Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  As revulsion at the church bombing spread swiftly around the world, President Kennedy retrieved Burke Marshall from his weekend farm by helicopter and dispatched him once again to Birmingham. Marshall found a city literally glutted with firearms, openly displayed. Businesses remained closed. White officers barricaded Negroes in the Negro neighborhoods, while roving bands of Negroes expelled white intruders by brandishing shotguns and clubs. The police and local FBI agents both refused to risk taking Marshall to meet King at John Drew’s house. Finally, an intrepid team of Negroes wearing homemade “Civil Defense” uniforms fetched Marshall from the Federal Building, slapped him facedown in the back of a car with a white helmet on his head, and ran the gauntlet up to Dynamite Hill, where hired bodyguards were protecting the homes of wealthy Negroes against follow-up bombers. Marshall found King in a seething mass of preachers, advisers, and local Birmingham leaders. Urgent clues from the last bombing competed with threats of the next, and both overlapped with other emergencies, such as hourly checks on the well-being of the five young Negroes in white schools. King, refuting the implications of A. G. Gaston and other Birmingham conservatives, maintained that the bombing was the result of too little daring in civil rights, not too much. He blurted out a hint of this debate to reporters: “What murdered these four girls? The apathy and the complacency of many Negroes who will sit down on their stools and do nothing and not engage in creative protest to get rid of this evil.” Marshall, relieved to learn that King planned no immediate demonstrations, gave assurances that the Attorney General had ordered the FBI full force into the church bombing investigation, ignoring the previously cited legalisms and jurisdictional obstacles. From firsthand observation, Marshall agreed with King’s fear that open racial warfare could erupt any hour.

  When Marshall returned to Washington, King stayed behind to bury the dead. Unlike military commanders, he could not limit contact with the survivors to telegrams or belated ceremonies. As a preacher, he was obliged instead to face the families in funeral homes and to speak out directly over the open caskets. Although King was falling into tactical paralysis, lacking any practical idea of what he might do to restore progress in Birmingham, he made no effort to distance himself from the bombing, or to portray these deaths as incidental to the movement. On the contrary, he claimed the mangled bodies. On hearing of plans for separate funerals, he demanded an explanation from John Cross, pastor of Sixteenth Street Baptist. “Why didn’t you try to have a mass funeral?” King asked.

  “Well, Martin, I did,” Cross replied. “I tried to have a mass funeral, but one family wouldn’t agree.”

  Unsatisfied, King went personally to the grieving parents of Carole Robertson. For an hour he pleaded with them to permit their daughter to be eulogized jointly with the others. In doing so, he proved to the point of callousness that he was anything but squeamish about confronting the human costs of his leadership. Still, he could not budge the Robertsons, both schoolteachers, who stoutly resisted the “grandstand play” of a mass funeral. “We realize Carole lost her life because of the movement,” said Mrs. Robertson, “but we feel her loss was personal to us.” She allowed Shuttlesworth to preach at her daughter’s funeral.

  King spoke over but three of the four coffins from the Birmingham church bombing. “At times, life is hard,” he said, “as hard as crucible steel.” Eight thousand people braved the vigilantes and jeep patrols to attend the giant funeral that overflowed Rev. John Porter’s church. No elected officials attended. Among the mourners were eight hundred Birmingham pastors of both races, making them many times over the largest interracial gathering of clergy in the city’s history. They assembled on Wednesday, September 18, exactly three weeks after the March on Washington. In conjunction, the two events etched a conflict of mythological clarity: purpose and suffering of blinding purity against a monstrous evil. Such extremes of reality were inherently unstable, but they opened new eyes.

