Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  “No, no, no, we’re not gonna get a goddamn thing,” sputtered Halleck, who protested that Johnson was using popular sentiment to swindle Republicans. “I don’t know what the hell the Senate’s put in there,” he said. “That means we ought to kind of take a little look at it.”

  “Well, maybe you ought to,” said the President. Pretending simply to be helpful, he asked, “Well, you wouldn’t want to go to your convention without a civil rights bill, would you?”

  “…Now wait just a minute,” said Halleck. “If I had my way, I’d let you folks be fussin’ with that goddamn thing before your convention instead of ours.”

  When Johnson said he would like to have a rule permitting a vote on his poverty bill, too, before the House recessed for the Republican convention, Halleck sputtered again. “No, no,” he said. “Now wait a minute. I’ll give you a rule in due time, but don’t press me.”

  “I’m not pressing you,” Johnson innocently replied.

  “Goddamn it, Mr. President,” shouted Halleck.

  “I’m not pressing you,” said the President, who opined over chuckles that he was just an “old Senate hand” and “an old House hand,” and an “old Halleck man,” too.

  “All right, you’re a Halleck man,” groused Halleck.

  “Give me a little rule up there in the morning…,” said Johnson, still chuckling.

  “Mr. President, Jesus Christ,” said Halleck.

  “I’ll call you this week,” said Johnson.

  From California, Johnson urged Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young to channel the energy of Senate celebration right back into the House. Looking ahead, he asked for suggestions on federal appointments and ideas about how to keep the South calm once the bill was signed. “I’m just afraid of what’s gonna happen this summer, like [what] I saw yesterday at St. Augustine,” he told Wilkins Friday. He said his goal was compliance, not enforcement. “If they’ll observe the law,” he said, “then we won’t have to take pistols and enforce it.”

  The President did not call Martin Luther King, with whom he lacked the comfortable rapport of a parliamentary commander, anyway, in part because of the controversy in St. Augustine. With the rabbis departing there, the two sides rallied to opposite moods over the Senate vote Friday—King praising a “dawning of new hope” while J. B. Stoner predicted race war to a thousand whites at the Slave Market, saying “niggers want to integrate because they want our white women.”

  ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON, the St. Augustine movement tried a new tactic designed to keep up demonstrations while avoiding both the tinderbox of the Slave Market and the costly burdens of jail. Thirty Negroes and four white supporters waded into the Atlantic Ocean off a beach that tradition restricted for whites. From a circle of onlookers, enraged by word that officials could not make trespass arrests on public property, lone vigilantes broke ranks to assault unresisting waders. Police first arrested attackers and victims in pairs, which attracted swarms of segregationists intent upon getting in their licks before police cleared away the Negroes. Dorothy Cotton, SCLC’s deputy director of citizenship classes, was among those slugged to their knees in the surf, forcing State Police officers to intervene with nightsticks to drive off attackers from the wounded. This rescue struck the segregationists as betrayal, curdling their resentment against the police themselves. “I can’t understand why any white citizen would want to protect niggers against white people,” explained Hoss Manucy, who had summoned and deployed most of the posse over his gun club’s two-way radio network.

  The fearful prospect of open conflict between police and white civilians caused Governor Farris Bryant to proclaim within hours an executive order suppressing all nighttime assembly in St. Augustine. This edict further ensnarled white leaders in conflict. U.S. District Judge Bryan Simpson summoned the governor of Florida to show cause why he should not be jailed for contempt of Simpson’s June 9 court order in the Andrew Young case, which protected the right to demonstrate.

  Passing through St. Augustine the next morning, a Florida motorist came upon a Sunday scene of children in miniature Klan robes on the fringe of a public rally, repeating exhortations about firing every coon and baboon in town. “We saw niggers coming out of the Episcopal church this morning,” J. B. Stoner called out over his bullhorn. “The preacher there has gone against his congregation in allowing niggers to attend services.” The visitor wrote down his impressions of “a charged atmosphere such as I had never felt before.” Lines of black and white marchers passed each other grimly downtown, as though observing a fragile cease-fire in the midst of motorcycles and police vehicles bristling with hardware.

