Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  “And both those things took place,” confirmed the President.

  White said he was delighted to hear this, because King’s people were trying to “push way beyond” the prior agreement.

  IN AN OHIO AUDITORIUM that night, the first two hundred volunteers-in-training watched a CBS television documentary entitled Mississippi and the Fifteenth Amendment. For three days, the assembled volunteers and movement veterans from Mississippi had encountered each other awkwardly, with whites quoting James Baldwin and Negroes singing jail hymns with Fannie Lou Hamer. Bob Moses had welcomed the college students as instruments of national mobilization—“getting the country involved through yourselves”—but grizzled SNCC members eyed them warily as privileged waifs, perhaps too naive to survive Mississippi. Drills in nonviolence swerved between frozen timidity and hostile excess. Some volunteers were awestruck by the moral bondedness of the movement (“I met those SNCC people and my mouth fell open”); others felt excluded by cliquish veterans “who looked down on us for not having been through what they had.” A few volunteers were shaken by their first sight of Rev. Edwin King’s scarred, sunken cheek, but others seemed to view Mississippi as a kind of fantasy.

  Tension rose as the Mississippi SNCC staff watched volunteers snicker at televised images of the obese Forrest County registrar Theron Lynd drawling on about contented Negroes. In spite of themselves, the students laughed also at the simplicity of rural Negroes who vowed to brave buckshot for the vote in order to get a street paved. Hollis Watkins could not bear it. Two years earlier in Hattiesburg, he had overcome his own fears to help the CBS crew shoot this film footage of the implacable Lynd, who remained a frustration to the U.S. Department of Justice and a tormentor to Negroes as intrepid as Vernon Dahmer. The rage of Watkins and other veterans in turn scalded the Northern volunteers. “Six of the staff members got up and walked out of the movie because it was so real to them while we laughed because it was so completely foreign to us,” one of them wrote home. “…We were afraid the whole movement was going to fall apart….” Arguments spilled from confrontation to tears over what could and could not be helped, and how to protect each other in Mississippi across immense cultural gaps.

  Far to the south, that same Tuesday night, an advance attack blurred the line between fear and understanding. In the woods outside the hamlet of Longdale, Mississippi, between Meridian and Philadelphia, ten stewards of Mount Zion AME Church finished their regular business meeting. As a point of decorum, the AME Methodists distinguished themselves from impatient Baptists by deferring nonspiritual matters—including dispersement of the visiting preacher’s fee—from Sunday until a weekly accounting on Tuesday night. That done, the stewards locked the church and drove away as usual, but ran into roadblocks a hundred yards in both directions. At one end, perhaps because the stewards had their young children with them in the cars, armed Klan interrogators reluctantly accepted word that Mount Zion harbored no white plotters, but frightened answers only seemed to infuriate the ambushers at the other end. “Where are your guards?” they shouted, clinging to an assumption that something military was going on in preparation for the summer “invasion.” Cries of liar turned into slaps and several beatings. One Klansman reached inside the cab of a pickup to break Georgia Rush’s collarbone with the butt of a pistol, after others had dragged Rush’s son from the driver’s seat. Nearby, Beatrice Cole ran screaming, “Lord have mercy, don’t let them kill my husband,” around her car to a place in the road where a circle of men was stomping her prostrate husband, Roosevelt “Bud” Cole. She asked permission to pray and fell to the ground crying out the words of a Methodist hymn that came to her, “Father, I stretch my hands to Thee, I stretch my hands to Thee, no other help I know,” until someone said to let him live and the Klansmen withdrew to torch Mount Zion Church with gasoline. Cole took her bleeding husband back to their farm with a broken jaw and spinal injuries, but did not dare take him to a hospital before daylight.

