Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  The President and King lacked the chemistry for small talk. Roy Wilkins was better. Once Kennedy had shaken hands all around, Wilkins embarked on a folksy monologue, craftily pointing out that the glowing success of the march could shift the heavy center of American opinion by diluting suspicions that the Negro and his cause were somehow inherently flawed. Wilkins employed flattery of the President—“If you will permit me to say so, sir, you’re politically astute”—and toward the end he wove in a strand of self-pity: “It fell to my lot, sir, in this afternoon of superlative oratory, to be the one to deal rather pedantically and pedestrianly with the hard business of legislation. And the other gentlemen were free to soar in the wild blue yonder. And they did so soar.” Only then did he ease into his argument that the Kennedy Administration should strengthen its civil rights bill. The House was ready to pass better legislation, he asserted, and was only waiting for assent from the White House.

  Randolph’s booming British accent quickly seconded Wilkins. At a minimum, the President should agree to add a section banning racial exclusions in employment, he said, stressing the rising threats of automation and joblessness. Inner-city teenagers, seeing no jobs ahead, were dropping out of school in epidemic numbers. “I may suggest to you that they present almost an alarming problem,” Randolph told Kennedy, “because they have no faith in anybody white. They have no faith in the Negro leadership. They have no faith in God. They have no faith in the government. In other words, they believe the hand of the society is against them.”

  Walter Reuther spoke up for a second desired amendment: the old Title III section stripped from the 1957 act, which would empower the Attorney General to initiate lawsuits to correct egregious denials of civil rights. The Kennedy bill provided such power only for school desegregation cases, and only then if private litigants had initiated a suit and were found to be indigent. To expand that power was urgently necessary and eminently fair, said Reuther. Now they had the muscle to do so, he added, as one practical effect of the march was that “we’ve put together the broadest working legislative coalition we’ve ever had.”

  President Kennedy interrupted to check the momentum of the concerted appeal. On the problem of jobs and school dropouts, he said, he and the Attorney General had been talking about Harlem and Southside Chicago, and they thought that in the coming months Negro leaders might do well to follow the Jewish example. “This doesn’t have anything to do with what we’ve been talking about,” he said. “But it seems to me, with all the influence that all you gentlemen have in the Negro community, that we could emphasize…which I think the Jewish community has done, on educating their children, on making them study, making them stay in school and all the rest.” From there, Kennedy listed the difficulties his own bill already faced. State by state in the House and person by person in the Senate, he read off Lawrence O’Brien’s predicted vote count. Prospects looked close in the House and grim in the Senate. Besides, the current bill would be more palatable to the Senate, where it must somehow overcome a filibuster.

  Wilkins had presented far more optimistic numbers, including a private assurance from Speaker John McCormack that a much stronger bill could pass the House to gain leverage against the Senate. A weaker bill would earn no gratitude in the Senate, where the arch-defenders of segregation were poised to slice any bill down to nothing. Randolph rose to say that if the obstacles were as great as President Kennedy indicated, “it’s obvious that it’s going to take nothing less than a crusade to win approval for these civil rights measures.” When Kennedy agreed, Randolph told him, “Nobody can lead this crusade but you,” and he urged him to take the crusade directly to the voters, over the heads of Congress.

  President Kennedy squirmed in the trap. “Well, we’re doing the, uh, we’re, uh, I think it would be helpful if you gentlemen indicated as you would here that this is a matter that, uh, that, uh, involves both parties,” he replied. “And are confident, which I said at the press conference, that I’m confident that the Republican Party is for the…Lincoln all the way down…just treat it as if you anticipate their support.” When one of the leaders asked directly if this meant the President thought the march had made no impression, Kennedy spoke more frankly of his political misgivings. What the Republicans were “trying to do is to play to the South—with some success, these days.” Nationally, they had nothing to lose, as the Democrats already had most of the Negro vote, and if they could push the President into a crusade, then they could be safely for civil rights and still hang blame for Negro excess on the Democrats. Then and later, President Kennedy alluded to treacherous political games being played—segregationist Democrats maneuvering for pro-Negro amendments to make it easier for moderates to vote against the entire bill, liberal Republicans threatening to vote against the bill because it was too weak. Exasperated, the President argued that the civil rights forces needed to push for a bipartisan consensus instead of a Democratic crusade. It was hard enough to get most Republicans to be for civil rights at all, he declared, citing his White House meeting with “all the golden names of American business.” The businessmen “sat on their tails” and fretted about demonstrations, Kennedy complained. “That’s all we could get out of them.”

