Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  King, while not privy to the internal dynamics of the White House meeting, saw the public result on the front page of the Times: “Kennedy Says Birmingham Can Solve Its Own Problems.” Such news fed the anxieties gnawing at him that week in Richmond, where the SCLC assembled for its seventh annual convention. The giant four-day affair drew five hundred delegates for what was meant to be a celebration of the movement’s breakthrough. Rosa Parks gave a short speech, as did Francis Griffin, the preacher who twelve years earlier had first supported Barbara Johns’s student strike in Farmville. The Birmingham movement choir gave nightly concerts of freedom songs. A panel discussion on “The Power of Nonviolence” featured organizers now acquiring an aura of legend—Bayard Rustin, James Bevel, James Lawson, and C. T. Vivian. The convention heard reports from Gadsden, Danville, and ten other cities in the grip of showdowns inspired by Birmingham. Celebrity speakers included Dick Gregory, Roy Wilkins, Adam Clayton Powell, and two U.S. senators.

  They all crowded into Richmond’s Hotel John Marshall, a proud old facility that bent to its first integrated convention with strained civility. For the delegates, a different strain of dissension rippled in all directions on the supercharged emotions of the church bombing, making it difficult to maintain even the façade of movement idealism. For King, at the center of a tempest, the underside of success collided with the topside of failure. Wyatt Walker demanded nearly a threefold salary increase based on the SCLC’s stupendous growth, while diverse critics charged that King’s paralysis had put the SCLC out of business. King’s “I Have a Dream” fame caused Ralph Abernathy’s long-simmering jealousy to spill over into indignant complaints that his hotel room was not appointed as finely as King’s, and finally into an inebriated elevator scuffle with a white man who did not share his low opinion of the room service. Septima Clark followed Abernathy to his room to tell him bluntly that he was a spoiled man, full of unseemly spite, and while she was at it, she also reproached him for his habit of being deliberately late to church services in order to flaunt his mastery over the common people of the congregation. In particular, she reminded him of the time when she spoke in his church and he insisted on showing her his garden while sending word that the congregation should keep singing hymns until he got there. Abernathy retorted lamely that Clark did not know everything, but very likely he would have tolerated no such scolding from anyone other than the SCLC’s mother conscience. (Clark refused the pay raise offered her at the convention, writing King that she “couldn’t accept it and feel perfectly free inside.”) Meanwhile, out on the convention floor, the rakish Adam Clayton Powell renewed his attack on Wilkins and the NAACP as “white-controlled,” and he spiked hopes for passage of the civil rights bill, saying that the white man already had given Negroes more than he wanted to.

  The scheduled three-hour board meeting stretched over the full four days. All the preachers believed that King desperately needed to launch a new campaign in order to recover from the trauma of the church bombing. The rub was how and where. Most had favored Danville, but now some argued that it would be fatal to abandon Birmingham. As they spoke, news flashed from Birmingham that Mayor Boutwell had spirited Blaik and Royall away from an all-white airport ceremony into seclusion, that Boutwell had arranged which local Negroes they were to see, that Blaik and Royall had agreed to conduct only secret, segregated meetings, and finally that Pitts and other leading Negroes were furious because they had not heard from President Kennedy’s envoys and had no way of contacting them.

  All this poured bane on King’s humiliation for his hasty endorsement of the Kennedy response to the bombing. William Shortridge, Shuttles-worth’s treasurer, told the board that Birmingham Negroes were collecting arms, whereupon the board swung heavily in favor of renewed nonviolent demonstrations for Negro clerks and policemen. King agreed, but expressed caution on three counts: (1) many Birmingham Negroes would oppose them ferociously, (2) Birmingham officials were still holding some $300,000 of SCLC bail money from the previous spring, and (3) the demonstrations could not be effective unless they were even larger than those in May. Benjamin Hooks argued instead for a march on Montgomery, a modified version of Diane Nash’s plan. This possessed the advantage of militancy aimed at Governor Wallace and the voting franchise, but it was a new direction, and King knew well from his years in Montgomery that the MIA was far from a smooth machine. As they debated, fresh news came of a double bombing on Dynamite Hill in Birmingham, and then of John Lewis’ arrest in Selma, Alabama, for carrying a “One Man/One Vote” sign outside the courthouse. Nearly two hundred followers joined Lewis while the SCLC board was meeting in Richmond. In jail, SNCC leaders planned a Selma “Freedom Day” campaign, which was a cross between Nash’s new idea and Bob Moses’ plan for a Freedom Vote in Mississippi.