  By then Martin Luther King was entering Chicago’s Soldier Field in the back of an open-air limousine. He drew a standing ovation from an interracial turnout that fell below expectations, owing to persistent rain, but still generated crowd estimates running upward from 55,000. After James Farmer and James Forman, King delivered a keynote address on the civil rights bill as “a step in a thousand-mile journey.” He challenged Negroes to “make full and constructive use of the freedom we now possess,” in order to compete with whites after more than three centuries of oppression, and he welcomed the interracial alliance especially to fight the corrosion of long-range unemployment. Automation, said King, was eliminating 45,000 jobs per week.

  The Soldier Field rally was predominantly a local event, scarcely noticed outside Chicago on June 21—a Sunday when Jim Bunning of the Philadelphia Phillies, father of seven, pitched the eighth perfect game in major league history against an expansion team called the Mets in New York, and when dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier of Haiti proclaimed himself President for Life. Even so, the clamoring Chicago press conferences highlighted for King the paradoxical contrasts of his communication. Just off a flight from St. Augustine, where fear prevented any white leader from deigning to talk with him even on the telephone,* he watched tens of thousands at the Chicago rally sign pledges to work personally toward seven major goals of human rights. Desperate for help in Florida, King awakened his former professor Harold DeWolf well after midnight that weekend with reminders of his standing offer to volunteer in crisis. On King’s assurance that modest theological hides might somehow make a difference, DeWolf recruited a carload of Boston professors for the thousand-mile drive to St. Augustine.

  26

  Bogue Chitto Swamp

  AT THE COFO CENTER in Meridian, Mississippi, Louise Hermey of Drew University followed the first rule of her communications training on her first day as a summer volunteer: she called the Jackson COFO headquarters to report that an expedition had failed to return by the appointed check-in time of four o’clock Sunday afternoon. Advised to wait an hour in case of unexpected delay, she called back at five and was told to activate the search procedure. Hermey steeled herself to make inquiries at the local jails from the master phone list, and called places where the group might have turned up safely. Movement veteran Sam Block, who turned up instead, volunteered to check the city jail. About ten o’clock, Hermey called Mary King in the Atlanta SNCC office.

  Fellow volunteer Edna Perkins, a nineteen-year-old student at Bryn Mawr College, sat down near Hermey’s phone desk to write her first letter home, trying to explain why “we’re all sitting here in the office being quietly nervous as hell”: “This morning Mickey, who’s the project director, and Chaney, a local staff member, and Andy, who’s a volunteer, all went out to one of the rougher rural counties to see about a church that was burned down a few days ago…. No word from them of any kind. We’ve had people out looking for them and they haven’t found anything…. They said that Meridian was an easy town.” The new community center above Fiedler’s pharmacy was nestled within a cluster of businesses—the E. F. Young Hotel, hair care and insurance companies, Beal’s Cafe—that extended toward the heart of white downtown, a rare and wispy beacon of progress for all of Negro Mississippi. Confidence collapsed as the hours wore on. Hoodlums menaced a mixed group that went out for coffee, and young Negro boys outs
ide wrote down the license numbers of slowly passing cars. “Still no word from the missing people,” wrote Perkins. “It must be 11 by now…. Nothing to do but play pingpong or read and wait for the phone to ring. I’ve been reading All Quiet on the Western Front….”

  In Atlanta, Mary King “felt a prickly sensation,” knowing that most of the movement people experienced enough to understand a delay of seven hours were still in Ohio for the training sessions. She called the Mississippi jails, posing as a reporter from the Atlanta Constitution. She called the FBI office in New Orleans—there were none in Mississippi—and helped the Jackson and Meridian COFO offices track down the few resident FBI agents posted in nearby Mississippi towns. By then Hermey and the others had located a Justice Department lawyer passing through Meridian on assignment. After midnight, desperate to find someone who appreciated why the alarm could not wait until morning, Mary King called John Doar at home in Washington. With a cringe, she awakened the parents of volunteer Andrew Goodman in New York and notified Mickey Schwerner’s wife in Ohio. Only yesterday, when Rita Schwerner stayed behind there to help with the second week’s training, her husband, Mickey, had made the long drive to Meridian in a station wagon with James Chaney and six volunteers, including Louise Hermey, Edna Perkins, and Goodman.

