When the press and paying guests had left, Julie and I sat up with Martin and his advisers. Only then did Martin allow himself his ceremonial glass of Harveys Bristol Cream. But even that did nothing to break the tension he clearly felt. That evening I noticed, for the first time, that Martin had developed a little facial tic. With no particular regularity, his head would yank a bit to the side. Later, when I asked him about it, he said it was nerves—a little reaction to some upsetting thought or new anxiety. It was easy enough, that night, to see what had set the tic off. The prospects for violence in the weeks to come could hardly be greater. Martin truly agonized over putting marchers in danger. But as he well knew, the power of nonviolence was greatest when confronted by violence, and he was pragmatic enough to know, like a general on the eve of battle, that not all his troops would escape unscathed. Always, we came back to the question of the local youth: whether we could strategically afford to encourage them to participate, and if so, how we’d protect them. Martin was deeply aware of the moral implications of urging young people to become involved. The serious injury or death of even one young protester would be devastating not only for his or her family but for all of us—for the whole movement. Yet there was also a moral power in putting youth on the streets: the most innocent among us marching to say that segregation will not stand. The news images of those young people in the streets standing up to uniformed policemen would be powerful, too powerful to ignore.
The question was just how violent Bull Connor’s troops would be.
Strangely enough, one of Martin’s concerns on April 3, when sit-ins kicked off the Birmingham campaign, was that Connor might no longer be a factor. Some months before, a number of influential Birmingham businessmen had agreed that Connor was too powerful and provocative—bad for the city’s image and bad for business. Rather than mount a divisive campaign to replace him as police commissioner, they slyly contrived to eliminate the job and create a new mayor–city council structure. Not surprisingly, Connor had decided to run for mayor himself. But the city fathers had persuaded a more moderate candidate, Albert Boutwell, to run against him. So close were the results of the March 5 election that a runoff had been scheduled for April 2. Martin had wrestled with whether to postpone those first sit-ins; if Boutwell won and Connor were broomed aside, the city might put a peaceful end to its segregation laws. Then again, it might not. A new administration might just as well dillydally into the Easter holidays, which would rob the movement of all momentum. And if somehow Martin reenergized the campaign after that, he might be met by the “kill-’em-with-kindness” approach that Police Chief Laurie Pritchett had used so well in Albany, Georgia. Bull Connor, as it turned out, lost the April 2 runoff. But he had decided to challenge the results in court. While the outcome remained in limbo, both Connor and Boutwell acted like winners, forming separate administrations. Which meant that as the first sit-ins occurred, Connor was still in control of the Birmingham police force. We were deeply concerned about Connor. But in a strange way, we needed him, too. His fiery temper and brutal tactics were the true face of segregation we needed the world to see.
While Connor’s fate hung in the balance, the first sit-ins and protests sputtered like wet kindling. Dozens, not hundreds, of protesters showed up. After eight days, only 150 had been carted off to jail, fewer than on the first day of the Albany Movement. When a judge issued a stern injunction banning all protests of any kind, and promised serious jail time for any who dared violate it, the campaign looked doomed. Not even Martin’s close aides seemed eager to test the judge’s resolve, especially not after Alabama’s recently sworn-in governor, George Wallace (“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”), and Bull Connor drafted a new bail policy that would apply only to Birmingham. The maximum bail bond for a misdemeanor had been $300. Now, if their bill passed, it would be $2,500. The movement could handle a few of those, but not too many.
After retiring to a bedroom to pray for guidance while his advisers waited outside, Martin emerged to declare that he would march in defiance of the judge’s injunction. And so he did, on Good Friday, April 12, 1963, with Ralph Abernathy somewhat reluctantly beside him. At first only a few dozen protesters followed. But as he made his way up the streets of Birmingham, hundreds of black bystanders came out to cheer him on. They knew the sacrifice he was making. This was the real thing. The two leaders were duly arrested, along with fifty or so others. Martin, at Bull Connor’s express orders, was put in solitary confinement, without even a mattress to sleep on, just a bed frame with metal slats. By the time Martin’s cell door shut, Clarence Jones, his lawyer, was on the phone to me in New York. He was terribly worried. Martin had vowed “jail, no bail,” but what if solitary confinement proved too much for him? Clarence wouldn’t even be able to talk to him all weekend, he’d been told. He had enough money to bail out Martin and Ralph if needed, but the city had just declared no further bonds would be granted to the jailed marchers because the SCLC had inadequate assets. I said I’d do what I could.
