Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  WHILE THE JUSTICES labored to submerge racial passions in constitutional law, FBI executives debated whether to offer a summary of the sensational Willard Hotel recordings to the Attorney General. If they did, warned Assistant Director Sullivan, the impulsive Robert Kennedy might well “reprimand” Martin Luther King for illicit behavior, which could shock King into reform or greater discretion. Either way, Sullivan wrote Hoover, King’s reaction likely would deprive the Bureau of opportunities to develop “any more such information by the means employed.” The prospect of fruitless bugs was enough to make up Hoover’s mind. “No,” he wrote Sullivan. “A copy need not be given A.G.” Hoover had been ignoring the Attorney General since November 22 anyway, and he used the Willard coup instead to restore his accustomed direct line to the White House. On January 14, the day before King’s thirty-fifth birthday, Hoover arranged a private peek at the Willard transcripts for President Johnson and his chief of staff, Walter Jenkins. Deke DeLoach, the Director’s carefully chosen emissary, had known both men since his service as FBI liaison with Congress, and he returned to headquarters satisfied that Johnson and Jenkins were duly impressed.

  DeLoach had scarcely delivered his report when President Johnson—rudely and mysteriously, from the FBI point of view—confounded hopes that he would recoil from political association with King. To the contrary, White House aides informed reporters that Johnson personally had requested that King, Wilkins, Farmer, and Whitney Young visit him on Saturday, January 18. The invitation itself turned out to be the first in a string of positive surprises for King and the other leaders. Instead of pressuring them to accept weakening amendments to the pending civil rights bill, Johnson assured them of his determination to secure passage “without a word or a comma changed.” Far from accepting their gloomy vote counts or fears of further delay, he predicted that the bill would be out of the Rules Committee and through the entire House before the Lincoln’s Birthday recess. Incredibly, Johnson was ahead of the civil rights leaders on their own legislation, and most unexpectedly of all, he looked past it to the “war against poverty” announced in his January 8 State of the Union message. Johnson sought their cooperation as full citizens rather than specialists confined to race. When he authorized them to say that publicly, they assumed the grandly vague language of fellow statesmen, telling reporters outside the White House of their “lengthy and fruitful discussion with the President on vital issues concerning our nation.”

  King put questions about Johnson’s aggressive strategy to the score of advisers who gathered the following Monday, January 20, for his Black Mountain retreat near Asheville, North Carolina. Could Johnson make the war on poverty a serious historical force, or was this a mirage caused by the emotional dislocation of Kennedy’s assassination? Could the movement safely plan for issues beyond the end of legal segregation, or might an agenda of economic oppression and recompense be a political trap? Johnson’s vision raised immediate practical implications for the book about Birmingham that King was rushing to print. In the manuscript as it stood, King recalled an anecdote from his 1959 trip to India, when he had asked how Prime Minister Nehru justified the new national program of job and education preferences for members of the untouchable caste—was it not discrimination?—and Nehru had replied, “Well, that may be, but it is our way of atoning for the centuries of injustices we have inflicted upon these people.” Toward the end of his book, King introduced a similar proposal of national redress for the cumulative effects of American slavery and segregation. Now at Black Mountain, he asked whether this provocative idea had been overtaken by the Johnson approach to poverty. To separate race from the question of poverty was to forfeit powerful historical arguments that might bring home to Americans the dire conditions among great masses of maids, day laborers, and semiliterate ex-farmers. But to focus on Negro poverty alone was to invite questions about why the movement ignored the white poor. After extensive debate at Black Mountain, King accepted advice to straddle the issue. He retained historical arguments on the economic burden of race, and proposals for advantage modeled on the GI Bill for veterans of the world wars, but he revised the concept to make it more compatible with Johnson’s. In the final book manuscript, his “Negro Bill of Rights” became a “Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged.”

  Harry Wachtel was watching the tape recorder. As enthralled as he was to be included with his wife in three days of softball games and mountain resort picnics, and to meet a half dozen King associates new to him, including historians Vincent Harding and Lawrence Reddick—Reddick had been in India with King for his talks with Nehru—and nonviolent strategist James Lawson, the former mentor to the Nashville student movement, Wachtel privately warned King to assume that government agents were infiltrating his Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He shuddered to think what hostile authorities might do with recorded proof that Bayard Rustin predicted political revolt from the structural decay of an economy losing forty thousand blue-collar jobs each week to automation, or with speculations by King that some sectors might need to be socialized to rescue the chronically unemployed. Such things could be political dynamite, Wachtel told King, who finally agreed to have the recordings destroyed.