  As the SCLC board spun dizzily between alternative plans, indecision did nothing to improve morale. King had hired Harry Boyte, an executive of long experience with the Red Cross, and Boyte’s crash campaign to reduce spelling errors, gossip, and other defects of what he called a poorly educated, unprofessional SCLC work force had run headlong into Wyatt Walker, who denied that any white office manager could be more exacting than he. Staff resentment against the imperious Walker surfaced in nasty chain-of-command struggles. Walker fought back by dismissing four top SCLC employees for “irresponsibility and insubordination” at the convention. King later talked him into docking their pay instead. Walker conceded, partly because the hide he really wanted was Bevel’s. When King’s inner circle suggested that he make amends with Bevel too, Walker exploded with his first resignation. “This is intolerable,” he said. “I’m gone.”

  King tried to calm Walker down, and to soothe him on the money question. Late at night, they still had the cathartic of fraternal preaching. Gathering in a suite with cigarettes and a few bottles, the top-ranking SCLC preachers teased each other about what hurt most—death, feuds, the day’s persecutions, and, always, their racial insecurities. Nearly every punch line evoked appropriate lines of Scripture, and someone would soar off on a run of preaching. They passed around improvised solos like jazz musicians in a late-night cutting session, showing off their operatic voices and their inexhaustible supply of metaphors, fables, and allegories. Bevel and Walker preached to each other on the meaning of famous blood feuds. Walker promised to buy “Chubby” Abernathy a diamond ring when he earned his first million dollars, which drew forth sermonettes on vanity and the love of money. They teased King about his liver lips and rhinoceros ears, Andrew Young about his nappy hair and fuzzy “white man’s” shoes, Walker about his satin ties and high-yaller cheekbones, Bernard Lee about his wandering eye.

  But morning brought no easy escape from the movement’s predicament. King wanted desperately to revive the nonviolent campaign, and thereby to preserve hopes for its deepest influences upon both races, but he knew that the next Birmingham bombing might well touch off a race war that would obliterate nonviolence, perhaps leaving the civil rights movement as vulnerable as the Communists and CIO organizers who dashed themselves against segregation after the war. He thought he should go to Danville, but he could not stay out of Birmingham. Logically, he could not risk breaking with a Kennedy Administration that commanded 90 percent support among Negroes, and which already was vulnerable to white backlash against civil rights. Yet he could no longer profess faith in the Blaik-Royall mission.

  “I have kept silence,” he admitted in his closing speech to the convention on September 27. “…In doing so, I have acted contrary to the wishes and the frustrations of those who have marched with me in the dangerous campaigns for freedom…I did this because I was naïve enough to believe that the proof of good faith would emerge. It is now obvious to me that this was a mistake.” He talked of the unsolved bombings, the evasions of the Administration, and the elusive goodwill of the March on Washington. He accused the Administration of wanting to believe that a quiet march meant the revolution was over. “They could have made no bigger mistake,” he said. “
…We are more determined than ever before that nonviolence is the way. Let them bring on their bombs. Let them sabotage us with the evil of cooperation with segregation. We intend to be free.” In conclusion, King delivered a hastily composed new dictum: “When General of the Armies Douglas Mac-Arthur was repelled in a just campaign during World War II, he fell back—just as your humble servant fell back at the White House that day when the President sent two men to do the job of reconciliation. But I serve notice tonight, that I will return to Birmingham, unless, by a certain date…” and he listed essentially the same minimal conditions that President Kennedy had tried to sell the Hamilton group in the White House.

