Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  Instead of avoiding risks, or grumbling about moral obtuseness in the press, King’s forces would embrace the public drama of a showdown between King and Bull Connor. Above all, King insisted, he would not again be drawn in as a “fireman” after someone else’s campaign had gone awry. He would take the initiative for the first time, seeking to apply all the accumulated movement lessons since the bus boycott. One of these was stealth. King did not invite his father, Daddy King, to Savannah or seek the approval of his board at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), knowing that his dear but long-winded elders would filibuster against the idea with consummate skill. He would lay groundwork in stages, move by fiat, spring surprises. The lesson pressed upon him by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was that unmerited suffering was required to supplement reason in a selfish world, that in nonviolent wars no less than shooting ones, dramatic risk and suffering were the surest, swiftest messengers for breaking through to guarded or disinterested strangers. King believed, he warned his friends at the retreat, that “some of the people sitting here today will not come back alive from this campaign.” When they accepted the plan nevertheless, he left Savannah for the Conference on Religion and Race.

  SECRECY ABOUT Birmingham did not relieve King from the normal bombardments of pressure. On the airplane flight into Chicago, Leslie Dunbar of the Southern Regional Council leaned over from the adjacent seat to say gravely that he had an important message from high officials in the government whose identities King probably could guess. Dunbar felt obliged to speak in the evasive spy language of the Cold War. Although it was a painful message for him, as one of King’s closest white allies and sponsor of much of the foundation money being funneled into voter registration, Dunbar had reluctantly agreed to warn that certain very high officials in Washington considered some of King’s advisers to be Communists, as he well knew, and that they wanted him to get rid of them to protect the cause and everyone’s best interests, including King’s.

  “Yes, yes,” King intoned in his deep, rolling preacher’s voice, giving no hint of great interest or alarm.

  The Kennedy people were having a hard enough time getting the FBI to move against powerful Southern interests on behalf of voter registration workers, Dunbar went on, and it made their task all but impossible as long as the FBI could protest that those workers were infiltrated. King must break off from his New York adviser Stanley Levison completely, as though he were dead—no dealings, meetings, or even phone conversations. Dunbar’s contacts in the administration were saying that the movement must be like Caesar’s wife, above taint or suspicion.

  “Yes, yes,” King kept saying, nodding along almost automatically. When Dunbar fell silent, having relayed the main points Robert Kennedy had sent through his chief aide for civil rights, Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall, King turned at last to reply. “I agree with everything you’ve said,” he told Dunbar. “But I have to weigh other factors, too, before I can shun anybody like that. You see, Leslie, I have a pastoral responsibility.”

  This perspective ambushed Dunbar, who had been uncomfortable enough urging a blacklist on cold political necessity. Unexpectedly, King made it into an intimately brutal, profane act, leaving Dunbar feeling like an executioner at the confessional. Whereas government security officials considered it a prerogative of office to define national enemies, and to prescribe conduct toward them, King claimed as the democratic ideal a religious standard under which he would shun no one, friend or foe. This was the underlying principle of his nonviolence. Dunbar realized that if King were determined to maintain the hope of human contact even with those segregationists who were beating his nonviolent colleagues with tire chains, surely he would not cut off Stanley Levison, his trusted friend of six years’ sacrifice to the movement. Never again did Dunbar raise with King the issue of his alleged Communist associations. He knew that although Robert Kennedy and Burke Marshall shared his misgivings about the secret blacklisting, they defended caution in civil rights on this ground. Subversion politics allowed them to deflect blame through the FBI back into the civil rights movement itself.

  King did not know the intensity of the Bureau’s institutional animosity. Most of his information about the FBI came from Robert Kennedy and his assistants in the Justice Department—the same people passing messages through Dunbar. Their pitch softened King’s perspective on Hoover and missed one of the strongest of the forces driving the FBI bureaucracy against him—a sensitivity to criticism that had sharpened across Hoover’s nearly forty years as the Bureau’s founding director. In an article of recommendations written for the incoming Kennedy administration, King had included the FBI among the federal agencies that needed racial integration in the workforce (there being no Negro FBI agents except for five liveried members of Hoover’s personal staff, including his chauffeur and doorman), and this relatively trivial reference had rocketed up to the Director’s office as the first Martin Luther King item to reach Hoover’s personal, frowning attention.

