Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  President Kennedy went to Europe over strong, bipartisan objections. Senators and press critics pointed out that he was leaving a nation racked with crisis to visit three countries—Germany, Italy, and Great Britain—where no substantive presidential talks were scheduled, nor could there be, inasmuch as all three governments had fallen or were falling, and as yet there was no new Pope in Rome. National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy defended the journey as best he could, saying on television that cancellation would bring down “quite serious consequences with respect to American clarity of purpose.” Privately, President Kennedy told his staff that the trip was important precisely because it was a diversion from the intractable problems of the United States, which discouraged foreigners as well as Americans. Seeking to touch peoples, not governments, he landed in Germany as the conqueror turned protector. A staggering one million people hailed his motorcade in Frankfurt. Similar crowds saluted the American President across Germany, as he vowed that he would risk sacrificing his own cities in order to deliver theirs from nuclear war. In West Berlin—Hitler’s capital, a city haunted by the last holocaust and literally torn apart by threat of the next—150,000 Germans shouted his name at the foot of the Berlin Wall as Kennedy gave the speech of his life:

  Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was Civis Romanus sum. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is Ich bin ein Berliner.

  There are many people in the world who really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin! There are those who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin!

  …All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words, Ich bin ein Berliner.

  If a speech could be said to shake the world, this one did. The ear-crushing response thrilled Kennedy to the point of dread. Upon a word from him, or perhaps merely a raised arm, the hysterical crowd might have torn down the Berlin Wall with bare hands, and for an instant the thought chilled him as power gone mad again in Germany. As he climbed aboard Air Force One to leave, Kennedy said, “We’ll never have another day like this one as long as we live.”

  Deeply shaken by the triple ambush in Washington, King ordered Jack O’Dell and his staff to prepare for what amounted to a summary trial within forty-eight hours—as soon as King could get to New York. He then flew with Walter Fauntroy to Detroit for a grand march, which had been plagued by ominous contention. The rally already had been postponed once, partly because of leadership resentment against King’s closest ally there, Rev. C. L. Franklin, and the Evers Bail Fund feud had exacerbated local rivalries to the point of open feud. Franklin’s people levied charges that the NAACP leaders were “a bunch of Uncle Toms,” and were answered by public claims that the NAACP was “the real and only voice of the Negro community.” In marked contrast with the organizational cooperation that had made the Los Angeles event a giant success in May, Detroit’s NAACP hierarchy was boycotting the King rally. Negro congressman Charles Diggs, who was to introduce King in Detroit, was about to demand that King conjure up a “graceful withdrawal” from the whole idea of a march on Washington. Given such hostilities, King faced a chance of being scolded again in public, this time at his own event.

  The first breath of Detroit blew away all such worries. The police commissioner greeted King at the airplane door with a promise that “you’ll see no dogs and fire hoses here,” and delivered the first reports that the downtown march was getting magnificently out of hand. The advance crowd, packed so densely that the city’s mounted police could not reach their parade escort stations, spilled out of a twenty-one-block staging area and headed downtown without King and the other leaders. An endless stream of marchers filled almost the full breadth of Woodward Avenue, the city’s main thoroughfare. In a holiday spirit, they raised spontaneous choruses of “We Shall Overcome” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” One woman wore a gaudy hat in the shape of a birdbath, with a sign saying “Birds of any color can bathe here.” To bystanders, strutting marchers shouted, “Come on, get out here. You ain’t in Mississippi. Let’s walk!” There were countless placards honoring Medgar Evers, and one group of whites carried a banner reading “I’m Ashamed I Live in Dearborn,” a wealthy, all-white suburb. When King’s motorcade finally intercepted the head of the line at Cadillac Plaza, his name was cried out and the people swarmed forward, knocking aside the police cordon around him. In a deafening chaos, with angry warnings and claustrophobic squeals of terror amid the joyful roar, King linked arms in a line with C. L. Franklin, Walter Reuther, and Mayor Jerome Cavanagh to keep from being swallowed up and crushed by his own admirers. The tide of people pushed around them with such force that the leaders’ legs churned and their bodies moved rapidly down the street without their feet touching the ground. Mayor Cavenaugh recalled that the only words he exchanged with King were “Hang on, hang on.”

  Crowd estimates ranged upward from 125,000. Parents recovered twenty-six children from the lost-and-found. Reporters wrote VJ-Day-style stories that saturated Detroit’s Negro and white newspapers almost equally. At Cobo Hall, a breathless King pronounced it “the largest and greatest demonstration for freedom ever held in the United States.” He spoke for forty-eight minutes on his standard themes, so magnified by the occasion that cheers followed nearly every sentence. Among the few insertions to fit the time and place was a new call for a “march to Washington more than a hundred thousand strong” in support of the civil rights bill. “Let’s not fool ourselves,” said King. “This bill isn’t going to get through if we don’t put some work in it and some determined pressure.” In a veiled reference, possibly to Stanley Levison, he warned that people in the movement would be “misunderstood and called bad names,” even killed like Medgar Evers, and he urged them not to allow a “magnificent new militancy” to sour into mistrust. “There are some white people in this country who are as determined to see the Negro free as we are to be free,” he declared. In his final peroration, he delivered a longer and richer version of the “Dream” sequence that became famous two months later in Washington. He quoted Amos’ vision of justice, Jefferson’s democratic intuition, and finally the epiphany of Isaiah, ending: “I have a dream that one day ‘every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.’ I have a dream this afternoon that the brotherhood of man will become a reality…”

