Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Reinhold Niebuhr perceived an entirely different sex scandal simply by reading the newspapers. “Your former choir boy, Barry Goldwater, is cutting a wide swath,” he wrote Bishop Will Scarlett. “Interesting how Rockefeller’s lack of private morality has made him a dead duck and given Barry his chance.” Niebuhr thought Rockefeller’s spicy divorce and remarriage might have the political effect of turning the Republicans into “a reactionary party” built upon white voters in the South and West. Jackie Robinson expressed similar fears in a newspaper column headed “Is the GOP Going Lily White?” So did King, who told Clarence Jones privately that “the Goldwater surge pushes Kennedy more and more to the right.” Although Niebuhr and King never became friends—never overcame disparities of age and stature, nor the barrier of Niebuhr’s Cold Warrior phase—they were beginning to sound alike in their private communications. The civil rights movement helped revive the seventy-one-year-old theologian, who, despite severe depressions and failing health, was beginning a reprise on his pre-Depression days as a race radical in Detroit.

  The racial crisis also helped lift Lyndon Johnson from the torpor of the vice presidency. For the first time since his formative experience as a New Deal congressman, an Administration was fighting for survival against domestic rather than foreign crisis. The fate of the Kennedy Administration unexpectedly hinged on a legislative program for the downtrodden, and Johnson, who had felt so superfluous and insecure among the fast-track Kennedy globalists, responded as though to a shot of adrenaline. Instead of cultivating the resistance among his fellow Southerners, he seemed to relish the chance to slough off his past as a regional politician. Suddenly he was in demand again as the Senate architect of the only two successful civil rights bills since Reconstruction. In private White House meetings, the Vice President changed from a sullen lump of self-pity into the gleefully rapacious arm-twister of the Johnson legend.

  Johnson told President Kennedy how he had reacted when the city of Houston shut off dockside electricity to protest the Navy’s new policies on off-base segregation. “The head of Houston Power and Light Company is [Senator] Eastland’s cousin,” he said. “So I called up Albert Thomas and I said, ‘Shall I tell the President that you cannot supply power to a Navy installation there because of the Negro question? And…what are you gonna do about space?’” Thomas had gotten the message that his nasty little protest endangered millions of dollars in new federal contracts for a NASA tracking station in Houston, Johnson reported, and the Navy had got its power back immediately. When Kennedy suggested that it might be unwise to force showdowns with entire Southern states, Johnson said, “Yeah, but I want the governor of Texas and the governor of Arkansas and the governor of Georgia…to know that when they stand up there and come out for segregation, it may cost them the economy of that state. And they ought to think about it a good deal.” Johnson advocated a Southern-style program of bareknuckled sweet talk to condition Southern politicians to new realities, saying he knew why they were howling in public about segregation, and there were ways to make them un-howl. President Kennedy was wary of such Machiavellian zeal. “You could do all that on the phone?” he asked.

  By early August, Johnson’s enthusiasm for the civil rights scrap was attracting public notice, which vexed electoral strategists for the 1964 campaign. Newspaper stories suggested that President Kennedy was so worried that he planned to send Johnson on a tour of Scandinavia during the March on Washington. By exiling the Vice President to the blondest part of the globe, far from the anticipated convergence of Negro unrest, strategists hoped to preserve enough of LBJ’s Southern image to salvage Texas and perhaps North Carolina for the Democrats. Such desperate schemes reflected the unsettled nerves within the Administration. Its officials were like sailors who, having leaned far overboard to grasp a new mooring, felt their ship slipping away to the rear.

