Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  ON WEDNESDAY MORNING, the MFDP delegation regathered amidst second thoughts about the compromise and rumors that the administration might relax some of the insulting details. Rauh told his friend Senator Humphrey that “the dumb bastards on your side—and I’m sure it wasn’t you, Hubert—chose our two people instead of letting them choose their own two people.” Humphrey dragged himself back to work, saying he was so battered that “I honestly don’t care too much anymore” about Johnson’s test for vice president, and Rauh joined a phalanx of speakers at Union Temple Baptist. He urged the delegates to reconsider the compromise, as did Senator Morse and Aaron Henry. Bayard Rustin argued that they must broaden their outlook from moral protest to political alliance, during which Mendy Samstein of SNCC jumped up to shout, “You’re a traitor, Bayard!” In an atmosphere charged with rebellion, James Forman eyed Al Lowenstein to make sure he did not dare speak for the pragmatism of experts. Church lawyer Jack Pratt did endorse the compromise, saying rejectionists were failing to disclose its many side promises—federal hearings, training programs, interventions long sought—but a cold reception made him wander off to get drunk in a bar.

  Martin Luther King delivered a speech of formal neutrality. “I am not going to counsel you to accept or reject,” he said. “That is your decision.” He balanced a denunciation of Johnson’s remote-control mistreatment against the leavening hope for political progress, airing his conflicted private advice: “So, being a Negro leader, I want you to take this, but if I were a Mississippi Negro, I would vote against it.” The delegates gave King generous applause on both sides. Some were still pinching themselves that all the big shots were worked up over their decision, and some shared the distaste of the student movement for King’s straddling.

  Bob Moses swayed nearly all of them against the compromise. “We’re not here to bring politics to our morality,” he said, “but to bring morality to our politics.” One admirer said, “Moses could have been Socrates or Aristotle…. I mean he tore King up.” When the outsiders departed after the speeches, a few MFDP delegates ventured praise of the compromise as “getting somewhere,” but the larger voices—especially Victoria Gray, Annie Devine, and Fannie Lou Hamer—scorned it as a paltry temptation. Gray said people back home were counting on them to bring back gains deep enough and fair enough to hold against conditions in Mississippi. “When they got through talking and hoopin’ and hollerin’ and tellin’ me what a shame it was for me to do that,” recalled an old man from Issaquena County, “I hushed right then.” The delegates voted again to reject the Democratic offer. “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats,” said Hamer.

  Meanwhile, Walter Reuther left for Washington to deliver a report in the West Hallway outside President Johnson’s bedroom. No record survives of their eighty minutes alone, nor of Johnson’s initial state of mind after serial crises, but Reuther’s bracing news included an agreement by Martin Luther King to carry on a specialized LBJ campaign tour among Negroes. His morning reports accented the positive. There was no residual chance for a roll call on Mississippi. The Washington Post predicted that the “vast bulk” of Southern delegates would stay on, and praised Johnson as the invisible wizard who helped the Democratic party “finally rid itself of the divisive civil rights issue which has plagued every national convention beginning with 1948.”

  The President buzzed for his press secretary after Reuther departed, but Reedy, cringing with his own undelivered resignation, ducked three calls before learning that Johnson was racing forward again. The President summoned Humphrey and Senator Thomas Dodd of Connecticut by private jet from Atlantic City, then took off for a spontaneous midday walk with his beagles, Him and Her, and sixty trailing reporters. He sent the exhausted dogs to their kennel after four breakneck laps around the White House driveway—about a mile—then herded the reporters through eleven more laps without dispensing a vice presidential announcement. Other reporters followed the two senators around the Washington Monument and other tourist sites in a Johnson-mandated holding pattern.

  “One of them must now at last be chosen to stand within a heartbeat of the presidency,” campaign historian Theodore White recorded of the contenders’ late afternoon arrival in a single limousine. Johnson privately consoled Dodd as his decoy, extracted pledges of loyalty from Humphrey, and called Humphrey’s wife, Muriel, under bond of secrecy. “We’re going to nominate your boy,” he said. His abrupt order scrambled the entire presidential entourage for Atlantic City a day ahead of schedule. Reedy, who had released White House reporters to evening cocktails, relieved that Johnson had abandoned his mad fits about quitting that night, recalled them to sudden departure. He replaced for safety reasons an inebriated member of the press pool who nearly walked into a helicopter blade.