As always when Martin was jailed, my first call was to Coretta, to sympathize with her and to see what I could do for her. This time, as soon as I said hello, another phone started ringing in her house, and then another. Meanwhile, I could hear her three older children running around in the background. Coretta had just given birth days before to her fourth child, Bernice Albertine. “Who’s taking care of Bernice?” I asked her.
Coretta said she was taking care of Bernice herself.
“What about the other children?”
“Just me,” Coretta said with a sigh.
“No one’s in that house with you?”
“No,” Coretta said. “It’s just me.”
“What about a secretary or a housekeeper?” I asked.
“No,” Coretta said. “Martin won’t permit it. He feels he can’t afford the help, and if he did, people would think he was living too high.”
I knew what Martin earned as a preacher: about $6,000 to $7,000 a year. Even in 1963, that wasn’t a lot of scratch. Maybe he couldn’t afford help, but how could Coretta cope with four children alone?
“From this moment on,” I told her, “you’re going to have a housekeeper and a secretary, and I want you to identify a driver who can take you wherever you need to go. And if anyone wants to know how you can afford that, you just say Harry’s paying.”
I carried through on my promise that very day. I felt pretty good about it until my accountant, Abe Briloff, saw the entry in my accounting books. “You can’t have these people on the company payroll,” he told me. “They don’t work for your entertainment company; you can’t deduct their wages from your taxes. If you want these people to work for the Kings, you have to pay for them out of your pocket, after taxes, one hundred percent. Otherwise you’ll get your head handed to you.”
I did as Abe said. Not long after, Martin was audited. As soon as those IRS agents got to the notation about “staff,” they pounced. Where, they wanted to know, was Martin getting the money to pay for this staff?
“Harry Belafonte,” Martin said.
In a matter of hours, there were two IRS guys in my New York office, putting a lock on my files, examining how I handled all my corporate money. When they got to “staff—Dr. King,” Abe produced the records—taxes paid on the money I paid them, staff withholding taxes paid, too. It was all 100 percent clean.
Those IRS agents looked so disappointed.
Later, when the journalist Taylor Branch was combing through FBI transcripts, researching his Pulitzer Prize–winning trilogy on Martin and the civil rights movement, he came upon an amusing chat between Martin and a friend. Martin related that he and his father had had a conversation about housekeepers. Martin’s father complained that his cost him twenty-five dollars a week. Highway robbery, Daddy King exclaimed. “I told him I paid my housekeeper a hundred dollars a week,” Martin told the friend. “That really shamed him.” Martin laughed. “But I didn’t tell him Harry was paying for it.”<
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Within an hour of getting Clarence’s call, I’d wired $50,000—most of it raised, some of it my own—down to Birmingham for bail bonds. I hoped I’d get that money back, but you never knew for sure with southern bail bondsmen. Often weeks or months after a case had been settled one way or another, the money would somehow be stuck in the entrails of a southern city’s court system.
All that Easter weekend, Martin remained in solitary confinement. Once again, I called Bobby Kennedy, among many others. How could Bobby sit by while Martin was suffering in these barbaric conditions? “Tell Reverend King we’re doing all we can,” Bobby said wryly. “But I’m not sure we can get into prison reform at this moment.” Bobby had made clear that he and the President opposed the whole Birmingham campaign; so far, nothing Bull Connor had done inclined them to interfere with the state’s authority. Bobby was especially irked that Martin had “chosen” to remain in jail when he could easily afford the bail to walk free. I tried to explain that choosing “jail, no bail” was not some bid for martyrdom. It was one of the tenets of nonviolence. “This ain’t no game,” I told Bobby. “It’s the real thing. Maybe it’s time you open your copy of Gandhi.”