  With palpable relief, President Kennedy announced on August 1 that the long season of racial demonstrations was subsiding at last. He embraced this prognosis so firmly that he warned the nation not to “go to sleep and forget the problem.” Almost as he spoke, however, Chicago police arrested a racially mixed band of one hundred demonstrators, and the next day authorities in Gadsden, Alabama, conducted a mass arrest of nearly seven hundred young people who were trying to renew the William Moore march. Picketers went to jail that same weekend in places as far apart as Torrance, California, and Athens, Georgia. Upstaged again, the Administration groped for political balance. In a complicated, partisan maneuver at the National Governors Conference, it managed to abolish the resolutions committee in order to forestall a ringing endorsement of civil rights. Such a vote of the assembled governors would have dramatized the sharp splits among the Democrats while showcasing Republican unity behind Nelson Rockefeller, and under these special circumstances the Kennedy strategists decided to duck rather than to win. Meanwhile, in the Justice Department, Robert Kennedy made two difficult choices that comforted Southern politicians in their campaign to suppress racial dissent. Both choices involved Charles Sherrod’s ongoing SNCC project in southwest Georgia.

  In Americus, two counties north of Albany, a team of SNCC students had struggled through the spring to register Negro voters, and since the national outburst of direct action they also had tried to integrate the town’s Martin Theater by pickets and sit-ins in the lobby. Nearly a hundred local teenagers went to jail in July. On the night of August 8, after a mass meeting at the Friendship Baptist Church, an overflow of energy and bravado led to a spontaneous one-block march through the Negro section of town by more than two hundred young people. The march irritated the Americus policemen on monitor duty. Their orders to disperse achieved nothing but a tight huddle of students and louder choruses of “We Shall Overcome.” Police reinforcements buttressed the white side of a standoff between authority and song, until Sheriff Fred B. Chappell finally issued orders to arrest them. This was easier said than done, as the officers were heavily outnumbered. They fired warning shots to scatter as many of the protesters as possible, then closed in on the holdouts, who braced themselves for arrest by lying down on the sidewalk. Sheriff Chappell stood over SNCC field worker Don Harris, a Negro graduate of Rutgers, and tried to make him get up by jabbing him with an electric cattle prod, known locally as a “hot shot.” The sheriff later testified that Harris lay “wiggling and twisting” on the ground but refused to tell his followers to stop singing. This vivid duel between the opposing leaders provoked anger on both sides. White officers fired more shots as they wielded their clubs; some Negroes threw bricks and broke windows. Seventy-seven demonstrators went to jail on the first night of a siege that soon left seven officers and twenty-eight demonstrators wounded. A state trooper broke one Negro’s leg with a baseball bat, and a policeman shot another fatally in the back as he walked through a white neighborhood.

  What raised the primitive dispute to the Attorney General’s desk was a unique decision by local authorities to charge four SNCC leaders—Harris, two white students from the North, and a young Negro from Americus—with seditious conspiracy against local laws. The charges were grounded in what was known as the “Angelo Herndon statute,” after the famous communism/integration show trial of the 1930s, which had started Herndon’s lawyer, Ben Davis, toward his career in the Communist Party. The statute made sedition a capital crime, and the Sumter County solicitor all but openly declared that he had filed these particular charges in order to jail the demonstration leaders indefinitely by fiat, as Georgia law permitted no pre-trial release in capital cases.

  For his murmurs of dissent against the crudely injudicious prosecution, the Sumter County attorney was hounded out of his church and eventually out of the county. Most of the local white leaders kept silence, and from Washington the Attorney General swiftly closed off hope of federal intervention in the case. His press office announced on August 13 that the FBI had found no merit in complaints of police brutality. Kennedy also declined to challenge the sedition prosecutions on behalf of the Unite
d States. Until November, when a team of defense lawyers won a federal court order aborting the sedition charges as an unconstitutional abuse of police power—the first such order ever won by a private litigant under the 1957 Civil Rights Act—the four SNCC workers languished in jail under threat of execution.

