arlington Cemetery was the largest since that of John Foster Dulles. President Kennedy did not attend, but afterward he sent a limousine for the widow and her two older children. He gave them kind words of condolence, and for the kids there were PT-109 souvenirs plus a scoot across the bed on which Queen Elizabeth had slept.

  For President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the alternating doses of euphoria and rude shock built toward a profound, historic climax. On the very morning after the Evers assassination, Kennedy invited King to join him for a discussion of civil rights at the White House the following Monday, June 17. King eagerly agreed, then abruptly rescinded his acceptance by telegram the next day. In the brief interim, the ugly feud over the Evers Bail Fund erupted, and King, with the march on Washington at issue, wanted to delay meeting the President until he at least had a chance to patch up the internal wounds. Also, he learned that he was to be only one of some 250 religious leaders received by the President in the East Room. Discovery of this mass audience punctured hopes for a working alliance. Put down, King rejected Kennedy’s invitation, ending his telegram with the pointed suggestion: “I hope we wi
ll be able to talk privately in the not too distant future.”

  King and Kennedy were like a pair of ill-fated lovers, with similar interests but mismatched passions. Having embraced, even imitated, King’s message on television, Kennedy now was pulling back. Entrenched Southerners were revolting against him in Congress. Everett Dirksen, the windy Republican leader of the Senate, proclaimed himself against the public accommodations centerpiece of Kennedy’s new bill as a violation of property rights. Kennedy’s speech had failed to check the epidemic of Negro protest, and scattered campaigns ripened into new mass protest nearly every day. Hosea Williams sent more than 200 children to jail in Savannah, then joined them. In Gadsden, Alabama, police arrested 450 students trying to renew the William Moore memorial march. Police in Danville broke down church doors to seize protest leaders. In Albany, Laurie Pritchett’s men arrested nearly 150 over the next week. Negroes threw up picket lines around police stations in Kansas City, and New York’s front pages showed local politicians scrambling to head off marches against segregated housing and employment. All this was distressing to Kennedy. Through Secretary of State Rusk, he secretly ordered all U.S. ambassadors to mount a concerted diplomatic effort to counter the “extremely negative reactions” overseas. (John Kenneth Galbraith, ambassador to India, replied tartly that “such crash effort would be wholly devoid of conviction,” and advised the Administration not to panic.) Meanwhile, the President did his best to concentrate public attention elsewhere.