An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964

by Todd S. Purdum

  James Farmer now echoed Randolph’s concern that trying to suppress demonstrations would be counterproductive. Finally, King himself spoke up, saying that the march could serve as a means of dramatizing the issue and mobilizing support in sections of the country that hadn’t experienced the problem firsthand. “It may seem ill-timed,” he acknowledged. “Frankly, I have never engaged in any direct action movement which did not seem ill-timed. Some people thought Birmingham seemed ill-timed.”

  “Including the Attorney General,” the president said drily.

  John Kennedy’s sardonic streak surfaced again moments later when he told the group, “I don’t think you should all be totally harsh on Bull Connor.” Schlesinger would recall that there was “an audible intake of breath” around the Cabinet table before the president went on, “After all, he has done more for civil rights than anyone else.”

  President Kennedy was all too aware that it was the violence on the streets of Birmingham—the violence perpetrated by Connor, yes, but set off by King’s determined protests—that had at last forced him to offer the bill. And thanks to King, the president was now in a fight he knew he might not win. He claimed to have just seen a new poll (if it ever existed, it has been lost to history) showing that his national approval rating had fallen thirteen points, to 47 percent, in the aftermath of his June 11 speech. He warned that “a good many programs I care about may go down the drain as a result of this.” In sum, he said, “We’re in this up to the neck.”

  Kennedy’s summary of the political situation was accurate enough. But the person in the Cabinet Room that morning who was really in it up to the neck—in ways he would never fully understand—was Martin Luther King himself.

  * * *

  BEFORE THE GROUP MEETING, Kennedy had taken King aside for a private word. The president led the preacher into the Rose Garden where King, unaware of the secret White House taping system, found himself silently wondering whether the president was afraid the Oval Office was bugged. Putting a hand on King’s shoulder, the president delivered a serious warning—one that Robert Kennedy and Burke Marshall had already given to a disbelieving King: that two of his close advisers, Stanley David Levison, a New York lawyer and entrepreneur who was King’s counselor and closest white friend, and Jack O’Dell, one of his black executive assistants, had ties to the Communist Party.

  “I assume you know you’re under very close surveillance,” Kennedy told King. “They’re Communists, you’ve got to get rid of them.”

  King’s relationship to Stanley Levison weighed heavily on John and Robert Kennedy, because of their paralyzing fear that King—and, by extension, the broader civil rights movement—might be under Communist influence. This concern colored every aspect of their dealings with him. Neither the Kennedys nor King knew the full story. The man who knew the most damaging secrets about both the president and the protester—FBI director J. Edgar Hoover—selectively leaked and withheld information about each man’s activities in ways that bred mistrust between them and left both of them vulnerable to Hoover’s malevolence.

  The president’s unease was understandable. At the height of the Cold War—barely eight months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, in the midst of public debate over Kennedy’s proposed Nuclear Test Ban Treaty—the mere suggestion that Martin Luther King might have Communist affiliations was so explosive that the Kennedy administration accepted at face value that it had to keep the civil rights leader at arm’s length. “If they shoot you down, they’ll shoot us down, too,” is how Kennedy put it to King in the Rose Garden that day. “So we’re asking you to be careful.”

  For the Kennedys, the reality of leftist support for the civil rights movement was not far-fetched. Nor, for King, would it have been disqualifying. Ever since the 1930s, in years when the civil rights movement had few friends in the centers of established political and economic power, American leftist movements had been in the forefront of support for equal rights, and prominent black activists and entertainers like Paul Robeson and others had been frank in their praise of the Soviet Union while condemning American injustice.

  Moreover, the FBI had known since the early 1950s that Levison, who had made a small fortune in a range of overlapping business ventures, had been a major financial backer of the American Communist Party. Levison had met King in 1956, just as the preacher was gaining nationwide fame in the wake of the Montgomery bus boycott, and King quickly came to rely on him as a kind of soul mate and amanuensis who consistently refused payment for his help. “My skills were acquired not only in a cloistered academic environment, but also in the commercial jungle,” Levison once wrote to King. “Although our culture approves, and even honors these practices, to me they were always abhorrent. Hence, I looked forward to the time when I could use these skills not for myself but for socially constructive ends. The liberation struggle is the most positive and rewarding area of work anyone could experience.”

  But it was not until early 1962, via reports from one of the same FBI informants who had prompted the bureau’s original interest in Levison, that Hoover learned of Levison’s close association with King. The FBI director was delighted to have what he considered damaging information about King, whom he so despised. He promptly informed Bob Kennedy, and within weeks the attorney general had authorized the wiretapping of Levison’s office. Hoover’s tip also prompted repeated warnings from Justice Department aides to King, who (the wiretaps showed) had just as repeatedly ignored their advice to sever his connections with Levison. The president’s own talk with King was meant to be a final, emphatic plea to change his behavior.