  Kennedy’s second tack against the civil rights movement was more confrontational. He held a special press conference on August 9—the day after the sedition arrests in Americus, and only hours after his nephew, the President’s newborn son Patrick, had died in a Boston hospital—to announce federal criminal indictments against nine members of the Albany Movement. To disinterested observers, this was an obscure though troubling case, illustrating perhaps that civil rights leaders could make errors just like cruel sheriffs. To those closer to the movement, however, “the Albany Nine” became almost a watchword for bitterness, a stark refutation of Pollyannish Camelot, and within the government the niceties of legal language masked ferocious internal struggles. This was the case that harked back to the gruesome, landmark Screws lynching case in Baker County, and to the point-blank shooting of another Negro prisoner by Sheriff Screws’s successor, “Gator” Johnson, on a night clouded by alcohol and cross-racial sex at the annual barbecue on the Coca-Cola plantation, and to the miraculous survival of the prisoner, Charlie Ware, and to Ware’s audacious civil suit against Sheriff Johnson that had been lost on the Good Friday, April 12, that Martin Luther King was locked up in the Birmingham jail.

  Since April, special detachments of FBI agents had swarmed over Albany trying to establish that movement Negroes had picketed Carl Smith’s grocery store in retaliation for his jury vote to acquit Sheriff Johnson. This had been no easy assignment, as there had been only a few hours of picketing on a single day, and the Albany Movement undeniably had been picketing that grocery and many other stores before the Ware verdict. Without hard evidence isolating vengeance as the picketers’ motivation, the white prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s office found themselves in the uncomfortable position of Negro plaintiffs who long had struggled to prove subjective realities as obvious as intimidation or voter discrimination. As a last resort, the prosecutors brought to bear the full weight of their authority: they had a special federal grand jury impaneled to investigate the Albany Movement and sent U.S. marshals swooping through the Negro section of town to serve nearly sixty subpoenas, spreading panic in their wake. “These ain’t no crackers now,” declared Sherrod. “This is the federal government.” C. B. King hastily scheduled a meeting in his law office to brief the subpoena recipients on their rights and duties as grand jury witnesses, but then he was called away to another county for a quickie mass trial of young people arrested at a library sit-in. In his absence, the meeting was a haphazard affair conducted by Elizabeth Holtzman,* a summer law clerk who had come South from New York to gain experience in civil rights litigation. Holtzman nearly got indicted herself.

  The grand jury grillings turned up dry on the picketing itself, but the prosecutors forged success on a collateral issue. When one of the witnesses mentioned the legal briefing conducted by C. B. King, the prosecutors craftily recalled selected leaders of the Albany Movement and asked them if they had “attended any mass meeting or meeting where one or more people were in attendance, where it was being discussed about the fact that certain ones were going to have to appear before the grand jury?” Slater King and several others replied, “I don’t recall.” Thus they met their downfall. When C. B. King learned of their testimony, he was distraught that they had equivocated about something so innocent and defensible as a meeting with their attorney. The chagrined witnesses could only explain that they had panicked, fearing a trap to indict C. B. King or to make the meeting part of some conspiracy.

  The proposed indictments also caused distress in the Justice Department. Even the steeliest review attorneys felt qualms about charges that intruded so closely on lawyer-client privilege. Both the questions and answers at issue were vague, making perjury difficult to prove, and there were numerous quirks in the indictment package. Joni Rabinowitz, the only proposed white defendant, was a young SNCC volunteer whose father, Victor Rabinowitz, was a New York lawyer of an alleged Communist past, and for that reason she was being cast as a ringleader of the entire Albany Movement, acting on orders that may have come from Moscow. This was a J. Edgar Hoover twist designed to appeal to white segregationist juries, but it was highly implausible to lawyers who knew anything about the Albany Movement. Also among the defendants was an unconnected, miscellaneous Negro who was rumored to have angered FBI agents by telling them they had no right to conduct interviews in his barber shop. Only two of the nine defendants—Rabinowitz and Dr. W. G. Anderson—actually were alleged to have conspired against Carl Smith, the juror from the Ware v. Johnson case. Only Rabinowitz was alleged actually to have picketed the grocery store, and witnesses were divided on that elementary point. Other defendants appeared to have been singled out for political reasons. These included Rev. Samuel Wells, who had led one of the most spectacular jail marches of the previous summer, and Thomas Chatmon, the NAACP Youth Council leader who had suffered so many misgivings about letting his members join the original Albany Movement.