  In those few days, a president of Irish descent went abroad to Germany while a preacher of African descent went inland to Detroit, both to stir the divided core of American identity. The proconsul defended the empire of freedom while the prophet proclaimed its soul. They inspired millions of the same people while acknowledging no fundamental differences in public. Together, they traced a sharp line of history. Where their interpretations of freedom overlapped, they inspired the clear hope of the decade. Where incompatible, they produced conflict as gaping as the Vietnam War.

  King felt the blade at his neck. The next night he received Jack O’Dell, Wyatt Walker, Andrew Young, Thomas Kilgore, Clarence Jones, and Walter Fauntroy in his New York hotel room, in an atmosphere that was as stone cold as the great rally had been tumultuous. It was Monday, June 24, fifty-four days after Bevel’s first children’s march in Birmingham, twelve days after the assassination of Medgar Evers. Stanley Levison missed the tribunal, having left the previous week for his annual vacation month in Ecuador. Some ventured jokes about what kind of Soviet agent would duck out just when his minions had the capitalists on the run, but the jokes fell flat. King somberly framed the dilemma. “I have just come out of Detroit, and it’s clear that the masses of people are with this movement,” he said. “But I’m dialectical enough to know that it’s your moment of greatest heights that could also be the beginning of your undoing.” T
hen he described the three wrenching conversations in Washington, recalling that he had endured everything except President Kennedy’s final statement in the Rose Garden that Levison and O’Dell were agents of a foreign power. “I checked him on that,” King said stoutly. “I told him that can’t be true, and he just turned red and shook.”

  King laughed as he told them how the three Administration officials had tried to impress him with all sorts of spooky code names. Whenever he had asked for proof—evidence that Levison and O’Dell were under Communist control, or that they wanted to make him do something he didn’t want to do—the Kennedys had dodged and danced around with more fancy words. This amused King—these big white folks acted like country preachers promising to pay back some money. What it really meant, King accurately guessed, was that J. Edgar Hoover was hoarding whatever evidence there was, if there was any. On this point, Andrew Young said he had gotten the impression that Burke Marshall did not expect to see what the FBI had. Marshall had suggested to him, Young recalled, that Levison and O’Dell should sue the FBI for defamation and force the Bureau’s evidence out in court, if they dared.

  “Sue? Why should I sue?” interjected O’Dell, who had been brooding like a prisoner on death row. “I don’t consider it a slander!” He said he was proud of his association with Communists who had dedicated themselves to fighting racism. All of the people in the room knew most of them—they were some of Du Bois’s people, and Ben Davis, the hard-line vice chairman of the party, now sick with terminal cancer. O’Dell said he had never done anything to betray Dr. King. As the only one there who did not call King by his first name, he already felt less a colleague than a defendant, and soon he sputtered into rage. “Hoover can kiss my ass!” he said. “I am not the issue!” The issue was control of the movement, he said, and whatever Dr. King decided, he should not kid himself into believing that Hoover and the Kennedys would be satisfied with this one execution.

  Others spoke up in agreement. This was a classic purge. It was beginning with two of King’s most indispensable people—O’Dell, the heart of both direct-mail fund-raising and voter registration records, and Levison, King’s closest confessor and sounding board in the white world. What would keep the government from coming after any of them, including King, once he accepted their terms with a tacit admission that he had subversive ties? Clarence Jones said this was what already was eating at Harry Belafonte, who was as close to Levison as any of them. Belafonte was saying you could not allow a witch-hunt into the movement—that’s how you self-destructed, piece by piece, that’s how Hitler came into power.

  King kept saying the principle was not in doubt. The problem was that the government was trying to force them to sacrifice one principle to realize others, such as the civil rights bill. If they refused, the likely price would be an avalanche of propaganda and a severance of relations. King recalled that on Saturday morning Marshall and the Kennedys had kept up such a barrage that he could not even discuss any other subject. He decided to seek other advice, talk to Belafonte, prolong the agony, but the pressure was already slashing his nerves. “You know, it’s one thing to have the head of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department come down on you,” he mused. “I can handle that. And even the Attorney General. But when Burke Marshall, the Attorney General, and the President of the United States all come down on you in one day, you have to consider that. You have to give it some weight.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON

  Age had begun to work on Bayard Rustin’s daredevil composure. At fifty-three, he had managed a long life as a globe-trotting pacifist while never making more than $25 per week. Now at last, in the national upheaval over civil rights he saw a chance to turn his past as a misfit hobo into a recognized credential, but the rumors against him were so unnerving that the phone call came almost as a relief. “Look, Bayard,” said Roy Wilkins, “I want you to know that I’m not in favor of your organizing the March on Washington.”

  “Well, Roy, I can understand that,” Rustin replied, “but I’d like to know why.”