  That night, Diane Nash presented to King the germ of what became his Selma voting rights campaign in 1965. She was angry. Privately, she told King that he could not arouse a battered people for nonviolent action and then give them nothing to do. After the church bombing, she and Bevel had realized that a crime so heinous pushed even nonviolent zealots like themselves to the edge of murder. They resolved to do one of two things: solve the crime and kill the bombers, or drive Wallace and Lingo from office by winning the right for Negroes to vote across Alabama. In the few days since, Nash had drawn up a written plan to accomplish the latter with a rigorously trained nonviolent host, organized at brigade and division strength, that would surround Wallace’s government in Montgomery with a sea of bodies, “severing communication from state capitol bldg…Lying on railroad tracks, runways, and bus driveways…Close down the power company.” Her plan amounted to a protracted sit-in on the scale of the March on Washington. “This is an army,” she wrote King. “Develop a flag and an insignia or pin or button.” When she argued for the plan that night, King could barely take it seriously. He had just come from the funeral. His problem was what could be done in Birmingham tomorrow, not in Montgomery six months hence. Besides, Wallace would love to be attacked by such an army. King stopped short of dismissing Nash, or John Lewis, who was there and thought well of her idea, but he sloughed off her plea for a special strategy session. His lack of interest annoyed Nash, who thought King was too eager to get to Washington for empty talks with politicians.

  By the time King reached Washington the next afternoon, his options had been chopped away both to the front and rear. He brought no independent plan for action, such as a march or demonstrations toward specific demands. He traveled with A. G. Gaston, Rev. J. L. Ware, and other pillars of Negro Birmingham who had dragged against his demonstrations all spring and now felt burdened with the cruel aftermath. They would not hear of big demonstrations, because they saw their city as on the brink of annihilation. All King brought to Washington was a plea for federal assistance, but the Kennedy Administration, warned by Marshall, foreclosed such hopes. Early in the day, Robert Kennedy announced that he saw no legal basis for sending marshals or troops to Birmingham. And just before five o’clock that afternoon, Pierre Salinger announced that President Kennedy had appointed two personal emissaries to mediate the racial crisis in Birmingham: former Army Secretary Kenneth Royall and former West Point football coach Earl Blaik. The Administration publicly set its response to the Birmingham bombing only minutes before the King group arrived at the White House.

  A pall hung over the private discussion in the Cabinet Room. King opened with a gloomy monologue on the twenty-eight unsolved bombings in Birmingham and the current tinderbox of segregationist martial law. “There is a great deal of frustration and despair and confusion in the Negro community,” he told the President. “And there is a feeling of being alone and not being protected. If you walk the street, you’re unsafe. If you stay at home, you’re unsafe—there’s a danger of a bombing. If you’re in church, now it isn’t safe. So that the Negro feels that everywhere he goes, or if he remains stationary, he’s in danger of some physical violence.” President Kennedy said nothing until A. G. Gaston interrupted King to complain that insurance companies were canceling commercial policies on Negro businesses, and President Pitts of Miles College pointed out that he had been unable to secure insurance coverage for his new student union building. At this, Kennedy perked up to say here was a problem they could take care of. “I’ll get it, Mr. President,” Burke Marshall said confidently.

  But the President fell silent again when Shuttlesworth renewed King’s argument for sending federal troops to replace the state troopers in Birmingham. He wanted to know why a city that was 40 percent Negro should live under the bayonets of an all-white force with a record of stark brutality and unsolved crimes. Ware took up the case, saying the local police had sunk almost to the level of Wallace’s troopers. President Kennedy did not contest these assertions, but to him they only proved the implacable hatred toward Negroes by a powerful whit
e majority. He interrupted Ware with marked irritation. “Well, if the local police are there and the State Police are there, what’s the hope in Birmingham?” he asked. When Ware mumbled something about martial law, the President sternly pressed his point: “What is the long-range hope for Birmingham?”

  The audience shrank from President Kennedy’s distemper. King rose quietly to surrender the troop argument. “I still have faith in the vast possibilities of Birmingham,” he said. “There are many white people of good will in Birmingham. They need help. I think the situation that we are presenting now is an emergency crisis…Troops cannot solve the problem. And we know that. The problem with the mayor is that he’s a weak man.”