  As instructed, Clarence Jones had brought to North Carolina Stanley Levison’s candid appraisal of his own danger to King. Levison sent word that he had broken off with Albert “Doc” Blumberg and other Communist party officials some years earlier—in fact, Jones told King confidentially, Levison said they had accused him of forgetting that for decades Communists had advocated and tried to practice racial equality. Levison had a theory that an old personal adversary was feeding false information about him to the FBI or CIA, but he could not be sure. Whatever the cause, Levison assumed that the recent, welcome relief from high-pressure government loyalty purges may be only temporary. He proposed to keep his distance from King, helping the movement by proxy through Jones. Ironically, for a branded Communist, Levison was caught up in marketing plans for King’s forthcoming book. Through his publishing contacts, he pushed for higher advertising budgets and a strategy aimed at hardcover trade sales rather than the “religious” specialty stores, and he hoped for a cover review in the New York Times Book Review. Levison also was engaged in a winter-long struggle to hire more efficient personnel and clean up the mailing lists in New York toward the goal, he told Jones, of making the SCLC fund-raising office run like a business.

  The written questions King posed to the Black Mountain assembly were deceptively simple. “What are SCLC’s basic aims and purposes?” he asked. After nearly a decade in the backwater, the nonviolent movement had flooded over walls of resistance since Birmingham. Now that King was on the cover of Time,* the focus of the Supreme Court, and a guest at the White House, he asked his advisers for “a critical evaluation of nonviolent direct action in 1963.” Exactly what was different, what the same? “Should we have massive demonstrations in 1964?” he asked. Or should they lobby for the civil rights bill and prepare for the presidential election? Should SCLC remain a consortium of preachers in the South or become a national membership organization?

  As always, discussion of the alternatives was an outwardly polite reflection of ferocious infighting. Those who favored a national membership organization were prepared to escalate the contained rivalry to competitive warfare with Roy Wilkins and the NAACP. Wyatt Walker wanted to target Atlanta for demonstrations on the scale of Birmingham, but James Bevel, who still pushed with his wife, Diane Nash, for a voting rights campaign in Alabama, argued that Walker’s imperious manner had alienated student demonstrators from King, and that SCLC would never grow until it got rid of him. Walker, who was contemplating a higher paying job in New York, sought to retain a supervisory role over Northern expansion, especially if Bayard Rustin replaced him. Cleveland Robinson, a New York labor leader in King’s confidence, flatly called Rustin a self-promoting manipulator unfit to be dogcatcher, while Rustin, for his part, insisted that he report directly to King. Rustin himself was in t
ransition, his credentials never stronger. He was just then closing down his March on Washington office, having written a widely discussed article saying the movement should graduate from a strategy of protest to one of politics. When King cautiously offered to hire him, provided SCLC could avoid the “trouble” of 1960—a veiled reference to the ostracism mounted then by King’s fellow Baptist preachers against Rustin as a homosexual—Rustin held out for firmer protection. “If the boys can run you once,” he told King at Black Mountain, “they can run you again.”

  Into the muddle of internal conflict came steady reminders that King’s essential message was all too clear to some people wherever he went, South and North. Answering a telephone page at the North Carolina airport, Wyatt Walker heard an anonymous female caller hope that an airplane bomb would rid Asheville of King. Authorities dismissed the threat as a prank and allowed passengers to board, but later called the plane back from the runway for evacuation and search. Piedmont Airlines flight 45 departed for Atlanta three hours late on January 22. Four days later, a “Mr. Adams” called the Denver, Colorado, fire department to warn that a bomb would destroy the Macedonia Baptist Church during King’s morning sermon. Military demolition units searched the Montview Boulevard Presbyterian Church before another King sermon the same afternoon. Three days later, the Milwaukee police department concluded that four different callers had warned the Milwaukee Journal and other local offices of a bomb set to blow up the civic auditorium during King’s rally. As usual, King urged that the threats be disregarded so as not to sow terror in the audience, and local papers played down news of the threats as alarmist embarrassments. Milwaukee police, having assured King that FBI demolition experts were alerted, had no more idea than he did that the FBI saw the bomb commotion as an irritating distraction from the serious business of intercepting King’s sex life. In cables to headquarters, agents worried that the extra security details posted around King at Milwaukee’s Schroeder Hotel would deflate interest in women, thereby wasting the microphones planted in his room. Director Hoover followed the surveillance debate closely enough to write down a prediction that King would misbehave no matter what. His Milwaukee FBI office, perhaps dreading to contradict the Director, took an apologetic tone in the next morning’s bug report: “No activities of interest developed.”

