Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  Unlike Jones, who admitted to King “a shortcoming in my character that I do not possess a larger degree of love and forgiveness,” King defended Williams against smears and petty resentments. “Now interestingly enough,” King told a graduate student who interviewed him at his home, “in the picture that they have of me at Highlander, I’m sitting next to Aubrey Williams, whose only crime is that he’s a white man from Alabama saying Negroes ought to have a square deal.” King referred to the photograph of himself at Highlander’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebration in 1957, which had become infamous—popping up on highway billboards labeled “King at Communist Training School”—since Governors Ross Barnett and George Wallace had displayed blown-up reproductions as the central exhibit of their congressional testimony that the civil rights bill was the pawn of an alien conspiracy.

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s right,” King told the graduate student, “That’s Aubrey….This has been used over and over again.” King described the pitfalls of trying to answer emotionally loaded propaganda about Highlander. “I haven’t done anything but give a speech there,” he said, “but the minute I go to arguing about I wasn’t ‘trained’ there, it looks like I’m trying to say there’s something wrong with the school.” The state of Tennessee had destroyed Highlander because it “brought Negroes and whites together in a way they would have never been brought together…they live together,” King said, adding that from fearful hysteria about integration, Highlander “suffered what many white liberals suffer in the South, the Communist tag…SCEF has suffered the same thing.”

  It came as a surprise to King that President Johnson never mentioned the Communist issue at their meeting early in December, not even as a hazard of domestic politics. The omission was a stark contrast with President Kennedy’s exclusive preoccupation at King’s White House meeting in June—and more than a welcome relief from the vulgar Nazi signs picketing the visit outside the gates: “Down with Martin Luther Coon,” “I Wants to See Dee President Too!” Like others, King found the new president to be a nonstop talker who consumed nearly all their forty-three minutes in the Oval Office working through the mechanics of his plan to get the civil rights bill out of the House Rules Committee before Christmas. The careening, folksy President, taking a phone call on the lobbying effort from David McDonald, president of the steelworkers’ union, said, “Well, here’s Dr. King that’s talking to me about it right now,” and impulsively handed the phone to King. Afterward, King praised Johnson to reporters as an advocate of equal rights, but warnings still sounded from elsewhere in the government, including an obscure newspaper report that the grieving Attorney General Kennedy soon must decide whether to expose the “Red ties” of a Negro leader “known by the FBI to be linked with a Soviet agent in a massive drive to register Negro voters throughout the country.” This was worrisome if true—“horrifying,” said King.

  During the Johnson transition, King was off balance on a host of matters great and small. With the SCLC fund-raising office in disarray because of staff turnover, he once again was compelled to cancel telephone credit cards in the face of huge unpaid bills. His lawyers were locked in revolving negotiations with mismatched partners—including the steadfast, bureaucratic NAACP Legal Defense Fund against the impetuous freelancer William Kunstler—over control, expenses, and public rhetoric for a large backlog of movement cases. A dentist who treated gospel star Mahalia Jackson after a joint appearance with King was pressing for a large fee against SCLC’s claim that he had rendered complimentary service. Wyatt Walker, who had handled dentists as well as grand administrative strategy for King since 1960, was quitting for lack of a pay raise in proportion to the triumph of Birmingham, and in disgust over King’s tolerance for the freewheeling visions of James Bevel. To replace Walker, King was torn between strong personalities at polar extremes: the temperamental genius Bayard Rustin, who had become a public figure since the March on Washington, and the reflective church administrator Andrew Young.

  Young himself was torn by the upheavals of the previous year. “I really have been struggling along just content to survive since the summer,” he wrote King. Young had spent frustrating months riding circuit among demonstrations across the South, fitfully spurring them on and throttling them down. “We are trying to free people when we are also enslaved by lack of background under a segregated upbringing,” he concluded. “All of the emotional problems, lethargy, misguided enthusiasm and impetuosity which we have to face comes from our being Southern Negroes. It takes time to overcome these ills [which] keep us tearing each other apart….” Young felt the special weight of criticism from SCLC’s literacy teacher, Septima Clark, who scolded the preachers in King’s executive circle for chasing drama and applause to the neglect of unglamorous work with plain people. She warned of “smoldering hate” within the movement itself, especially among young activists who had broken through their fears of jail.