  What Hoover never told the president or the attorney general—and what emerged only decades later with the release of sealed documents—was that one of the informers who had tracked Levison’s actions for the FBI had reported in March 1963 that Levison had definitively severed all of his ties with the Communist Party of the United States, telling associates that he found it “irrelevant” and “ineffective.” In fact, it would turn out, Levison had steadily reduced his involvement with the party from almost the moment he met King, his support for the utopian ideal of Marxist ideology now apparently transferred to King’s crusade.

  Of course, Kennedy knew nothing of the complexities of the Levison matter, even if Hoover did. And the president kept his warning to King so deliberately vague that King could not be sure of the nature of the government’s sources. So Hoover held the high card, as usual, and he kept up his sub rosa dirty work. Just days after the Rose Garden conversation with Kennedy, after yet another newspaper leak about Jack O’Dell’s continued work for the SCLC, King announced O’Dell’s resignation. Stan Levison was another matter. King trusted and needed him too much to cut all ties, whatever the president’s advice. After Levison himself warned King that it was too dangerous for the fate of the pending civil rights bill for them to maintain direct contact, they arranged to stay in touch through their mutual friend, Clarence Jones, the young black attorney in New York who had attended the meeting with Bob Kennedy and the black intellectuals in May.

  Because of the existing tap on Levison’s phone, the attorney general learned of this subterfuge immediately and was predictably outraged. Within days, he ordered the wiretapping of Jones’s home and office phones. He also considered acceding to Hoover’s request to tap King’s own phone, but held off for the time being.

  There was one last wrinkle that John Kennedy emphatically did not share with King—but that the president knew all too well: J. Edgar Hoover had voluminous evidence of Kennedy’s sexual indiscretions, dating back to his wartime romance with Inga Arvad, a Danish journalist whom Hoover had suspected of being a Nazi spy, and continuing into 1962 with Judith Campbell, the sometime girlfriend of both Frank Sinatra and Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana. Barely two weeks after Kennedy’s Rose Garden encounter with King, Hoover would warn Robert Kennedy that the FBI had received reports that the president had been involved with Ellen Rometsch, the twenty-seven-year-old wife of a West German army
officer stationed at his country’s embassy in Washington, who worked by night as a call girl and was suspected of being an East German spy. (The FBI could never confirm the president’s involvement, or Rometsch’s suspected spying, but the attorney general was concerned enough that he arranged to have Rometsch secretly deported that summer.)

  Letting Hoover build his file on King was the price the Kennedys paid for protecting the president’s political future and the civil rights bill’s prospects. But if their complicity in the surveillance had been known at the time, the revelation would have destroyed their credibility with the leading civil rights groups. A march on Washington, however disruptive it might be, was the least of the Kennedy brothers’ worries when it came to Martin Luther King that summer.

  * * *

  IF BY 1963, MARTIN Luther King was not only the most prominent spokesman for the black cause in America (and in the eyes of his critics and skeptics one of the most dangerous), he had traveled a long road to reach such exalted status. He was the opposite of a plaster saint—and a most unlikely prophet. In fact, for the first four or five years of his life, he wasn’t Martin Luther King Jr. at all, but simply Michael—“little Mike”—the eldest son and namesake of a onetime Georgia sharecropper who had risen to become the highly respectable, thoroughly bourgeois assistant pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, a church that had been founded by the elder King’s father-in-law, A. D. Williams. Only in 1934, when the younger King was five years old, would “Daddy King” formally change both their names to Martin, for reasons that remain unclear but nevertheless stamped the mark of a towering religious reformer on the small, round-faced, almond-eyed boy.

  Raised in a secure and loving home in Sweet Auburn, a stable, middle-class black neighborhood in Atlanta, King experienced the delights and travails of a typical childhood. He showed a gift for music (as an adult he would occasionally play bits of the Moonlight Sonata for close friends), and at age ten he sang with the Ebenezer Baptist Church choir at a gala Junior League benefit for the world premiere of Gone with the Wind—an appearance for which his father was censured by his fellow Baptist pastors, both because the ball was segregated and because it involved dancing and drinking.

  Despite his clerical heritage, young Martin was a precocious enough thirteen-year-old to startle his Sunday school class by declaring that he did not believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. He entered the tenth grade at Booker T. Washington High School at age thirteen in 1942, and two years later he went on to Morehouse, Atlanta’s distinguished all-male black college, his way eased by a wartime enrollment shortage, despite what he would later estimate was an eighth-grade reading level. Fastidious in dress and bearing, he was known to his friends as Tweedie. As a teenager, he developed the orotund flourishes of speech and diction for which he would become celebrated. When a teacher asked how he was, he might reply, “Cogitating with the cosmic universe, I surmise that my physical equilibrium is organically quiescent.”

  King also experienced the sting of racial prejudice from an early age. As a youngster, one of his closest playmates had been a white boy whose father owned a small grocery store near the King house. But after they began attending separate, segregated elementary schools, the child’s father forbade them to socialize. Martin watched his father be forced to correct white policemen who presumed to call him “boy,” and had himself been made to stand for several hours on a bus returning from a high school oratorical contest in southern Georgia so that newly boarded white passengers might have a seat. As a result, he would recall years later, “I was determined to hate every white person,” despite his parents’ injunction that, as a Christian, it was his duty to love.