  In late 1962, asked why he thought the FBI had not arrested some of the local officials who openly had assaulted nonviolent Negroes in and around Albany, Georgia, including one lawyer inside the courthouse, King had speculated that the local FBI agents were Southerners in cultural sympathy with the segregationist officers. Publication of this comment created lasting outrage among the highest officials of the FBI. Hoover authorized his political and public relations emissary, Assistant Director Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, to orchestrate a public rebuttal through press contacts that included the major Negro newspaper chains. Both the Defender papers of publisher John H. Sengstacke (“whom we know most favorably,” DeLoach boasted to Hoover) and the four Afro-American newspapers attacked King for offhand comments that stood out sharply from the customary public praise heaped upon Hoover even by presidents who disliked him, such as Truman and Kennedy.

  Early in 1963, FBI agents gathered wiretap intelligence that King invited Stanley Levison down to a summit meeting near Savannah. Neither diligent surveillance nor a canvass of informants gained FBI officials a clue about King’s secret purpose—the nonviolent gamble in Birmingham—but they treated the gathering as sinister to the core, sneaky, for one thing, and proof that King ignored FBI instructions not to associate with Levison. On these assumptions, DeLoach added enough malice to draft a summary epitaph for King at FBI headquarters. Charging that King used “deceit, lies and treachery as propaganda to further his own causes,” he recommended that the FBI write him off as a “vicious liar,” beyond hope and unworthy of contact. “I concur,” Hoover scrawled at the bottom of the memo, marking King as an enemy of the Bureau. This was on January 15, King’s thirty-fourth birthday, one day after Heschel’s opening speech to the Conference on Religion and Race.

  Unwitting, King was wary of royal hostility much nearer at hand from the Baptist conqueror, Rev. J. H. Jackson, who was forbidding his loyal pastors to attend the conference. Over the past year, a procession of ecumenical leaders had been turned away from Jackson’s enormous Olivet Baptist Church in Chicago, shocked and befuddled that the elected leader of the largest religious body of Negroes could curtly refuse to join the first national, interracial conference, right there in his home city. One prominent Negro scholar among the conference planners was so disgusted with Jackson that he renounced his own Baptist affiliation to become a Presbyterian. The few white clerics who came to meet Jackson could only speculate that he was mired in primitive, otherworldly fundamentalism, but they did not fret over the strange surprise because they already had cooperation from King, the best-known Negro pastor. Jackson’s boycott had the ironic effect of building rather than undercutting Martin Luther King’s image as the embodiment of the Negro clergy, and because the separation of religious cultures concealed his internal opposition, King was careful to let this one by-product of segregation stand uncorrected in the larger world. Privately, he and his allies had no doubt that Jackson simply refused to recognize any forum tainted by renegad
es against him. They felt Jackson’s hostility as a politically intimate force, so extreme in pettiness as to seem perversely but warmly human.* What King could not yet appreciate was how a distant national icon such as J. Edgar Hoover could hold personal fixations against him every bit as intensely as J. H. Jackson, Daddy King’s occasional houseguest since King’s childhood. When King arrived in Chicago, the vast FBI was opening secret, unfriendly eyes on him, while “Old Jack” professed a lofty disregard.

  DURING THE VOLLEY of tributes to Heschel’s speech, William Stringfellow stunned the huge audience with a prepared commentary declaring that white pastors had allowed racial hatred to sink into the American character beyond the reach of religion. “The most practical thing to do now is weep,” he advised. The cold resignation of these remarks by a prominent Episcopalian lay author flustered dignitaries on the podium and sent reporters digging to confirm a fresh theme of controversy. They found explosive potential in the advance text of Rev. Will D. Campbell, a theologian born in Mississippi and one of the few white clerics with a long record of advocating racial integration in the South. Campbell warned his colleagues not to assume that Negroes would welcome or wait upon their blessing. “In our generation,” he predicted, “white children will be marched into gas chambers by dark-skinned masses, clutching their little toys to their breasts in Auschwitz fashion.” What he meant to communicate by hyperbole was that no one could count upon Negroes to maintain the heart-melting courage and forbearance that had so astonished Campbell as a counselor to the Freedom Riders, who integrated interstate bus travel in 1961. On reflection, he had decided that such saintliness should not be expected to endure or always to dominate, and that the average human being must have built up through the long centuries of slavery and humiliation at least as much resentment as, say, the German generation following World War I.