  The White House ignored the speech, but A. G. Gaston and Arthur Shores immediately denounced King from Birmingham. Breaking with Pitts and the other conservative Negro leaders, they issued a public statement declaring faith in the Blaik-Royall team and implacable opposition to demonstrations or “outside interference.” Both the white and Negro newspapers in Birmingham splashed the Gaston-Shores statement on the front pages. As a result, King was left with a threat of open schism in Birmingham if he acted, silence from Washington until he did, and the tinny echo of his own grandiose pledge to regroup as triumphantly as MacArthur. Feeling demoralized and stale, King asked Chauncey Eskridge to undertake a secret mission to Petersburg, Virginia.

  Eskridge could tell the errand was important to King, and anyway he was delighted by the adventure of trying to locate Vernon Johns. Since meeting King in 1960, Eskridge had acquired a trove of Vernon Johns stories. Knowing that the old preacher was in another vagabond phase and had not lived regularly with Altona Johns in some years, Eskridge was not surprised to hear King say that he was not reachable by telephone, lived “somewhere around Petersburg,” some thirty miles from Richmond, and that the recommended detective approach was to go to a church or street corner and ask any Negro. Still, Eskridge was not prepared for the husk he found on the vacant lot of an abandoned gasoline station. It was cordoned off by rope to keep cars from parking there, or from miring in the red mud. Inside, tending a squatter’s vegetable stand, was a silver-stubbled old relic in brogans without socks or shoelaces. Eskridge suspected that a prankster had directed him to one of the local winos.

  Vernon Johns was no less taken aback by the message he received from the impeccably tailored Chicago attorney. “Dr. King sent you to me for that?” he asked, speaking every word in disbelief.

  Eskridge insisted that indeed King was hungry for some of Johns’s ideas—hungry enough to give Eskridge expense money out of his own pocket, along with an urgent plea to track him down. “He wants you to give me all your notebooks for your Sunday sermons,” Eskridge repeated.

  It took some time for Johns to adjust to the gravity of the request. When he did, he began ticking off sermon titles, then reciting snatches of sermons, and finally he began preaching in full animation on the dangers of drinking Pharaoh’s wine. Eskridge stood there in the mud for the better part of an hour, deeply moved. Later he recovered enough of his legal skepticism to suspect correctly that the notebooks Johns promised to send did not exist—always his sermons returned to the air from which they had come. King did not easily accept the lonely reality of such a conclusion. He insisted that there must be notebooks. Even after Johns died months later,* he asked Eskridge whether any had arrived in the mail.

  Beyond King’s knowledge, layers of intrigue were piling up against him within the secret chambers of the federal government. Just before the March on Washington, the FBI’s intelligence chief had informed Director Hoover that an exhaustive analysis revealed little or no Communist involvement in the march. The Communist Party’s most sensible members had long since quit by the tens of thousands, and those remaining were largely ineffectual misfits, damaged by years of persecution and welded to psychosis, Soviet dogma, and dreams of cataclysm. There was a note of triumph in Assistant Director William Sullivan’s appraisal of the march as a home-grown American protest.

  Fatefully, Hoover challenged the intelligence assessment with the full weight of his authority. “This memo reminds me vividly of those I received when Castro took over Cuba,” he scratched across Sullivan’s letter. “…I for one can’t ignore the memos re King, O’Dell, Levison, Rustin.” Hoover did not welcome a giant march for freedom by a race he had known over a long lifetime as maids, chauffeurs, and criminal suspects, led by a preacher he loathed. More pragmatically, he also faced a dire institutional question: if there was no subversion here—with several hundred thousand Negroes and white sympathizers descending upon the capital with demands for revolutionary change in all American institutions, including the all-white FBI—then where might the subversion be? If Communists were not powerful among these Negroes, then they must be negligible indeed, and if so, Hoover could not long deploy the Bureau so heavily against the threat of internal subversion. The Director instantly forgot that he had remarked favorably on Sullivan’s qualifications as an eventual successor.