  The attack on Mount Zion jolted those in Ohio with a message far stronger than any lecture. The volunteers knew or quickly learned that James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner, two CORE staff members then present at the Oxford training sessions, had asked Mount Zion to host a Freedom School, and that the tiny congregation had agreed to do so with trepidations and second thoughts. Merely for these intentions, it seemed, the hand-built church was destroyed. This news, coming only three days after the latest written appeal by Bob Moses,* spurred another COFO press release calling for federal protection and a flurry of orchestrated letters to Washington officials from volunteers and their families. Most of the pressure fell upon the President’s exasperated civil rights aide, Lee White. “Although on the surface it is nearly incredible that those people who are voluntarily sticking their head into the lion’s mouth would ask for somebody to come down and shoot the lion,” he wrote President Johnson on June 17, “we now have a request for the parents group to meet with you and their insistence on Federal protection ‘before a tragic incident takes place.’”

  In the shock of the Wednesday morning news, James Lawson addressed the Ohio trainees on the nonviolent philosophy that had guided most of the student movements since the Nashville sit-ins of 1960. Stokely Carmichael, designated project director for the Delta, disputed him by attacking deliberate self-sacrifice as an unnatural philosophy. Dramatized suffering by Negroes was no longer novel to reporters, nor moving to a jaded public, Carmichael argued, though he supported nonprovocation policies such as barring guns from COFO locations.

  Remarks by church lawyer Jack Pratt, Bayard Rustin, and others also precipitated conflict. When John Doar warned that the Justice Department would not be able to prevent or punish most crimes against volunteers, James Forman denounced the cowardice and treachery of the federal government. Doar sidestepped what was for him a painful distinction between political and legal limits on federal power. Enduring some jeers, he told Forman that he simply did not want to mislead civil rights workers by overpromising again, as after the Freedom Rides in 1961, and Bob Moses intervened to support Doar’s candor. He urged volunteers not to think of Washington as omnipotent, nor as an enemy withholding some magic solution, and later expressed worry that no students had dropped out of training by Wednesday. Something about Moses reassured even those he pushed to confront danger. “He is more or less the Jesus of the whole project,” one volunteer wrote home, “not because he asks to be, but because of everyone’s reaction to him. (I forgot to say, he’s a Negro.)”

  By Friday, Moses told the first groups heading south that Mississippi, like race, could not be discovered in the abstract. Whether terrified by nightmares or giddy with invincibility, volunteers knew from the ardent attentions of reporters that they were sensors for a national exploration into Mississippi. One carload noted with amused bravado that a CBS crew had wired their Corvette for the drive to Mississippi to “record our profound thoughts as we went into battle….” On buses, press-savvy volunteers realized that Look magazine was sifting them “for the ideal naive Northern middle-class white girl,” and that Life was focusing its coverage on Greenwood. Heading south, asking his parents to “keep your eyes open” for him on television, a Harvard student summarized the week of training: “The workshops were very helpful—getting us used to hearing nigger and white nigger without flinching and so forth. Also how to keep together when getting beaten so that they can’t get you one at a time, and all of that jazz.”

  IN ST. AUGUSTINE, sixteen Reform rabbis and lay administrator Albert Vorspan converged upon First Baptist Church for the mass meeting on Wednesday night, June 17. Martin Luther King announced their entrance to an enthusiastic crowd, then invited Rabbi Israel “Sy” Dresner to speak from the pulpit. Dresner, as the only Reform volunteer with experience at such events, astonished his colleagues with call-and-response preaching that evoked a tumultuous response. Carried away, he retained his customary long-windedness beyond the endurance of several rabbis who, wilting from fatigue in the Florida heat, discreetly
chanted “genug”—Yiddish for “enough already.” They all followed Shuttlesworth and Andrew Young on a long march beyond the Slave Market, then dispersed for the night in Negro homes as King debated strategy with his staff. Hosea Williams suffered a ribbing when he refused for once to lead one of his own wild schemes to maintain public momentum at low cost, by trying to integrate a swimming pool. Williams admitted that he could not swim.

