Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  Six days earlier in Oslo, addressing what he called “man’s ethical infantilism,” King had used the Greek myth of Ulysses to illustrate his belief that it was better to overcome the siren music of evil by listening to the melodies of Orpheus than by stuffing wax into one’s ears. Now he preached in the Harlem armory on his favorite biblical parable of the rich man Dives, condemned because he never noticed the humble beggar Lazarus outside his door. King did not mention his resolve to go straight to Selma, but six times he tore himself from the mountain. “Oh, there are some humble people down in the valley!” he cried, in his distinctive mix of despair and inspiration. “…I go back with a faith that the wheels of the gods grind slowly but exceedingly fine,” he said. “I go back with a faith that you shall reap what you sow. With that faith, I go back to the valley.”

  He stopped off at the White House on the way, transported Friday afternoon in Governor Rockefeller’s private plane. On the other end, aides briefed President Johnson to steer King off three politically troublesome courses: his criticism of the triple murder prosecution, his support for unseating the five incumbent Mississippi congressmen, and the “statements he made abroad about an economic blockade of South Africa and a perhaps unfortunate linkage of Mississippi and South Africa.”* Johnson chose instead to emphasize their common agenda. To illustrate the Texas roots of his new poverty program, he showed King and Coretta the family heirloom letter to his Grandfather Baines from Texas hero Sam Houston in 1857 (“…paper currency will not pass in heaven. It must be the coin…from an honest heart”) and promised to send them a copy. The President said he had signed the new civil rights law and Justice Tom Clark had “rounded up nine votes” to uphold it, and he made a point of having Clark’s son Ramsey, an assistant attorney general, nearby for introduction as yet another Texan in the fight. “Now what’s Georgia doing?” the President asked King. “You ought to get back down there and get them to work.”

  When King pushed for legislation to secure Negro voting rights in the South, Johnson embraced that goal for his administration but deflected it beyond 1965. He did attend to social courtesies by walking to a satellite office to retrieve Ralph and Juanita Abernathy, along with Andrew Young and Walter Fauntroy, for a handshake and a brief return to the Oval Office. Then he was off to light the national Christmas tree, and the Kings flew to Atlanta for the Nobel homecoming.

  THAT SUNDAY AFTERNOON, December 20, Malcolm X first encountered Fannie Lou Hamer at a small, integrated church rally in New York. SNCC’s Freedom Singers performed movement songs, including a tribute to Vice President Oginga Odinga of the newly independent Kenya, and Hamer asked the audience why the United States could intervene to protect white settlers in the Congo but not Mississippi Negroes who sought the ballot. She told her story of the Winona jail beatings, which was new to Malcolm. He soon gained the floor to speak. “When I listened to Mrs. Hamer,” he said, “a black woman—could be my mother, my sister, my daughter—describe what they had done to her in Mississippi, I asked myself how in the world can we ever expect to be respected as men when we know that we will allow something like that to be done to our women and we do nothing about it?” He belittled a nonviolent response. “The language they were speaking to Mrs. Hamer…,” he declared, “was the language of a brute, the language of someone who has no sense of morality, who absolutely ignores law…. Let’s learn his language. If his language is with a shotgun, get a shotgun…a rifle, get a rifle…a rope, get a rope…. Speak his language. There’s nothing wrong with that. If something was wrong with that language, the federal government would have stopped the cracker from speaking it to you and me.”

  Malcolm half apologized. “I know I’m in the church,” he said. “I probably shouldn’t be talking like this, but Jesus himself was ready to turn the synagogue inside out and upside down when things weren’t going right.” Malcolm said America measured champions—except for Negroes—by their willingness to fight when provoked. “Your own Patrick Henry said ‘liberty or death,’” he told whites in the audience, “and George Washington got the cannons out, and all the rest of them that you taught me to worship as my heroes, they were fighters….

  “But now,” said Malcolm, “when the time comes for our freedom, you want…somebody who’s nonviolent and forgiving and peaceful and long-suffering. I don’t go for that. I say a black man’s freedom is as valuable as a white man’s freedom.” He called for an American Mau Mau, modeled on Kenya’s feared warriors, to go as vigilantes where the government refused to secure justice. He took it as a sign that the nonviolent SNCC Freedom Singers sang a song about Odinga of Kenya, saying violence worked there for the Mau Mau. “He’s not humble. He’s not nonviolent,” Malcolm said of Odinga. “But he’s free.”

