Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  Lewis laughed too, but he soon took leave of his guests to prepare his speech for the March on Washington. Although the prospect was daunting for a young man with a speech impediment, Lewis had no trouble deciding what aspects of this historic moment he would try to highlight for a crowd that might be larger than the population of Idaho. He drafted a simple speech about the Americus prisoners and the Plaquemine cavalry charges. He invoked the plight of Slater King by name, summoning his audience to look more sharply for complicity in ostensible goodwill. “Do you know,” he asked, “that in Albany, Georgia, nine of our leaders have been indicted not by the Dixiecrats but by the Federal Government for peaceful protest?” He turned charges of equivocation and fuzzy purpose back upon the Administration. “I want to know,” he wrote, “which side is the Federal Government on?”

  A week before the march, Clarence Jones ducked out of his office to call Stanley Levison from a pay phone. Dispensing with greeting or introduction, he said, “The only reason that I’m hounding you is that I would like to get what you have, and start getting it transcribed.”

  “Well, I have to go over it,” Levison replied. He promised to “have something” by that night.

  “Okay, but time runneth on,” said Jones.

  Inside the New York FBI office, the Levison wiretappers decided that this cryptic caller must be Jones. They contacted the Jones wiretappers, who reported that Jones had been in his law firm just minutes before but that the Levison call had not gone out over Jones’s office lines. Once the technicians confirmed by voice identification that the caller indeed was Jones, they noted the suspicious circumstances for their superiors: Jones and Levison clearly were taking precautions against wiretaps. For the Bureau, this gave a sinister cast even to Levison’s effort to complete the crash book project on Birmingham. He was drafting passages to submit to King and the ghostwriter, Al Duckett, who were holed up at the Riverdale Motor Inn.

  King broke away from Riverdale that night to give a speech in Chicago before the National Insurance Association. This was a big money event for the SCLC, as the NIA executives had guaranteed a minimum collection of $10,000 and Wyatt Walker had wangled free use of their mailing list. The event also carried personal and political significance for King, who greeted his audience as “the economic power structure of the Negro community.” These were the heirs of the pioneers who had forged the first major Negro business markets by writing dime-a-week life insurance and burial policies, often doubling as morticians and bill collectors or working in collaboration with preachers, such as Daddy King, to collect on pledges to the church coffers. “You know as well as I know that these vast economic resources that you’ve gained through pooled resources have come by and large from the masses of the Negro people,” King told them. “And you owe it to them to pour some of these resources back into the struggle.” The mood of the crowd was so bright that they burst into applause at this blunt assessment, and they applauded again when King warned that they could not have both integration and a protected Negro market. “Now if you have the illusion at any point that our job will be merely to compete with Negroes in this new age that is emerging,” he said, “you’re sleeping through a revolution…We must set out to do our jobs so well that the living, the dead, or the unborn couldn’t do them any better.”

  Having admonished the Negro capitalists, King turned to easier targets. He denounced the white politicians in Congress for “playing around with one of the vital issues facing our nation and…our world.” Already those politicians were maneuvering to weaken the civil rights bill and delay its consideration at least into the next year, and King drew cheers from the insurance executives by vowing not to let it happen. A surge of emotion carried him through rather abstract remarks on the power of nonviolence. Almost defiantly, he invited them to contemplate the potential of a system that embraced no inherently repugnant means. “I believe that one of the weaknesses of communism is found right here,” King declared, citing Lenin’s defense of deceit and violence toward the goal of a classless society. “And this is where nonviolence breaks with communism or any other system that would argue that the end justifies the means, for in the long run the end is pre-existent in the means, and the means represents the ideal in the making and the end in process.” As his content grew more technical and remote, King compensated with nearly desperate passion. “I have come to see even more,” he cried in a choking voice, “that as we move on toward the goal of justice, hatred must never be our motive.”