  President Kennedy said he understood their frustration. “Now it’s tough for the Negro community,” he said. “…And I know that this bombing is particularly difficult. But if you look at any, as you know, of these struggles over a period, across the world, it’s a very dangerous effort. So everybody just has to keep their nerve.” He commended his two new emissaries, saying their reputations gave them a chance to open communication between the races. “Royall is an outstanding fellow,” he said, “and Colonel Blaik’s one of the finest men I’ve ever met.”

  King soon faced the huge White House press corps outside. “This is the kind of federal concern needed,” he said. The New York Times and other major newspapers played the day’s developments straight: “Kennedy Names 2…Negroes Applaud Move, Drop Appeal for Troops and Accept Panel.” However, dissent sprouted even during King’s press conference. Reporters, especially the few Negro ones, asked pointedly if he really thought a “study team” was an appropriate response to the carnage at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Did he think a “segregated” pair of white Army retirees was a sensible way to promote racial harmony? Did King know that Royall was a corporate lawyer from North Carolina, or that no Negro ever played for “Red” Blaik’s famous teams at West Point? Did King know these men, or anything about them? Did he think the appointments had been timed deliberately to show he had played no role in the decision? King defended himself lamely and escaped to the seclusion of the Justice Department, where the next day he protested the Albany Nine prosecutions without success. Clarence Jones warned King that James Baldwin and a group of New York intellectuals were furious that he had allowed President Kennedy to outmaneuver him so shamefully. Still, the Baldwin group’s more “militant” response of a Christmas shopping boycott fizzled almost as quickly as it was announced. King was cornered between realism and ridicule.

  That Sunday marked one week since the Birmingham church bombing. By then, news stories circulated symbolic details of the tragedy—the church clock stopped at 10:22 A.M., the face of Jesus was knocked cleanly from the only surviving stained-glass window in the east wall. On a New York television program, James Baldwin discussed the “missing face of Christ” with Reinhold Niebuhr. Their talk was suffused with the gathering emotion of the civil rights movement, which Niebuhr called a “revolution” that was bringing him out of retirement. Baldwin contended that suffering made Negroes “the only hope this country has,” not because of their race or inherent virtue but because only in extremity do people “discover what they really live by.” Most Americans, he added, “don’t have any longer a real sense of what they live by. I really think it may be Coca-Cola.” Niebuhr, saying “history throws a light on this,” endorsed Baldwin’s idea. “We are in a revolutionary situation,” he said, “and all through history, it was a despised minority—the proletarians, the peasants, the poor—who recaptured the heights and depths of faith. And the country itself choked in its own fat, as we are inclined to choke in our own fat.”

  It was an extraordinary bit of television—a spontaneous, passionate, unlikely alliance between the plodding old Germanic theologian and the tormented young ghetto artist. The one crack of difference between them was a pregnant conundrum on nonviolence. Baldwin chafed at the limits of nonviolence, which he criticized as a psychological affliction peculiar to Negroes, saying that through all American history, “the only time that nonviolence has been admired is when the Negroes practice it.” In reply, Niebuhr gently chided Baldwin for adopting the prevailing condescension toward nonviolence as a ghetto of the weak. “People ask me,” said Niebuhr, “since I am such a strong anti-pacifist, how I can have this admiration for a pacifist? Well, I have a simple answer…King’s doctrine of nonviolent resistance is not pacifism. Pacifism of really the classical kind is where you are concerned about your own purity and not responsibility. And the great ethical divide is between people who want to be pure and those who want to be responsible. And I think King has shown this difference.”

  The spirit of resistance already seemed aroused among King’s respectable opponents. On Monday, September 23, a five-man delegation of Birmingham officials marched into President Kennedy’s office to present their side of the dispute, showing no trace of doubt or defensiveness. “Mr. President, we came here, sir, with big chips on our shoulder,” began Mayor Boutwell’s spokesman, William Hamilton. He said the responsible whites of Birmingham deeply resented implications that they were somehow tarnished by the church bombing, that on the contrary they already had taken steps to solve racial problems but “have not, in a great many instances, been given credit for them,” and finally that what was holding back their progress was the lack of a peaceful working atmosphere, most especially a respite from Northern critics and outside agitators such as Martin Luther King.