  Malcolm presented Hamer and the Freedom Singers to his own rally that night at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. There he elaborated on the Mau Mau formula with a story, almost certainly apocryphal, of a Mau Mau leader who asked three hundred followers how many were willing to kill for freedom, and when fifty stepped forward, ordered them first to kill the other 250. “I go for that,” said Malcolm, but he recognized that the suggested purge of assimilationist “Uncle Toms” applied more aptly to the Nation’s internecine wars than to likely vengeance against white authorities in Winona or elsewhere. He also predicted, accurately, that his Mau Mau comments to the church audience would dominate the next day’s news.*

  Facing representatives of the nonviolent movement, Malcolm hedged. “If you’re going to get yourself a .45 and start singing ‘We Shall Overcome,’ I’m with you,” he told Hamer at the Audubon. But a few days later, he subordinated all questions of method to the goal. “I’m not interested in either ballots or bullets,” he said. “I’m interested in freedom…. If Negroes can get freedom nonviolently, good. But that’s a dream. Even King calls it a dream.”

  In Atlanta, King was debating how to cooperate with the controversial MFDP congressional challenge. He knew most members of the House would scarcely welcome a vote to bar their Mississippi colleagues. Moreover, he retained bruised memories of being scorned by movement students for having the high-level connections they now wanted to borrow, and he was aware that SNCC and MFDP were virtually paralyzed with dissension since Atlantic City. Bob Moses was opposing the challenge as a surrender to “glamour” politics (VIPs, lobbyists, and lawyers) and withdrew from deliberations; Hollis Watkins and other young SNCC veterans went back to college courses. On December 21, as MFDP chairman Lawrence Guyot announced in Jackson that an insolvent Mississippi movement was awaiting a promised donation from King, Clarence Jones told King that leaders of the congressional challenge were wary that he would “steal the show.” Still, Jones urged, the petitions were sound and creative. On December 24, when Rep. William Ryan revealed that seventeen co-sponsors would offer a preliminary resolution for Mississippi members to “stand aside” pending review of election credentials, King agreed to send House members a letter of support. The novel challenge, he wrote, addressed “the root cause of Mississippi injustices—the total denial of the right to vote on account of race.”

  In Boston, Leon 4X Ameer took refuge on December 25 in the Sherry Biltmore Hotel. Ameer had served the Nation of Islam as a trained pugilist, assigned as bodyguard to heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali until he had defected to Malcolm. “It was he,” Malcolm said publicly, “who heard Elijah Muhammad, Jr.,” tell enforcement squads “that I should have been killed, that my tongue should have been put in an envelope and mailed back to Chicago by now.” Marked as Malcolm’s agent, lured to the hotel lobby with a pretext call from a French reporter seeking the inside story, Ameer stepped off the elevator into an ambush by Captain Clarence X and three subordinates from Muhammad’s Temple No. 11. An armed detective arrested the four attackers before severe damage was done, but a follow-up squad broke into Ameer’s hotel room that same Christmas night and left him battered, brain-damaged, and unconscious in the bathtub, to be discovered by the morning housekeepers.

&nbs
p; At year’s end, the New York Times reported on its front page that influential Atlantans were agitating against a January dinner planned to honor the local Nobel Prize winner. Integrated social gatherings remained controversial in many cities,*but this exposure stung Atlanta’s boosterish civic pride. The Times story forced the Atlanta Constitution to publish its first acknowledgment of controversy that had been stewing in high circles since the announcement of King’s award in October. Anonymous business leaders grumbled that King was picketing a local pen factory over segregated labor practices. Former mayor William Hartsfield answered that he would “certainly hate to see my town held up as a city which refused to honor a Nobel Prize winner,” and other supporters offered statements of pinched or brave hospitality. Ralph McGill, the Constitution’s outspoken publisher and one of four sponsors behind the King tribute, deflected his own newspaper’s questions with a formal “no comment.”