  “I refuse to become bitter,” he said, then moved to a final peroration on a theme that had inspired the multitude at his Detroit speech in June. “And so tonight I say to you, as I have said before, I have a dream, a dream deeply rooted in the American dream,” he began. “I have a dream that one day, right down in Birmingham, Alabama, where the home of my good friend Arthur Shores was bombed just last night, white men and Negro men, white women and Negro women, will be able to walk together as brothers and sisters. I have a dream…” During the ovation that followed, the dapper Chicago emcee shouted that he wished he had King’s eloquence in order to express his appreciation for the speech. “I don’t have that eloquence, so you’ll have to have another dream,” he quipped.

  King returned to New York to join Roy Wilkins for a guest appearance on “Meet the Press.” In the first question, Lawrence Spivak spoke of the numerous authorities who “believe it would be impossible to bring more than 100,000 militant Negroes into Washington without incidents and possibly rioting,” and he asked Wilkins sourly what the country could possibly learn about civil rights that could justify such risks. Spivak asked no questions of King—perhaps still fuming over King’s refusal to come out of jail for the show the previous summer—but the next panelist promptly asked King three times how the march’s leadership could tolerate Bayard Rustin’s background of subversion and character defects. The friendliest reporter, Robert MacNeil of NBC News, sparred with King over the meaning of “social equality” and wanted to know how the civil rights movement could survive the “psychological climax” of the march without either disbanding to rest or pushing on into violence. The fourth panelist pressed King to admit that the movement needed to eliminate extremism and “rowdyism,” such as the public booing of Mayor Daley and J. H. Jackson. “I wouldn’t say that I condone every action that is taking place at this time,” King replied. “I think we must see that we are in the midst of a great social revolution, and no social revolution can be neat and tidy at every point.”

  Wilkins and King did their cooperative best to project the march in a positive light—there was not a shaving’s difference between them in tone or substance—but public expectations brimmed with apprehension. In Washington, authorities from all sectors guarded against the possibility that marauding Negroes might sack the capital like Moors or Visigoths reincarnate. The city banned liquor sales for the first time since Prohibition. President Kennedy and his military chiefs were poised with pre-drafted proclamations that would trigger suppression by 4,000 troops assembled in the suburbs, backed by 15,000 paratroopers on alert in North Carolina. Washington hospitals canceled elective surgery. Some storekeepers transferred merchandise to warehouses to safeguard against looting. Chief Judge John Lewis Smith, Jr., notified his fifteen colleagues to be prepared for all-night criminal hearings,* and practically no baseball fans protested when the Washington Senators postponed two days’ games until Thursday, when the march would be safely over.

  Similar fears penetrated the movement itself. Bayard Rustin spent countless hours arranging police security and imported a supplementary force of four thousand volunteer marshals from New York. From his new headquarters tent near the Washington Monument, he announced that the psychology of peace was fragile and that there was no telling what might happen if attackers burned one of the two thousand buses headed toward Washington, as they had burned the Freedom Ride bus, or if any bombs were detonated, as in Birmingham. It was Rustin’s obsession to make sure that no flaw in the arrangements
permitted claustrophobia or discomfort to flare up into violence. He drove his core staff of two hundred volunteers to pepper the Mall with several hundred portable toilets, twenty-one temporary drinking fountains, twenty-four first-aid stations, and even a check-cashing facility. Meanwhile, in the great hall of New York’s Riverside Church, volunteers worked in shifts to prepare 80,000 cheese-sandwich bag lunches for overnight transport to Washington—to feed growling stomachs, and thereby to prevent growling people. Over the vast march area, Rustin had signs posted high enough to be read by someone jammed in a crowd. “If you want to organize anything,” he kept saying, “assume that everybody is absolutely stupid. And assume yourself that you’re stupid.”

  As to the program, Rustin notified all speakers that a hook-man would unceremoniously yank them from the podium if their speeches exceeded seven minutes. He was determined to move the huge mass of people into Washington after dawn and out again before dusk, and therefore he could not tolerate the usual stretch of performers’ egos. Strict discipline would allow timely evacuation, which would reduce the chances of violence by or upon Negroes wandering strange city streets at night. It would also refute the racial stereotype of imprecision and inbred, self-indulgent tardiness. The planners wrestled not only with logistics but with the weight of perceptions that had accumulated over centuries. Never before had white America accepted a prescheduled Negro political event for national attention. By guilt or aversion, many of the most sympathetic whites retained a subliminal belief pairing Negroes with violence, such that even innocent beating victims were implicated to some degree in their fate.