  Calls spread through emergency networks before dawn—from Mary King to New York Times reporter Claude Sitton in Jackson after 2:00 A.M.; to John Doar again at three o’clock and again at six; to hospitals and highway patrol offices; at three o’clock to CORE chairman James Farmer, sleeping at home after the Soldier Field rally, and from Farmer to contacts ranging from the FBI’s Deke DeLoach to comedian Dick Gregory; to the Schwerner parents and to a Mississippi preacher who was comforting James Chaney’s mother, Fannie Lee; from the Goodmans to lawyers and the homes of New York senators and representatives; at first light to the county jails once more.

  At Peabody Hall in Ohio, on the campus of the Western College for Women, Bob Moses greeted three hundred new volunteers on Monday morning with a meditative speech. “We’ve had discussions all winter about race hatred,” he said. “There is an analogy to The Plague, by Camus. The country isn’t willing yet to admit it has the plague, but it pervades the whole society.” Staff people soon interrupted to huddle with him, after which Moses stared for some time at his feet. “Yesterday morning, three of our people left Meridian, Mississippi to investigate a church bombing in Neshoba County,” he announced. “They haven’t come back, and we haven’t had any word from them.”

  Rita Schwerner appeared on the stage to organize a telegram campaign to members of Congress. She erased a map of Mississippi from the blackboard to write in large letters the names of her young husband and the two other missing workers. The fresh trainees could tell something was terribly amiss beneath the veneer of exaggerated composure. “It suddenly became clear that she, Moses, and others on the staff had been up all the night before,” wrote one volunteer. During the scramble to write telegrams, Moses slipped out of the auditorium to sit alone on a small porch outside the college cafeteria. What had prompted his disclosure to the trainees was a report from Jackson that the jailer in Neshoba County now acknowledged having the three missing workers in cells there until sometime the previous evening. Moses drifted into solitary apprehension, not wanting to disclose his interpretation to Rita Schwerner. He sat on the porch for nearly six hours. Those who knew him best approached tentatively with hugs of consolation. “You are not responsible for this,” Victoria Gray whispered.

  Theologian Vincent Harding and Jesse Morris of SNCC quietly urged the staff to carry on with volunteer training, despite frantic calls from parents who wanted their sons and daughters sent home. From Mississippi, Edwin King passed along word from one white sympathizer in Neshoba County, an ostracized Methodist like himself, that Sheriff Lawrence Rainey was rumored to have beaten the three civil rights workers while they were under his custody. Shortly before noon, James Farmer got through to President Johnson’s assistant Lee White with a request for help. Someone else alerted the patrician socialist Norman Thomas, who at 12:17 dispatched a terse emergency wire from New York to Al Lowenstein in Europe: “Developments COFO seem to some parents and me to make your return imperative since you recruited students.”

  Meanwhile, a civic-minded local woman named Florence Mars stopped by to ask the editor of the Neshoba Democrat if it could be true that Klansmen had burned the nearby Mount Zion AME Church the previous Tuesday night, as reported in her out-of-state newspaper. The editor replied that he was withholding the story as untrustworthy, because he was finding Negro members who were so deeply troubled by the idea of civil rights work at Mount Zion that they might have destroyed their own church in protest. Crazy things were happening, he told the skeptical Mars, informing her of the fresh kidnapping rumors that could be no more than a fund-raising hoax.

  By mid-afternoon, the first two national reporters arrived at the Neshoba County jail, just after the local FBI agent finished initial interviews there and set out for Longdale to verify from Beatrice Cole and other Mount Zion victims that Mickey Schwerner indeed had tried to visit them the day before. Sheriff Rainey and his deputy, Cecil Price, repeated for the reporters their story that they had held the three civil rights workers for six hours after a speeding arrest and then released them safely about ten-thirty. “If they’re missing,” said Rainey, “they just hid somewhere trying to get a lot of publicity out of it, I figure.”