  King’s spiritual awakening was gradual. Benjamin Mays, the president of Morehouse, was a nationally known theologian who often chided his students for not getting excited about “anything bigger than a hamburger,” but King spent most of his college years rebelling at the idea of following his father into the ministry, embarrassed by the emotional effusions of the Baptist worship style. He considered medicine, and then the law. But in the summer before his last year at Morehouse, he decided, seemingly to his own surprise, to become a preacher after all. His father was overjoyed and quickly arranged for Martin to join him in the pulpit at Ebenezer, only to be knocked back by his son’s determination to pursue formal religious training.

  King’s choice of a school was Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, an unusually integrated institution for its day and one where free and critical thinking prevailed. For the first time, King became a diligent student, exposed to the classic works of Plato, Aristotle, and Saint Augustine, together with those of such modern figures as Reinhold Niebuhr and Mohandas Gandhi. He became captivated by the “social gospel” of the theologian Walter Rauschenbusch, which held that humankind could be bettered by a “moral reconstruction of society” that replaced cold capitalism with a “Christian commonwealth.” He grew into such a superb preacher that his fellow students would come listen to his sermons just to pick up pointers.

  He also fell deeply and painfully in love, in a way that friends would later say left a lifetime emotional scar, because the object of his affection turned out to be the white daughter of a German-born cook at the school. They dated seriously for several months, but King ultimately concluded that interracial marriage was impossible in his chosen line of work in the black church, and he despaired of the hurt such a relationship would cause his mother. He broke off the romance.

  After graduation as valedictorian, King again tested his father’s patience by heading off to graduate school at Boston University, and a whirlwind courtship and marriage to Coretta Scott, an Alabama farm girl who was studying voice at the New England Conservatory of Music. Despite Daddy King’s initial vociferous objections (he had always expected his son to return to Atlanta and marry into black society there), the couple took their vows in front of the elder King in the Scott family’s front yard, then spent their wedding night in the only sort of public accommodation that Alabama law would allow them: a spare bedroom in a nearby black-owned funeral home.

  Earning his PhD in theology in 1954, King passed up the possibility of a teaching post, or an assignment in some northern city that would have been his bride’s preference, for the pastorate of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. His salary was a princely $4,200 a year, which made him the highest-paid black preacher in town at age twenty-five. In barely eighteen months, he would be famous.

  * * *

  IF A WEARY BLACK seamstress and NAACP activist named Rosa Parks had not been ordered to stand up and surrender her seat on a crowded Montgomery bus to a white passenger on the afternoon of December 1, 1955, and then been promptly arrested for her refusal to do so, who can say whether there would have been lunch counter sit-ins or Freedom Rides? And if a reluctant but gifted preacher named Martin King had not been willing to assume the leadership of a mass movement to integrate Montgomery’s buses in the wake of Parks’s protest, who can say when, if ever, there would have been marches and hoses and bombs in Birmingham?

  The very night of Rosa Parks’s arrest, Montgomery’s leading civil rights activist, E. D. Nixon, telephoned King, already locally celebrated for his preaching, and asked him to join in supporting a boycott of the city’s bus lines to begin the following week. In his brief pastoral career, King had come to the realization that “the right word, emotionally charged, could reach the whole person and change the relationships of men,” as a friend would later recall. Still, he hesitated at first to accept Nixon’s invitation. He finally agreed, on the condition that he not be required to do any organizing. But within days, as the boycott got under way with resounding success, King found himself the only person nominated to lead the crusade, as head of the newly created Montgomery Improvement Association. At a mass meeting that night, man and moment converged. “You know, my friends, there comes a time, when people get tired of being trampled over by the i
ron feet of oppression,” King intoned, the spirit upon him, and the congregation carrying him along. “There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being thrown across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amidst the piercing chill of an Alpine November.”

  And so it went, night after night and month after month, as King preached and prodded and the boycott dragged on, supported by an elaborate carpool system in which two hundred volunteer drivers supplied some twenty thousand rides a day. “The fight here is between light and darkness,” King would say, as he honed what would become a familiar refrain: “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” Soon enough, though, the darkness threatened to overwhelm King. There was a bomb threat, then an actual bomb at his house, then a shotgun blast that blew open his front door. One night he found himself praying aloud at his kitchen table, “Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right … But I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.” At that moment, he would recall, he seemed to hear “an inner voice … the voice of Jesus,” ordering him: “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness, stand up for justice, stand up for truth. And, lo, I will be with you, even until the end of the world.”

  King may have found an inner peace, but the Montgomery establishment remained stubbornly impervious in negotiations to end the boycott, until finally, with the help of the NAACP, the boycott’s leaders filed suit in federal court. The powers that be in Montgomery retaliated with mass local indictments of the Montgomery Improvement Association’s leadership and a request that a state court grant an injunction against the carpool system as an unlicensed transportation network. Just when things looked bleakest, after nearly a year, the United States Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that segregation of the buses was illegal. Weeks later, the city government enacted an ordinance allowing blacks to sit virtually anywhere they wanted.