  These stakes prompted the leadership to turn outward—to emphasize their goals and common grievances rather than their particular enemies. Once again, this self-conscious political diplomacy conflicted with the self-conscious foot-soldiery of SNCC leaders. A number of them labored to turn attention to the jailhouse door, where they were. Huddling with John Lewis, each of them added a line or two to the draft of his speech. Courtland Cox helped sharpen the politics by pointing out that nothing in the Administration’s civil rights bill would protect Negroes seeking to vote or protest segregation, nor “the hundreds and thousands of people who have been arrested upon trumped-up charges.” Tom Kahn, a young white socialist who had attended Howard University with Cox, helped add language to make the speech more overtly ideological: “If any radical social, political and economic changes are to take place in our society, the people, the masses, must bring them about.” James Forman inserted references to specific outrages, such as the caning of C. B. King by the Albany sheriff, and in his swashbuckling style contributed a vision of conquest: “We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own ‘scorched earth’ policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground—nonviolently. We shall crack the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of democracy.” After polishing by Julian Bond and Eleanor Holmes, among others, the final draft of the Lewis speech became a collective manifesto of SNCC’s early years. Courtland Cox was so proud of it that when he saw a pile of advance copies of Whitney Young’s speech sitting on the press table at the Statler-Hilton Hotel, he mimeographed a stack of Lewis speeches for equal distribution.

  Trouble over the speech began on Tuesday afternoon, the day before the march. A Catholic prelate took the Lewis draft to Washington’s Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle, who was scheduled to deliver the opening invocation at the march. O’Boyle found Lewis’ remarks incendiary, and his complaints soon spread to Burke Marshall, Walter Reuther, and to other white clergymen who had agreed to participate. Within hours, Bayard Rustin was obliged to convene an emergency mediation session at the Statler-Hilton. Lewis stoutly defended his speech against censorship by the elders, who argued in rejoinder that its content—particularly the statement that the civil rights bill came “too little, too late” and was unworthy of SNCC support—was incompatible with the general purpose of the march. This triggered a heated debate on what exactly the purpose was. Word of the dispute filtered downstairs to the hotel lobby, where Malcolm X was fielding questions from reporters, and the Black Muslim leader adroitly cited the reports to buttress his thesis that powerful white forces had made puppets of the Negroes and turned the protest into a Kennedy pep rally, which Malcolm later ridiculed as the “Farce on Washington.” Word of his stinging comments filtered back upstairs to the SNCC contingent. Lewis and several others had met Malcolm that day. They admired him for slinging darts of uncomfortable truth, and yet they also wanted to prove that at least some Negroes were not puppets.

  Several blocks away, Bob Moses led a crew of pickets on the sidewalks outside the Justice Department. Ever aloof from public speeches and political deals, even those of his closest SNCC colleagues, Moses remained fixed upon the deeds that he saw as the essence of good faith. If the federal government would fulfill its duty to protect would-be voters and lawful demonstrators, he insisted, the movement could accomplish the rest by hard work. To him, all else was political vapor. No march could make these underlying realities more or less compelling, and part of him rebelled against conniving with federal authorities to create a public climate for recognizing responsibilities that already were obvious. Together with supporters of the Americus prisoners and the Albany Nine, he attacked the Justice Department for retreating shamefully into politics. Moses himself carried a picket sign that caused more than a few pedestrians to brush by him as a doomsday kook: “When There Is No Justice, What Is the State but a Robber Band Enlarged?”