  A menacing crowd accosted the journalists in the courthouse rotunda outside the sheriff’s office, led by an insurance executive who bluntly promised violence against the lying, mongrelized Northern press. Claude Sitton of the New York Times managed to duck into the Turner Furniture Store across the street. Introducing himself and his companion, Karl Fleming of Newsweek, Sitton begged the proprietor to explain to the men threatening to kill them outside that they were not agitators but Southerners themselves, just doing their jobs. He said his managing editor in New York had advised him to stop in the family furniture store if he ever got in trouble, which he definitely was now.

  The uncle of Turner Catledge, managing editor of the New York Times, studied Sitton and the angry noises from the sidewalk. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “If that mob gets you and Mr. Fleming down in the street and is kicking the hell out of you, I wouldn’t participate in that. On the other hand, I wouldn’t lift one damn finger to help you.” He urged Sitton to leave town as the crowd instructed.

  In Washington, John Doar went to the White House that afternoon as one of four chosen recipients of the President’s Award for Distinguished Civilian Service. After a ceremonial handshake and a word of praise from President Johnson—who hailed his “basic contribution to our democracy as a vigorous champion of equal voting rights,” and did not fail to point out that he was a Republican—Doar returned to the barrage of Mississippi phone calls at the Justice Department. At 5:20, he informed Mary King in Atlanta that the Mississippi Highway Patrol had put out an all-points alert, then reviewed with Burke Marshall the case for doing more. Although there was as yet no direct evidence of any federal crime, and although the tangible hostility of Neshoba County could not be the basis of federal policy any more than Sheriff Rainey’s nasty language and bulging chaw of tobacco, they could cite objective reports of recent Klan violence at Mount Zion. Doar vouched for the meticulous training of the civil rights workers as an indication that they would not willingly remain out of touch. At 5:48 P.M., Marshall reached Robert Kennedy at a hospital in Massachusetts, where his brother Edward was under care for his broken back, and at 6:20 the Justice Department announced Kennedy’s order for a full federal kidnap investigation under the 1936 “Lindbergh Law.” FBI headquarters sent New Orleans agents overnight into Neshoba County.

  Off a flight from St. Augustine, ABC correspondent Paul Good walked into rumored hard news that superseded his assigned general feature on the arrival of summer volunteers. Late into the night, his proposal to divert a film crew into Neshob
a County ran into heated opposition from network producers who argued that missing people could not be filmed for television. He raced with his crew the next day across Mississippi to Meridian, up to the Neshoba County jail, and out to the ruins of Mount Zion AME, where he filmed his report near a gravestone that read, “Just Sleaping.”

  CLAUDE SITTON’S front-page story—“3 in Rights Drive Reported Missing”—appeared in the Times on Tuesday, June 23. A delegation of New York representatives escorted the Goodman parents, Carolyn and Robert, and Nathan Schwerner, father of Mickey, to press Burke Marshall, Nicholas Katzenbach, and Robert Kennedy for an expanded investigation, then moved on to appointments on Capitol Hill. President Joachim Prinz of the American Jewish Congress urged President Johnson to assume personal command of the search; others pushed for spotter planes and Navy helicopters.

  Johnson stuck to his breakneck schedule—a congressional breakfast on legislation, a political meeting with the governor of Nevada, a speech on public safety, an audience for the visiting Prime Minister of Turkey, a ceremony transferring Army land to New Jersey, quick photographs, a recording session for USIA about Denmark, and the latest round of Vietnam huddles so intense that Johnson shouted out a command to a secretary—“Tell [McGeorge] Bundy to come on in. I’m going to the bathroom, but come on in anyway.” Late Tuesday morning, Johnson told an impromptu press conference that he was sending General Maxwell Taylor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to replace Ambassador Lodge in South Vietnam. Signaling military resolve with such an illustrious choice, he refused to guess whether Lodge was coming home to run against him. To a question about “those three kids that disappeared in Mississippi,” Johnson replied that FBI searchers “have substantially augmented their personnel in the last few hours,” but that he had heard no search reports since breakfast.