  President Kennedy doggedly followed the briefing agenda he had received from the Attorney General and Burke Marshall. He pressed the officials to take even one of three minimal, concrete steps that would ease national pressures since the bombing: (1) hire at least some of the Negro sales clerks promised in the May agreement, (2) begin biracial negotiations with local Negro leaders, or (3) hire at least one Negro policeman, as even Jackson, Mississippi, had done. “I’d like to see what steps you could take,” said the President, “even though you may feel that what you’ve done is enough.” The Birmingham delegates parried each salvo. As to a Negro policeman, Hamilton said Kennedy had no idea what personal abuse they were taking just for replacing Bull Connor. “I would say fifty percent of the morning force when I walk into City Hall, and when the mayor walks into City Hall, if I hold out my hand, they refuse to shake hands,” said Hamilton. “If I speak, they refuse to speak.” He said at least a third of the police force would quit rather than serve with a Negro. Rev. Dr. Landon Miller, president of the Birmingham Council of Ministers, told Kennedy that the moderates already were “branded.” “When we left the airport yesterday, there were signs over our heads saying these liberals do not represent us,” he said.

  President Kennedy expressed sympathy, saying people were calling him names too, but that this was the price of public life in difficult times and that things would get worse if they did not do something. Every few minutes he ventured forth on his refrain: “Now isn’t it possible to do something?…Is there anything that can be done?…I’m just trying to think of two or three things that could be done…Is there anything that you can do now?” He finally prodded Frank Newton, vice president of the telephone company, into what Newton called “a straightforward answer, but a respectful answer,” that such steps would only encourage “those people,” and that in fact “a lot of people…think you’ve been giving those people encouragement.”

  “I understand that,” replied the President, his voice rising defensively. He told them he had not encouraged any agitation in Birmingham, but on the other hand he did not think all the agitation was unwarranted. “Let me make it clear that I regard getting a police force as legitimate,” he said. “And I regard people working as clerks in the stores as legitimate. And I don’t think that you can take any other position from a national point of view. And my opinion is that if you can integrate the armed forces, where you have to live together, eat together, use the same john, and all the rest, you can in these cases work together…. We’re talking ab
out some things which are rather limited.” When Newton rejoined that in his opinion the Kennedy public accommodations bill was not so limited, President Kennedy fairly exploded. “Oh, public accommodations is nothing!” he said, launching a passionate monologue on the theme that public accommodations was minimal justice compared with the wrenching problem of the public schools. “Nobody here is naïve about it,” he said, “or doesn’t understand it, or doesn’t see what’s happening in Washington, where you’ve got fifty-four percent Negro and eighty-five percent in the schools, the whites just running out of Washington. Nobody wants that. Public accommodations is nothing! My God, it’s whether you can go into a store or a hotel. They don’t go into the Statler…and they won’t be coming into the hotel in Birmingham.” He wound up his exhortation by telling them he hated to argue with the state of Alabama, “but isn’t there something that you can now do, given the problem as it is?…You ought to be able to turn that situation around.”

  “We think we have turned it around,” Newton replied with cheerful obstinance. After that, President Kennedy hazarded no more emotional pleas. He did warn them not to pin their hopes on getting King out of Birmingham, saying that SNCC and far more radical groups would come behind him. “King has got a…terrific investment in nonviolence,” said the President, “and SNCC has got an investment in violence, and that’s the struggle.” But Kennedy himself made no threats, offered no deals, sold no bargains. He resumed the plaintive theme of a rather helpless president in a representative democracy, saying no fewer than twenty-five times that he wished they could take just one step, “even a public relations action…anything that gives a hook that suggests that the prospects are better.” Out of sheer exhaustion, President Kennedy collapsed toward the only positive step available: support for the Blaik-Royall advisory mission. Grasping the gesture, the Birmingham leaders said they were ready to do just that and already felt better for the exchange of views.