  Late that night, King returned to Washington from two days on the road. Sealing himself off in his suite at the Willard Hotel, he began to outline his speech for the next day. His opening sentence bowed to Lincoln: “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.” King would have liked to stamp the moment with his cry for a Second Emancipation Proclamation, but he knew he would reap confusion or worse by introducing a strange alternative to the civil rights bill. Instead he conjured up the safer notion that Lincoln and the Founding Fathers had issued all Americans a “promissory note” guaranteeing basic democratic freedoms. From there he developed an opening run on the clanking, dissonant metaphor of a “bad check” of liberty for Negroes—“a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’ But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt…So we have come to cash this check…”

  King wrote new language for one of his standard refrains, “Now is the time,” ending with a rebuttal of the rumors that the movement was being tamed by success or by the Kennedy Administration. “Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual,” he wrote. He turned aside briefly in a paragraph addressed to incipient Negro separatism within the movement—not only from Malcolm X but also from King’s exasperating colleague Adam Clayton Powell, who of late had been sounding off about how Negroes needed to purge the civil rights organizations of white influence. King blended a plea for renewed nonviolence with a call for a “biracial army.” “The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people,” he wrote. It was a measure of the extraordinary national shift since spring that King felt obliged to nurture white allies rather than to scold them desperately, as in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” This was a complicated, delicate line of racial politics, and he returned to urgency in a third paragraph on a cumbersome new refrain: “We cannot be satisfied…we can never be satisfied…we cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.”

  These few themes exhausted the seven minutes. All night long King pared his language so that he could squeeze in a run on his common refrain, “With this faith…With this faith…” His final result was a mixture of truncated oratory and fresh composition. The speech was politically sound but far f
rom historic, nimble in some streaks while club-footed through others. King gave his handwritten draft to Wyatt Walker for typing and reproduction just as the Moses picket line was ending its all-night vigil at the Justice Department. Also that morning, Robert Kennedy was calling Archbishop O’Boyle to renew the stalemated discussions over the acceptability of the John Lewis speech, and FBI agents, on order from Hoover, were calling Charlton Heston and other celebrities in their Washington hotel rooms, warning them to stay indoors because the government expected violence. None of these contending parties had yet found a formula to shape or define the March on Washington. This privilege fell to the anonymous people who had spent the night on trains and buses.

  It was the first—and essentially the last—mass meeting ever to reach the national airwaves. Relatively few Negroes and almost no whites had experienced the mood of that central institution—not during the bus boycott or the Freedom Rides, nor since then from the churches of Albany, Birmingham, or Greenwood. As a result, the term “mass meeting” meant very little when the pilgrims spilled out singing freedom songs. A trainload that had boarded in Savannah singing “We Shall Not Be Moved” arrived at Washington’s Union Station singing “We Shall Overcome.” Andrew Young was there when hundreds of movement people from another city stepped through the train doors singing, “Woke up this morning with my mind set on freedom. Hallelu, hallelu, hallelujah!”

  According to march historian Thomas Gentile, twenty-one charter trains pulled in that morning, and buses poured south through the Baltimore tunnel at the rate of one hundred per hour. A jaunty young Negro finished a week-long journey on skates, having rolled all the way from Chicago wearing a bright sash that read “Freedom.” An eighty-two-year-old bicycled from Ohio, and a younger man pedaled in from South Dakota. Small high school bands improvised on corners of the Mall. Determined high spirits converged from all directions in a kind of giant New Orleans funeral—except that here there was hope of removing the cause of the underlying pain, and here the vast acreage between the Capitol and the Washington Monument muffled the excitement with the dignity of open space. Among the tens of thousands of inpouring whites, plainspoken workers from the UAW and other unions mingled with students and over-earnest intellectuals. Few of them were completely at ease in a swelling sea of dark faces, but nearly all of them forgot their apprehensions. They were swept away by what in fact was the ordinary transport of countless mass meetings, while movement veterans absorbed revelatory homage from palpable symbols of white prestige —the television cameras, movie stars, and dearest edifices of American democracy. A chorus of news cameras clicked as James Garner pushed through the crowd hand in hand with Negro actress Diahann Carroll; they were among dozens who had arrived on the Hollywood “celebrity plane” organized by Harry Belafonte and Clarence Jones. Even those who had attended a hundred mass meetings never had witnessed anything like Marlon Brando on the giant stage, holding up for the world an actual cattle prod from Gadsden as an indictment of segregationist hatred.