Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  The King and Johnson camps skirmished through telephone intermediaries. Johnson had the advantage of better sources. Bill Moyers heard from his clergyman friend Robert Spike, head of the national Commission on Religion and Race, that civil rights leaders were preparing for demonstrations in Atlantic City because they anticipated no White House concessions to the Mississippi freedom delegation. “He says the chances of serious violence are high,” Moyers wrote President Johnson—leaving ambiguous whether mayhem would arise from previously nonviolent movement Negroes or Klan sympathizers in New Jersey. Either prospect posed ruin for a presidential campaign.

  Beyond volunteer sources, the White House enjoyed spy intelligence from the FBI, which, under the “roving” wiretap order signed the previous October, placed a temporary intercept on King’s guest home in New York. There and over the tap on Bayard Rustin’s phone, Bureau technicians overheard King’s camp forecast accurately that Johnson, secure of the pro-Negro vote already, would act to preserve hope of reconciling now or later with the Democratic white South. King and his allies labored to make the President explain on the public record why he preferred a segregated, pro-Goldwater delegation to the suffering, loyal MFDP, but King’s interest in the White House meeting faded with every indication that Johnson’s entire purpose was to avoid mentioning or hearing about Mississippi. Through Tuesday night into Wednesday, King debated whether to skip the session rather than allow Johnson to finesse his purpose. High-speed summaries of these conversations reached FBI headquarters, where Deke DeLoach filtered out most of King’s substantive reasoning to portray him as insolent and headstrong, yet subservient to advisers. “Deke’s information is that if King did show,” Lee White advised President Johnson, “…he was instructed to ‘speak up to the President.’”

  President Johnson burst into the gathering of civil rights leaders, minus King, with a declaration that he would consider no political matters related to the convention, followed by a monologue on his plans and achievements that exhausted the fifty-nine minutes until his next engagement. The Johnson assistants who had disparaged King for a self-promotional desire to meet the President found cheekiness in his last-minute notice of “regret that I am unable to attend.” King, for his part, tried to circumvent Johnson’s control of the White House agenda. Affecting an offhand desire “to communicate my views on subjects which might come under discussion,” he filled three telegram pages on precisely the one subject he correctly assumed would be off limits. In his own name, King presented Johnson with four arguments why he should seat the MFDP delegates, ranging from gritty politics and moral choice to civic abstraction: “Number three, pressures of metropolitan existence require some firm evidence the democratic process can prevail in the United States[,] and that persons deprived of representation at the state level can receive redress of grievances before some national body.”

  Lee White notified President Johnson of King’s rapid maneuver before the other Negro leaders left the secret meeting (“The attached telegram from King was received here at 11:23…”), warning of FBI intelligence that King’s friends wanted him to release the telegram to the press. At noon, George Reedy called the President for guidance on press rumors about a telegram, saying King’s “whole life’s work would be ruined if the Mississippi delegation were seated.” Johnson’s staff threw together contingency plans for muting a major news break, or “beating King to the punch,” with a White House announcement that the Mississippi question rested properly before the Democratic convention. King backed away from a direct statement or release to the press, however, and the two sides accepted a preliminary standoff heading into Atlantic City.

  Mortified FBI officials were battling their own peculiar crisis. The front page of the Wednesday morning Atlanta Constitution revealed the FBI’s gift of a birthday cake to murder suspect Herbert Guest. FBI field agents dodged as best they could internal inquiries about why they had undertaken—without approval from headquarters—a ploy that raised wild suspicions of fraternization and exposed the Bureau to public ridicule.

  ELECTED MFDP DELEGATES from all parts of Mississippi were converging upon Tougaloo College, where Bob Moses ended the three-day staff conference with a Wednesday announcement that COFO had decided to extend or replace roughly two hundred of seven hundred summer volunteers. Moses acknowledged to reporters that the summer project was better known for a running tally of arrests (250) and beatings (fifty-two) than its negligible increase in registered Negro voters, but he claimed success for the political goal of opening Mississippi to the rudiments of common citizenship. A visiting New York Times correspondent described siege conditions that night in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where a select group of ten interracial volunteers dared to open a project office in territory still traumatized by the triple murders of June. Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price served eviction notices and a court summons for trespassing; one of the more polite phone messages announced, “The end is tonight,” and carloads of conspicuously armed whites prowled outside as the rattled volunteers lying on bedrolls contemplated whether to resist attack. “We decided to remain nonviolent to the death,” a white graduate student from Princeton told the Times. In the morning, his colleague Ralph Featherstone, a Negro teacher from New Jersey, drove a bookmobile into the rural areas toward Meridian, where churches burned that night and the next. The bookmobile canvass was COFO’s prescribed regimen until Freedom School classes could be opened after the September cotton was picked.