  The convention floor at the Edgewater Beach Hotel buzzed over whether Campbell would be allowed to speak this sentence. Some delegates charged him with anti-Semitism for appropriating the imagery of the Holocaust. Privately, Campbell’s employers at the National Council of Churches pressed him to delete the sentence so as not to play into the hands of segregationists, arguing that to acknowledge a capacity for evil in Negroes, especially collective evil, was to support the fear upon which segregation was built. Worn down, Campbell substituted a terse warning: “It is too late for us to be here.” Under the circumstances, the omission was greeted with immense relief, but clashing apprehensions ran through the delegates. Just as the titled leaders were roused to urgent calls of mobilization—with the conference host, Albert Cardinal Meyer of Chicago, declaring that “our whole future as a nation and as a religious people may be determined by what we do about the race problem in the next few years”—some of the most experienced church activists concluded that religious people had forfeited their chance already.

  King changed his advance text, too. His handwritten additions reflected a raw edginess, perhaps born of the melancholy judgment that he had more to lose than to gain by informing even these religious colleagues that he was going into Birmingham without them. “We have listened to eloquent words flowing from the lips of Christian and Jewish statesmen,” he said, brushing close to sarcasm. “We have analyzed with painstaking care the broad dimensions and deep complexities of this haunting problem. And now the valley of injustice, with all of its ghettos, economic inequities, and demoralized children of God, stands before us in grim, stark, and colossal dimensions. Will this conference end up like all too many conferences on race?” Words were not enough, he said. From the hardest lessons of his own young career, he cried out for clergymen willing to “make their witness real.” Oddly enough, he quoted the lament of celebrated ex-Communist Whittaker Chambers that modern religion had “lost its power to move anyone to die for it.” The august Chicago assembly might have buoyed his hopes five years earlier, but now it could not contain his impatience. “One must not only preach a sermon with his voice,” King said. “He must preach it with his life.”

  WHAT BROUGHT KING and Heschel together was a prescription for the dilemma that plagued the Chicago conference. Most of the delegates searched for ways to overcome a stubborn avoidance of race in religious discourse. (“I wonder why I can go to church 52 times a year and not hear one sermon on the practical problems of race relations,” said Sargent Shriver, Director of the Peace Corps.) To break such a barrier, nearly all the theologians felt the need for a calming approach that labeled racial prejudice a feeble anachronism, a holdover of premodern irrationality, but this very impulse to soothe and minimize opened them to charges of false engagement from realists such as Stringfellow and Campbell. Yet, the realists’ tinge of fatalism reminded Heschel of a ghostly legacy from the Jewish past—the defiant urge to abandon hope of any divine presence in the face of inexplicable calamity. “The greatest heresy is despair,” he told Stringfellow in sharp retort, echoing his continuing plea to fellow victims of the Nazis and to the secularized Jews he found in America: “We all died in Auschwitz, yet our faith survived. We knew that to repudiate God would be to continue the holocaust.”

  As proof that human beings could engage the most deadening crises without falling into either of the classic polar traps—nihilism or blandness—Heschel held up the ideal of the Hebrew prophets. While facing, even welcoming, the destruction of themselves and their own people, the prophets remained suffused with redemptive purpose. Far from soaring off into saccharine self-persuasion, however, they made biting symbols out of daily pains and predicaments. “Moralists of all ages have been eloquent in singing the praises of virtue,” wrote Heschel. “The distinction of the prophets was in their remorseless unveiling of injustice and oppression….” Heschel’s seminal study of the prophets had just been published in the United States, translated from the original German, and it gained the eager devotion of King and his fellow pastors because they had grown up with Moses and Isaiah in their pulpits. The distinctly molded personality of the Negro preacher, as recognized by W. E. B. Du Bois and memorialized by James Weldon Johnson in God’s Trombones, was a cousin to the blazing psychic originals such as Jeremiah and Daniel—marked by passion, vivid images of slavery and deliverance, and arresting combinations of the earthy and sublime. To King and Heschel alike, the prophetic tradition came naturally as a grounding language.