  Johnson announced Humphrey within hours, in person, to a pleasantly astonished convention that swept them jointly to nomination. The nominees returned to give acceptance speeches at the closing session Thursday night, when Robert Kennedy’s speech in Convention Hall indeed broke the dam, as Johnson had feared. An unbroken wave of applause lasted fully twenty-two minutes when Kennedy introduced the film about his brother with Shakespeare’s tribute to Romeo: “When he shall die/Take him and cut him out in little stars/And he will make the face of heaven so fine/That all the world will be in love with night/And pay no worship to the garish sun.” Johnson by then could welcome, even absorb, some of the outpouring as the secure successor to President Kennedy. “Party and nation both now gaze in wonder at the huge man,” wrote Theodore White for the CBS election special. “Yet no man but he knows all the measure of the huge distance he has come.”

  Private dramas continued in the background. George Reedy endured embarrassing bureaucratic torment after a colleague retrieved the unused letter of resignation from his White House desk and leaked it to reporters. Reedy strongly suspected aides to his agile rival Bill Moyers, but he could only say he was “puzzled” by news stories painting him as an idiot who “quit because Mr. Johnson had ignored his advice not to go to Atlantic City.” Any hint of the truth would have scandalized voters over a manic, unstable President. “I don’t want to louse things up,” he told Johnson morosely.

  Deke DeLoach applied successfully for Director Hoover to bestow secret letters of commendation upon the agents of his Special Squad, highlighting their undercover work to “make major changes in controlling admissions into the Convention Hall and thereby preclude infiltration of the illegal Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) delegates in large numbers into the space reserved for the regular Mississippi delegates.” Agents posing as reporters had broadcast warnings to agents posing as security guards, who helped strip the chairs from the Mississippi section and block entrances to the empty rows.

  Bob Moses and six others stood vigil in an aisle through the Kennedy tribute Thursday night, wearing black neck placards embossed with JFK’s silhouette and his exhortation, “Ask not what your country….” Moses was among many who already felt Atlantic City a bitter turning point for the Mississippi movement, if not for all of American politics. Outside, Fannie Lou Hamer led farewell choruses of “We Shall Overcome,” and fireworks from President Johnson’s gigantic fifty-sixth birthday celebration illuminated the whole Boardwalk, including portraits of Mississippi martyrs held aloft.

  President Johnson left the convention giddy with energy, having conquered political and mortal anxieties on a birthday never reached by most Johnson men. Racing from a helicopter to Air Force One, with the Humphreys as guests, he veered across the airfield toward a crowded security fence to lift Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham happily off the ground. “We’re going to Texas and we want you with us,” Johnson announced as he swept her aboard without regard for the luggage and corporate jet she left behind. All the trappings of government flew from Atlantic City to the LBJ Ranch, where on Friday the President whirled among the vistas, gadgets, and livestock of his domain. He dressed Senator Humphrey in an LBJ-sized ranch outfit—“I looked ridicu
lous and I felt ridiculous as I smiled wanly from under a cowboy hat,” Humphrey recalled—and abruptly commandeered six other guests, including Katharine Graham, to visit two venerable kinfolk in a ramshackle house down the road. “Cousin Oriole, wake up!” shouted Johnson, banging on the screened porch where he sank into a nap as soon as he got homecoming hugs. To his party, seated near the sleeping President, Aunt Jessie Hatcher recalled that even as a small boy young Lyndon sat in the front and held the reins on donkey rides. “He still does,” quipped Humphrey.

  Cousin Oriole Bailey told them that in order to get her chores done back in the old days she had staked toddler Lyndon outside in the dusty yard, where he played to the end of the tether rope and pulled on it to go farther.

