Parting the Waters

by Taylor Branch

  * Dean of the faculties at Howard University in Washington. King had hoped to be guided through India by Nelson, who had spent the last six months of 1958 there on a Fulbright scholarship, but Nelson had been unable to extend his visit long enough.

  * Police Commissioner Bull Connor had suppressed Birmingham’s one tentative student demonstration. When a dozen Negro college students carried placards with religious slogans into a park in a Negro section of the city one night, police officers seized, fingerprinted, photographed, and thoroughly intimidated them at the police station before releasing them with instructions to “be good.” Connor issued a terse press release stating that he would not permit such activities. Confident that the local students were not a threat, he worried only about Shuttlesworth and possible threats from afar. “Keep your eyes open for this negro, Lawson,” Connor wrote his chief of detectives. “He has been kicked out of Vanderbilt, and I understand he is a Birmingham negro, or an Alabama negro. [Here Connor was in error. Lawson never lived in Alabama.] He may come down here to start some trouble. If he does, you will know what to do with him.”

  * Including Wyatt Walker himself, who would always maintain that he succeeded John Tilley instead of Baker.

  * A phrase taken from a Times editorial of March 19, 1960, which endorsed the sit-in movement as “something new in the South, something understandable.”

  * Highlander was first padlocked on September 26, 1959, by order of Judge C. C. Chattin, on charges of selling beer. With the padlocks removed pending appeal, the judge revoked Highlander’s corporate charter on February 16, 1960, and when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to intervene, all Highlander property was auctioned under state receivership on December 16, 1961.

  † Early in April, King took the drastic step of pledging a $600 contribution to the SCLC from his own pocket—a tithe of his Ebenezer salary—and challenged all the SCLC board members to do likewise.

  * Barry would be elected mayor of Washington, D.C., eighteen years later.

  * In 1947, Ming had helped W. E. B. Du Bois draft a petition urging the new United Nations to recognize that the human rights claims of American Negroes were similar to those of the colonized peoples around the world.

  * Two days after police fired into a crowd of people demonstrating against apartheid in Sharpeville, South Africa, Muste and Bayard Rustin pressured King to attend an upcoming conference in Ghana, which had been called to protest French plans to test atomic bombs in Africa. Muste feared that the worldwide outrage over the “Sharpeville massacre” would push the African anti-colonial movement into violence. “There is probably no one in the world today who can speak more convincingly about nonviolence to Africans than yourself,” Muste wrote King, observing shrewdly that increased visibility in Africa would benefit King indirectly in the struggle against segregation at home by making it “harder for any elements here to attack or stop you and your people.” King decided not to attend the Ghana conference, sending Abernathy in his place. (Abernathy and Muste were the only two Americans at the meeting.) But King did continue to work with Muste and Rustin to support the anti-colonial movement. On May 5, for instance, he welcomed Kenneth Kaunda—a pro-independence leader of Northern Rhodesia and future president of Zambia—to Ebenezer.

  * Kennedy had been the only Democratic senator who neither voted for nor announced his support of the historic censure resolution against McCarthy in 1954.

  * “We Shall Overcome” is generally traced to “I’ll Overcome, Some Day,” which was written in the World War I era by Rev. C. A. Tindley of Philadelphia. Tindley was a prime influence on Thomas A. Dorsey, the father of modern gospel music. The gospel rhythms, along with the quartet styles and other modes of religious music pioneered by Tindley and Dorsey, became so popular that they burst out of the black churches into concert halls and even nightclubs during the Depression. Later, through pop music and the civil rights movement, they registered strongly among millions in the majority white culture who remained ignorant of the origins in black sacred music. One small indication of the astonishing range of early gospel is the fact that Tindley wrote not only the model for the anthem of the civil rights movement but also “Stand By Me,” a title which Ben E. King of the Drifters adapted to puppy romance and made into a hit rock ‘n’ roll song.

  *This was the famous Esther James case, which would hound Powell for the rest of his life. Over the next decade, more than eighty judges in ten different courts would be called upon to rule on such questions as whether the House of Representatives had the constitutional power to expel Powell for standing in contempt of court orders to pay Mrs. James. As often happened with Powell, his own flamboyance and the race issue publicly overwhelmed the substantive origins of the dispute. His attack on Mrs. James, first delivered in a speech to the House and then repeated on March 6, 1960, on television, was but a small part of an extremely detailed investigation of police corruption in Harlem. New York police officers were taking payoffs to protect the numbers racket and other vices, he said, naming Mrs. James almost incidentally as one of those helping to collect the payments. Ironically, his charges of corruption would be substantiated in spectacular police scandals that developed after his death. But most New York politicians and newspapers dismissed his original campaign as a political slur on the New York police department. From there, the popular fiction grew that Powell’s troubles started with a capricious ad hominem attack on Mrs. James.