  Inside a divided Justice Department, lawyers from the Criminal Division conceded flaws in the package but argued that the rash of equivocation over the legal meeting indicated that the defendants had guilty minds over the picketing of Smith. The U.S. Attorney’s team was comforted by the excellent chances of obtaining convictions before a Georgia jury. Lawyers from the Civil Rights Division, on the other hand, argued strenuously against bringing such marginal charges against Albany Negroes while failing to indict the jailer who had beaten Slater King or the officers who had kicked Slater King’s pregnant wife to the ground. When the conflict reached Robert Kennedy for decision, he realized that there was no subtle way to shelve the case. Only his explicit order to the U.S. Attorney could abort the indictments. Such an order would infuriate a number of government officials who had invested much labor in the prosecution, including the U.S. prosecutors in Georgia and Kennedy-appointed District Court judge Robert Elliott, who had pushed the investigation from the start. Once the Attorney General resolved not to block the indictments, it was politically expedient to be as noisy about the decision as he was quiet about civil rights enforcements on behalf of Negroes. Accepting an inevitable torrent of criticism from the civil rights movement, Kennedy moved boldly to capture the attention of those on the other side. As he was announcing the indictments at his press conference in Washington, U.S. marshals and FBI agents were hauling the nine defendants to jail in Georgia. Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach told reporters that the Albany Movement’s picketing of Smith’s grocery store “must become a matter of serious Federal legal concern.” The department further signaled the Administration’s unwavering support by dispatching senior prosecutors to assist the U.S. Attorney in Georgia, where the first convictions would be recorded in November. The Washington Star congratulated Attorney General Kennedy for proving in the Albany Nine case that he did not stand “with the Negro against the white man.”

  All through August, little pinpricks of back-page news joined the running stories from Americus and Albany. In Birmingham, a tear-gas cannister sent twenty shoppers to the hospital from Loveman’s just after the store complied with integration conditions of the spring settlement, and a few days later a bomb demolished the entrance to the home of Arthur Shores, the city’s best-known Negro lawyer. In Plaquemine Parish, Louisiana, James Farmer of CORE led a march of two hundred to jail, where he stayed all month through a sustained siege of mounted patrolmen and house searches and night riders so menacing that he eventually escaped the region concealed in the back of a hearse. These and other threatening episodes ran counter to the larger mood of a nation that was just adapting to the moral challenge of the civil rights bill, and in which the same Kennedys who were prosecuting the Albany Nine were widely disparaged as nigger-lovers. Perhaps no American felt the
ragged edges of these contradictions more acutely than John Lewis, who spent the summer shuttling between Southern jails and luxurious salons of power. Don Harris, the most threatened and abused sedition defendant in the Americus jail, was his closest friend in SNCC. Lewis knew several of the Albany Nine personally, and scores of other prisoners were as real to him as freedom songs or the rattle of handcuffs. He identified with their latest ordeals even as he was rising to personal acquaintance with the President and the Attorney General.

  Lewis was a gifted mimic. During the last executive planning sessions for the March on Washington, he was the guest of a wealthy family in Westchester County, New York, where in off hours he entertained sophisticated Northern students with his droll imitations of Robert Kennedy’s choppy, distracted discourse and of King’s pulpit cadences. Lewis beguiled the students as the irresistible Negro man-child, awed by everything and nothing. He radiated with the belief that power and luxury were immoral, and yet this conviction, filtered through James Lawson’s teaching that there was virtue in all people, came out in Lewis as a gentle parody on the distractions of worldly success. On the Saturday before the march, he climbed into a tanning chair and floated out into the Westchester swimming pool. From this perch, he was holding forth on the vicissitudes of the movement when an emergency phone call came in from one of the Southern jails. As Lewis could not swim and the others were fully dressed, the task of fishing him out brought a few seconds of addled, crisis hilarity. Scrambling students tossed off jokes that the national chairman of SNCC would save the day just as soon as they could tow his chair to a poolside phone.