  35

  “We see the giants…”

  AHANDFUL OF NATIONAL CORRESPONDENTS proceeded directly from the crush of Atlantic City to the hot Snopesian stillness of Danielsville, Georgia (pop. 362), for the Lemuel Penn murder trial. Reporter Paul Good counted twenty-three Coca-Cola signs hanging from buildings around the courthouse lawn, where a historical marker noted the first use of surgical ether by local-born physician Crawford Long in 1842. An uncovered staircase rose along the exterior wall into an unlit courtroom balcony strictly segregated for Negroes, but the judge otherwise ran an informal trial to the point of praising from the bench the lunch dishes that the women’s club had thrown together for the week’s occasion.

  When prosecutors presented a string of FBI witnesses on the conspicuous vigilante rampage by Klavern 244, a defense lawyer casually scoffed, “There’s no crime in Georgia against intimidating colored people.” Garage owner Herbert Guest, whom the state grand jury had declined to indict, testified that he had lost all memory of his sworn statement. Loretta Lackey sat mute on the stand, refusing instruction to speak, but she could not endure testimony by a defense psychiatrist that impeached her husband’s confession as the delusion of a subnormal “paranoid personality” who had turned against his friends, possibly out of anxiety over a misshapen head. In the hallway she cried out, “Doctor, does that mean my husband is crazy?”

  The defense case, which consumed less than two hours on Friday, September 4, portrayed not only the defendants but the entire region as victims of big shots such as the bushwhacked Lieutenant Colonel Penn and his companions. “I wasn’t no officer,” summarized the lead defense lawyer. “Officers have a pretty good deal, we all know that.” In a peroration—“my mind is boiling”—his co-counsel exhorted the jurors to stand against “the untold resources of the federal government” and its “howling mob” of preying carpetbaggers that had swarmed down from FBI headquarters under instructions, “Don’t come back until you bring us white meat!” The jury recessed to a truck stop for Friday evening supper and then acquitted the defendants Cecil Myers and Howard Sims eighty-seven minutes later. Humiliated state authorities aborted the separate murder trial scheduled for Lackey. To a local judge who complained that the FBI’s wasted prosecution “cost my good county several hundred dollars” and had brought down hostile suggestions that it be “wiped off the map” from as far away as Yokohama, Japan,* J. Edgar Hoover replied that the FBI had merely assisted a prosecution handled by Georgians.

  FBI officials “telephonically advised” FBI headquarters of exact developments: 8:45 P.M., jury back from supper; 10:12 P.M., verdict returned. Director Hoover regularly ordered notices on the Penn trial sent to Walter Jenkins at the White House. Earlier on September 4—his first full day on the job following the resignation of Robert Kennedy—Acting Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach wrote President Johnson that creation of a new federal grand jury in Mississippi was “certain to raise speculation” that the FBI had solved the Neshoba County triple murder. “This is not so,” Katzenbach emphatically warned. The grand jury was merely a tool for Inspector Joe Sullivan in his investigation into “a conspiracy on the part of law enforcement officials and others,” he wrote. The cautionary note was aimed at Johnson himself, because the eager President had publicly forecast imminent success in the Mississippi case.

  In Atlanta that same Friday, Martin Luther King interrupted his glancing home life—and his campaign for a personal audience with Pope Paul VI two weeks hence—to take a phone call from the Miami training camp of heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali. It was Chauncey Eskridge, the urbane Chicago lawyer who, while working for King since the narrow escape of his Alabama income tax trial in 1960, had also represented Elijah Muhammad through several unpopular religious freedom cases, including the draft imprisonment of his son Wallace and a lawsuit for the right to buy Nation of Islam poster ads on Chicago public transit vehicles. Through Muhammad, Eskridge was working to dislodge and replace the syndicate of Louisville businessmen who had managed the career of the pre-Muslim Cassius Clay. When he introduced his two famous clients by telephone, King congratulated the young boxer on his recent marriage and Ali invited King to his rematch against Sonny Liston. By the FBI wiretap log, Ali then assured King that he “is keeping up with MLK, that MLK is his brother, and [Ali is] with him 100 but can’t take any chances.” The buoyant Ali urged King to “take care of himself” and “watch out for them whities.”