  For King, the conflicting pressures converged on the worth of large-scale demonstrations. Under heavy pressure from an anxious publisher, King labored to craft a durable interpretation of the Birmingham campaign. What he first portrayed as a focused attack on local conditions had broadened across the summer into a contagious national optimism, which imploded after the church bombing and dissipated again after Dallas. “This book,” Stanley Levison remarked on the telephone, “always seems to be in the shadow of tragic deaths.” FBI wiretappers heard Levison tell friends that although he would not be seeing King anymore, “I’ve got to finish off this book thing that was started.” As the trusted liaison between King’s literary agent, Joan Daves, the publisher, New American Library, and the editors hired to work on the manuscript, Levison managed to coordinate revisions “to interpret the direction of change,” while still crippled by the ban against direct communications with King. “This is now much closer to what Martin means to say,” Levison would tell Joan Daves of a draft early in 1964, “and says it the way he would say it.”

  The blurred meaning of Birmingham confronted King nearly every day with summons to demonstrations somewhere in the South, including Birmingham. His dilemma was elevated to national and even international urgency: President Johnson told him that any new street agitation would jeopardize the historic opportunity in Congress, but experience told him to keep pushing, as did steady streams of newcomers. On December 15, at what the New York Times called “the first major civil rights demonstration in the South since President Kennedy’s assassination,” King emerged under heavy guard by Atlanta police to address a crowd of four thousand under freezing drizzle at a downtown park. He described segregation as a “glaring reality” in his home city, and warned that the local movement was losing faith in prolonged negotiations. “We feel that we are the conscience of America and its troubled souls,” King declared. “…Let us go out united and inspired by the words of our slave foreparents, ‘Walk together, children, doncha get weary.’”

  King held back when the rally triggered sustained, small-scale demonstrations in Atlanta. For seeking service at a local Toddle House restaurant, SNCC Chairman John Lewis went to jail for the twenty-seventh time since 1960, following two white women so transfixed by their first arrest that they impulsively told the booking officer they were Negroes. Almost daily into winter, robed Klansmen and angry lunchtime crowds squared off with integrated pickets outside segregated restaurants—notably Leb’s, a kosher delicatessen whose owner pummeled integrationists from his door—in ugly scenes that mortified Atlanta’s image-conscious city leaders. By straddling the conflict, King strained close ties on both sides. Technically, he honored his unwritten pledge not to join or launch demonstrations in his home city, which disillusioned some student demonstrators suffering through a long skirmish of low visibility. He supported their courage, however, by appearing at street vigils outside the jail, which showed up the more conciliatory Negro leadership, including his own father. (Reporter Paul Good made it back from Mexico City in time to see Daddy King hounded from the pulpit at a mass meeting
.)

  With cracks and uncertainties looming from the Oval Office down through the Birmingham book revisions into his own staff and family, King arranged to gather twenty advisers at a church-owned retreat in North Carolina. They would set movement goals for 1964 in what King called “a where do we go from here discussion.” King commissioned a staff report on whether Stanley Levison’s coerced withdrawal from the movement might be ended under the new administration. He set a retreat date of January 6, then postponed it for two weeks on notice from Clarence Jones that King, Jones, and most of the other conferees were to be in Washington that day for oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court in their three-year-old case, New York Times v. Sullivan.

