Pillar of Fire

by Taylor Branch

  FOR TWO DAYS in Atlanta, Bob Moses again refused pleas to address SNCC’s future course. Some 250 staff members, nearly half from Mississippi, had gathered in the old chapel pews of Gammon Theological Seminary for freedom songs mixed with often raucous debates among ardent newcomers and weary or jail-damaged veterans, with more than a little drinking in the wings. Ella Baker announced that someone had stolen valuables from her satchel. John Lewis and the leadership first pushed through a statement of identity: that henceforth the basic unit of SNCC would be the paid staff member, superseding the campus-based coordinating committees from the sit-ins. Structurally, this meant that SNCC could be governed by majority vote instead of brotherhood consensus, which favored the ambitions of James Forman and others to build a disciplined political “field machine.” Forman hailed the decision as a “working-class victory” over dreamy self-sacrifice. Most of the field staff sprang from the poor of the South, which made the focused constituency a runaway hit with all SNCC’s factions—“floaters” and religious purists, as well as Forman’s “hard-liners.” Speakers championed them in language destined to spread across the political spectrum. They castigated liberals as treacherous or naive, and rejected as misguided SNCC’s history of appeals to a just national purpose in the federal government.

  Jesse Morris, a staff worker from Mississippi, formally proposed that the governing executive committee be restricted to black Southerners without a college education, which touched off six hours of heated argument late Friday night, February 12. Forman called the debate “stormy, even traumatic, and at times totally confusing.” Some ridiculed SNCC for limiting its own franchise; others shouted that SNCC should make good on rhetoric about giving local people the power to be free. Fannie Lou Hamer questioned the deeper meanings of prestructured votes, saying, “I just don’t understand.” Several hours into the fracas, Morris brought forward a dozen newcomers from Mississippi, saying he had bolstered their courage with whiskey to prove that unlettered people could speak effectively before large groups. The qualifications issue remained unresolved when Moses at last stepped forward.

  “I have a message for you,” he said quietly. “I have changed my name. I will no longer be known as Bob Moses.” These words caused an electrified hush in the chapel.

  He said they should go back to the Morris proposal, which highlighted their direction. “If you want to keep a man a slave, then give him the vote and tell him he’s free,” said Moses. “If you vote for that executive committee and don’t stay here to work out the programs, then don’t tell me you’re free.” It might take five months or five years, he said, but they would not give the time. The real program would be left as usual to the dominant officers and dialecticians, the very people whom the enshrined but intimidated field staff could not address without the fortification of alcohol.

  “I am drunk,” said Moses. Though he clearly was not, he acted out stumbles and slurs while delivering a poetic reverie on symbols of power and spirit in a democratic movement. Moses said people in SNCC faced so many paradoxes to keep hold of themselves in a whole world gone mad like Mississippi, which feared nonviolence as murder and excused murder as order. He talked of growing up in Harlem under family stress so severe they had to call an ambulance for his mother, and recalled hearing his father scream at the doctors, “She’s not crazy! She’s not crazy! You’re the ones who’re crazy!” He said years later they had picked up his father, raving on the street that he was the actor Gary Cooper, and had taken him to Bellevue Hospital for extended psychiatric treatment. He told stories of his father loving the whole family very much.

  Moses looked up. “I want you to eat and drink,” he said. He solemnly passed around a block of cheese and a jug of wine. Wordless, some pretended to drink after the jug was empty. “Some of you need to leave,” said Moses. They were becoming creatures of the media, contending for power, and to avoid all that he was adopting his mother’s maiden name. “From now on, I am Bob Parris,” he said, “and I will no longer speak to white people.”

  He left the chapel before anyone could respond. “Did he mean it?” someone whispered. Interpretations ranged from sacramental cleansing and mental breakdown to staged parody. Some thought he was abdicating his name and place because of the suffering he felt he left too close in his wake. Others thought it was brilliant, and ran off to see whether he would answer to Parris. The former Bob Moses never attended another SNCC meeting.