  On Thursday morning, August 20, President Johnson addressed a ceremonial crowd in the White House flower garden. “For so long as man has lived on this earth, poverty has been his curse,” he said in a voice husky with his own memories, adding that the first great nation was willing and able “to make a commitment to eradicate poverty among its people.…The days of the dole in our country are numbered.” First to Adam Clayton Powell, then to scores of legislators and guests (including, discreetly in the back, the sacrificial scapegoat Adam Yarmolinsky), Johnson dispensed pens used in signing into law the $947 million Economic Opportunity Act. Between ceremonies for two other new laws that day—a defense appropriation more than fifty times larger than the proposed War on Poverty, and a securities reform bill—reporters trailed on walks behind an energized President who fished from his pocket one astonishing preelection opinion poll after another: Johnson running ahead of Goldwater 67-32 in Wisconsin, 70-30 in New York, 77-23 in Republican Maine.

  At Tougaloo College, where buses were loading with MFDP delegates, many of whom never before had left Mississippi, a radio reporter from the destination state of New Jersey interviewed Stokely Carmichael about the summer project. Carmichael stressed the travail of registration work in Tallahatchie County, and reviewed his own intermittent movement service since entering Mississippi and Parchman Penitentiary in 1961 as a twenty-year-old Freedom Rider. When the reporter asked about the bullet holes in the car he had parked, Carmichael explained that his vehicle was well known in the Delta’s Second District, where he was project director. He pointed out windshield damage from potshots during the Friday night Belafonte-Poitier visit, then the driver’s side hole from the bullet that hit Silas McGhee.

  “Were they aiming for Silas himself,” the reporter asked in awe, “or do you think they thought it was you in the car, knowing your car?”

  “That’s hard to say,” Carmichael replied. His explanation echoed the mentoring tone of Bob Moses behind his own insouciant bravado: “If they were aiming for Silas—and I know that they want Silas McGhee very badly because he’s one of the local youth who just wouldn’t tolerate any of their nonsense—then I wouldn’t feel bad. But if they were aiming for me because it was my car, and Silas took the shot, then that’s something I have to deal with. And I’m not sure. Now, they’ve chased my car several times and shot at it before. It’s very hard for me to say.”

  34

  A Dog in the Manger: The Atlantic City Compromise

  ATLANTIC CITY, marooned by the spread of convenient air travel
to warmer resorts, was suffering slow reduction from splendor to relic. Home to the Miss America Beauty Pageant, and still the storied setting for the board game Monopoly—Marvin Gardens, Reading Railroad, Boardwalk—the aging queen of seashore destinations hosted a great storm of Democrats also in transition. At a preconvention hearing on Friday, August 21, George Wallace hotly denounced national Democratic leaders as revolutionaries who “would sell the birthright of our nation” to install “an alien philosophy of government.” Having arranged by recent state law to expunge President Johnson and his running mate from Alabama ballots in November, so that Wallace himself could allocate “Democratic” votes in the Electoral College (eventually to Goldwater), Wallace notified convention leaders that he cared little whether or not they unseated his Alabama delegation over this supercession of the party’s nominees. “I’m not here to beg,” he declared. Wallace demanded that national Democrats repeal the civil rights law, and foretold otherwise an “uprising” on par with the revolt against Reconstruction. Against an excess of “central authority, given free reign by this very party,” he promised a conservative movement to “take charge of one of the parties in the next four years.”

  Busloads of Mississippi Freedom Democrats were arriving at the Gem Motel on Pacific Avenue, an address tarnished enough to welcome late-booking stragglers who ate from cracker boxes and slept four to a room. One national correspondent who watched them disembark for a spirited mass meeting described “a hymn-singing group of dedicated men and women who feel as though they had temporarily escaped from a Mississippi prison and who think they may be jailed when they get back home.” They matched Wallace in fervor, towing behind them as an exhibit of democratic devotion a burned-out replica of Mickey Schwerner’s station wagon. On the long ride north, they had reviewed legalistic primers on why the regular Democrats in their state had forfeited legitimacy (“IV. B. 2. There was not a single Negro at the State Convention”), and they soon deployed in best Sunday dress as folk lobbyists among the incoming delegations. Summer volunteer Dennis Sweeney escorted MFDP representatives to search out delegates from his home state of Oregon. SNCC staff member Charles Cobb, architect of the summer Freedom Schools, wangled meetings with Massachusetts delegates who reflected the cautious sympathy of Governor Endicott Peabody, son of “Mother Peabody” from the spring crusade to St. Augustine.

  With Victoria Gray of Hattiesburg, Fannie Lou Hamer had flown ahead to tell her story before a panel of historians at New York’s Town Hall. She reached Atlantic City for Saturday morning breakfast with a delegate targeted as a swing vote in the Mississippi dispute. Vera Canson of Sacramento, one of two Californians and seven Negroes assigned to the Credentials Committee, absorbed a preview of Hamer’s testimony in open torment. California Democrats had resolved during the summer project to support the MFDP challenge, but Governor Pat Brown expressed second thoughts about the resolution before leaving to see President Johnson that afternoon. Canson was moved by Hamer and yet mindful of larger pressures on her role; what was just for Mississippi might not be wise for the national party.