  15

  Hattiesburg Freedom Day

  DURING KING’S North Carolina retreat, veterans and newcomers converged in Mississippi for the Hattiesburg Freedom Day. Recruitment of prestigious clergy from the North had not gone smoothly since Robert Stone, the ex-Freedom Rider minister from the Bronx, had volunteered his support to Bob Moses during SNCC’s Thanksgiving meeting in Washington. Stone’s proposal met resistance where he least expected it—from Robert Spike, leader of the new Commission on Religion and Race at the National Council of Churches. In the “God Box,” as church bureaucrats called the National Council’s massive New York office building near Union Seminary and Riverside Church, Spike was famous for his zealous summons to active church witness. Summoned to the White House in December, with four executives of the National Council, Spike had received President Johnson’s personal plea that they guide their actions by what would help the civil rights bill through Congress. Spike knew that the incoming governor of Mississippi was from Hattiesburg and would not welcome the blot of an ugly pastors’ demonstration in his hometown just after his festive inauguration. To give Governor Paul Johnson the benefit, Spike declined to have his commission sponsor Freedom Day or seek jail volunteers from its affiliated Protestant denominations. The most he would do was to lend his overworked staff counsel to help arrange bail for Stone’s Presbyterians, who had no lawyer. When Governor Johnson strained in his inaugural address toward what passed for racial moderation in Mississippi—“I would say to you that you and I are a part of this world. Whether we like it or not, what happens here through no fault of ours affects us”—Spike sent him a telegram of encouragement from New York.

  Left on their own, Stone and his two colleagues on the Presbyterian commission divided their national phone directory into thirds and canvassed fellow clergy. To their dismay, even the most sympathetic contacts were put off by an emergency invitation to pay their way down to a small town in Mississippi to be abused or worse and then pay their way out of jail and back home. The few who were positively inclined wondered how to explain their departure from normal life, and eventually the commissioners pleaded with the heads of the major Presbyterian agencies to set a desperately needed example. This was the idea of Dr. Gayraud Wilmore, a Negro theologian hired from Pfister Theological Seminary to head the three-man commission staff, but Wilmore was reduced to little hope by the time he approached the pink-cheeked, silver-haired John Coventry Smith, who, as secretary of the Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations, headed the bureaucracy that supervised 1,300 Presbyterian missionaries worldwide. Unaccountably to Wilmore and Stone, who considered him a piece of soft furniture at ecclesiastical conferences, Smith reached back to the pluck of his experience as a World War II missionary imprisoned in Japan. “I have people who can keep the office going without me,” Smith said. “That’s what they’re paid for. I will go to Hattiesburg.”

  Smith’s name put a jolt of adrenaline through Presbyterian phone lines, but Stone and Wilmore still had received more maybes and devotionals than firm commitments when they journeyed ahead to Mississippi. They left behind the third member of the new Presbyterian commission, Rev. Metz Rollins—a tall, slender Negro with a cavernous bass preaching voice, best known for televised pictures of him beaten bloody on Easter Sunday in Nashville during the first wave of demonstrations after the 1963 Birmingham breakthrough—to escort John Coventry Smith from New York to Hattiesburg as the ranking standard bearer for the Northern church. Into the final mass meeting on the evening of January 21, others appeared one by one until fifty-one white faces and clerical collars dotted St. Paul’s AME Church. Presbyterians numbered more than thirty, with reinforcements including ten Episcopalians, two rabbis, and Professor Gibson Winter of the University of Chicago Divinity School. A crowd of four hundred jammed the sanctuary, and an overflow of half that many outside gave the ministers a warm tribute mixed with disbelief, as though a company of strange volunteers had turned up for a parachute mission before D-Day. One movement veteran marveled that Hattiesburg’s previous attendance record for mass meetings was twenty-seven.