  Wilkins spoke calmly, without an accusing edge. “There are several reasons,” he said. “First of all, I know that you were a sincere conscientious objector during the war, but you have been called a draft dodger over and over again on the floor of the Senate and House. Second, you are a socialist, and many people think that socialism and communism are basically the same thing. Thirdly, you admit that you belonged to the Young Communist League. And then there’s the whole business of your having been arrested in California on a sex charge. Now, do you think we ought to bring all that into the March on Washington? Because it’s gonna come out, you know.”

  “I know, I know,” Rustin said defensively. He hesitated, as though the recitation made his life sound tawdry even to him. “But what happens depends on you people who are the main leaders. If you stand up and have some courage, it will do no damage.”

  “Randolph may be prepared to do that,” said Wilkins. “But I’m not. I just wanted you to know.”

  “Okay, Roy.” Rustin, though shaken, respected Wilkins for having the decency to warn him personally of his opposition. There was a dutiful, straightforward side to Wilkins’ cunning, which Rustin considered a character strength corresponding to one of Martin Luther King’s weaknesses—an exasperating instinct of avoidance. Rustin had been estranged from King for more than three years, since Adam Clayton Powell’s threat to use Rustin’s homosexuality to blackmail King. King had never spoken to Rustin about the breach—not then, nor in the excited caucuses of the past few weeks, when the idea of the great march had renewed their association.

  When the nation’s major civil rights leaders gathered at New York’s Roosevelt Hotel a few days later, on July 2, Roy Wilkins made an entrance that indelibly stamped the event. Taking one look at the private dining room with place settings for some fifteen people, he announced that this would never do. He had come for a chiefs-only meeting, he said, and began literally to tap the men on the shoulders, saying, “This one stays. This one goes.” A. Philip Randolph could stay but not Rustin, who had come as his deputy. Among the others Wilkins marked for ejection were Fred Shuttlesworth, James Forman, Norman Hill of CORE, and Cleveland Robinson, the New York labor leader who had helped subsidize the march preparations by giving Bayard Rustin a union office and a stipend. Wilkins cut through the group like a scythe. It was no small tribute to his stature that he could command obedience from such people as Shuttlesworth and Forman, who had come great distances for the summit meeting but soon retreated sullenly into the hallway. (The rebuke so stung Forman that he later claimed to have conceived the chiefs-only idea and to have disinvited himself accordingly.) Grumbling furiously among themselves, some of the expelled ones said this power play by Wilkins surely foretold an effort to scuttle the entire march, perhaps at the behest of the Kennedys. Rumors to that effect spread among the scores of representatives of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, who were to meet in the downstairs ballroom that afternoon.

  Only six chiefs remained: Wilkins of the NAACP, Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, King of the SCLC, Farmer of CORE, John Lewis of SNCC, and Whitney Young of the Urban League. Randolph opened the business by declaring that a march on Washington had been his obsession for more than twenty years, and that he wanted Bayard Rustin to make it a reality. Wilkins said he wanted no part of Rustin. Farmer and King defended Rustin’s superior abilities but conceded that political attacks on Rustin might harm the march. Young supported Wilkins, who refused to yield, and finally someone asked whether Randolph himself should lead the march instead of Rustin.

  “Yes, Phil, you should lead it,” said Wilkins. Randolph promptly reached for a compromise, telling Wilkins that if he did, he would insist upon the right to choose his own deputy, and it would be Rustin. Wilkins replied that he would not quarrel with such an arrangement. “You can take that on if you want,” he told Randolph, “but don’t expect me to do anything abou
t it when the trouble starts.” King joined a chorus of approval for the compromise. He thought the histrionics by Wilkins camouflaged what was essentially a surrender of the NAACP’s traditional claim to preeminence.

  Wilkins did not have to wait long to feel confident that his adjustment to the march was prudent. He flew to Chicago that same day for the NAACP’s fifty-fourth annual convention, which Mayor Daley already had pitched into controversy by declaring at an opening ceremony that “there are no ghettos in Chicago.” Daley, a conservative ally of the NAACP, led ten thousand convention delegates down State Street in a Fourth of July freedom march, but when he tried to make a speech to them in Grant Park he met a solid wall of catcalls. Loud, continuous boos forced Daley to step back from the microphone so that Wilkins and other NAACP dignitaries could plead for courtesy—if not for a friend, or for Daley’s right to speak, then at least for the convention’s official host. Their pleas only added to the noise of the hecklers, who roared on for twenty minutes, driving the furious mayor in retreat to his limousine. Red-faced and tear-streaked, but partisan to the quick, Daley blamed the insult on “the Republicans.”

  J. H. Jackson, King’s conqueror in the National Baptist Convention, had the temerity to come forward on the platform, only to receive a greeting that might have made him envy Daley’s. Jackson had just issued a statement denouncing the March on Washington as a dangerous, unwarranted protest, and now he endured the first public booing of his life. Jackson stared in disbelief. When he too stepped down without speaking, the crowd’s ugly mood materialized in the form of hecklers who pinned him against a wall, shouting, “Kill him! Kill him!” until police escorts plucked him to safety.