  At Chicago, they raised strikingly similar cries. “May the problem of race in America soon make hearts burn,” said King, “so that prophets will rise up…and cry out as Amos did, ‘Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.’” Heschel quoted the same passage from Amos, which he used in his book to illustrate the emotive force in the prophetic conception of justice as contrasted with the arid rationality of the Greek ideal. They both quoted theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Heschel’s personal friend in New York and one of King’s primary influences as a seminary student. When King declared that the durable sins of race stressed “the need for prophecy,” he did not mean the popular notion of foretelling but the prophecy described by Heschel as “the voice that God has lent to the silent agony,” through prophets able and willing to draw upon themselves the excess poison in the world. Their communion on this rich subject was a pleasant surprise to both men, who vowed to see more of each other, and for once King encountered an orator who reached for notes in his register. “Let there be a grain of prophet in every man!” Heschel exclaimed.

  After generous applause, the Chicago delegates reacted cautiously to the summons for prophetic witness. Observers wryly noted that the only resolution they approved, an “Appeal to the Conscience of the American People,” called for no binding action by any of the participating religious bodies. No doubt many of the clergy had hoped to treat race with an insightful malediction, and were surprised to have the challenge shoved under their own collars. Reports of a contemporary scandal filtered in from a prosperous Chicago suburb, where civic groups blocked the local symphony’s invitation to its first Negro performer, a violinist.
“We just thought we were not the organization to crusade and pioneer in a controversial subject in the community,” said Geneva Palmer, president of the symphony association. “Nothing is integrated in Oak Park, you know.” Local ministers intervened, citing the mandate of the national religious conference, only to stimulate round-robin evasion on collateral issues, including a charge that the symphony conductor had pressed the integration because he was Jewish. Time magazine ridiculed the entire Chicago conference as another exercise of “doleful hand wringing” by theologians, who “proved themselves still unable to offer much wisdom.”

  Undaunted, volunteer clergy resolved to continue the mission of the four-day conference by forming permanent local commissions across the country. A groping awkwardness persisted in their work. Intramural differences kept popping up even among the subdivisions of the major white groups, especially Protestants and Jews, and hostile archbishops all but shackled Catholics in Los Angeles and Philadelphia. A Catholic leader of the organizing coalition reported that no city began with even a communicating familiarity between the white and Negro clergy. Approaching such gaps in city after city, he found the bravest of recruits wanting to perceive the task not as a step into the unknown but as a restoration of an imagined past that somehow might “bring sanity back” into race relations. By fits and starts, those chastened and inspired by the Chicago conference placed the issue on the agendas of most of the upcoming church and synagogue conventions. Fledgling local commissions were meeting in thirty states by April, when King sent his first Birmingham volunteers to jail.

  3

  LBJ in St. Augustine

  NO ONE COULD GUESS what bumps lay just ahead—certainly not the Vice President of the United States on a ceremonial visit to prepare for the four hundredth birthday of the nation’s oldest city. In the false quiet before the first lasting reverberations rolled in and out of obscure places like St. Augustine, Florida, transforming people of every station, it remained possible to muffle the conflict over legal segregation with a few exertions on behalf of accommodation, and politicians of stature still managed to leave such details to the staff. On March 11 in St. Augustine, Lyndon Johnson waved expansively from the balcony of a restored Spanish mansion to a festive crowd that appreciated what the rare visit of a sitting Vice President meant to a small tourist town of fifteen thousand people. There were no Negro picket signs to mar the occasion—an invisible success Johnson took for granted. While his aide George Reedy broke away to make sure that the other parts of the racial truce were holding up, Johnson’s motorcade rolled off to a shrine marking the first permanent outpost of European culture on North American soil.