  King himself, tired of being the honored leper at a forced celebration, told family that he did not care whether or not Atlanta pulled off the testimonial, and the FBI wiretaps on his home picked up no comments on the subject. They revealed King to be depressed instead about the lingering effects of the Oslo trip. Ralph Abernathy was refusing to go to Selma. He did not see the need for a new movement there, and in fact was instructing the SCLC staff not to disturb any of his numerous relatives in the Alabama counties nearby. When publicity about the Nobel banquet erupted from the New York Times article on December 29, wiretaps overheard Coretta King worrying about King’s depressed mental state and the fight with Abernathy, seeking advice from Andrew Young about how to relieve pressure on her husband.

  Late Monday night, December 28, a New York FBI agent took notes on a talk-show appearance by Malcolm X: “He said he considered himself a true Muslim who believed in brotherhood of all people, whereas NOI [Nation of Islam] Muslims do not believe in brotherhood of anyone but Negroes. When asked why he preaches that Negroes should take arms to protect themselves, Malcolm said that just because he believes in brotherhood does not mean that he should not protect himself.”

  On Tuesday, Malcolm went by train to Philadelphia, where he told a group of black reporters they were “almost as bad” as the white press about distorting news from Africa. Philadelphia FBI agents fielded a report that Malcolm would be shot that night. He took ten bodyguards to tell an audience of thirty that he was forming an alliance with Elijah Muhammad’s son Wallace. Outside the Sheraton Hotel that night, a dozen members of the Nation’s Temple No. 12 jumped from cars and brawled through the entourage, knocking three to the ground before two Philadelphia detectives drove them off. Malcolm called home when he reached radio station WDAS. “Be careful,” he told his wife. “Keep those things near the door, and don’t let anyone in until I get there.” The detectives posted officers with shotguns outside the studio for his midnight appearance on the Joe Rainey talk show.

  Two days later, on New Year’s Eve in Harlem, Malcolm X received a delegation of thirty-seven young people from McComb, Mississippi. Northern supporters had raised funds to bring members of the summer project’s extraordinary Freedom School to New York for a broadening tour, which included a stop by the Hotel Theresa to visit the man with ferocious reputation and X for a last name. Malcolm talked to them at first of civics. “This generation, especially of our people, has a burden,” he told them. “…The most important thing that we can learn to do today is think for ourselves.” He ranged at length over World War II history and the importance of Africa, until exchanges on the summer siege in McComb distracted him. “Excuse me for raising my voice,” said Malcolm, “but this thing, you know, gets me upset. Imagine that. A country that’s supposed to be a democracy, supposed to be for freedom, and…they want to draft you and put you in the Army and send you to Saigon to fight for them, and then you’ve got to turn around and all night long discuss how you’re going to just get a right to register and vote without being murdered. Why, it’s the most hypocritical government since the world began!”

  He told the Mississippi students that their elders in civil rights organizations had failed them—failed to protect them, failed to stand with them, failed to respond vigorously to the murders of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman. “That’s what split the Muslim movement,” said Malcolm. Almost offhandedly, he stretched a link from the McComb students, heirs to the first rural foray by Bob Moses in 1961, to his own troubled quest for stand-up sectarian vigilantes in Los Angeles. “Some of our brothers got hurt, and nothing was done about it,” said Malcolm. “And those of us who wanted to do something about it were kept from doing something about it. So we split.”

  39

  To the Valley: The Downward King

  ON A SATURDAY MORNING drive from Atlanta to Selma, King mollified his sullen and reluctant companion with ruminations on the line of succession. He told Ralph Abernathy that President Johnson had worried out loud about dying in office before Hubert Humphrey became vice president on January 20, because until then a vacated presidency would fall first to the failing House Speaker, John McCormack, and second to the frail Senate elder, Carl Hayden. He recalled that Johnson had explored various remedies. “If he had sense enough to do it, I should have sense enough to do it,” King added, saying he wanted to make formal arrangements for Abernathy to succeed him as SCLC president. Abernathy scoffed and protested, short of refusal. He said he had no ambition beyond shared leadership, and figured to be killed along with King anyway, but he did accept the argument that no one else stood a chance to hold together the contentious personalities on the staff. King said he had not expected to live through his summer trip to Mississippi. As he and Abernathy traded raucous snippets of imaginary orations for each other’s funeral, a common amusement among SCLC preachers, King parlayed the White House analogy into a promise from Abernathy to accept formal designation as his heir.