  Reuther jumped in to correct the President’s approach. “You gotta get small groups of these fellows,” he said urgently. In Detroit, he had picked key auto executives. “And I said, ‘Look, you can’t escape this problem, and there are two ways of resolving it: either by reason or riots. Now the civil war that this is gonna trigger is not gonna be fought at Gettysburg, it’s gonna be fought in your backyard, in your plant, where your kids are growing up.’” Reuther claimed to have organized an emergency management/labor group to integrate the auto industry. He commended his method—Lyndon Johnson-style conspiratorial jawboning—as the only way to get difficult things done, and all but rebuked President Kennedy for his seminar appeals. “You call a big meeting,” said Reuther, “and you haven’t got a little group organized that will give it a sense of direction, a little push, and nothing will happen.”

  King remained silent through the politely contentious debate of the post-march summit. Near the end, he asked whether a private moral appeal might induce former President Eisenhower to exert influence on Minority Leader Charles Halleck, the most critical of the House Republicans.

  “No, it won’t,” President Kennedy replied quickly. “No, it won’t.”

  To correct any impression that he wanted to undertake such a mission himself, King told Kennedy that he meant “some groups” should do it, as Ike “happens to be in the other denomination.” Chuckles broke out over this play on religion and race. King continued his improbable role as Cabinet Room jester by adding a partisan twist. There must be some way to enlist Eisenhower, he quipped. “Isn’t he a Democrat when he goes to church?”

  Reverend Blake, Eisenhower’s pastor, waded out of the ensuing laughter to declare that in fact Ike “can be got at on that ground.” However, Blake counseled against a one-on-one pastoral appeal, warning that the former president could get testy “if he thinks I’m trying to push him.” Blake thought it better to send a blue-ribbon ecumenical delegation to make the moral case to Eisenhower less personally. President Kennedy seized on the idea and urged Blake to organize a secret pilgrimage to Eisenhower’s Gettysburg farm as soon as possible. He recommended that Blake include a Catholic, “and maybe a businessman or two.” Smiling at the firebrand Reuther, he added, “And keep Walter in the background.”

  At 6:12 P.M., after a meeting of seventy-two minutes, President Kennedy excused the leaders on this light note, promising to keep in touch on the legislative head counts. By then, Rustin had volunteer crews sweeping up the debris from an emptied Mall, and news organizations were rushing to meet evening deadlines on one of the world’s leading stories. Heavy coverage stressed the unprecedented size and utter peacefulness of the march, with a strong subliminal message that the first whiff of mass political integration had been remarkably pleasant. No
t all white newspapers were attuned at first to the depth of the impression King had made. The Washington Post, for example, highlighted Randolph’s speech and made no mention of King’s. By contrast, The New York Times featured a story headlined “‘I Have a Dream…’ Peroration by Dr. King Sums Up a Day the Capital Will Remember,” by James Reston, on a front page containing no fewer than five different stories on the march, arranged in a collage around two large crowd photographs. It was perhaps the zenith of the Times’s pioneer devotion to the civil rights movement. Negro press coverage amounted to a proud rhapsody. Even the Atlanta Daily World announced that the rally “forever” changed racial perceptions, and the paper relaxed its rules against picturing King on the front page (though only in a group shot with President Kennedy). Motown Records released an album within weeks, followed swiftly by bootleg recordings of “I Have a Dream” by Mr. Maestro Records and Twentieth Century—Fox Records. Clarence Jones soon brought suit against the bootleggers on King’s behalf.