  MALCOLM X returned home late Saturday from eight days in Europe. A neighbor called in a fire alarm at 2:46 A.M. the next morning, February 14, saying that noises of breaking glass awakened her to flames in the house across the driveway. The first Queens fire truck arrived at 2:50 A.M. to find Malcolm on the front sidewalk with a .25-caliber pistol, having hustled barefoot in underwear out the back door with his pregnant wife and four daughters, aged six months to six years. In the cold, four-year-old Qubilah complained of tear holes in her pajamas. Nearly an hour later, Malcolm returned inside with fire inspectors to retrieve a few clothes and his “insurance” tape recordings from the attic. He deposited his family with friends and caught an early morning flight to Detroit.

  He was intent on keeping his schedule, in part because he needed the speaking fees. FBI sources reported that his Detroit hosts summoned doctors with sedatives that made Malcolm sleep most of Sunday, and observed him receive backstage a bonus collection of $200 to help replace smoke-damaged clothes. In daily speeches that week, he made passing references to his desperate plight—hotly denouncing conspiracy theories that he had firebombed his own home,* and wishing out loud for a truce. (“Elijah Muhammad could stop the whole thing tomorrow, just by raising his hand,” he declared. “Really, he could.”) However, Malcolm curtailed public remarks about an internecine war too obscure for his audiences, and delivered instead sweeping statements of credo. “I have to straighten out my own position, which is clear…,” he said. “I don’t believe in any form of discrimination or segregation. I believe in Islam. I am a Muslim. And there’s nothing wrong with being a Muslim…. Those of you who are Christians probably believe in the same God.” He lectured on racialism he found pervasive, from congressional committees and judges to commanders “dropping bombs on dark-skinned people” in Asia, and by contrast he belittled the celebrated new civil rights law that left the federal government still powerless to protect Negroes seeking the right to vote in Alabama. “Think of this,” shouted Malcolm. “Those school children shouldn’t have to march.” He advocated world recognition and perspective for a race problem “so complex that it was impossible for Uncle Sam to solve it himself.”

  OVER THE WEEKEND in Selma, secret talks at the Hotel Albert produced a deal whereby Wilson Baker granted a parade permit for Monday the fifteenth—the second and last courthouse registration day of the month—and movement leaders in return agreed to confine their ranks to voting-age adults. The permit secured a record turnout of some fifteen hundred, stretched nearly ten blocks from the courthouse on Lauderdale Street. More than four hundred of these signed the appearance book for a future place in the registration line; ninety of those with early numbers completed applications to register. After classes, Selma’s Negro schoolteachers marched to the end of the line. Thirty laborers filed in behind them in uniforms reading, “Henry Brick Company.” Eight hundred students paraded by in salute.

  Reporters followed when King broke away to the neighboring county seat of Camden, where he walked along a line of seventy aspiring registrants from Gee’s Bend—mostly Petteways, from the extended rural clan that had first tried to register with Bernard Lafayette in 1963. Asked how they were faring, Monroe Petteway told King, “I filled out the form like I have three times before, but I can’t get nobody to vouch for me.” Under Alabama law, a new voter had to obtain a signed reference from one current voter in the county, and there were no registered voters among the Negro majority in Wilcox County. King led observers across the courthouse lawn to ask Sheriff P. C. “Lummy” Jenkins whether he would vouch
for Monroe Petteway, and Jenkins replied that doing so would not “look right” for him in local politics. King’s roving party drove back to Selma by way of Marion, where “about 150 Negroes were so inspired by Dr. King’s visit that they refused to leave the courthouse at the end of the day,” reported the New York Times. Deputies shoved them out with nightsticks after dark.

  When the registration board closed the appearance book for lunch on Tuesday, C. T. Vivian tried to lead a line of Negroes inside the courthouse to seek shelter from the rain. Sheriff Clark blocked him with a row of deputies who shoved the line down the steps Vivian kept climbing, preaching defiantly, until one of them slugged him in the mouth. They hauled him away, bleeding. By the time King tried to visit Vivian that afternoon at Good Samaritan Hospital, he had been treated and removed to the county jail. Nuns crowded around King in the white habits of the Sisters of Saint Joseph, eager to pose one by one for pictures. King tried to visit Vivian in the county jail, but was refused. That night, over vehement security objections from the staff, he addressed a voting rally in the rural wilderness of Gee’s Bend. There were late-night arguments about why no one could find a church in Lowndes County willing to host a mass meeting.