  * “Now we come to the key question: what should our answer be? And some might say, why, do as they do. Outpromise them, because that’s the only way to win…And I serve notice here and now that whatever the political consequences, we are not going to try to outpromise our opponents.”

  * See Chapter 4.

  * Taylor’s lawyers included Benjamin Hooks, a preacher-lawyer from Memphis who served on King’s SCLC board, the daughter of J. Pious Barbour, King’s philosopher-host at Crozer Seminary, and Chauncey Eskridge of Chicago.

  * In Terrell County, Georgia; Macon County, Alabama; and Washington Parish, Louisiana.

  * Unbeknown to Kennedy or Shriver, the lawyer also represented J. H. Jackson in his battle to control the Negro Baptists. For King, this was another indication that the Kennedys picked their Negroes ineptly.

  * Senator John Sparkman of Alabama and Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, Adlai Stevenson’s running mates in 1952 and 1956.

  * Abram’s subsequent high positions would include terms as president of the Field Foundation, of the American Jewish Committee, and of Brandeis University, and, two decades later, appointment by President Ronald Reagan to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

  * Rev. Marshall L. Shepherd. The other co-chairman, Dr. William A. Gray, was the father of future congressman and House Budget Committee chairman William Gray, Jr.

  * King told Negro reporters that he “felt very badly” after reading newspaper accounts of Jackson’s remarks while confined in the Fulton County jail.

  * The unreleased statement was drafted by Deputy Attorney General Lawrence E. Walsh, who would become Special Counsel for the Iran-Contra investigation in 1987.

  * “Interposition,” as defined by Kilpatrick, was essentially a modernization of John C. Calhoun’s “nullification” doctrines, developed more than a century earlier.

  * SCLC scholarship students included Bernard “Jelly” Lee of the Montgomery sit-ins and Stokely Carmichael, a freshman at Howard University in Washington, D.C.

  * Minnie Badeaux Wilkins, Roy Wilkins’ wife.

  † Boynton v. Virginia, handed down in December 1960.

  * Jones’s 1956 injunction outlawing the Alabama NAACP was still in effect, pending appeal.

  * Four years later, Kennedy’s closest aide and explicator still would cling to the bizarre notion that the military result at the Bay of Pigs was essentially a matter of noise. “The President thought he was approving a quiet, even though large-scale, reinfiltration of fourteen hundred Cuban exiles back into their homeland. He had been assured that the plan as r
evised to meet his criteria was an unspectacular and quiet landing of patriots plausibly Cuban in its essentials, of which the air strike was the only really noisy enterprise that remained.”

  * Probably Isaac Reynolds of Detroit.

  * The Attorney General preferred to be called “Bob” instead of the diminutive “Bobby” by everyone except his older brother. The President said “Bob” in an exaggerated way that had the reverse effect of tweaking his younger brother for wanting to seem older.

  * “I never recovered from it,” Kennedy said in an oral history in 1964. In a lighter vein, he always remained amused that his agitation had led him to speak of “Mr. Greyhound.”

  * “He didn’t think that that was very humorous,” Kennedy recalled three years later in an oral history. They retreated around the corner of the church and down the muddy hill on the Columbus Street side, out of the drifting fumes.

  * “Whereas, as a result of outside agitators coming into Alabama to violate our laws and customs, outbreaks of lawlessness and mob action have occurred…. Whereas, the Federal Government has by its actions encouraged these agitators to come into Alabama to foment disorders and breaches of the peace…”

  * The Southern Regional Council went so far as to assert that its interest in the political revolution was wholly academic, in keeping with its tax-exempt charter. It would administer the project “in order that, by empirical evaluation of the results accruing from the programs which you will carry on with funds allocated under the grant, SRC can subsequently draw publishable conclusions.”

  * “It is not necessary for me to speak at length about South Africa,” Luthuli said of his native land. “It is a museum piece in our time, a hangover from the dark past of mankind, a relic of an age which everywhere else is dead or dying.” He lamented that “the golden age of Africa’s independence is also the dark age of South Africa’s decline and retrogression.”

  * Smith had taken one of the most militantly nonviolent positions among CORE staff members. Against James Farmer’s directions, he and Doris Castle checked back into Parchman to complete their full sentences. Later, Smith became the central figure in a dramatic 1963 confrontation with Attorney General Kennedy.

  * There is no kind way to describe the process by which the nation’s leaders came to regard FBI microphone surveillances—bugs—to be legal on Hoover’s authority alone. The only written justification for the practice was a private 1954 memorandum in which Attorney General Herbert Brownell effectively advised Hoover to disregard a unanimous Supreme Court decision outlawing such bugs. In practice, no Attorney General for the next generation tried to hold Hoover accountable to any law or review. When this record came to light during the intelligence scandals of the 1970s, congressional authorities found it too embarrassing to acknowledge an official history of blatant illegality or supine ignorance. Instead, they simply accepted Brownell’s 1954 memorandum as a permanent “policy” that conferred legal authority for Hoover to bug at will.