  Among the instant commentators, only Stanley Levison paid much attention to the political nuances of King’s speech. Bursting with pride over the success of the day, Levison told callers that “it was marvelous in Martin’s speech the way he handled the white and Negro question, completely repudiating this kind of nonsense of Adam Powell and the Muslims and everybody else in a way that was so positive.” He praised King as “the man of the hour for everybody,” and said he was “bowled over” by the public generosity of Roy Wilkins, who once had refused to invite King to the NAACP’s fiftieth anniversary dinner.

  What quickly swept the press of both races was the “Dream” sequence, which stamped King’s public identity. Critics would point out that the dream was ethereal, and people who yearned for simple justice would object that the content was too simple. Still, precious few among millions detected lightness or naïveté in the speech. On the contrary, the emotional command of his oratory gave King authority to reinterpret the core intuition of democratic justice. More than his words, the timbre of his voice projected him across the racial divide and planted him as a new founding father. It was a fitting joke on the races that he achieved such statesmanship by setting aside his lofty text to let loose and jam, as he did regularly from two hundred podiums a year.

  TWENTY-THREE

  CROSSING OVER: NIGHTMARES AND DREAMS

  That September, Birmingham faced a federal court order to admit the first five Negro students to three different public schools. Governor Wallace threw up a public cloud of resistance, citing the threat of violence. Mayor Boutwell maneuvered furtively between Wallace and Burke Marshall, telling each that he wanted to keep the other’s troops out of the city. In a last-minute compromise, Boutwell sought a delay for the court to consider new evidence of “inherent differences in the races.” That night another dynamite bomb struck the home of Arthur Shores, touching off another long night of swarming demonstrations, sorties by the police riot tank, rock-throwing, and finally armed suppression that killed one Negro and sent twenty-one others to the hospital. By the next morning, Wallace had persuaded Boutwell to close the schools targeted for integration. King sent another protest telegram to President Kennedy.

  On September 9—the date on which President Kennedy appeared exclusively on NBC’s “Huntley-Brinkley Report,” inaugurating the network’s jump from fifteen to thirty minutes of nightly news—the three Birmingham schools finally opened, but Wallace sent National Guard troops in to bar the Negro students. By some oversight, Wallace neglected to surround one school in a parallel case across the state in Huntsville, with the result that Alabama’s first Negro elementary-school student, six-year-old Sonnie W. Hereford IV, attended a previously all-white school that day. By morning, President Kennedy had federalized and withdrawn the Alabama guard troops in Birmingham, allowing the five Negro students to attend classes there, whereupon a majority of the white students filed out in protest. A crazily inverted pattern of tension developed across the balance of the week. At West End High, white cheerleaders and football players organized a movement to support integrated classes against fellow students who marched and threw rocks to enforce a segregationist school strike. Other white students staged a sit-in at Mayor Boutwell’s office to protest integration. Governor Wallace denounced federal intervention. On Friday, September 13, he flew to Baltimore and declared his intention to run in the 1964 Maryland presidential primary.

  That Sunday was the annual Youth Day at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Mamie H. Grier, superintendent of the Sunday school, stopped in at the basement ladies’ room to find four young girls who had left Bible classes early and were talking excitedly about the beginning of the school year. All four were dressed in white from head to toe, as this was their day to run the main service for the adults at eleven o’clock. Grier urged them to hurry along and then went upstairs to sit in on her own women’s Sunday-school class. They were engaged in a lively debate on the lesson topic, “The Love That Forgives,” when a loud earthquake shook the entire church and showered the classroom with plaster and debris. Grier’s first thought was that it was like a ticker-tape parade. Maxine McNair, a schoolteacher sitting next to her, reflexively went stiff and was the only one to speak. “Oh, my goodness!” she said. She escaped with Grier, but the stairs down to the basement were blocked and the large stone staircase on the outside literally had vanished. They stumbled through the church to the front door and then made their way around outside through the gathering noise of moans and sirens. A hysterical church member shouted to Grier that her husband had already gone to the hospital in the first ambulance. McNair searched desperately for her only child until finally she came upon a sobbing old man and screamed, “Daddy, I can’t find Denise!” The man helplessly replied, “She’s dead, baby. I’ve got one of her shoes.” He held a girl’s white dress shoe, and the look on his daughter’s face made him scream out, “I’d like to blow the whole town up!”