  On Thursday, Fred Shuttlesworth and C. T. Vivian led the rabbis and some fifty supporters downtown to the Monson Motor Lodge, where owner James Brock blocked the restaurant door at 12:40 P.M. Normally a bookish and controlled businessman (who routinely showed reporters an office adding machine with his precise tabulation of integrationists arrested at Monson’s, standing thus far at 239), Brock lost his temper when the rabbis knelt to pray over his refusal to serve their party. One by one, he shoved the rabbis toward arresting officers until 12:47 P.M., according to reporters and FBI observers, when shouted alarms sent the whole mass of spectators on the run to find two white civil rights workers holding room keys in the pool, saying that as registered motel guests they had a right to invite their five Negro friends to swim. While Florida State Police strained to hold back onlookers enraged by the sight of intermingled wet bodies, Brock poured two gallons of muriatic acid into the pool, screaming that he would burn them out. (This was a scare tactic, as the cleaning acid was relatively harmless.) “Hold me, baby, I’m scared,” said a Negro female who dog-paddled beneath shouted threats to shoot, stone, or drown them. Finally, Officer Henry Billitz removed his shoes and jumped in fully clothed to haul them out. An AP photograph captured his leap in midair for the front pages of many newspapers, including the Miami Herald and the New York Times. By previous order of Governor Farris Bryant, state officers assumed custody of prisoners under the near-riot conditions, but an overwrought local deputy reached over and around a trooper to pummel one arrested swimmer most of the way from the pool to a State Police cruiser.

  King watched the two-pronged demonstration of rabbis and swimmers from a waterfront park across the street. He and Brock were falling from opposite ends of a spinning log. At a press conference the previous day, Brock and State Senator Verle Pope had hinted vaguely at white concessions (“a study of the legitimate problems of this community by responsible, local, law abiding citizens”) behind a screen of wounded victimization (“we find ourselves beset by outside forces”). King had responded positively, saying he hoped to move on soon to a voting project in Alabama—only to hear that a special grand jury sensed new weakness in him and was holding out for better terms. Stiffening, King had gone forward with Wednesday demonstrations. Now, the enraged Brock, feeling betrayed on both flanks for his moderation, drained and refilled his pool to purify it of integration. He posted guards and hoisted a Confederate flag over his motel.

  Late that Thursday afternoon, a deputy sheriff served King with the grand jury’s formal presentment: “…Racial harmony has existed in the past…. This Grand Jury now calls upon Dr. Martin Luther King and all others to demonstrate their good faith by removing their influences from this community for a period of 30 days.” King promptly wrote a press response on the back of the legal papers, rejecting “not only an impractical request, but an immoral one. It is asking the Negro community to give all, and the white community to give nothing.” He reversed the order of the grand jury’s minimum terms with an offer to leave St. Augustine for thirty days if a biracial committee were established first.

  In convention that evening at the Ambassador Hotel in Atlantic City, the president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis announced the imprisonment of the volunteer delegation to St. Augustine and extended “our prayers and best wishes and our sense of gratitude.” At the St. Johns County jail, parched and miserable after sun-drenched hours in the outdoor “chicken coop,” the prisoners refused an order to come inside to segregated cells. While guards fetched Sheriff Davis, the rabbis formed a protective circle around Shuttlesworth and Vivian, vowing to stand on their constitutional right to remain together with the Negro clergy. Shuttlesworth laughed, saying they did not understand jails, but the rabbis held firm through booming threats and pointed guns until Sheriff Davis had a Negro teenager hauled from the cell block and shocked in front of them with a cattle prod, causing her to scream and shrivel to the floor like an autumn leaf. Then they parted to let the Negro prisoners separate, and marveled when Shuttlesworth veered toward Sheriff Davis to say, “I love you, brother.”

  The rabbis talked until dawn about what had brought them from eight different states to such a place. They told of supportive or puzzled congregations, or of blunt warnings from synagogue boards not to cause scandal or neglect their regular duties. Some said they were stung that local Jews avoided them; others confessed a creeping taste for sanctimony among the righteous few. One by one, with Rabbi Eugene Borowitz taking notes on the back of a leaflet about the Ku Klux Klan, each man spoke, and then they composed a lengthy common testament: “…We shall not forget the people with whom we drove, prayed, marched, slept, ate, demonstrated and were arrested. How little we know of these people and their struggle…. How many a Torah reading, Passover celebration, prayer book text and sermonic effort has come to mind in these hours…. These words were first written at 3:00 a.m. in the sweltering heat of a sleepless night, by the light of the one naked bulb hanging in the corridor outside our small cell.” On Friday, most of the rabbis refused their first jail food—small jars of Gerber’s Baby Food merrily offered as a “special meal”—and bailed out to fly home for the Sabbath.