  * King and Levison did in fact talk several times a week, but the FBI did not learn of this pattern until later taps on Levison’s home phones picked up the regular, post-midnight calls between them.

  * King miscarried some weeks later, and although she herself was never sure enough to say that the Camilla officers had killed the unborn baby, that assumption was more than reasonable enough for the creators of Albany Movement lore.

  * Kennedy ascribed some of Castro’s difficulties to the U.S. boycott on trade with the island, but of course he did not mention the highly secret campaign of protracted economic and military sabotage, code-named Operation Mongoose, that the CIA had been conducting under his orders for the previous ten months. Its secrecy, plus the secrecy of Cuba’s dealings with the Soviet Union, severely restricted the vision of historians trying to explain the origins of the Cuban missile crisis.

  * Connor’s image problems predated the civil rights movement. In 1951, a rival police officer had raided a Birmingham hotel and arrested the police commissioner for having an extramarital affair with his secretary. Convicted on a morals charge and driven from office, Connor had taken advantage of the school desegregation crisis to make his political comeback. In 1957, running as a bareknuckled segregationist who could protect whites more effectively than candidates from polite society, which he scorned, Connor had regained his old office by the slim margin of 108 votes. Since then he had consolidated his power, to the discomfort of many respected leaders in Birmingham.

  * Later Secretary of State under President Carter.

  † Later commander of U.S. military forces in South Vietnam.

  ‡ Commanded by Captain Murry Faulkner, the novelist’s cousin.

  * When the FBI’s Levison wiretaps picked up talk of Kunstler’s idea, Hoover promptly dispatched warnings to Robert Kennedy and Kenneth O’Donnell.

  * Ole Miss defeated Arkansas in a Sugar Bowl contest between the two states in which federal troops had been used to enforce school integration.

  * “It is quite possible that there will never be anything to show for your stay in Mississippi, not in a material sense anyway,” Young wrote James and Diane Nash Bevel, in a sad letter of what Young called “bureaucratic daydreams.”

  * “We must get [white photographer] Marion Palfi out of Mississippi tonight,” Bernice Robinson wrote Myles Horton. “It is dangerous for her to stay here and take pictures.”

  * “This is in line with my suggestion years ago that the sight of the great Bishop of Alabama ridden out of his State on a rail because of courageous and enlightened speech, would be one of the greatest events of many years,” Scarlett wrote Carpenter. “I still think so: I think you have an opportunity of a hundred years.”

  * Though jarring by later standards, the word “black” was usually taken as an insult in the pivotal year of 1963. In Toledo, Ohio, high school students staged a mass protest after an assistant principal referred to them as “black students” over the intercom.

  * It was an acutely awkward tragedy for CORE’s national leaders. Privately, they hesitated to lionize Moore, because they had summarily refused his request for CORE sponsorship of his walk, and had disparaged him among themselves as a kook. More pragmatically, they qualified their support for the memorial marches, having not yet recovered from the near bankruptcy of the Freedom Rides.

  * Clarence Jones had married Ann Norton, daughter of the founder of the prestigious W. W. Norton publishing company, in 1956. Jones’s father, still a Lippin-cott chauffeur, hosted the Waldorf reception after one of New York high society’s first interracial weddings. For the groom, the most lasting irony was that his widowed new mother-in-law married the financial adviser to President Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid.

  * Jackson already had attracted notice in the Negro press as a sports star and precocious social leader. He had been elected second vice grand basileus of the national Omega Psi Phi fraternity. In these first political stories, he appeared in a snap-brim hat, telling his followers, “I’ll go to jail and I’ll go to the chain gang if necessary.”

  * Only Abernathy said nothing. Always quiet in such political discussions, he was perhaps more preoccupied than usual, as that day he had basked at West Hunter in a gala service of “Tribute to Our Pastor and First Lady,” opening a week-long celebration of Abernathy’s second anniversary in that pulpit. The panegyrics were lavishly detailed and slavishly fawning, extravagant even by the standards common to preachers of his station.

  * With more difficulty, they also gained the widow’s permission to have Evers buried at Arlington Cemetery instead of the family plot in Jackson, where she had been telling friends that he would lie.

  * Readers of the Negro press in the United States received early notice of the scandal because of its racial origins. Christine Keeler had first attracted attention in London by failing to appear at the trial of Johnny Edgecombe, a West Indian charged with shooting at her in a jealous rage and also rumored to have slashed the face of another of Keeler’s West Ind
ian lovers. Press inquiries about these violent passions had uncovered Keeler’s affair with Profumo.