  AT THE FEDERAL BUILDING in Oxford, Mississippi, prosecutors under John Doar presented their case that December against the five Mississippi officers charged with civil rights violations from the jailhouse beatings in Winona the previous June. On the witness stand, an FBI agent explained the physical evidence, such as photographs of the bloodstained shirt worn by the youngest victim, June Johnson. Two Negro prisoners—one of them retrieved from Parchman by court order—told the jury that they had taken over the heavy cudgeling of the civil rights workers under duress, intimidated by the Winona police chief and bribed with a pint of corn whiskey. Along with SNCC’s senior adviser, Ella Baker, Septima Clark sat daily among the courtroom spectators, keeping watch over her former citizenship students and her assistant teacher, Annell Ponder, who testified that she was not yet “completely over” the terror. Defense lawyers challenged her testimony as the sort of lies taught at the “Communist training school,” Highlander, where the citizenship classes originated. “Your name has not been called,” Septima Clark wrote Myles Horton in mid-trial, “but the school as the sponsor was mentioned many times. One man sitting in front of me said, ‘I know Russia had something to do with it.’”

  As expected, the federal jury needed only an hour’s deliberation to acquit all five defendants—the Montgomery County sheriff, a Highway Patrol officer, the Winona police chief, and two police officers. Some observers consoled themselves with the hope that the extraordinary effort by the Justice Department at least might sound a warning against heinous abuse, while Mississippi COFO leader Aaron Henry expressed a practical worry about retaliation against the two friendly witnesses still in confinement. (As a thin tissue of protection, Henry recruited preachers for prison visits.) In the courtroom itself, the two grand old women of the movement counseled the beating victims to rise above their resentment. “You can be bigger than this,” Clark told Lawrence Guyot, who complained bitterly that his tormentors had won with lies and coarse racial insults. Like Clark, Ella Baker had a way of reducing oppression to a childish retardation. “Look beyond this foolishness,” she advised. “Don’t let it stop you.”

  Back at his new COFO assignment in Hattiesburg, Guyot presented to local leaders his plan for a Freedom Day modeled on the October event in Selma. He argued that voting rights would remain null throughout Mississippi so long as the local registrar, Theron Lynd, successfully defied the Justice Department’s marathon lawsuit against him. With Lynd’s most recent contempt citation on appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court, and with the local movement paralyzed in the meantime by threat of imprisonment, Guyot proposed a one-day demonstration dramatic enough that it might push the U.S. government to enforce one of its decrees against Lynd, so that cowed local Negroes could “see his ass put in jail.” To supplement the jail-weary movement veterans, Guyot planned to recruit not only celebrities but also volunteer clergy, mostly white, from the North. (“I think there will be roughly 25 preachers in all,” his church liaison soon confided, “though not all of them will picket, i.e., go to jail.”)

  Local scrutiny of Guyot’s plan fell largely to the yeoman farmer Vernon Dahmer, who had lost his own church and his friend Clyde Kennard to the voting rights movement. “Are you strong enough for this?” Dahmer asked Guyot. “Do you know what these folks around here are capable of doing?” With Dahmer’s blessing, recruitment went forward quietly beneath the larger debate over a statewide program for the summer. At a COFO meeting in mid-December, the plan rejected in November was reintroduced first as a grandiose scheme to import 100,000 college students into Mississippi, then pared all the way down to one hundred. “You’re going to get a lot of folks killed!” shouted Willie Peacock when the vote carried, prompting another reconsideration. A number of delegates were reluctant to pursue the question in the absence of Bob Moses, who was away in New York, which prompted a stinging accusation that the self-consciously independent movement people were in fact captives of one leader. “I’m not attacking Moses,” said Guyot, who supported the summer project. “I’m mad because nobody’s challenging Moses.” Another speaker voiced private doubts about “the Bob Moses mystique—we’ve operated as though the very word of God was being spoken.”