  Reporters and movement leaders also concentrated in Hattiesburg. Ella Baker arrived from New York in time to give a speech that evening, as did James Forman, who led a SNCC caravan from Atlanta. Aaron Henry, the state chairman of COFO and the NAACP, had been arrested when his familiar car entered town that afternoon, but he posted bail in time for the meeting. Amzie Moore, who four years earlier had sold Bob Moses on the idea of recruiting students for voter registration, drove down from the Delta along with Fannie Lou Hamer, Hollis Watkins, and many others. The doelike Annell Ponder, Martin Luther King’s representative in Mississippi, praised Victoria Gray for her swift development from Hattiesburg’s first citizenship student to its teacher of teachers. Jack Pratt, the church lawyer on loan from Robert Spike, reviewed from the pulpit the long trail of lawsuits against the local registrar, Theron Lynd, whose defiance of contempt orders, recently left standing by the U.S. Supreme Court, now posed a delicate problem for the federal government—how to punish Lynd for contempt without setting a politically uncomfortable precedent in the contempt case against former governor Ross Barnett, still pending from James Meredith’s integration of Ole Miss in 1962. “We’re here to prod the Justice Department a bit,” Pratt told the crowd.

  The largest ovation came toward midnight when Lawrence Guyot summed up the agenda. In the past few months, since being assaulted with Hamer and Ponder in the Winona jail and bailed out of Parchman by Pratt, Guyot had worked toward Freedom Day as the Hattiesburg project director for Hattiesburg, assigned by Moses. He raised his arm for silence and pronounced two words, “Immanuel Kant.” After a dramat
ic pause, Guyot continued: “Immanuel Kant asks, do you exist? Kant says every speck of earth must be treated as important.” Among the Northerners, John Coventry Smith was surprised to hear a college-aged Negro make such connections to an audience largely of maids and laborers, some holding babies—so much so that Smith wrote down one of Guyot’s sentences (“Redemption is an experience that recreates only those who wish to be redeemed”) and later complimented him for making a theological statement. Guyot moved from philosophical thoughts to practical warnings about the morning picket line. Volunteers should conceal money in their shoes and bring toothbrushes for jail, but avoid pencils and anything else that might be construed as a weapon. He suggested some nonviolent techniques to reduce injury from police nightsticks, or from beatings by angry white bystanders if police gave them leeway. Whatever happened would be over quickly, Guyot said, because no civil rights demonstration lasted more than fifteen minutes in Mississippi. These ominous prospects collided with the inspiration of speeches and freedom songs, so that Rabbi Andre Ungar of New Jersey closed his anguished benediction with a forthright plea for “the guts to march.”

  Only Pratt and the white reporters, under cover of professional neutrality, could lodge safely for the night in white hotels. Since no Negro hotels existed in Hattiesburg, and no white homeowners offered hospitality, the visitors scattered into Negro neighborhoods. John Coventry Smith drew celebrity housing at the Vernon Dahmer farm in Kelly Settlement. Daisy Harris, who had been wrestling with an urge to take Victoria Gray’s citizenship class, agreed to provide a bed for two white preachers and wound up with four. Until the mass meeting, her first, Harris had understood that they were coming in to start some new kind of Montgomery bus boycott; afterward, she squeezed the preachers into the beds of three young sons whom she stacked elsewhere. In the chaos of her own home, Victoria Gray announced a last bathroom call before she turned out the lights, warning that anyone who groped toward relief in the dark surely would step on an occupied pallet. Still later, when SNCC historian Howard Zinn discovered someone asleep in his assigned cot at the downtown freedom office, behind J. C. Fairley’s television repair shop, he wandered off into the predawn with an interracial group of strays. Zinn soon awakened on a mattress, listening through the walls to the full-throated morning prayer of the woman who had taken them in: “Oh, Lord Jesus, oh let things go well today, Jesus. Oh, make them see, Jesus.”