  Spirits were improved by the time King and Abernathy pulled into the driveway of their Selma hosts, Sullivan and Jean Jackson. The Atlantans made a show of inspecting their joint quarters in the guest room, and the Jacksons made a fuss over King’s new Norwegian wristwatch. The four friends shared many ties. Jean Jackson’s great-aunt, Ethel Dinkins,* had been Coretta King’s childhood music teacher; her best friend had married Ralph Abernathy’s college roommate, Rev. Howard Creecy, and she had grown up with Juanita Abernathy. Her husband, Sullivan—“Sully” to King and Abernathy—had testified with Sam Boynton at the 1958 federal hearings on the exclusion of professional Negroes from the Selma voting roles. Since then, chastened by hostile and enduring reaction from local white people, Jackson had confined himself to dentistry and a supporting role in politics, playing straight man for the running jokes of movement preachers. His sister and dental hygienist, Marie Foster, ran the tiny literacy and citizenship classes in Selma, funneling students to Septima Clark’s SCLC workshops near Savannah. Foster worked in the Dallas County Voters League with Margaret Moore, the intrepid schoolteacher who had offered lodging to the lone SNCC registration worker, Bernard “Little Gandhi” Lafayette, in 1962.

  Andrew Young moved into the guest room of Amelia Boynton, who lived across the street from the Jacksons. On this Saturday, January 2, a concerted movement was scheduled at last to take up two distinct appeals that had ripened from the Birmingham church bombing sixteen months earlier. One was the grand strategic plan for a “nonviolent army” to win minority voting rights throughout Alabama, which Diane Nash Bevel and James Bevel had proposed as a monument of justice to the four murdered girls. The other was a plaintive local request from Amelia Boynton about Dunn’s Rest Home for the aged. For attending the first Selma Freedom Day, three weeks after the church bombing, two Dunn’s employees had been fired, photographed (to warn prospective employers), and roughed up so badly that sympathetic colleagues walked off jobs paying $18 per week. The result was that “forty colored ladies of Selma…cannot get employment in their hometown,” Boynton had written Martin Luther King. “We need your help very much, and we are asking
that your organization please give us ONE HIGH POWERED SEWING MACHINE.” Boynton and the Dallas County Voters League undertook to sustain the former Dunn’s attendants as home seamstresses.

  The first step in January tested the most basic power to move. There had been no regular Monday meetings of the Voters League for six months, under Judge James Hare’s sweeping injunction that forbade discussion of racial issues at any gathering of “three or more persons.” The blatantly unconstitutional order remained in effect during leisurely review by the federal courts, but King’s scouts in Selma saw a crack in the wall. Like Birmingham two years earlier, Selma’s local government was in factional transition. In October, the first mayor from outside the agrarian gentry—Joe Smitherman, a young refrigerator salesman without college education—had assumed office as a moderate, image-conscious segregationist, pledged to seek industrial jobs to replace farm belt losses. Smitherman had installed a police and fire chief, Wilson Baker, who had narrowly lost an election to the reigning sheriff, Jim Clark, and the Smitherman-Baker town crowd advocated the polite, jail-’em-with-kindness approach that had stymied Martin Luther King in Albany, Georgia.* They claimed jurisdication within the Selma town limits against the county hard-liners of Sheriff Clark, who had enforced Judge Hare’s meeting ban everywhere—to the point of breaking up a strategy session in the Negro Elks Hall of enlisted men from nearby Clark Air Base. Hushed negotiations addressed details down to the control of Selma sidewalks outside Sheriff Clark’s domain in the Dallas County courthouse, where aspiring voters must attempt to register. In a small story on New Year’s Day—“Dr. King Due to Head Alabama Vote Drive”—the New York Times had reported that Wilson Baker considered the Hare injunction to be suspended in Selma during legal challenge by the U.S. Department of Justice. King’s campaign, noted the Times, “is expected to last about six months.”