  Moses only enhanced his moral authority by trying to reduce or escape its burden. When the Mississippi debate resumed after Christmas, at a SNCC meeting in Atlanta, he was reluctant to speak to the issue at all, saying it was too divisive within the movement and too fraught with responsibility for him to disclose an opinion either way. His doubts about the propriety of charismatic leadership within a democratic movement were a hallmark of SNCC culture generally, at odds with Martin Luther King and other leaders who actively cultivated techniques of command. Like King’s SCLC, SNCC veterans did contend privately over the Cold War issue of red-baiting—whether the inclusion on principle of alleged subversives was worth the price of being tarred by association*—and they worried that a spectacular failure could destroy their organization, but SNCC’s bias against hierarchy combined with the intense introspection of Moses to accent a personal, purgative quality in its debates. Among the roughly fifty SNCC leaders gathered in Atlanta, abstraction mingled with confessions about “bossism” of nearly every kind. To diagnose ongoing SNCC troubles around Albany, Georgia, some attributed an “image of failure” to the nebulous local goal of “freeing men’s minds,” others to limitations of the mass meeting approach, and still others to project director Charles Sherrod’s use of white staff workers.

  On the awkward issue of racial tensions within the movement, speakers rose to say that the movement did not know how to utilize white staff people, or that whites required more supervision because of their erratic psychological passage through a predominantly Negro movement. (“Some of the whites in SNCC are among the strongest advocates of black nationalism,” said one white staff member. “This is a necessary step…. It is fruitless for all the whites in SNCC to try to be Negro.”) Whether viewed as growing pains or warning signs, apprehensions about whites in the movement saturated the looming decision about the Mississippi summer proposal “pushed by Al Lowenstein,” as Moses told the Atlanta meeting, to “pour in thousands of students and force a showdown between local and federal governments in an election year.” Nearly all those students would be raw white recruits, entering a state where movement veterans could not so much as carry a sign in public without being snatched away to hang from cell bars at Parchman. By unanimous exhaustion, as usual, the Atlanta meeting adopted Marion Barry’s vague resolution that SNCC “intends to obtain” universal suffrage in Mississippi in 1964, “using as many people as necessary.” Details were left to a “final showdown” debate scheduled for late January in Hattiesburg, after Guyot’s Freedom Day.

  14

  High Councils

  EARLY ON MONDAY, December 23, as swaths of black crepe were removed from the chandeliers of the White House state rooms and flags nationwide were raised from half staff to close the month of official mourning for President Kennedy, seven top FBI officials gathered in the office of Fred Baumgardner, section chief, Internal Security [Division Five], for an all-day conference “aimed at neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader.” Robert Nichols, one of two Atlanta agents flown to Washington for the occasion, arrived with some misgivings about his extraordinary new wiretap opera
tion. Unlike other wiretap monitor lines, which ran from the telephone company to the Atlanta FBI office, the King tap monitors were wired into a phony engineering company that Nichols had been ordered to set up as a front, complete with a made-up name, a leased suite at the new downtown Peach Tree Towers, and rented office furniture. These stealthy arrangements made the taps more difficult to trace to the FBI, and already had prompted gossip among the Atlanta agents that Director Hoover must be operating without the required legal authorization from Attorney General Kennedy.

  Assistant Director William Sullivan reassured the Atlanta agents that headquarters possessed signed wiretap orders for each installation. The documents left Robert Kennedy a figurehead in no position to supervise or restrict the FBI’s pursuit of King, and Bureau officials, in restoring traditional direct channels to the White House, were free to disclose fruits of the unknown surveillance to the new administration as they saw fit. This was heady stuff for the Atlanta agents. (Afterward, Sullivan sent a memo to Hoover’s office stating that “the men from the field expressed their appreciation for the opportunity of being brought into the Seat of Government…[and] were both enthusiastic about the case….”) Still, they would have preferred to hear that the King investigation was headed toward arrest or resolution, as criminal cases were the coin of respect among field agents. Agent Nichols in particular felt that his entire Bureau career had been trapped in Cold War loyalty investigations. No agents in Atlanta wanted to be part of his King detail, because they knew it was all sedentary paperwork and waiting—deciphering intercepted conversations, trying to fathom the personal dynamics of a separate world, writing reports. Agents on the lowly bad check squad, who at least got out to chase suspects, resisted transfer into security work as clerk duty.