  Nearly five years later, from a Texas courtroom, this passing courtesy call opened a crack to vast chambers of subterranean history. With Ali then stripped of the heavyweight title for refusing to fight in the Vietnam War, and his appeals lawyers questioning whether FBI wiretaps might have tainted the government’s criminal prosecution of Ali, FBI witness R. R. Nichols testified that the September 4 call had been captured on a wiretap that Nichols supervised on King himself. This marked the first official acknowledgment of FBI operations against King or the movement. Instantly, Hoover launched a crossfire of public denial. He branded columnist Carl Rowan a “racist” for writing truthfully that the Bureau bugged King’s hotel rooms and “shadowed [him] right up to the time he was slain.” He blamed the late Robert Kennedy for initiating—and King for deserving—any unspecified surveillance, and banished Special Agent Nichols for his slip of candor to silence in the Oklahoma City FBI office. By these and other scattershot intimidations, the Director tamed public speculation on the sensational topic without further breach of secrecy. Not until 1975, three years after Hoover himself was dead, did congressional investigations begin to uncover in retrospect the outlines of the FBI’s covert crusade.

  IN ATLANTA, as King chatted with Muhammad Ali, members of the SNCC Executive Committee opened debate on a new course after Atlantic City. Young SNCC veterans saw the Democratic convention as a “watershed” or “end of innocence,” after which “things could never be the same.” Now that the Democrats had deflected the rare chance to align a major political party openly with the movement, Bob Moses forlornly predicted, national politics would submerge the race question into other issues—order, urban adjustment, world affairs—where its democratic clarity would recede. “Well, I’ll give fifty years for this to work itself out,” he sighed. Some students expressed shock that Atlantic City had snuffed out their eager expectations—“it never occurred to us that our delegation would be turned down”—while others claimed to have known all along that the power brokers would undercut their cause. Nearly all leaders bristled against the Johnson compromise. Even the steadfast chairman John Lewis called it a blow to the movement’s long-standing strategy of seeking redress from the federal government. Charles Sherrod of the southwest Georgia SNCC project railed against the constant pressure on the movement to curtail just claims in order to beat Goldwater, or comfort those who fretted about riots. “Who holds the power?” he wrote. “Let them be responsible…. We are a country of racists with the racist heritage, a racist economy, a racist language, a racist religion, a racist philosophy of living, and we need a naked confrontation with ourselves.”

  This was the unifying passion of telescoped history. Having begun in 1960 as a campus-based clearinghouse for the sit-ins, with one paid staff member during its first year, SNCC had grown after the Freedom
Rides to a cadre of sixteen ex-students through 1962, then from seventy by the end of 1963 to 144 far-flung field organizers by the end of Freedom Summer, all on subsistence wages. With expansion outrunning both the identity and structure of the original SNCC family, the September debates tested ideas of purity against ambition. Some wanted to hire professional fund-raisers to maintain a temporarily bountiful treasury—$165,000 in one New York account alone. Others, shunning “hired guns,” wanted to keep relying on the Friends of SNCC support groups that had sprung up in Northern cities. James Forman said the support groups could be rewarded with inside reports on SNCC operations, but Moses argued that “the problem is deeper than that.” Mindful of the philosophical split with Al Lowenstein over the summer project, he asked, “What is our responsibility to Friends of SNCC?” In return for the money and volunteers they sent south, did the support offices deserve representation in SNCC decisions? Could they mount their own SNCC demonstrations in, say, Los Angeles or Boston?

  Divisions tended toward a Moses faction and a Forman faction. Each one advocated discipline against glamour. Moses wanted to step back from all that Atlantic City represented—press conferences, lobbying, clamoring for Washington’s attention—to the “normal” movement work of Freedom Schools and registration drives in communities of hard-core oppression, where personal risk sorted out matters of control. Forman wanted to weed out self-starting romantics to forge SNCC in an unabashed quest for power. To organize around the experience of certain oppression, he would reject the untrustworthy alliances of Atlantic City along with proposals to give voting privileges within SNCC to new, “unproven” staff. There were pressing applications from more than a hundred summer volunteers who said staff wages would allow them to forgo college for the school year.