  For Sullivan, Hoover’s comments signaled a failed gamble and hence a career emergency. Down through the ranks of the Bureau, where officials were conditioned to send the Director only what they knew he agreed with (and usually in the exact words he preferred), the heresy only proved that “Crazy Billy” Sullivan was nuts. Sullivan tried to save himself by blatantly reversing his position. “The Director is correct,” he wrote just after the march. “We were completely wrong.” While even conservative commentators were acknowledging the patriotic merits of the “I Have a Dream” speech, Sullivan told Hoover that “in light of King’s powerful demagogic speech yesterday he stands head and shoulders over all other Negro leaders…We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the stand-point of communism, the Negro and national security.”

  Hoover did not let the chastened intelligence chief off with surrender. At first, when Sullivan proposed that the Bureau go so far as to unleash its COINTELPRO covert warfare against King’s movement, Hoover pretended that he could not understand “how you can so agilely switch your thinking…Now you want to load down the Field with more coverage in spite of your recent memo depreciating CP influence in racial movement. I don’t intend to waste time and money until you can make up your minds.” In effect, Hoover demanded that Sullivan grovel, and Sullivan abjectly complied. By example, Hoover enforced discipline within the entire FBI intelligence apparatus. Two days after the march, Hoover ordered the New York office to find out whether a wiretap could be added safely to the telephone of Stanley Levison’s teenaged son. A week later, he ordered preparations for wiretaps on the SCLC offices in New York and Atlanta, and also on King’s home. Just as the march was introducing the movement to millions of Americans as a legitimate cause—if not a compelling one against the rights and feelings of segregationists—Hoover targeted it as a full-fledged national security enemy.

  Justice Department officials perceived that the FBI was rumbling ominously again on King’s Communist connections. Politically, the threat was that a leak might allow hostile congressional investigators to discredit King and the civil rights bill, and through them the Administration. To close off exploitable gaps between the FBI and Justice, Burke Marshall composed a summary record of the Attorney General’s vigilance against O’Dell. It was a delicate task. Marshall had to portray the Attorney General as acting in full appreciation of the danger but without exposing any FBI secrets, and as having eliminated the threat without subsequently relaxing. He delivered a confidential draft personally to Robert Kennedy. After a week’s consideration, interrupted by the trauma of the Birmingham church bombing, Kennedy concluded that Marshall himself should seek a truce with Hoover. To do so, Marshall sent the draft to Hoover’s aides with a request that Hoover agree to receive it as worded. Thus, without directly exposing Attorney General Kennedy to repudiation, Marshall tacitly asked Hoover to bless the department’s performance on O’Dell. Bureau officials groused that Marshall’s summary was incompl
ete and somewhat soft, but not enough so to pick a fight on this ground. With Hoover’s consent, they archly notified Marshall that he “should feel free, of course, to submit the memorandum as he drafted it.”

  One effect of Sullivan’s reeducation was to sharpen the selectivity of perception in his Intelligence Division. Officials had no trouble interpreting Hoover’s instructions to keep pecking away at Kennedy with anything new on O’Dell or Levison. When surveillance agents once spotted O’Dell walking into the New York SCLC office, the Bureau rocketed this discovery to the Justice Department as proof of “King’s duplicity” and O’Dell’s continuing subversion. On the other hand, the Bureau did not report at all the wiretapped conversations of King’s aides complaining that a wounded, rejected O’Dell had left the SCLC “high and dry,” taking with him mailing lists and files, with the result that the SCLC’s direct-mail fund-raising effectively ceased.

  These extraordinary bureaucratic exchanges signified an atmosphere of groping suspicion between the Bureau and the Justice Department. Mistrust and miscommunication were most pronounced over the hot issue of King, but they also intensified along at least two parallel tracks. One was organized crime. That fall, differences were personified in a crew-cut contract killer named Joe Valachi, who for his own reasons was willing to testify publicly about the inner workings of crime syndicates. For Kennedy, Valachi’s proposed firsthand revelations about “capos” and “consiglieres” would prove that the old legends of Capone were alive, enlarged, and modernized into an established criminal conspiracy of enormous power. However, such revelations threatened to contradict Director Hoover’s public position that organized crime theories were “baloney.” From a different angle, Valachi’s testimony raised the same danger as Sullivan’s short-lived declaration of victory over the Communists. If he publicly described the vast operations of the five New York crime families, Hoover could not long hold out against Kennedy’s demand for new priorities within the Bureau.