  Reports on scores of wavering Democrats bombarded MFDP counsel Joseph Rauh just before his presentation to the Credentials Committee. When an NBC correspondent rushed in to shout, “Joe, they’ve screwed you!” Rauh replied, “My god, already?” before learning that convention managers were preparing a room too small for television. Rauh’s strategy needed cameras—not so much to win initial votes as to fix an impression of Mississippi that would last through the chaotic politics of a national convention.

  His protest percolated secretly by telephone into the Oval Office. “This is a helluva thing to be taking up with you,” confessed Walter Jenkins to the President, “but I’m kind of scared to be making a decision by myself.” He said the prepared room was big enough only for one pool camera, and that “the television people are raising hell” for separate ones. Johnson backed the single camera to minimize attention for party disputes, saying they needed to accommodate only the rival delegations. Jenkins then explained that the site was expressly chosen to hold only the testifying witnesses, and that “Joe Rauh is raising hell” over the exclusion of his MFDP clients. Conceding the point on merit, Jenkins fretted with the President over the potential theatrics of white and Negro Mississippians intermingled in a larger space. “Rauh will storm the room,” Johnson feared.

  Jenkins had Democratic officials, including party chairman John Bailey, holding on other lines, “kind of shook up” by Rauh’s arguments about the arduous journey of the MFDP challengers from Mississippi and how “it will be awful hard to get ’em to accept any compromise if you don’t even let ’em see what’s going on.” After a half hour’s anguish over several calls, the President authorized Rauh to have the ballroom and the cameras. “I don’t give a damn if he puts on a little show,” he said, “as long as he just don’t wreck us.” Setting a pattern for the week, Johnson ordered confidants to deny flatly his involvement in Atlantic City matters large or small. “I never heard of it,” declared the President. “…My name’s Joe Glutz, and you haven’t talked down here.”

  ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON, the MFDP challengers filed into seats directly across from the opposing Mississippi regulars. “We have only an hour to tell you a story of tragedy and terror in Mississippi,” Rauh began. He faced the Credentials Committee as a comfortable peer, owning one of its 110 votes himself as a delegate from the District of Columbia. To counter the notion that Mississippi’s regular Democrats were “legal,” he emphasized the freewheeling independence of American political parties and addressed the committee as a jury of political choice. (His printed brief for the MFDP cheerfully quoted a statement by Mississippi’s Democratic chairman that the convention “could seat a dozen dead dodos brought there in silver caskets and nobody could do anything about it.”) Rauh summoned a hurried parade of witnesses to support his assertion that MFDP delegates were not only deserving and loyal but “willing to die” for the party’s cause. Aaron Henry told of wholesale persecution over the right to vote, and accused party regulars of tending an airtight white supremacy that confined Mississippi to a garrison at the bottom rank of states (“On them is the blood and responsibility…”). Rev. Edwin King followed with firsthand accounts of white Mississippians (“…over one hundred ministers and college teachers have been forced to leave the state.…I have been imprisoned. I have been been beaten…”), after which former governor David Lawrence of Pennsylvania asked delicately from the chair for more on party procedures and less on the state’s “general life.” Rauh objected that the regular party’s everyday terror was “what I want the credentials committee to hear.”

  He called Fannie Lou Hamer, who limped forward on her polio-damaged left hip to place her purse on the witness table as attendants pinned a microphone to her cotton dress. Hamer launched her story: “It was the 31st of August in 1962 that eighteen of us traveled twenty-six miles to the county courthouse in Indianola to try to register to try to become first-class citizens. We was met in Indianola by Mississippi men, highway patrolmens…the bus driver was charged that day with driving a bus the wrong color….” She told in four sentences how her attempt started earthquakes by nightfall.

  My husband came and said the plantation owner was raising cain because I had tried to register, and before he quit talking the plantation owner came, and said, “Fannie Lou, do you know—did Pap tell you what I said?”

  I said, “Yes, sir.”

  He said, “I mean that,” he said. “If you don’t go down and withdraw your registration, you will have to leave.”

  She stared straight at the bank of Credentials Committee delegates, flouting norms of polished authority with her unlettered grammar. Words that first seemed a masquerade of Aesop rose toward the spare cadence of a biblical text, packing abstract force into stories of household strife.

  And I addressed him and told him and said, “I didn’t try to register for you. I tried to register for myself.” I had to leave that same night.r />
  On the 10th of September, 1962, sixteen bullets was fired into the home of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Tucker for me. That same night two girls were shot in Ruleville, Mississippi. Also Mr. Joe McDonald’s house was shot in.

  And in June, the 9th, 1963, I had attended a voter-registration workshop, was returning back to Mississippi. Ten of us was traveling by the Continental Trailway bus. When we got to Winona…

  She recalled the Winona incident from the first commotion (“I stepped off the bus to see what was happening”) to the steadily approaching dread in jail. “I began to hear the sounds of licks and screams,” Hamer testified. “…I was carried out of that cell into another cell where they had two Negro prisoners. The State Highway Patrolman ordered the first Negro to take the blackjack.” Then, near the end of her allotted eight minutes, Hamer vanished from television screens. “We will return to this scene in Atlantic City,” said correspondent Edwin Newman from a control desk, “but now we switch to the White House and NBC’s Robert Goralski.”