  By then, ten-year-old Sarah Collins had staggered out through the gaping hole in the wall where the stone staircase had been. She was partially blinded, bleeding through the nose and ears from concussion. Her brother ran around screaming that his sister was dead, and in the addled shock it was some time before anyone understood he did not mean Sarah but older sister Addie Mae, fourteen. Ambulance medics scooped up Sarah Collins among some twenty others and headed for University Hospital. It registered dimly on Mamie Grier that Denise McNair and Addie Mae Collins were two of the four girls she had seen in the ladies’ room minutes earlier. Grier took a chance that her car would start even though its windows were shattered, fenders curled, and part of a door blown off. She drove unsteadily away until stopped at one of the police roadblocks being thrown up around the city. Officers recruited a white man off the street to drive her car to the hospital, where she found her husband among the less seriously wounded. The hospital was a noisy blur of shrieks, hymns, television cameras, and shouted orders from crowd-control guards. Comforting stories circulated about how the pastor’s injured daughter, four-year-old Susan Cross, had smiled so bravely when they wheeled her through a nearby corridor. Grier could say little more than “Those poor girls,” a phrase she would repeat vacantly under sedation for the next two weeks.

  Claude Wesley, principal of Lewis Elementary School, did not often subject himself to Sunday-school classes. He had dropped his adopted daughter Cynthia at the church and then escaped to the errands of a pleasant Sunday morning. When the noise of the blast interrupted his shoeshine, he had made his way to the church, the hospital, and finally the morgue, where he and his wife identified their daughter’s remains by the feet and a ring on her finger. Chris McNair made the same desperate trip to the morgue. A Lutheran, schoolteacher, and freelance photographer, McNair had heard the bomb from his own church some blocks distant. He had stopped to pick up his camera on the way to investigate, but the horrible procession of clues left the camera dangling uselessly by the time he found his wife Maxine and her father at the hospital. In his grief, the gran
dfather switched numbly from rage to religion. “Maybe the kid’s death will do some good,” he said. Chris McNair soon reeled away back downtown, seeking refuge in objects and details, searching for items the family would need for the funeral ordeal. Everywhere he went, white sales clerks burst into tears, saying they had seen him on television. Odd novelties of emotion burned through his daze, leaving senseless impressions of pain and balm. McNair was sure that some white people had just killed his daughter in church, but that same afternoon dignified, overwrought white strangers knocked at his door to express their condolences. Some of them arrived in cars bearing Confederate license plates.

  Secondary effects of the church bombing churned madly through the white population of Birmingham. A preacher cut short a segregationist rally at a Go Kart track. Heading home from the rally, a pair of Eagle Scouts fired their new pistol at two Negro boys riding double on a bicycle, killing a thirteen-year-old perched on the handlebars; the Eagle Scouts told police they had no idea what made them shoot. By late afternoon, the polite remorse that had prevailed among policemen at the bomb site had hardened against real and anticipated reprisals from angry Negroes in the streets. Governor Wallace sent in the dreaded Colonel Lingo with three hundred state troopers. Typically, when officers came upon rock battles between young whites and Negroes, the Negroes ran while the whites welcomed the relief. Officers killed one fleeing Negro by shooting him in the back of the head. Among civilian whites in general, reactions wound more softly in the same coil: a stab of sympathy and generalized remorse, followed quickly by resentment of exaggerated accusations and then a growing sense of innocence. White attorney Charles Morgan passionately declared that he and all other whites shared guilt for the bombing because they had tolerated or encouraged racial hatred. “We all did it,” he said. For this he became a pariah among whites, and his speech itself fed a tide of aggrieved self-vindication. “All of us are victims,” insisted Mayor Boutwell.