  Tensions rose on both sides. Segregationist sentiment shifted against the spectacle of authorized Negro marches, while movement leaders chafed over the negligible return in actual registered voters for so much effort. The Citizens Council published a full-page ad comparing the Communist party’s racial equality platform of 1928 with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, ending, “The similarity will certainly shock you.” Editors of the Selma Times-Journal, who had upbraided Sheriff Clark for violence, warned in a front-page editorial that the tolerant attitudes of the past month—“the ultimate expression of good faith by our white citizens”—were at risk because “outside forces” and “showmen” under King had pushed “all sound-thinking citizens perilously near the breaking point.” King, meanwhile, took ill with a fever. Chicago’s Daily Defender ran a banner headline: “Virus Fells King.” An FBI wiretap picked up Ralph Abernathy borrowing $500 from Harry Wachtel, saying King was sick and “completely broke.” On his way to Atlanta for home rest, King stopped by the Wednesday night mass meeting at Brown Chapel. “Selma still isn’t right!” he cried, in a speech reporters called his strongest to date. “We must engage in broader civil disobedience to bring the attention of the nation on Dallas County,” King declared. “It may well be we might have to march out of this church at night….”*

  At a strategy meeting of white people that night in Marion, irate sentiment prevailed to the extent that two substantial citizens were shouted down and physically assaulted for suggesting negotiations with local demonstrators. Perry County officials called upon Alabama state troopers for reinforcements, and sheriff’s deputies arrested SCLC project leader James Orange Thursday morning for contributing to the delinquency of young marchers. In response, Albert Turner of the Perry County Voters League urgently sought a big-name movement speaker from Selma to build the crowd for an evening mass meeting. He requested C. T. Vivian, whom Judge Thomas had just ordered released. Vivian replied that he could not risk jail again, being on weekend duty in King’s absence, but he finally agreed to drive over for a quick sermon. His audience overflowed Mount Zion Baptist, a small clapboard church off Marion’s courthouse square. The much-discussed plan was to walk to the jail less than a block away, sing a freedom song for the incarcerated James Orange, and disperse.It was a quick but dangerous venture in view of the darkness. Network news correspondents told their crews to return film cameras to their cars, so as not to provoke the hostile crowds milling outside. C. T. Vivian, who slipped out a rear door into a waiting car, noticed on the drive to Selma a number of flashing police lights speed by in the opposite direction.

  At 9:30 P.M., Albert Turner and Rev. James Dobynes of Marion led four hundred people two abreast from Mount Zion. They proceeded less than half a block before halting at a blockade of state troopers and other law enforcement officers. Over a bullhorn, Police Chief T. O. Harris ordered the marchers to disperse or return to the church. When Reverend Dobynes knelt to pray before retreat, a state trooper struck him in the head with a club and two others dragged him by the feet toward jail. Reporters, confined across the square, heard struggles in the darkness. Network news correspondents instantly sent crews to retrieve cameras, but bystanders clubbed down NBC’s Richard Valeriani with a severe head wound before they returned. Bystanders also beat two UPI photographers, destroyed their cameras, and sprayed the lenses of arriving film crews with black aerosol paint. No photographs survived. Streetlights went dark, and New York Times correspondent John Herbers reported by ear: “Negroes could be heard screaming and loud whacks rang through the square.”

  Only the first quarter of the march line had left the church. Those who fled back inside collided at the door with those rushing outside to see the commotion. Panic drove the ones trapped outside to flee toward buildings behind the church. Fifty state troopers overtook many of them, including eighty-two-year-old Cager Lee, who stumbled bleeding into Mack’s Cafe to find his daughter Viola and grandson Jimmy Lee. In utter chaos, some troopers chased two dozen marchers into the cafe while ten others pushed inside to chase them out. They expelled one crippled customer unharmed, overturned tables, smashed lights, dishes, customers, and marchers. The cafe owner saw troopers attack Cager Lee again in the kitchen. For trying to pull them off, Viola Jackson was beaten to the floor. Her son Jimmy Lee Jackson lunged to protect her. One trooper threw him against a cigarette machine, another shot him twice in the stomach, and then they cudgeled him back outside toward the bus station, where he collapsed. Jackson was the only gunshot victim among ten Negroes who were hospitalized. Several others lay injured in jail, including George Baker, an SCLC volunteer from Illinois. Reporters on the Marion square were surprised to come upon Sheriff Clark among the officers imported from other counties. He quipped that things had been too quiet for him in Selma.