Finally, on Monday, Martin was allowed a visit from Clarence, who told him I’d sent the $50,000. Clarence told me later that Martin beamed at that. He was thrilled, not only that he and Ralph could be sprung at a time of their choosing, but that others could be, too. I’d told Clarence I was good for whatever else he needed, and Clarence passed that on to Martin as well.
Cheered as he was by that news, Martin scanned the newspaper that Clarence brought him with growing indignation. A group of Birmingham clergymen had written a letter urging the black community to end its protest, and criticizing Martin for staging the campaign. The moderate Boutwell administration would surely take power, with promises of healing, and the last thing the city needed at this delicate juncture was civil strife. Agitated, Martin began drafting a reply, writing on the only paper he had: the margins of those same newspapers. Eventually, his scribbled notes, linked by numbers and arrows, would be typed up clean and published as a “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” One day the letter would be seen as one of Martin’s most eloquent testaments, beautifully explaining the need for nonviolent actions to make a community confront unjust laws. It was, at the same time, such a rebuke to the American clergy, putting Christianity—or at least their version of it—to severe test. I would read that letter often in the years to come; for me, it was all about sacrifice: how much the clergy was willing to sacrifice for the greater good of mankind.
For the moment, though, the letter was obscured by the rush of oncoming events.
Martin and Ralph were released on bond that following Saturday, April 20, along with the marchers who’d joined them. Yet even with its leader back in charge, the campaign seemed to drift. So did Birmingham’s political stalemate; both administrations were still awaiting word from a judge as to which would take office. They could agree on one thing: When Fred Shuttlesworth applied to both for a parade permit for May 2, both administrations turned him down. That was when the true miracle of Birmingham occurred. The city’s children, hundreds and then thousands of black Birmingham schoolchildren, marched, without a permit, into the teeth of Bull Connor’s police. James Bevel, formerly of SNCC, now of SCLC, had pushed Martin into using the children at this juncture. But no one could have anticipated how many would respond to the call, why thousands would rush forth right into the phalanx of uniformed police. Even Taylor Branch, in his definitive trilogy, cannot say for sure. And why thousands more followed them, many as young as six or eight years old, is one of the mysteries of the movement—for me, as powerful a show of faith and Christian spirit as I’ve ever seen.
Those next days remain, for me, a montage of grainy black-and-white news photos. The high-pressure water jets turned on ten-year-old children, slamming them down on the pavement. Groups of schoolchildren singing, terrified, as police with guns and billy clubs bear down upon them. Children emerging in flocks from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Children everywhere, confounding the police by coming from all directions. And, of course, the picture that shocked the world: high school student Walter Gadsden bitten in the abdomen by a snarling police dog.
Hundreds of children were jailed each day, seventy-five to each cell built for eight. The next waves of children weren’t coached or encouraged by SNCC; they just came out on their own. When Birmingham ran out of room, hundreds more were put outside in barbed-wire encampments. Finally Birmingham’s “big mules”—its leading businessmen—threw up their hands and agreed, with prodding from the Kennedys, to negotiate with Martin. The talks went late into the night, producing what seemed a compromise agreement. Before he could sign off on it, Martin was hauled back in front of a judge, along with Ralph Abernathy, for a hearing in regard to their unlawful parade on Good Friday. After refusing to post their respective $2,500 bail bonds, both men were put in jail again. Not until the children were all set free, they said, would they seek their own release.
The Kennedys were furious. In such a volatile climate, the compromise might fall apart while King and Abernathy whiled away these precious hours in prison, making a moral point that seemed, to the pragmatic Kennedys, an exercise in self-indulgence. Obviously the children would be let out of prison soon enough, one way or another; why did Martin have to make a martyr of himself by tying their release to his? It seemed to Bobby that both Martin and Bull Connor, for their own different reasons, might privately want the violence to escalate at this point. That was when Bobby called me in New York. This was a maddening situation, he said. Martin wouldn’t let the SCLC bail him and Abernathy out of jail, but, clearly, he needed to get out as soon as possible so the Birmingham deal could be drawn up and signed, and the children then let out of jail. Could I send down $5,000 myself to bail the two of them out?