  FOR THE MOST PART, movement news trailed on the back pages along with notice that Nelson Mandela and six other black leaders had received life sentences on June 12 for treason against apartheid in South Africa, and were shipped off to lime pits on Robben Island. However, headlines did trumpet stories with a movement subtext. Governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania “stunned the nation” by announcing a “stop-Goldwater” candidacy barely a month before the Republican convention. On Monday, June 15, in a decision the New York Times called as significant as the Brown cases on school segregation, the U.S. Supreme Court required states to apportion their legislative districts to equalize the weight of each citizen’s vote, undercutting the preserved advantage of rural areas. On Tuesday, Southerners kept the Senate in session past midnight for a record thirty-four roll call votes on futile amendments to the civil rights bill, with speeches of exhausted defiance that a team of congressional historians likened to “death scene arias of an interminable opera….”

  On Wednesday, Senator Goldwater flew to a farm outside Gettysburg to seek the blessing of Dwight Eisenhower for his own vote on the bill. Afterward, fuming that Eisenhower gave him no better than a noncommittal response, the candidate returned to find his Senate office besieged by politicians awaiting the result, including the young chairmen of fledgling Republican parties in Mississippi and Alabama. Goldwater, on the counsel of his legal advisers, * stressed constitutional rather than moral or political arguments in his catalytic announcement on the Senate floor, opposing the civil rights bill as a “threat to the very essence of our basic system” and a “usurpation of such power…which 50 sovereign states have reserved for themselves.” While renouncing segregation personally, he voted with five other Republicans and twenty-one Democrats against the decisive majority of seventy-three fellow senators on Friday, June 19—exactly one year after President Kennedy sent his original version of an omnibus civil rights bill to Congress.

  J. Edgar Hoover reacted to the Senate vote with bitter foreboding, seasoned by bureaucratic caution. In strictest secrecy, he retrieved copies of FBI surveillance photographs showing Martin Luther King together with Stanley Levison, on the remote chance that a leak against King and the bill might become worth exposing the Bureau’s hand. Hoover disallowed—“because of the occupations of the individuals using the office”—a detailed plan to bug Harry Wachtel’s law office when King met there with his New York advisers on June
22, but he encouraged vigilant surveillance by safer methods. Teams of New York agents followed Clarence Jones in the hope of observing scandalous political activity, while the Director himself supervised an overhaul of selected files at headquarters. Finding the boilerplate description of Bayard Rustin too tame, he called for revision based on “the most pertinent and adverse information concerning him from a subversive standpoint.” Hoover decreed that allegations be updated if they sounded too old, and that “the term ‘noncommunist’ not be used.”

  President Johnson declared that the civil rights bill “goes further to invest the rights of man with the protection of law than any legislation in this century.” He hailed the Senate vote before a San Francisco crowd of thirty thousand, and continued triumphant motorcades through Los Angeles on Saturday, pausing long enough to make calls about two senators, Edward Kennedy and Birch Bayh, whose private plane had crashed after adjournment Friday night, killing the pilot.†

  Johnson’s polls showed him favored to become the first Democrat to carry California since Truman in 1948, and his buoyant speeches against poverty and racial injustice (“I have come to California to ask you to throw off your doubts about America”) attracted what one reporter called “wealthy industrialists, ranchers, and other generally conservative types not recently to be found at California Democratic Party dinners.” His evening fund-raiser at the Ambassador Hotel overflowed with large donors until it displaced the long-scheduled bar mitzvah party of young Lyle Peskin from the Embassy Room. Hotel officials hastily moved the Peskins to a substitute location, and the President himself dropped by after midnight to make amends.

  The President already had determined his strategy for the last legislative mile on civil rights. To avoid revisiting the quicksand of the Senate, he resolved to have the House accept the Senate-passed version intact, first by bowling over Howard Smith of the House Rules Committee to forestall the slightest amendment. Johnson immediately called House Republican Leader Charles Halleck to push for assistance. “Y’all want civil rights as much as we do,” he said. “I believe it’s a nonpartisan bill. I don’t think it’s a Johnson bill.”