  King wired Attorney General Katzenbach from Atlanta late that night: “This situation can only encourage chaos and savagery in the name of law enforcement unless dealt with immediately.” Katzenbach replied the next morning that an FBI investigation was under way. At the White House, Press Secretary Reedy mildly told reporters that the President was keeping informed. The Alabama Journal of Montgomery reacted more intensely, calling the Marion attack “a nightmare of State Police stupidity and brutality.” In Marion, all-day church services offered prayers for the recovery of Jimmy Lee Jackson—a twenty-six-year-old pulpwood worker, high school graduate, youngest deacon at Saint James Baptist Church, who had applied for the vote five times without success. In Selma, where Jackson was under treatment at Good Samaritan, Hosea Williams collected all potential weapons down to pocket combs and preached a congregation at Brown Chapel into a frenzy for a Friday night march on the courthouse. Wilson Baker stopped him on the church steps to warn that troopers and hotheads and assorted posses were spoiling for night violence downtown. He argued for postponement to protect the town and the marchers themselves, but Williams—glassy-eyed—shouted that he had given himself over to march. Baker had him arrested instead, to the relief of some terrified movement people standing uncertainly behind.

  ADAM CLAYTON POWELL had the misfortune to pick that Thursday, February 18, to launch an update of his 1960 speeches on police corruption in the New York rackets—“naming the places and the numbers,” asking why “police officers can receive $3,000 per drop in Harlem every month and to whom does it go.” Having just lost an appeal to the Supreme Court of the $210,000 Esther James libel judgment, he asked the House of Representatives to “forget about Mississippi for a while.” His legal predicament guaranteed more press but no more respectful attention, and Powell was swamped by bigger news from Vietnam to Harlem.

  Minority Leader Everett Dirksen set the tone that day for the first bruising Senate debate about Vietnam. On behalf of President Johnson, he rebuked Senator Frank Church of Idah
o as a “sunshine patriot” for a lengthy address in which Church, citing a lack of strategic interest or political support in “these former colonial regions,” had argued for negotiated withdrawal. (“As the beat of the war drums intensifies, and passions rise on both sides,” said Church, “I recognize that negotiation becomes more difficult.”) Dirksen bemoaned “a chorus of despair sung to the tune of a dirge of defeat.” He said he was “grieved but not surprised” to hear in the Senate chamber, “which echoes with the courageous words of brave men now gone, the opinion that we cannot win….” George Smathers of Florida among other senators rose to support him. “To negotiate in South Vietnam while Communist aggression is spreading…,” Dirksen declared, “is like a man trying to paint his front porch while his house is on fire.”

  At the White House, President Johnson was hosting another congressional briefing on Vietnam. As usual, he spoke convincingly of his personal worry over the safety of each American pilot in the recent air retaliations. (“I stay awake all during the night to see whether my planes come back or not.”) When asked, “what’s necessary to win that war,” Johnson told them confidentially of his consultations on Wednesday with former President Eisenhower. “I asked him how he settled Korea,” he said, and repeated Eisenhower’s response that he had forced the North Koreans to bargain by aerial punishment. “There are no sanctuaries,” Johnson said, affecting Eisenhower. “I am going to bomb wherever I damn please. And we been spending a lot of money on bombs for a number of years, and there is no use of having them if you don’t use them.” Johnson said the air attacks would be fitting, they would be measured, they would be adequate. He said that if the other side would pull back, he would withdraw U.S. forces “tomorrow morning,” as quickly as he had evacuated dependents the previous week. Until then, his course would be fixed by guerrilla attacks at Pleiku and since. “I decided if they were going to get real rough and tough and come into white men’s barracks and start picking out our own units in our own compounds in our own billets,” he said, “those men had no business with the women and children around. I’d better get them on home, because this is going to be choose up and the winner take it. And that’s what we’ve done.”