I’m sure that at other times in American history, a U.S. Attorney General has called on a private citizen to ask him to resolve a national conflict by wiring $5,000 of his own money. I just can’t think of any. I was happy to do it. “It’s on its way,” I told Bobby. “The only problem is, I’m not sure the SCLC will use it.” In my latest talks with Clarence Jones—the one person with whom Martin was able to communicate—I’d learned that Martin was adamant. He would not be bailed out until the children were bailed out, too.
Bobby said he’d get back to me. He then called a prominent black businessman in Birmingham, A. G. Gaston, who’d held himself aloof from the protests until the day he’d looked out his window to see a black schoolchild being hurled up the street by a high-pressure water jet. Gaston was no great admirer of Dr. King, but he was horrified by Bull Connor’s troops and wanted an end to the mayhem. At Bobby’s request, he took $5,000 from his own bank and sent it right over to the court. To their surprise, and somewhat to their dismay, Martin and Ralph were duly released.
By then, Bobby was back on the phone with me. He understood that if the children weren’t bailed out soon, Martin would get himself jailed again. That in itself would spark action on the streets. And Bull Connor would then do all he could to provoke a full-scale riot. Any more violence, from either side, would kill the compromise and fan extreme reactions. What Bobby needed was the money to bail out two thousand incarcerated children.
“Bobby,” I said, “I’m not sure I can do that.”
“You don’t have to,” Bobby said. “”What I’m about to tell you will not be repeated. You’re going to get a call from Mike Quill. He’ll be a resource for you. You may get calls from other resources, too. I’m working on that.” Bobby paused. “I’m in an extremely vulnerable position,” he added, “as the Attorney General, getting personally involved in a case that has huge federal ramifications—a case I may have to try if this gets out of hand. For me to be showing any favoritism to victims in the case could become highly problematic.”
I said I understood, and I certainly did. But I also knew—and I told him this—that
if he didn’t deal with the situation today, it would be twice as bad tomorrow. There would be twice as many children, and the potential for violence and tragedy would be far, far greater. Helping to get these children out of jail, as part of the larger solution to this whole quagmire, was something he simply had to do.
I’d had some tense innings with Bobby. Too often he’d seemed a cold pragmatist, more intent on protecting his brother than promoting civil rights, which, as Attorney General, was his job. But I felt that at last I’d found his moral center, just as Martin had predicted we would. I knew, too, that he’d come, at last, to trust me, and that I mustn’t betray that trust. I did check with Martin to be sure he was onboard. He was. He, too, now sensed that Bobby was doing all he could to resolve the crisis by bailing out the children. Together, Martin and Bobby had estimated that they’d need at least $160,000 for the task. The only people with access to that kind of money on a weekend—at least for a Democratic administration—were U.S. labor leaders, of whom Mike Quill was one.
When the phone rang a short while later, I recognized the thick Irish brogue right away. Mike Quill was the legendary head of the Transit Workers Union—founded by New York City subway workers and bus drivers. He was one scrappy guy. “It’s a sad day in America when the cops put kids in jail for nothin’,” Quill growled. “We gotta get those kids out.” I told him I was grateful for his help. “Lord, yes, we’ll do what we can,” he said. “I’m sending a courier over with a check for fifty thousand dollars.”
By then Bobby had also called Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers. Reuther had told Bobby he could come up with a good chunk of that $160,000. George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO, said he was good for $80,000. David McDonald of the United Steelworkers kicked in $40,000, and my friend Cleveland Robinson, a black New York labor leader representing store workers, helped with another sizable chunk.
In the midst of all these calls back and forth, Bobby called to ask if Mike Quill’s courier had arrived yet. The intercom rang as we were talking. “That might be him now,” I said.
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